AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaccccccccckkkkkk!!!!!!!!! You brute! Knock before entering a ladies room! %% Look out! Behind you! %%  *** System shutdown message from root *** System going down in 60 seconds %% [Cunixc Continued] %% FINAL WARNING -- SYSTEM GOING DOWN IMMEDIATELY %% PLAYGIRL, Inc. Philadelphia, Pa. 19369 Dear Sir: Your name has been submitted to us with your photo. I regret to inform you that we will be unable to use your body in our centerfold. On a scale of one to ten, your body was rated a minus two by a panel of women ranging in age from 60 to 75 years. We tried to assemble a panel in the age bracket of 25 to 35 years, but we could not get them to stop laughing long enough to reach a decision. Should the taste of the American woman ever change so drastically that bodies such as yours would be appropriate in our centerfold, you will be notified by this office. Please, don't call us. Sympathetically, Amanda L. Smith p.s. We also want to commend you for your unusual pose. Were you wounded in the war, or do you ride your bike a lot? %% War --- "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% 11-28-88 Post Thanksgiving "Far Away" I miss her presence, The warmth of her smile. I miss the kidding, Her laughing the while. I miss the nearness, The love in her eyes. I miss the freshness, And endless surprise. I miss the wond'ring- Wha'd she mean by "OK?" I miss line-running, And talking all day. I miss the hugs, The warmth of her touch. And I miss her spirit, I love her so much. -- Kurt WERLE %% Censorship ---------- "I cannot convince myself that there is anyone so wise, so universally comprehensive in his judgment, that he can be trusted with the power to tell others: 'You shall not express yourself thus, you shall not describe your own experiences; or depict the fantasies which your mind has created; or laugh at what others set up as respectable; or question old beliefs; or contradict the dogmas of the church, of our society, our economic systems, and our political orthodoxy.'" -- Jake Zeitlin %% Penguins -------- "I have often had the impression that, to penguins, man is just another penguin--different, less predictable, occasionally violent, but tolerable company when he sits still and minds his own business." -- Bernard Stonehouse %% Religion -------- "Your petitioners are Atheists and they define their ideas as follows. An Atheist loves his fellow man instead of a god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now--here on earth--for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist knows that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find within himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it and to enjoy it. An Atheist knows that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment. "An Atheist seeks to know himself then and his fellow rather than to know a god. An Atheist understands that a hospital must be built instead of a church. An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand, love and accept all of mankind. He wants an ethical way of life. He knows that we cannot rely on a god, channel action into prayer, or hope for an end to our troubles in a hereafter. He knows that we are not only our brother's keepers--but keepers of our own lives foremost, that we are responsible persons and that the job is here and the time is now." -- Murray vs. Curlett, 374 U.S. 203 (1963) (Atheists have to get their scripture wherever they can find it :-) %% A Day Off So you want a day off. Let's look at what you are asking for. There are 365 days per year available for work. There are 52 weeks per year, in which you already have two days off, leaving 261 days available for work. Since you spend 16 hours each day away from work, you have used up 170 days, leaving only 91 days available, You spend 30 min. each day on coffee break, that accounts for 23 more days each year, leaving only 68 days. With a one hour lunch each day, you use up another 48 days, leaving only 22 days available for work. You normally spend 2 days per year on sick leave. This leaves only 20 days available for work. We offer 5 holidays per year, leaving only 15 days. We generously give you 14 days vacation per year leaving you only 1 day available for work and I'll be dammed if you're going to take that day off!!! %% APPLICATION FORM Mothers And Fathers of Italian Ancestry (M.A.F.I.A.) Watza-U-Name ________________________________________ U-Hage __________________ Watza-U-Howza Numbero _________________ U-Stretta _____________________________ Watza-U-Bag: Hittaman _________ Lona-Arranger ___________ Prostittuta ________ Izza U Girl or Boy (Orizza U Girl-Oh-Boy) ______________ (Pick one, Weizza Guy) Putta Downa Wearra U Worgga Now _______________________________________________ Wazza U Inna De Bigga Ouse: ___________________________________________________ For Whatza Wazza U Inna De Bigga Ouse For: ____________________________________ U Shoote One Guiz ____________________ U Keednap Sumbodys _____________________ Porteckshion Raggets _______________________ Udder Thingza ____________________ U Wanna Be De Bigga Shotz, Sumdaze? Yazze: ________ No: ________ Eh: _________ U Likka Eata Garlic: ____________ Pizza: _____________ Salami: ________________ U Know Ow To Makea De Cement Shooz? ___________________________________________ U Driva De Car _______ Cadillac ________ Buick ___________ Linken _____________ U Likea Spagetti _____ Calamara ________ Boyze ___________ Girlze _____________ (Peek justa one - no foola rounde, cuz I slappa U face.) U Sees De Godfather? ___________________ Or Justa De Movie? ___________________ %% Excuses ======= Submitted by (The following are actual notes written to school teachers by emphatic parents. There are no typos.) 1). "My son is under the doctor's care and should not take P.E. today. Please execute him." 2). "Please excuse Mary for being absent. She was sick and I had her shot." 3). "Please excuse Fred for being. It was his father's fault." 4). "Please ackuse Fred being absent on Jan. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and 33." 5. "Mary could not come to school today because she was bothered by very close veins." 6). "Mary was absent from school yesterday as she was having a gangover." 7). "Please excuse Mary from Jim yesterday. She was administrating." 8). "Please excuse Fred for being absent. He had a cold and could not breed well." 9). "Please excuse Mary. She has been sick and under the doctor." 10). "Please excuse Mary from being absent yesterday. She was in bed with gramps." %% MOUNTIES: I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK, He's a lumberjack and he's OK, I sleep all night and I work all day. He sleeps all night and he works all day. I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, He cuts down trees, he eats his lunch, I go to the lavatory. He goes to the lavatory. On Wednesday I go shopping, On Wednesday he goes shopping, And have buttered scones for tea. And has buttered scones for tea. I cut down trees, I skip and jump, He cuts down trees, he skips and jumps, I like to press wild flowers, He likes to press wild flowers. I put on women's clothing, He puts on women's clothing, And hang around in bars. And hangs around in bars. I cut down trees, I wear high heels, He cuts down trees, he wears high heels, Suspenders and a bra. Suspenders? and a bra? I wish I'd been a girlie, That's rude... Just like my dear Pappa. %% dancer she danced at night on the sand in the waves when no one was looking when they came for her she was sitting in the sand hugging her knees and the ocean was in her eyes they did not see her footprints the tide had washed them away they have never seen her dance they have never seen her fall laughing in the water they would not understand that the falling is part of the dance they would not understand when she danced they called her awkward they would not understand -- copyright 1987 (same deal here) (gypsy) %% Three Squaws ============ Three squaws were each preparing for the birth of their first child. The first squaw placed a large bear hide by a river, the second squaw placed an elk hide by a tree by a river, and the third squaw placed a hippopotamus hide by a path, near the river and the tree so that the three formed a triangle. It just so happens that all three women gave birth on the same day. The first squaw on the bear hide had a 5-lb son, the second squaw on the elk hide had a 6-lb son, and the third squaw on the hippopotamus hide had an 11-lb son. To this day, mathematicians credit these three women with the first proof of the Pythagorean Theorem: "The son of the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the two adjacent hides." %% VIKING HOME JOURNAL (Todays Journal for the modern viking) * Three fast and tasty village dog recipes for the working viking who doesn't have all day to cook. * War wound stitchery - Don't throw away those severed body parts. Needle point tips that can make that foot or arm good as new. * Burning pitch techniques that can really let you rain hell on your neighbors! * Surrounded by intellectuals - How one viking escaped. By David-the-Saxon. * Viking mid-life crisis - Is raping murdering and pillaging all there is ? * Is your son a Pansy? - A candid article by Erick-the-Red which every father should read. * Don't let your viking tupperware party end in a blood bath - Do's and don'ts for a successful evening. * Detroit unveils the New 90 line of warships - Faster, sleeker, fewer slaves in the galley! AT YOUR VILLAGE NEWSSTANDS NOW ! %% off season i stood in the water and when the waves came in they were up to my knees sometimes they splashed my guitar and i played your song over and over i'm so damn tired of writing love songs must've sang that damn song ten maybe fifteen times and the people came up and asked me why are you standing in the water by yourself you'll catch cold and aren't you lonely and i said go away leave me alone that was the way i planned it see and then i went back to watching the waves there's something about the ocean in off season that reminds me of you -- copyright 1986 (my real name which i prefer not to reveal on the net) (gypsy) %% 'MIRI' [**] First aired October 27, 1966. The landing party contracts a disease that strikes after puberty, while the children still alive on the planet refuse to let them contact the ship for help. %% First Offender ============== Only a short sentence, but he was no less shocked to hear it pronounced. Never caught before, he had assumed he could get away every time. He flashed a helpless, appealing glance towards his anxious relatives. But it was too late. He had owned up. He had said "I do." -- Dostoevsky %% Great Exam Lies =============== by Dr. Strangeloop and The Eater of Babies (1) "All the data you need will be printed on the front of the paper." (2) "You only need to answer two questions to pass." (3) "It's not a test of memory, it's a test of ability." (4) "There's plenty of time to read through the paper before you start." (5) (from the lecture course) "I probably won't test you on this." %% Politics & Philosophy --------------------- "All I know is that I am not a Marxist" -- Karl Marx; Attr. in Engels, letter to C. Schmidt, 5 Aug 1890 %% 'ARENA' [***] First aired January 19, 1967. Kirk and a reptilian alien (The Gorn) must duel to the death to determine whose ship will survive. %% Chapter XII OF Auxiliary, Mixed, and National Arms The second sort of unprofitable arms are auxiliaries, by whom I mean, troops brought to help and protect you by a potentate whom you summon to your aid; Auxiliaries may be excellent and useful soldiers for themselves, but are always hurtful to him who calls them in; for if they are defeated, he is undone, if victorious, he becomes their prisoner. . . . -- from "The Prince", by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), 1513 %% FEAR OF FAILING (Outlandish comments from professors on student papers) "What's page one, a preemptive strike?" -- Professor David Freund, Communication, Ramapo State College "The 'A' is for content, the 'minus' is for not typing it. Don't ever do this to my eyes again." -- Professor Ronald Brady, Philosophy, Ramapo State College "I think your opinions are reasonable, except for the one about my mental instability." -- Psychology Professor, Farifield University %% ___ 12 + 144 + 20 + 3 V 4 2 ---------------------- + 5(11) = 9 + 0 7 Take twelve and add one forty-four Plus twenty and thrice square root of four, Divide that sum by seven, Add five times eleven And you've nine squared and not a bit more. %% 'CATSPAW' [* 1/2] First aired October 27, 1967. Amidst an atmosphere of witches and dungeons, a pair of aliens use seemingly magical powers in an attempt to trick further scientific information from the people of the Enterprise. %% 'CHARLIE X' [***] First aired September 15, 1966. A teenager, raised by aliens and possessing some of their unusual powers, proves incapable of adjusting to human society and emotions. %% 'THE APPLE' [**] First aired October 13, 1967. The Enterprise finds itself under attack by Vaal, a machine that guides the actions and even the environment of a primitive populace. %% (####) (#######) (#########) (#########) (#########) (#########) __&__ (#########) / \ (#########) |\/\/\/| /\ /\ /\ /\ | | (#########) | | | V \/ \---. .----/ \----. | (o)(o) (o)(o)(##) | | \_ / \ / C .---_) ,_C (##) | (o)(o) (o)(o) <__. .--\ (o)(o) /__. | |.___| /____, (##) C _) _C / \ () / | \__/ \ (#) | ,___| /____, ) \ > (C_) < /_____\ | | | / \ /----' /___\____ /___\ /_____/ \ OOOOOO /____\ ooooo /| |\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ Homer Marge Bart Lisa Baby Maggie THE SIMPSONS %% 'AMOK TIME' [****] First aired September 15, 1967. Spock is forced by the instinctive Vulcan mating cycle to return to his home planet and take a wife. %% 'I, MUDD' [*** 1/2] First aired November 3, 1967. The Enterprise is forced to a planet populated by androids and ruled by their old nemesis, Harcourt Fenton Mudd. %% 'METAMORPHOSIS' [*] First aired November 10, 1967. A shuttlecraft is forced down to a planet as company for a stranded spaceman, who has been kept young by a gaseous alien called the 'Companion'. %% 'SHORE LEAVE' [**] First aired December 29, 1966. The crew of the Enterprise takes shore leave on a planet where their every thought is immediately converted to reality. %% 'SPOCK'S BRAIN' [*] First aired September 20, 1968. A mysterious woman surgically removes Spock's brain. %% 'THE MAN TRAP' [**] First aired September 8, 1966. The Enterprise is ravaged by a creature that sucks the salt from its victims' bodies, and that is capable of assuming any identity. %% ANNOUNCER . . . Harpo broke a tradition of years and agreed to speak over the radio. A thrilled audience sat tense and nervous as Harpo and his interviewer approached the microphone in the studios of XKVYRVTD. In the control room, a red light flashed. History in the making! Harpo on the air!! INTERVIEWER (nasal voice) Mr. Marx, this is a great occasion for me. Never in your career have you uttered one single word from stage or screen. And just think, I, who all the boys used to call, "Stinky", am to be the first person to interview you. First, I'd like you to tell our great unseen audience something about your new picture, "A Day At the Races". (Silence) We're waiting, Mr. Marx. (Silence) HARPO INTERVIEWER Thank you, Mr. Marx. ANNOUNCER And thank *you*, Mr. Interviewer. And, as Harpo Marxes out, "TIME MARXES ON"! %% OUR ASCII ALPHABET A for ASCII, our alphabet's name. N the New version which doesn't fit. B for Bugs, for which we get blamed. O is the Operating system we buy. C the Computer, which never works right. P the Patch to make programs fry. D is Debugging the rest of the night. Q is for Qwerty of typewriter lore. E is Errors, we try to forget. R is the Ram we used to call core. F is Files, we need to invent. S the Standard we'll follow some day. G is 'G', whose control we call bell. T is the Teletype banging away. H is headaches, we know them so well. U is the User, that unhappy man. I is Input we handle with care. V the Vengeance he wreaks when he can. J is Jump to nobody knows where. W is Work, it's the managers call. K is Kill, we do when we're bored. X is the Xerox machine down the hall. L is Listings, which cover the floor. Y is the Yes you reply by mistake. M is Memory dropping from it. Z is the Zeros all over your tape. %% THE LUMBERJACK SONG Monty Python Shopkeeper: Well, I, I never wanted to be a pet store shopkeeper! I wanted to be out, in the great outdoors, in British Columbia! With my girlie by my side, fresh air and trees--- I want to be a LUMBERJACK! Ohhhh...... I'm a lumberjack, and I'm OK, I sleep all night and I work all day! Chorus (sung by a group of Canadian Mounties): Oh, He's a lumberjack and he's OK, He sleeps all night and he works all day. I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, I go to the lavatory-- On Wednesdays I go shopping, And have buttered scones for tea! Chorus: I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wild flowers-- I put on women's clothing, And hang around in bars! Chorus: I cut down trees, I wear high heels, Suspenders and a bra-- I wish I'd been a girlie, Just like my dear papa! Chorus: %% "I Hold Your Hand In Mine" I hold your hand in mine, dear, The night you died I cut it off, I press it to my lips. I really don't know why. I take a healthy bite But now every time I kiss it From your dainty fingertips. I get bloodstains on my tie. My joy would be complete, dear, I'm sorry now I killed you, If you were only here, For our love was something fine, But still I keep your hand And 'til they come to get me As a precious souvenir. I shall hold your hand in mine. -- Tom Leher, from "Songs by Tom Lehrer" %% "The Twelve Days After Christmas" The first day after Christmas The sixth day after Christmas My true love and I had a fight The six laying geese wouldn't lay And so I chopped the pear tree down I gave the whole darn gaggle to And burnt it just for spite. The A.S.P.C.A. And with a single cartridge The seventh day what a mess I found I shot that blasted partridge All seven swimming swans had drowned My true love, My true love The eighth day before they could suspect My true love gave to me. I bundled up the Eight maids a-milking, The second day after Christmas Nine ladies dancing, I pulled on the old rubber gloves Ten lords a-leaping, And very gently wrung the necks Eleven pipers piping, Of both the turtle doves. Twelve drummers drumming, (Well, actually I kept one of the maids) The third day after Christmas ...And sent them back collect. My mother came down with the croup I had to use the three French hens And so I wrote my true love, To make some chicken soup. "We are through, love! And I've said it in so many words The four calling birds were a big mistake Furthermore your Christmas gifts For their language was obscene Are for the... The five golden rings were completely fake ...B Four calling birds And they turned my fingers green. I Three french hens R Two turtle doves D And a partridge S! in a pear tree! %% 'A PIECE OF THE ACTION' [*****] First aired January 12, 1968. Kirk must figure out a way to counteract the effects of an earlier expedition, which caused a planet's civilization to pattern itself after the Chicago mobs of the Twenties. Features Vic Tayback. %% 'A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR' [***] First aired February 2, 1968. When the Klingons hasten the arms development of one faction on a hitherto peaceful planet, Kirk must arm the other side in order to maintain a balance of power. %% 'A TASTE OF ARMAGEDDON' [***] First aired February 23, 1967. The Enterprise and its crew are declared casualties in an interplanetary war entirely simulated by computers. %% 'ALL OUR YESTERDAYS' [***] First aired March 14, 1969. A rescue mission to a planet whose sun is about to nova results in Kirk, Spock, and McCoy being sent to various eras in the planet's past. %% 'AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD' [*] First aired October 11, 1968. A group of children, under alien domination, play on the crew members' secret fears in order to gain control of the ship. %% 'ASSIGNMENT: EARTH' [****] First aired March 29, 1968. On a historical fact-finding mission to 1969, the Enterprise accidentally intercepts an interplanetary agent out to sabotage an orbiting nuclear platform. Terri Garr in a classic bimbo role. %% 'BALANCE OF TERROR' [*** 1/2] First aired December 15, 1966. Kirk matches wits against a Romulan commander in the first encounter between the species to occur in several decades. %% 'BREAD AND CIRCUSES' [*] First aired March 15, 1968. The Enterprise encounters a civilization that combines the features of the Roman Empire with 20th-century technology. %% 'BY ANY OTHER NAME' [** 1/2] First aired February 23, 1968. A group of aliens from the Andromeda galaxy commandeer the Enterprise to make the journey back home. %% 'COURT-MARTIAL' [**] First aired February 2, 1967. Kirk is placed on trial when the ship's record tapes show he committed an error that cost a man's life. %% 'DAGGER OF THE MIND' [***] First aired November 3, 1966. A deranged escapee from a penal planet causes Kirk to investigate the psychiatric treatments being administered there. %% 'DAY OF THE DOVE' [** 1/2] First aired November 1, 1968. Klingons and the Enterprise crew must unite to overcome an alien who feeds on the hatred between them. %% 'ELAAN OF TROYIUS' [** 1/2] First aired December 20, 1968. The Enterprise's task of transporting an imperious woman to another planet for marriage is complicated by Kirk's falling in love with her. Problems arise because this wench's tears are cause any man touching them to fall madly in love with her,and guess who goes and does it -- none other than Kirk. %% 'ERRAND OF MERCY' [*** 1/2] First aired March 23, 1967. Kirk and Spock, stranded on Organia, attempt to interfere with the Klingon occupation of the planet, despite the Organians' insistence upon the necessity of non-violence. %% 'FRIDAY'S CHILD' [***] First aired December 1, 1967. Negotiations over mining rights become a battle for survival when McCoy unintentionally violates a tribal taboo. %% 'GALILEO SEVEN' [* 1/2] First aired January 5, 1967. Spock finds himself in command of the shuttlecraft Galileo, stranded on a hostile planetoid. %% 'JOURNEY TO BABEL' [***] First aired November 17, 1967. Crisis piles atop crisis when the Enterprise is in charge of transporting a volatile cargo of Federation diplomats, including Spock's parents. %% 'MIRROR, MIRROR' [***] First aired October 6, 1967. Kirk, McCoy, Scott, and Uhura are accidentally exchanged with their counterparts in a parallel universe, where instead of the Federation they find a violent, dictatorial Empire. %% 'MUDD'S WOMEN' [** 1/2] First aired October 13, 1966. Jack-of-all-illegal-trades Harry Mudd is transported aboard the Enterprise along with his cargo, three irresistibly beautiful women. %% 'OBSESSIONS' [*** 1/2] First aired December 15, 1967. Kirk disregards all other responsibilities in an effort to destroy a gaseous cloud that absorbs red corpuscles from human bodies. %% 'OPERATION--ANNIHILATE' [**] First aired April 13, 1967. The Enterprise faces an onslaught by parasitic creatures that invade the nervous system to take control of their hosts. %% 'PATTERNS OF FORCE' [**] First aired February 16, 1968. A Federation historian ignores the Prime Directive and reshapes a planet's society along the lines of Nazi Germany. %% 'PLATO'S STEPCHILDREN' [*] First aired November 22, 1968. The dwarf Alexander's lack of mind-over-matter abilities may be the only clue to aid Kirk in defeating a band of telekinetics. %% 'REQUIEM FOR METHUSELAH' [**] First aired February 14, 1969. Flint, an immortal, uses Kirk to rouse emotions in Rana, an android,so that she will become fully human and can be a suitable, immortal mate. %% 'RETURN OF THE ARCHONS' [**] First aired February 9, 1967. An entire planet is under the total mental control of a mysterious being known as 'Landru'. %% 'RETURN TO TOMORROW' [** 1/2] First aired February 9, 1968. Highly advanced alien minds 'borrow' bodies, including those of Kirk and Spock, in order to build permanent android bodies. One of them, however, does not wish to leave his borrowed body. With Mariette Hartley. %% 'SPACE SEED' [*** 1/2] First aired February 16, 1967. The Enterprise runs across a 'sleeper ship' full of supermen fleeing their defeat in the Eugenics Wars. %% 'SPECTRE OF THE GUN' [***] First aired October 25, 1968. Kirk et al find themselves on the losing side of the gunfight at the OK Corral. %% 'THAT WHICH SURVIVES' [** 1/2] First aired January 24, 1969. A mysterious woman whose touch is death threatens the landing party. %% 'THE ALTERNATIVE FACTOR' [*] First aired March 30, 1967. A schizophrenic personality named Lazarus seems to be the key to an anomaly in the space-time fabric of the universe. %% 'THE CHANGELING' [***] First aired September 29, 1967. Nomad, an ancient Earth probe, has combined with an alien probe (The Other) to form an incredibly powerful mechanism that is determined to destroy all 'imperfect' life forms. %% 'THE CLOUD MINERS' [**] First aired February 28, 1969. Kirk's attempt to pick up a shipment of a vital mineral embroils him in the demands of the oppressed miners against the rulers. %% 'THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING' [*/2] (***) First aired December 8, 1966. The star of a Shakespearean acting company may be the infamous 'Kodos the Executioner'. %% 'THE CORBOMITE MANEUVER' [***] First aired November 10, 1966. To stave off an attack by an alien vessel, Kirk concocts the now-famous 'Corbomite' bluff. %% 'THE DEADLY YEARS' [****] First aired December 8, 1967. Kirk is relieved of command when he and other officers contract a disease that results in senility and death by old age within days. %% 'THE DEVIL IN THE DARK' [***] First aired March 9, 1967. A mining operation is ravaged by a monster that dissolves men's bodies. The classic 'Horta' bit. %% 'THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE' [**** 1/2] First aired October 20, 1967. The starships Enterprise and Constellation battle an enormous machine that destroys planets and consumes them for fuel. %% 'THE EMPATH' [*/2] First aired December 6, 1968. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are manipulated by aliens who use them to teach compassion to a girl capable of absorbing the pain and injuries of others. %% 'THE ENEMY WITHIN' [* 1/2] First aired October 6, 1966. A transporter malfunction splits Kirk into two personalities, one brutal and incapable of control, the other gentle and incapable of command. %% 'THE ENTERPRISE INCIDENT' [****] First aired September 27, 1968. Kirk goes mad and Spock turns traitor in an attempt to steal an improved cloaking device from the Romulans. %% 'THE GAMESTERS OF TRISKELION' [**] First aired January 5, 1968. Kirk, Uhura, and Chekov are captured for use in gambling conflicts. %% 'THE IMMUNITY SYNDROME' [*** 1/2] First aired January 19, 1968. A gigantic single-celled creature, which feeds on the energy necessary to our form of life, invades our galaxy. %% 'THE LIGHTS OF ZETAR' [***] First aired January 31, 1969. An electrical cloud formed by the life-essences of the long-dead Zetarians seeks to possess the body of Scotty's new-found sweetheart. %% 'THE MARK OF GIDEON' [** 1/2] First aired January 17, 1969. Kirk is decoyed into a replica of the Enterprise. While Spock searches for him through a maze of diplomatic red tape, the people of Gideon are using him as a source of alien infection. %% 'THE MENAGERIE (part I)' [**** 1/2] First aired November 17, 1966. Spock risks the death penalty by hijacking his old commander, Captain Pike, to Talos IV. Court-martial testimony (actually scenes taken from 'The Cage', Star Trek's original pilot episode) recreates the story of Pike's earlier encounter with the Talosians. %% 'THE MENAGERIE (part II)' [****] First aired November 24, 1966. The conclusion to the previous episode, in which the remainder of the earlier visit to Talos IV is shown, and Spock makes clear why he felt it necessary to return there with Pike. %% 'THE NAKED TIME' [*** 1/2] First aired September 29, 1966. A strange malady strikes the crew of the Enterprise, causing them to succumb to their innermost desires. %% 'THE OMEGA GLORY' [*] First aired March 1, 1968. Captain Tracy, believing he has found a planet containing the secret of eternal youth, interferes in the struggle between the two planetary cultures, the Yangs and the Kohms. %% 'THE PARADISE SYNDROME' [*** 1/2] First aired October 4, 1968. In a state of amnesia, Kirk marries and finds happiness with Miramanee, an Indian maiden. Meanwhile, Spock must find a way to save her planet from an impending meteor collision. %% 'THE SAVAGE CURTAIN' [**] First aired March 7, 1969. Lincoln of Earth and Sarek of Vulcan join Kirk and Spock in battle against a group of villains, while alien observers examine the distinctions between good and evil. %% 'THE SQUIRE OF GOTHOS' [** 1/2] First aired January 12, 1967. The crew of the Enterprise are made unwilling guests of the powerful but capricious General Trelane (retired). %% 'THE THOLIAN WEB' [**] First aired November 15, 1968. The Tholians entrap the Enterprise, not believing that the crew is merely trying to save Kirk from a hyperspace warp. %% 'THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES' [*****] First aired December 29, 1967. Kirk must put up with Federation bureaucrats and hordes of hungry tribbles while protecting a shipment of quadrotriticale (wheat) against Klingon sabotage. %% 'THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER' [*** 1/2] First aired March 8, 1968. The Enterprise is put under total control of a new type of computer, which then refuses to relinquish control. %% 'THE WAY TO EDEN' [*/2] First aired February 21, 1969. A group of space hippies are searching for the legendary planet of Eden. Doc Severin (ears) and Adam. Spock jams. %% 'THIS SIDE OF PARADISE' [*** 1/2] First aired March 2, 1967. Strange spores cause the entire crew of the Enterprise to mutiny and beam down to a planet where all work is done in unity and contentment. Interesting encounter between Spock and an incredibly beautiful blond. %% 'TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY' [****] First aired January 26, 1967. The Enterprise is accidentally flung back to the year 1967, where they find they must take desperate measures in an attempt to avoid changing history. You get to see the Enterprise from the bottom. %% 'TURNABOUT INTRUDER' [* 1/2] First aired March 28, 1969. A woman bitterly jealous of Kirk uses an alien device to exchange her consciousness with his, and then attempts to kill her body and thus Kirk's mind. %% 'WHO MOURNS FOR ADONAIS' [**] First aired September 22, 1967. The Enterprise is seized by a being claiming to be the god Apollo, who requires their worship to survive. %% 'WHOM GODS DESTROY' [* 1/2] First aired January 3, 1969. Captain Garth, having taken over the penal planet where he was being treated, uses his ability to change shape in an attempt to get aboard the Enterprise. %% 'WINK OF AN EYE' [* 1/2] First aired November 29, 1968. The Enterprise is invaded by beings who move too fast for human eyes to detect. %% 'WOLF IN THE FOLD' [* 1/2] First aired December 22, 1967. Scotty appears to be the only logical suspect in a bizarre series of murders. %% *** NEWSFLASH *** Russian tanks steamrolling through New Jersey!!!! Details at eleven! %% -- Gifts for Children -- This is easy. You never have to figure out what to get for children, because they will tell you exactly what they want. They spend months and months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday- morning cartoon-show advertisements. Make sure you get your children exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices. If your child thinks he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You Can Rip Right Off, you'd better get it. You may be worried that it might help to encourage your child's antisocial tendencies, but believe me, you have not seen antisocial tendencies until you've seen a child who is convinced that he or she did not get the right gift. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% -- Gifts for Men -- Men are amused by almost any idiot thing -- that is why professional ice hockey is so popular -- so buying gifts for them is easy. But you should never buy them clothes. Men believe they already have all the clothes they will ever need, and new ones make them nervous. For example, your average man has 84 ties, but he wears, at most, only three of them. He has learned, through humiliating trial and error, that if he wears any of the other 81 ties, his wife will probably laugh at him ("You're not going to wear THAT tie with that suit, are you?"). So he has narrowed it down to three safe ties, and has gone several years without being laughed at. If you give him a new tie, he will pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you. If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires. More than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set of tires. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% --- (0 0) Kilroy was here ----------------------W--U--W------------------------------ %% ACHTUNG!!! Das machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und corkenpoppen mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands in das pockets. Relaxen und vatch das blinkenlights!!! %% DELETE A FORTUNE! 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. %% Dreams Are For The Damned copyright 1986 meredith tanner You live in unreality Your head is in the clouds You go to work at nine each day Your mama would be proud You come back home at five o'clock Your mind is in a daze You're living in your fantasy You turn another page (chorus) But fairytales are children's games And dreams are for the damned This ain't the Marvel Universe Or never-never land There's no tall dark handsome stranger Standing waiting here for you That's only in your fantasy It's never coming true Reality is painful, yes I know that's how you feel Much too hard for the likes of you And you're sure it isn't real So you just keep on pretending As you live from day to day And it's just a small annoyance But it never goes away (chorus) I saw you just the other day You didn't notice me Your fairytale alternative Was all that you could see You took a train to fairyland The train went off the tracks You're stranded in your fantasy You're never coming back (chorus) %% Get GUMMed ---------- The Gurus of Unix Meeting of Minds (GUMM) takes place Wednesday, April 1, 2076 (check THAT in your perpetual calendar program), 14 feet above the ground directly in front of the Milpitas Gumps. Members will grep each other by the hand (after intro), yacc a lot, smoke filtered chroots in pipes, chown with forks, use the wc (unless uuclean), fseek nice zombie processes, strip, and sleep, but not, we hope, od. Three days will be devoted to discussion of the ramifications of whodo. Two seconds have been allotted for a complete rundown of all the user- friendly features of Unix. Seminars include "Everything You Know is Wrong", led by Tom Kempson, "Batman or Cat:man?" led by Richie Dennis "cc C? Si! Si!" led by Kerwin Bernighan, and "Document Unix, Are You Kidding?" led by Jan Yeats. No Reader Service No. is necessary because all GUGUs (Gurus of Unix Group of Users) already know everything we could tell them. -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, June '84 %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 1 proof by example: The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof. proof by intimidation: 'Trivial'. proof by vigorous handwaving: Works well in a classroom or seminar setting. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 2 proof by cumbersome notation: Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols. proof by exhaustion: An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful. proof by omission: 'The reader may easily supply the details' 'The other 253 cases are analogous' '...' %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 3 proof by obfuscation: A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements. proof by wishful citation: The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature to support his claims. proof by funding: How could three different government agencies be wrong? proof by eminent authority: 'I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP- complete.' %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 4 proof by personal communication: 'Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication].' proof by reduction to the wrong problem: 'To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.' proof by reference to inaccessible literature: The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883. proof by importance: A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 5 proof by accumulated evidence: Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample. proof by cosmology: The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God. proof by mutual reference: In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A. proof by metaproof: A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 6 proof by picture: A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission. proof by vehement assertion: It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience. proof by ghost reference: Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 7 proof by forward reference: Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first. proof by semantic shift: Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result. proof by appeal to intuition: Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here. %% I can see your truth As I look into your deep, dark eyes I can see the fire burning on the coals I can see your truth, I can see your lies Deep in my heart a part of me cries I see the reality of our painful roles As I look into your deep, dark eyes You have had many men, that's what beauty buys I can see your wiles digging in like moles I can see your truth, I can see your lies You reach into my soul, then a part of me dies I can see my hopes fade, along with all my goals As I look into your deep, dark eyes I've had enough. I feel the anger rise I can feel anguish for all the lost souls I can see your truth, I can see your lies I can walk away now, from you the Lord of Flies You see I've finally won. A bell of conquest tolls As I look into your deep, dark eyes I can see your truth, I can see your lies -- (c) Patrick Deupree %% It's grad exam time... COMPUTER SCIENCE Inside your desk you'll find a listing of the DEC/VMS operating system in IBM 1710 machine code. Show what changes are necessary to convert this code into a UNIX Berkeley 7 operating system. Prove that these fixes are bug free and run correctly. You should gain at least 150% efficiency in the new system. (You should take no more than 10 minutes on this question.) MATHEMATICS If X equals PI times R^2, construct a formula showing how long it would take a fire ant to drill a hole through a dill pickle, if the length-girth ratio of the ant to the pickle were 98.17:1. GENERAL KNOWLEDGE Describe the Universe. Give three examples. %% NATIONAL CONDOM WEEK Cover your stump before you hump. Before you attack her, wrap your wacker. Don't be silly... protect your Willie. Before you blast her, protect your bushmaster. Don't be a loner, cover your boner. You can't go wrong if you shield your dong. If you're not going to sack it, go home and wack it. If you think she's spunky, cover your monkey. Before you bag her, sheath your dagger, It'll be sweeter if you wrap your peter. If you slip between her thighs be sure to condomize. She won't get sick if you cap your dick. If you go into heat, package that meat. Befo' da van start rockin', be sho' yo' cock gots a stockin'. Wrap it in foil before checking her oil. A crank with armor will never harm her. %% PRAYERS AROUND THE ZODIAC ARIES Dear God, please give me patience... and could you do it right now? TAURUS Dear God, help me accept change, but not too quick. GEMINI Dear God! Who is God? Where is God? Why is God? CANCER Dear God!!! LEO Yes? VIRGO Dear God, please make us perfect and don't mess it up like You did the last time. LIBRA Dear God, please help me to be decisive, but on the other hand, what do you think is best? SCORPIO Our Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, even though the b*****ds don't deserve it! SAGITTARIUS Dear Lord, if I've told you once, I've told you a million times, help me stop exaggerating. CAPRICORN Dear God! I'd like to ask you to help me, but I learned a long time ago not to rely on anyone else! AQUARIUS Dear God, I know I like change, but this chaos is ridiculous!! PISCES Dear Lord, as long as I'm going to drink this fifth of Scotch tonight, please use the stimulation for Thy glory. %% Pittsburgh Driver's Test (7) The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light but a steady left tail light. This means (a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn to call the problem to the driver's attention. (b) the driver is signaling a right turn. (c) the driver is signaling a left turn. (d) the driver is from out of town. The correct answer is (d). Tail lights are used in some foreign countries to signal turns. %% Pittsburgh Driver's Test (8) Pedestrians are (a) irrelevant. (b) communists. (c) a nuisance. (d) difficult to clean off the front grille. The correct answer is (a). Pedestrians are not in cars, so they are totally irrelevant to driving; you should ignore them completely. %% Pittsburgh driver's test 10: Potholes are a) extremely dangerous. b) patriotic. c) the fault of the previous administration. d) all going to be fixed next summer. The correct answer is b. Potholes destroy unpatriotic, unamerican, imported cars, since the holes are larger than the cars. If you drive a big, patriotic, American car you have nothing to worry about. %% Popcorn Talk Walking hand in hand, the couple were the last To leave the matinee. They traded turns Munching on a bag of greasy popcorn While their footsteps chattered on the pavement. Eventually the man looked up and said, ``It's going to rain'', but meant to say it had. Well, she looked up, then down, then sniffed the air And with a shrug she smiled and said, ``it has''. Nodding, he agreed. He passed the bag to her, Reached in, and finished off the popcorn. So they walked, in silence, Each wondering what the other had said. 02/88 Bruce Sutherland (Somewhere in Toronto) 19 JUN 1987 05:06, so long ago ... -- michka %% THE THREE THEOS Three Theos got together For a discussion/conversation. The were: Theologist, Theologician, and Theologian. Theologist was telling the others About new concepts That he was able to locate in the Bible. Theologician was reciting proofs That he managed to come up with For various Biblical theories. Theologian was preoccupied With quoting historical facts Concerning the events in the Bible. They were addressing each other When they spoke -- Like any three persons During a conversation. But their questions did not seem To emanate from what was said before. Their replies were not answering The questions raised. They were constantly interrupting each other, Erratically changing the topics With the help of The insincere "Yes" and "OK". They were not communicating. They were simply emptying their learned minds. %% PROBLEM SOLVING PROCESS ___________________________ YES / Does the Darn Thing work? \ NO +------------| |------------+ | \___________________________/ | | | V V +----------+ _________ | Don't | YES / Did you \ | mess | +---------| mess | | with it! | | | with it | +----------+ | \_________/ | V | NO | _________ +-------+ | | / Does \ | YOU | | | NO | anyone |<-----------| MORON | | | +---| know? | +-------+ | | | \_________/ | | V | YES | | +------+ +-----------+ | | | HIDE | V | | | IT | +--------+ _____v_____ | +------+ | YOU | YES / WILL THEY \ | | +------->| DUMB |<------------| CATCH YOU?| | | | | MORON | \___________/ | | | |________| | NO | | | | V | | | ______v________ +------------+ | | | NO / CAN YOU BLAME \ |DESTROY THE | | | +------| SOMEONE ELSE? | | EVIDENCE | | | \_______________/ +------------+ | | | YES | | | | | | | v | | | ============================= | | +------>|| N O ||<------+ +-------------->|| P R O B L E M || ============================= %% GHOST CHICKENS IN THE SKY (Music: "Ghost Riders in the Sky."; Guitar chords: Em G C) A chicken farmer went out, one dark and stormy day. By the coop he rested as he went along his way. All at once a rotten egg hit him in the eye, It was the sight he feared the most -- ghost chickens in the sky. The farmer had raised chickens since he was twenty-four, Working for the Colonel for thirty years or more, Killin' all them chickens and sending them to fry, Now they want him dead -- ghost chickens in the sky. Their beaks were black and shiny, their eyes were burning red, They had no meat or feathers -- Those chickens were DEAD! They picked that farmer up, and he died by the claw. They cooked him extra-crispy, and served him with coleslaw. -- Shawn Maury, 1988 %% THE STORY OF CREATION or THE MYTH OF URK 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 %% "the Comet" .solitude. such- infinite bone chilling darkness yet across the void there comes, dancing lights a vast sum of shining ice s p r ay ing out ward t r a i l s, crystalline jets of luminescence- frost of dreams, though absolute it's seeds of radiance reach from the swarth to spark much gravid thought. by m. maxwell %% God: The Ultimate Autobiography =============================== (Holy Ghost-written by Jeremy Pascall) submitted by Johnathan R. Partington Featuring: * THE TRUTH ABOUT ADAM AND EVE, and why they were fired from the world's first theme park. * SODOM AND GOMORRAH: THE CITIES OF SIN, including street plans, good food guides and listings of the best clubs, discos, and bars. And why compulsory demolition orders were placed on all of them. * BEGETTING: THE DO'S AND DON'T'S, including why you shouldn't covet your neighbor's ass. And exclusively revealing: * The Eleventh Commandment! * That pigs were *meant* to fly, and rhinos were designed to live under stones! * That the sky should have been called "Waxtl" but Adam couldn't pronounce it! Plus a word for any atheists among you: "Wrong!" Ebury Press - ISBN 0 85223 657 3 - Hardback - $5.95 %% How to Catch a White Elephant ============================= Submitted By Niels Kristian Jensen Go to an place where there are white elephants. Bring with you a muffin (with raisins). Climb a tree. When the white elephant is close, drop the muffin (with raisins) in front of it. The white elephant will be happy, and eat the muffin (with raisins). White elephants like muffins (with raisins). Repeat this procedure for five days in a row. After the fifth day, the white elephant will be used to its daily muffin (with raisins). The sixth day you climb the tree, bring with you a muffin without raisins. Drop the muffin as usual. When the white elephant finds out that the muffin lacks raisins, it will darken in anger. And then you catch it the same way as an ordinary grey elephant. %% JACK AND THE BEANSTACK by Mark Isaak Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL character named Jack. Jack and his relations were poor. Often their hash table was bare. One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices are sparse. You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some BASICs." She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it to him. So Jack set out. But as he was walking along a Hamilton path, he met the traveling salesman. "Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman in high-level language. "I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips and Apples," commented Jack. "I have a much better algorithm. You needn't join a queue there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now." Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house. But when he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she started thrashing. "Don't you even have any artificial intelligence? All these kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the window ... %% The Churchill Wit ----------------- Churchill was known to drain a glass or two and, after one particularly convivial evening, he chanced to encounter Miss Bessie Braddock, a Socialist member of the House of Commons, who, upon seeing his condition, said, "Winston, you're drunk." Mustering all his dignity, Churchill drew himself up to his full height, cocked an eyebrow and rejoined, "Shove it up your ass, you ugly cunt." %% AM AM AM AM \AM/AM-AM/\AM/\AM-AM /AM\AM AM\AM/AM AM-AM/AM\AM/\AM AM-\/\/\/\AM-AM /\/ ||| ||| ||| ----- ===== AmBush. %% v ~. v v /| / | v v /__|__ \--------/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`~~~~~~'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ %% The Five Yorkshiremen: The Next Generation Y1: Who would've thought that we'd be on a ship that could separate in times of battle and keep most of the crew safe? I remember when the whole ship used to go to yellow alert every time we entered an ion storm. Y2: You were lucky. We had to go to double yellow alert whenever the captain fell into an obelisk, came out thinking he was a god, and married an Indian woman. Y3: You were lucky. We had to go to yellowish-red alert every time a woman came on board and stole the first officer's brain. Y4: You were lucky to have a woman on board. We had to go to red alert when we were attacked by a mutant salt creature disguised as a woman. Y5: Luxury! We had to go to double red alert every time the captain found an overloading phaser in his quarters. Y1: Oh, we used to dream of having an overloading phaser in the captain's quarters. We had to go to triple red alert every time the blood- sucking gas cloud got into the ship through impulse vent number two. Y2: You were lucky. We had to go to quadruple red alert, blow up our own ship, steal a Klingon bird of prey (which doesn't even have a red alert), go to Vulcan to revive the dead captain, go back in time and get two whales, come back and crash land in San Francisco Bay, all on a Klingon triple black alert. Y3: And if you'd try to tell that to these young officers today, they wouldn't believe you. Others: Nope. No they wouldn't. %% two together first there are two, but then there is one not apart, but together as only two true to love can be experiencing feelings that only those in love can for the joy of two being one is not in the having but in the sharing, not of body but of life living a life in the gossamer hands of togetherness feeling only the good as the power of their love shields them from all malice first there are two but then there is one not apart, but together as only two true to love can be %% The Committee ============= by Leslie Lipson submitted by Michael J. Irvin Oh give me your pity! I'm on a committee, Which means that from morning to night, We attend and amend And contend and defend Without a conclusion in sight. We confer and concur, We defer and demur, And reiterate all of our thoughts. We revise the agenda With frequent addenda And consider a load of reports. We compose and propose, We suppose and oppose, And the points of procedure are fun; But though various notions Are brought up as motions, There's terribly little gets done. We resolve and absolve; But we never dissolve, Since it's out of the question for us To bring our committee To end like this ditty, Which stops with a period, thus. %% The Wind -------- The Stranger's tale is done but still The memory lingers on. His face was red, his hands were numb, He shivered in the dawn. The air was warm, the sky was still; I did not understand What could have stung the Stranger's face Or paralyzed his hand. "The Wind is cold, the Wind is dark," The Stranger said at last. "Out of the future this wind blows But not into the past." "The People know the Wind will come, They cower in their fear. In brimstone fires they'd rather burn Than have to disappear." "They threw their slogans and their stones, Two wooden sticks they crossed. They rushed to make a place where truth Was false and logic lost." "But the Mighty Fortress that they built Of wishes and of lies Will, Windswept, crumble and be no Salvation nor disguise." The Stranger paused and, gazing east, Beheld the glowing dawn. "I have no where to go," he said, "And so I must begone." He turned and walked into the west And as I watched him go I thought that I began to hear The Wind begin to blow. %% ___====-_ _-====___ _--~~~#####// ' ` \\#####~~~--_ _-~##########// ( ) \\##########~-_ -############// |\^^/| \\############- _~############// (O||O) \\############~_ ~#############(( \\// ))#############~ -###############\\ (oo) //###############- -#################\\ / `' \ //#################- -###################\\/ () \//###################- _#/|##########/\######( (()) )######/\##########|\#_ |/ |#/\#/\#/\/ \#/\##| \()/ |##/\#/ \/\#/\#/\#| \| ` |/ V V ` V )|| |()| ||( V ' V /\ \| ' ` ` ` ` / | |()| | \ ' '< > ' ( | |()| | )\ / / __\ |__|()|__| /__\______/ / (vvv(vvvv)(vvvv)vvv)_______/ %% "Advice from Nicholai Ivanovich Lobachevsky" I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky. In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize! Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize- Only be sure always to call it please 'research'. -- Tom Lehrer %% "Facts of Life" From a church bulletin: "Congratulations to the Burbanks on the arrival of their new little bungle from heaven." %% "O Lutefisk" [May be sung to the tune of "O Tannenbaum"] O Lutefisk... O Lutefisk... how fragrant your aroma O Lutefisk... O Lutefisk... You put me in a coma You smell so strong... you look like glue You taste yust like an overshoe But Lutefisk... come Saturday I tink I'll eat you anyvay O Lutefisk... O Lutefisk... I put you by the door vay I vanted you to ripen up... yust like dey do in Norvay A dog came by and sprinkled you... I hit him vid an army shoe O Lutefisk... now I suppose I'll eat you as I hold my nose O Lutefisk... O Lutefisk... how vell I do remember On Christmas eve how we'd receive... our big treat of December It vasn't turkey or fried ham... it vasn't even pickled spam My mudder knew dere vas no risk... In serving buttered Lutefisk O Lutefisk... O Lutefisk... now everyone discovers Dat Lutefisk and lefse makes... Norvegians better lovers Now all da vorld can have a ball... You're better dan dat Yeritol O Lutefisk... vid brennevin You make me feel like Errol Flynn. %% 'THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER' [**** 1/2] First aired April 6, 1967. McCoy, suffering from an overdose of cordrazine, vanishes through a time portal and somehow changes the past. Kirk and Spock follow in an effort to rectify whatever it is that McCoy has done. Written by Harlan Ellison, starring the bitch of bitches, Joan Collins. %% 'Twas the Night before Crisis '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... %% 'WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF?' [**] First aired October 20, 1966. Nurse Chapel's long-lost fiance turns up in control of a mechanism capable of producing android replicas of live beings. %% 'WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE' [****] First aired September 22, 1966. In passing through an energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy, some Enterprise crew members find their ESP powers enormously heightened. %% (to "The Caissons Go Rolling Along") Scratch the disks, dump the core, Shut it down, pull the plug Roll the tapes across the floor, Give the core an extra tug And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash. Teletypes smashed to bits. Mem'ry cards, one and all, Give the scopes some nasty hits Toss out halfway down the hall And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash. And we've also found Just flip one switch When you turn the power down, And the lights will cease to twitch You turn the disk readers into trash. And the tape drives will crumble in a flash. Oh, it's so much fun, When the CPU Now the CPU won't run Can print nothing out but "foo," And the system is going to crash. The system is going to crash. %% A Severe Strain on the Credulity As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. -- New York Times Editorial, 1920 %% ABSENCE We've looked at the whole Solar System: Mars, Venus, the Moon - you can list 'em. Wherever we roam, There's nobody home. Perhaps they stepped out, and we missed 'em? %% ADMITTING MISTAKES Women will sometimes admit making a mistake. The last man who admitted he was wrong was General George Custer. %% AGE (gather an old man's affections to myself. the earth would have age a weight but the midnight sky simply laughs, dancing.) twenty- I am young; I've danced... (I should not call it dancing. dance is not a change but something fixed within a motion. the stars turn, the earth turns, my eyes turn and spin a hundred, yet a thousand times remaining still within. affections of an old man for the sun's warmth, chair's warmth, dance.) do you bend me then old man, in ways I do not fully sense turn me away, pointing toward my own kind, who shiver beneath the sun? release me with strength over the years... (I who long to long to end the swift journey, bring the arrow earthward, to quiver beneath the moon. till then...) night caress me, wind be like a shawl to a mind in flight. wrap my arms around myself (they feel the ribs of an old man before an evening meal; of fathers of fathers; even now, I can touch the heart of an ancient Man. but now,) me eyes look outward, to see turn downward, to feel (then upward, to dance.) %% AMAZING BUT TRUE ... If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful. %% AMAZING BUT TRUE ... There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert. %% Abou Ben Adhem ============== by James Henry Leigh Hunt submitted by JRP Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw, within the moonlight in his room, Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom, An angel writing in a book of gold. Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, And to the presence in the room he said, "What writest thou?" The vision raised its head, And with a look made of all sweet accord, Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord." "And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay not so," Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low, But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee then, Write me as one that loves his fellow-men." The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night It came again with a great wakening light, And showed the names whom love of God had blessed, And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. %% Another Glitch in the Call ------- ------ -- --- ---- (Sung to the tune of a recent Pink Floyd song.) We don't need no indirection We don't need no flow control No data typing or declarations Did you leave the lists alone? Hey! Hacker! Leave those lists alone! Chorus: All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call. All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call. %% Answers to Last Fortune's Questions: (1) None. (Moses didn't have an ark). (2) Your mother, by the pigeonhole principle. (3) I don't know. (4) Who cares? (5) 6 (or maybe 4, or else 3). Mr. Alfred J. Duncan of Podunk, Montana, submitted an interesting solution to Problem 5. %% Answers to Last Fortunes' Questions: 1) None. (Moses didn't have an ark). 2) Your mother, by the pigeonhole principle. 3) You don't know. Neither does your boss. 4) Who cares? 5) 6 (or maybe 4, or else 3). Mr. Alfred J. Duncan of Podunk, Montana, submitted an interesting solution to Problem 5. Unfortunately, I lost it. 6) I know the answer to this one, but I'm not telling! Suffer! Ha-ha-ha!! 7) There is an interesting solution to this problem on page 10,953 of my book, which you can pick up for $23.95 at finer bookstores and bathroom supply outlets (or 99 cents at the table in front of Papyrus Books). %% BATHROOMS A man has 6 items in his bathroom: a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, a razor, a bar of Dial soap and a towel from a Holiday Inn. The average number of items in a typical American women's bathroom is 437. A man would not be able to identify most of these items. %% CAMERAS Men take photography very seriously. They'll shell out $4000 for state of the art equipment, and build dark rooms and take photography classes. Women purchase Kodak Instamatics. Of course women always end up taking better pictures. %% CHEERLEADERS Female cheerleaders are cute, sexy, fresh, and all American. Male cheerleaders are scary. %% COMEDY Let's say a small group of men and women are in a room, watching television, and an episode of the Three Stooges comes on. Immediately, the men will get very excited; they will laugh uproariously, and even try to imitate the actions of Curly, man's favorite stooge. The woman will roll their eyes and groan and wait it out. %% Clam Up The finished mollusk whimpers with regret For what she's done- be silent, silly shell. You took as alms the first grit you could get, So don't cry foul. You surely did as well As anyone, built pearly-perfect curves Around what raw material you had. The few mistakes belong to youth or nerves. To take a speck of sand and leave it clad In luster! No one will ever ask What inspiration looked like at the start, Or leach away the layers of your task To show the common crystal at the heart. They will hold your jewel, exclaim in pleasure- And you may laugh, knowing what they treasure. %% DETERIORATA Go placidly amid the noise and waste, And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof. Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep. Rotate your tires. Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself, And heed well their advice -- even though they be turkeys. Know what to kiss -- and when. Remember that two wrongs never make a right, But that three do. Wherever possible, put people on "HOLD". Be comforted, that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment, And despite the changing fortunes of time, There is always a big future in computer maintenance. You are a fluke of the universe ... You have no right to be here. Whether you can hear it or not, the universe Is laughing behind your back. -- National Lampoon %% DIETING RULES & CALORIE COUNTER ------------------------------- 1/ If you eat something and no one sees you, it has no calories 2/ Drink diet soda with candy bars (the calories in the candy bars are canceled out by the diet soda) 3/ When eating with someone else, calories don't count if you don't eat more than they do. 4/ Food used for medicinal purposes NEVER count (ie hot chocolate brandy, toast, Sara Lee cheesecake etc.) 5/ If you can make others around you fatter, it is automatic that you become thinner. 6/ Movie related foods do not contain calories (ie Buttered Popcorn Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Red Hots, Smarties etc.). These are considered as part of the entire Entertainment Package, not part of the diet. 7/ Cookie pieces contain no calories (the process of breaking allows calorie leakage). 8/ Simply saying to yourself "I'm on a diet", reduces calories in foods by 50%; telling others you are on diet increases calories by 100%; therefore when dieting always remember: KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT %% DIRECTIONS If a woman is out driving, and she finds herself in unfamiliar surroundings, she will stop at a gas station and ask for directions. Men consider this to be a sign of weakness. Men will never stop and ask for directions. Men will drive in a circle for hours, all the while saying things like, "Looks love I've found a new way to get there." and, "I know I'm in the general neighborhood. I recognize that White Hen store." %% Double Bucky (Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie") Double bucky, you're the one! You make my keyboard lots of fun Double bucky, an additional bit or two: (Vo-vo-de-o!) Control and Meta side by side, Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide! Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs, plus a few! Double bucky, left and right OR'd together, outta sight! Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you! -- (C) 1978 by Guy L. Steele, Jr. to Nicholas Wirth, who suggested that an extra bit be added to terminal codes on 36-bit machines for use by screen editors. [to the tune of "Rubber Ducky"] %% Eclipse ------- Once before she is gone We have promised to meet At the edge of the night And walk unspeaking On naked feet, Before the light Starts creeping Across the silent meadow. Will she cry too, My sad, gentle widow Of love ? %% Fairytale Lovers There once was a time when all lovers were men And women, love-ees. Ah, such happy old days When each knew the ways to entice a young heart: The man with his confident boasts and a grin So dashing that even a swallow would swoon; And a maiden, to see him, would look down and blush While trying to hide a broad smirk with her hand. But lovers aren't lucky in love anymore For men who are MEN act like chauvinist jerks And the rest are left proving they're not men at all. Yes woman, you're wise not to fall for his lies. Pretend you don't need to be held in the arms Of a fairytale lover ... and cover your eyes. 03/88 Bruce Sutherland (Somewhere in Toronto) %% GARAGES Women use garages to park their cars and store their lawnmowers. Men use garages for many things. They hang license plates in garages, and they watch TV in garages, and they build useless lopsided benches in garages. %% GROCERIES A woman knows how to shop for groceries. She makes a list of the things she needs, and then goes to the store and buys these things. A man does not shop on a frequent basis. He waits until the only items left in his refrigerator are an opened can of Schlitz and a half a lime. Then he goes grocery shopping. A man buys everything that looks good. By the time a man reaches the checkout counter,his cart is packed tighter than the Clampett's car on the Beverly Hillbillies. Of course, this will not stop him from going to the 10 items or less lane. %% Gimmie That Old Time Religion We will follow Zarathustra, We will worship like the Druids, Zarathustra like we use to, Dancing naked in the woods, I'm a Zarathustra booster, Drinking strange fermented fluids, And he's good enough for me! And it's good enough for me! (chorus) (chorus) In the church of Aphrodite, The priestess wears a see through nightie, She's a mighty righteous sightie, And she's good enough for me! (chorus) CHORUS: Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, 'Cause it's good enough for me! %% HANDWRITING To their credit, men do not decorate their penmanship. They just chicken scratch. Women use scented, colored stationary, and they dot their "i's" with circles and hearts. Women use ridiculously large loops in their "p's" and "g's." It is a royal pain to read a note from a woman Even when she's dumping you, she'll put a smiley face at the end of the note. %% HATS Women look good in hats; men look like idiots. %% HOW TO READ AN COMPUTER ADVERTISEMENT When It Says: It Really Means: -------------- ---------------- Available Now! We overstocked / We can't sell any. (Alternative: We have a really hot item at an outrageous price) State-of-the-Art Design We can't get the chips yet but we hope to before manufacturing starts. Proven reliability Antiquated technology and obsolete parts. Compatible with most systems Favor us with a big enough order and we'll start designing an interface Tremendous expandibility The unbundled "bare-bones" system with the low advertised price is virtually useless. User-friendly Slow, eats memory for lunch, and probably won't meet your specific needs (but for a fat consulting fee, we'll be happy to customize it for you). Advanced features We couldn't get rid of the quirks/bugs in the system, so we're pretending we planned them all along. Competitively priced Costs less than IBM's. %% Hard Copies and Chmod And everyone thinks computers are impersonal cold diskdrives hardware monitors user-hostile software of course they're only bits and bytes and characters and strings and files just some old textfiles from my old boyfriend telling me he loves me and he'll take care of me simply a discarded printout of a friend's directory deep intimate secrets and how he doesn't trust me couldn't hurt me more if they were scented in lavender or mould on personal stationery -- terri@csd4.milw.wisc.edu %% Has your family tried 'em? POWDERMILK BISCUITS Heavens, they're tasty and expeditious! They're made from whole wheat, to give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. POWDERMILK BISCUITS Buy them ready-made in the big blue box with the picture of the biscuit on the front, or in the brown bag with the dark stains that indicate freshness. %% JEWELRY Women look nice when they wear jewelry. A man can get away with wearing one ring and that's it. Any more than that and he will look like a lounge singer named Vic. %% LAUNDRY Women do the laundry every couple of days. A man will wear every article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants that were really hip about eight years ago, before he will do the laundry. When he is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweatsuit inside out, rent a U-Haul and take his mountain of dirty clothes to the Laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the Laundromat, but this is only a myth perpetuated by old reruns of Love American Style. %% LEG WARMERS Leg warmers are sexy. A woman, even if she's walking the dog or doing the dishes, is allowed to wear leg warmers. She can wear them any time she wants. A man can only wear leg warmers if he is auditioning for the "Gimme the Ball" number in A Chorus Line. %% LEPROSY Leprosy, all my skin is falling off of me. I'm not half the man I used to be. Oh, how did I get leprosy? Syphilis, it all started with a simple kiss. Now it even hurts to take a piss. Oh why did I get syphilis? Why'd she have VD? I don't know, she wouldn't say. I did something wrong, now I long for yesterday .... -- To the tune of "Yesterday" %% LOCKER ROOMS In the locker room men talk about three things: money, football, and women, They exaggerate about money, they don't know football nearly as well as they think they do, and they fabricate stories about women. Women talk about one thing in the locker room -- sex. And not in abstract terms, either. They are extremely graphic and technical, and they never lie. %% LOW BLOWS Let's say a man and a woman are watching a boxing match on television. One of the figures is felled by a low blow. The woman says, "Oh gee, that must hurt." The man doubles over and actually feels the pain. %% Love Makes People Stupid (The Warm Kiss of Spring) I knew a man (a doctor too!) that LOVE Reduced into the echo of a laugh. Chuckling at jokes he didn't hear, His LOVE would pinch and poke his face with dimples Until that goofy smile became indelible ... Like a baby's ... Hmm, where was I? I'm sorry. I was thinking 'bout last spring. It's silly really, but the very day The scent of growth was floating in the air My daughter stumbled right into my arms And, looking up with all the innocence Of daisies, she said ``dabby''. And I wished those tears would run forever. 02/88 Bruce Sutherland (Somewhere in Toronto) %% MAGAZINES Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is lumpy and hairy and should no be seen by the light of day. Men are turned on at the sight of a naked woman's body. Naked men elicit laughter from women. -- from "Men and Women are different" by Richard Roeper %% MATURITY Women mature at a much faster rate than men. Most 17 year old females can function as adults. Most 17 year old males are still trading baseball cards and giving each other wedgies after gym class. This is why high school romances rarely work. %% MENOPAUSE When a woman reaches menopause, she goes through a variety of complicated emotional, psychological, and biological changes. The nature and degree of these changes varies with the individual. Menopause in a man provokes a uniform reaction --- he buys aviator glasses, a snazzy French cap and leather driving gloves, and goes shopping for a Porsche. %% MIRRORS Men are vain; they will check themselves out in the mirror. Women are ridiculous; they will check out their reflections in any shiny surface, mirrors, spoons, store window, toasters, Joe Garagiola's head. %% MORE SPORTS RESULTS: The Beverly Hills Freudians tied the Chicago Rogerians 0-0 last Saturday night. The match started with a long period of silence while the Freudians waited for the Rogerians to free associate and the Rogerians waited for the Freudians to say something they could paraphrase. The stalemate was broken when the Freudians' best player took the offensive and interpreted the Rogerians' silence as reflecting their anal-retentive personalities. At this the Rogerians' star player said "I hear you saying you think we're full of ka-ka." This started a fight and the match was called by officials. %% MOUSTACHES Some men look good with mustaches. Those men are Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds. There are no women who look good with mustaches. %% MOVIES For women their favorite movie scene is when Clark Gable kisses Vivien Leigh for the first time in Gone With the Wind. For men it's when Jimmy Cagney shoves grapefruit in may Clark's face in Public Enemy. %% Masks We all have masks to hide behind Every hour, day after day To keep ourselves from being hurt By the things other people may say. The problem I've found with wearing a mask Is that it often fits too well, And when you try to open up, You're still inside the shell. The mask that was built to hide behind Gets harder to move with the years. It keeps your feelings deep inside - The joy, the sorrow and tears. Remove the mask you hide behind And let your soul run free. Pay good heed to your own true thoughts And be what you want to be. -- (C) 1988 John M. Olsen %% Men vs. Women On the subject of men: I've been a member of the gender for 24 years. I've stumbled through many of the stages of becoming a man, including wildly irregular voice changes at the age of 12, acne attacks in my teens, major crushes on girls who still do not know I am alive and periods of time when I knocked over or broke everything in sight because I had grown seven inches in four days. Regarding women: You could take what I know about women and place this information in a hollowed-out walnut shell, and still have room left for a network executive's brain. But that has not stopped me from observing, questioning, applauding, admiring, and wondering about women. One basic truth: Men and women are different. Now, this may seem a little simplistic, but the fact is, for a period of about six months in 1973, it was very fashionable to believe that we were all persons first, and members of our gender second. This, of course, was so much hooey. We are different -- in our habits, and in the way we react to environmental stimuli and the way we spend our leisure time; and we are especially different when it comes to our attitudes regarding relationships. My personal observations have uncovered many significant differences between men and women. %% Mommy Daddy is that You! He awoke alone in his darkened room. He sat up and looked around. Suddenly there came a noise. "Mommy daddy, is that you?" There was no response. He was becoming frightened. Then suddenly the sound again. SSchcink! "Mommy daddy, is that you!" Still no answer. "Mommy daddy, I cant see you, where are you, Mommy daddy?!" Again that awful sound. "Mommy daddy, I know thats you!!" The sound got closer as he sat shivering in the dark. He screamed,"Mommy Daddy, is that you!!!" The axe bit deeply into his back, completely severing his spine. No it was not his mommy or daddy! %% My Favorite Drugs [Sung to My Favorite Things] Reefers and roach clips and papers and rollers Cocaine and procaine for twenty year molars Reds and peyote to work out your bugs These are a few of my favorite drugs. Uppers and downers and methedrine freakout Take some amphetamines, watch your brains leak out Acid and mescaline pull out your plugs These are a few of my favorite drugs. Backs that are perfect for carrying monkeys Users of heroin, often called junkies Methadone helps then to stop being thugs Takes them off one of my favorite drugs. On a bad trip When the cops come When I lose my head I simply take more of my favorite drugs And then I'm not sad -- I'm dead! %% 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.) %% NICKNAMES With the exception of female body builders, who call each other names like "Ultimate Pecs" and "Big Turk," women eschew the use of nicknames. If Gloria, Suzanne, Deborah, and Michelle get together for lunch, they will call each other Gloria, Suzanne, Deborah, and Michelle. But if Mike, Dirk, Clint, and Jack go out for a brewski, they will affectionately refer to one another as Bullet-Head, Godzilla, Peanut-Brain, and Useless. %% NUDITY IN MOVIES Every actress in the history of movies has had to do a nude scene. This is because every movie in the history of movies has been produced by a man. The only actor who has ever appeared nude in the movies is Richard Gere. This is another reason why men hate him. %% PLANTS A woman asks a man to water her plants while she is on vacation. The man waters the plants. The woman comes home five or six days later to an apartment full of dead plants. No one knows why this happens. %% POLITICS Men love to talk politics, but often they forget to do political things such as voting. Women are very happy that another generation of Kennedy's is growing up and getting into politics because they will be able to campaign for them and cry on election night. %% Pearls of Egypt like stones of history the crumpled page of scripture its ancient wisdom surfaces in all creation the madman the prophet the drunken sage his shabby clothes this toothless grin. shamanism the liquid trance rain dance the potent seer see's the storm from far away he knows he understands the ruins & the ways of the natives tongues he speaks as he wades across the time-river this, he phrophecizes is the end of the world and all its culture "if only love were less cruel" but the idiot hour is the dawn of destruction television is the oracle it speaks wisely the children bow, vow to be perfect-this they understand. %% Pittsburgh Driver's Test (8) Pedestrians are (a) irrelevant. (b) communists. (c) a nuisance. (d) difficult to clean off the front grille. %% RESOLUTIONS this year i'll try to see my way clear once and for all through the smokey trail you left. this year i'll feel less sorry for myself and try to smile instead of cry about the good times that are gone. this year i won't doodle your name in the snow with my ski pole or in the sand with my finger. this year i'm not going to read through all those letters you sent me so long ago. this year i'm going to open my heart to all those who have so much to offer me. this year... yes, this year it's my resolution to finally get over you. %% RICHARD GERE Women like Richard Gere because he is sexy in a dangerous way. Men hate Richard Gere because he reminds them of that slick guy who works at the health club and dates only married women. %% Refraction White light pure, brilliant, omnichromatic, streams down from heaven on a flawless blue afternoon. White as a fresh-fallen field in the depths of winter Undefiled. Not so. Take a prism, transparent, crystalline pure geometry, and the light shatters some red, more yellow, less violet shot here and there (if you take the care to look) with black lines. Not pure at all. Say either is beautiful but give me the spectrum I'd rather see structure than simplicity. One thing more, and here's the mystery -- another prism will put it all back together anyway. One could wish for a prism for other things. -- Michael Caplinger, December 1986 %% SEX:CHAPTER 3-SEX IN ANCIENT ROME Romans created the world's first Birth control device. It was known as 'Throwing Christians to the Lions.' But while this device worked wonders in cutting down the Christian population, it did occasionally cause troublesome side effects...Namely, very fat lions. %% SEX:CHAPTER 5-SEX DURING THE MIDDLE AGES Sex in the Middle Ages was a beautiful experience that was both uplifting and poetic. On their wedding night, the knight would take the lady in his arms, whisper softly in her ear, gently hold her closer, kiss her tenderly, and then in a fit of extreme passion, he would run out and kill a dragon. %% SHOES When preparing for work, a woman will put on a Mondi wool suit, and then slip in Reebok sneakers. She will carry her dress shoes in a plastic bag from Saks. When a woman gets to work, she will put on her dress shoes. Five minutes later she will kick them off because her feet are under the desk. A man will wear one pair of shoes for the entire day. %% SOCKS Men are sensible about socks. They wear argyle socks or standard white sweatsocks. Women wear strange socks. Socks with pictures of clouds on them. Socks that are cut way below their ankles. Socks that have little fuzzy balls on the back. %% SYSTEM CRASH (sung to the tune of "The Monster Mash") I was working in the lab, late one night, When my eyes beheld an eerie sight, Some smoke from our VAX began to rise And suddenly, to my surprise... [chorus] (There was a crash) There was a system crash (A mighty crash) I heard the disk heads smash (A system crash) It came down in a flash (There was a crash) A fatal system crash The lab manager then appeared from his room, Said: "I don't want to be a prophet of doom, But we had one like this just the other day Which blew up 4 megs and the SBA" [chorus] The system had just been booted, diagnostics had all run through, When a power fluck made it all run amuck, then MOOSE and BIRCH blew too. So we'd lost all our VAXen in less than one night When a VP came in and said: "Hey, that's all right, I'll loan you a Venus - here's what to do When you call up Support, tell them Gordon sent you..." [chorus] %% Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence Tip #1: How to tell when you are dead. (1) Little things start bothering you: little things like worms, bugs, ants. (2) Something is missing in your personal relationships. (3) Your dog becomes overly affectionate. (4) You have a hard time getting a waiter. (5) Exotic birds flock around you. (6) People ignore you at parties. (7) You have a hard time getting up in the morning. (8) You no longer get off on cocaine. %% Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence (1) Never use an elevator in a building that has been hit by a nuclear bomb; use the stairs. (2) When you're flying through the air, remember to roll when you hit the ground. (3) If you're on fire, avoid gasoline and other flammable materials. (4) Don't attempt communication with dead people; it will only lead to psychological problems. (5) Food will be scarce; you will have to scavenge. Learn to recognize foods that will be available after the bomb: mashed potatoes, shredded wheat, tossed salad, ground beef, etc. (6) Put your hand over your mouth when you sneeze; internal organs will be scarce in the post-nuclear age. (7) Try to be neat; fall only in designated piles. (8) Drive carefully in "Heavy Fallout" areas; people could be staggering illegally. (9) Nutritionally, hundred dollar bills are equal to ones, but more sanitary due to limited circulation. (10) Accumulate mannequins now; spare parts will be in short supply on D-Day. %% Shadows ------- The light is full of shadows That lurk within, Threatening to billow out And block the sun -- The day is full of thoughts of you. %% Sonnet 69 Ah, love, let us retreat and find a place, A meadow, or a quiet grassy field, Where thou canst place thy buttocks 'pon my face, And to my probing tongue thy privates yield. Far greater pleasures than a simple fuck Are waiting for us to enjoy; to wit: My swelling love-tool thou caress and suck, As I move tender tongue about thy clit. Let us indulge the horniness of youth, For we must let our inhibitions go. Sweet genitalia touch the wanting mouth, 'Til jism spurt and lubrication flow. Thy cunt in my mouth, and my cock in thine, Come with me dear, and we shall sixty-nine. -- (c) Joe English. Don't let my mother see this. %% THE "FUN WITH USENET" MANIFESTO Very little happens on Usenet without some sort of response from some other reader. Fun With Usenet postings are no exception. Since there are some who might question the rationale of some of the excerpts included therein, I have written up a list of guidelines that sum up the philosophy behind these postings. One. I never cut out words in the middle of a quote without a VERY good reason, and I never cut them out without including ellipses. For instance, "I am not a goob" might become "I am ... a goob", but that's too mundane to bother with. "I'm flame proof" might (and has) become "I'm ...a... p...oof" but that's REALLY stretching it. Two. If I cut words off the beginning or end of a quote, I don't put ellipses, but neither do I capitalize something that wasn't capitalized before the cut. "I don't think that the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place" would turn into "the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place". Imagine the posting as a tape-recording of the poster's thoughts. If I can set up the quote via fast-forwarding and stopping the tape, and without splicing, I don't put ellipses in. And by the way, I love using this mechanism for turning things around. If you think something stinks, say so - don't say you don't think it's wonderful. ... -- D. J. McCarthy (dmccart@cadape.UUCP) %% THE DIRTIEST DOZENS, these are 1520 - 1523 in the book The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. I'll tell you a story-- It won't take me long-- Of a brother and sister whose tale is my song. There was an old fellow and what do you think? He lived on the cheese that he scraped from his dink. He whacked it, he hacked it, He ate it with glee- Was there ever a fellow so happy as he? This charming old chap had a sister as well : She was ugly and gaunt, with a horrible smell. Her cunt was so dirty It stank like a beast, And the odor killed flies as they gathered to feast. What a wonderful family! What marvelous style! I'll bet you and I aren't close by a mile. Their odor and diet Won't soon be forgotten, And one day you and I may be equally rotten. %% THE ITALIAN WHO WENT TO DETROIT One day, Ima go to Detroit to a bigga hotel. I go down to eat breakfast. I tella the waitress I wanna two piss's toast. She bring only one piss. I tella her "I wanna two piss on my plate." She say, you better no piss on the plate, you sonnamabitch. I don't even know the lady and she call me a sonnmabitch. Later, Ima go to eat lunch at the Drake Restaurant. The waitress bring me a spoon, ana knife, but no fock. I tella her I wanna fock, she tella me everybody wanna fock. I tella her you no understand, I wanna fock on the table. She say you better no fock on the table, you sonnamabitch. So, Ima goes back to my room inna hotel, and there's no sheet onna my bed. I callsa the manager and tellsa him I wanna sheet. He tells me to go to the toilet. So I say you no understand, I wanna sheet onna the bed. He say you better no sheet onna the bed, you sonnamabitch. I go the checka out and the man at the desk, he say "peace to you." I say piss onna you to, you sonnamabitch. Ima go back to Italy! %% THE MOST IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE OF ALL Colored underwear. Women are allowed, in fact encouraged, to wear colored underwear. There is no reason for a man to ever, ever, wear anything besides solid white. %% THE RAPTURE Starlight... Morning sun. The curiosity! Do I remain in the universe where I fell in sleep? One stands with one's back to the past and wonders... Soft breeze... Have you seen the leaves trembling or do they laugh in the arms of the whispering wind? My thoughts are shaken by time, even there, some reach, falling, even here, changing color... A forest pool... and thou. You take a sheltered dip in my mind, do - sunlit, sparkling - leave and leave behind a robe, an idee fixe, and yearning. and wonder will there be times when I'd rather the waters close over to detain the moment. %% THE TELEPHONE Men see the telephone as a communication tool. They use the telephone to send short messages to other people. A woman can visit her girlfriend for two weeks, and upon returning home, she will call the same friend and they will talk for three hours. %% THE TELNET SONG ("Control-Uparrow Q.") Words and music by The Great Quux (c) 1984 Guy L. Steele Jr. (A function of N. N = 4 is recommended.) EVERYBODY-SING ( There is a program called TELNET that gets to another CPU. Control-uparrow is the escape; it's doubled to send it through, and "quit" is control-uparrow Q. A hacker once used TELNET to get to another CPU. He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type control-uparrow Q. FOR I = 1 TO N ( Instead the hacker used TELNET to get to another CPU. He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type FOR J = 1 TO 2^I ( control-uparrow ) Q. ) %% 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 fortune. 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! %% TOYS Little girls love to play with toys. Then when they reach the age of 11 or 12, they lose interest. Men never grow out of their obsession with toys. As they get older, their toys simply become more expensive and silly and impractical. Examples of men's toys: little miniature TV's. Car phones. Complicated juicers and blenders. Graphic equalizers. Small robots that serve cocktails on command. Video games. Anything that blinks, beeps, and requires at least 6 "D" batteries to operate. %% The Guy on the Right Doesn't Stand a Chance The guy on the right has the Osborne 1, a fully functional computer system in a portable package the size of a briefcase. The guy on the left has an Uzi submachine gun concealed in his attache case. Also in the case are four fully loaded, 32-round clips of 125-grain 9mm ammunition. The owner of the Uzi is going to get more tactical firepower delivered -- and delivered on target -- in less time, and with less effort. All for $795. It's inevitable. If you're going up against some guy with an Osborne 1 -- or any personal computer -- he's the one who's in trouble. One round from an Uzi can zip through ten inches of solid pine wood, so you can imagine what it will do to structural foam acrylic and sheet aluminum. In fact, detachable magazines for the Uzi are available in 25-, 32-, and 40-round capacities, so you can take out an entire office full of Apple II or IBM Personal Computers tied into Ethernet or other local-area networks. What about the new 16-bit computers, like the Lisa and Fortune? Even with the Winchester backup, they're no match for the Uzi. One quick burst and they'll find out what Unix means. Make your commanding officer proud. Get an Uzi -- and come home a winner in the fight for office automatic weapons. -- InfoWorld (June, 1984) %% The Looter of The Spirit You want it to be unearned ... You want handouts, but of a different kind ... It's the spirit that you want to loot ... the unearned in spirit ... You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything. Without the necessity of ... being ... -- Cherryl Taggart %% The Modern Guillotine ... the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices -- that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others -- that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us -- and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord. -- Ragnar Danneskjold %% The New Ideal What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it. This is the age of the common man, they tell us -- a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve. He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he will be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce ... They will dispose of our energy because they have none to offer and of our product because they can't produce. -- John Galt %% The Prime Movers A city is the frozen shape of human courage -- the courage of those men who thought for the first time of every bolt, rivet and power generator that went to make it. The courage to say, not "It seems to me", but "It is" -- and to stake one's life on one's judgment. You're not alone. Those men exist. They have always existed. There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as your Board of Directors have brought them out of the cave and up to this? -- Francisco d'Anconia %% The STAR WARS Song Sung to the tune of "Lola", by the Kinks: by Weird Al Yankovic I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah Where it bubbles all the time like a giant cabinet soda S-O-D-A soda I saw the little runt sitting there on a log I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said Yoda Y-O-D-A Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda Well I've been around but I ain't never seen A guy who looks like a Muppet but he's wrinkled and green Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand How he can raise me in the air just by raising his hand Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda %% The San Sebastian Mines But surely you don't want me to do anything about it. My mines and your railroad were seized by the will of the people. You wouldn't want me to oppose the will of the people, would you? I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching. Doesn't everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastian project. Isn't it evil to work for a profit? I did not work for profit -- I took a loss. Doesn't everyone agree that the justification of an industrial venture is not production, but the livelihood of its employees? The San Sebastian mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they provided a livelihood for thousands of men who could not have achieved, in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day's work, which they could not do ... I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden the San Sebastian mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of those who count ... I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed the job very badly. Isn't it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it's his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn't everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I have carried out every moral precept of our age. I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned. -- Francisco d'Anconia %% The Snack Oh my God, screamed Mommy, You went and ate the Baby. What baby? asked Daddy. You know that's just the last of the leftover donkey. Donkey, my ass! said Mommy with some sentience. Do you think I don't recognize my own baby? Why I can still see his little privates caught in the gap between your front teeth. How many times have I told you to take only what's on the *top* two shelves of the freezer? But there wasn't a thing to eat, cried Daddy. And am I not the master of my own? Nothing to eat? What about the elephant testicles in aspic that I put up for you just last week in the ball jar? Our very first baby, too, wailed Mommy, that I was saving for Christmas dinner. Testicles, testicles, said Daddy. A man gets tired of testicles. -- L. L. Zeiger %% The Three Major Kind of Tools * Tools for hitting things to make them loose or to tighten them up or jar their many complex, sophisticated electrical parts in such a manner that they function perfectly. (These are your hammers, maces, bludgeons, and truncheons.) * Tools that, if dropped properly, can penetrate your foot. (Awls) * Tools that nobody should ever use because the potential danger is far greater than the value of any project that could possibly result. (Power saws, power drills, power staplers, any kind of tools that uses any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.) -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% Thus spake the master programmer: "A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell." %% To His Parents The pain was never real, the blood but words Some poet wrote; historic notes. I tried To picture riots rich with violence, or plea Like frightened widows dancing in Peru. But all my dreams were silent scenes in black and white. For us to face your fears would be a joke. Here, no one ``disappears'', and no one finds Their life in death save on the evening news. Oh please forgive my blindness to this stripped, Abandoned man, your son. I knew his pain too well. 02/88 Bruce Sutherland (Somewhere in Toronto) %% To a Frustrated Philosopher You have a streak of poetry, a rainbow in your eye; Weaving words of wonder for the people passing by. Yet they do not comprehend the concepts that you bring: Still, your words I understand; I know what makes you sing. You see the world through gilded eyes, but always you're aware Of the sordid side of life. I sense how deep you care. So you use your talent to teach where'er you go: And when you wander, don't be lonely; I am with you, for you KNOW. %% Touch Snapshot Her hand, is still, extending Always reaching, always groping Never touching, never holding Stop One thought when thoughts fly You try to run And you run Run like deer chased by fear Run through forests wrought with fire Feet that pound like clenching fists Catch the wind with aching gasps Stumble through the misty night Rivers wash away your sight Leave the light. At last alone Run your hands along the stone Feel the pain, caress the cold Fight until you feel no more And nothing will replace her touch Except the love you need so much When her hand extends toward you Snapshot %% USEFUL PHRASES TO KNOW WHEN TRAVELING IN MOSLEM AREAS: AKBAR KHALI-KILI HAFTIR LOTFAN. Thank you for showing me your marvelous gun. FEKR GABUL CRADAN DAVAT PAEH GUSH DIVAR. I am delighted to accept your kind invitation to lie on the floor with my arms above my head and my legs apart. SHOMAEH FEKR TAMOMEH OEH GOFTEH BANDE. I agree with everything you have ever said or thought in your life. AUTO ARREREGH DAVATEMAN MANO SEPAHEH HAST. It is exceptionally kind of you to allow me to travel in the trunk of your car. FASHAL-EH TUPEHMAN NA DEGAT MANO GOFTAM CHEESHAYEH MOHEMARA JEBEHKESHVAREHMAN. If you will do me the kindness of not harming my genital appendages I will gladly reciprocate by betraying my country in public. KHREL JEPAHEH MANEH VA JAYEH AMERIKAHEY. I will tell you the names and addresses of many American spies traveling as reporters. BALLI, BALLI, BALLI ! Whatever you say! MATERNIER GHERMEZ AHLEIEH, GHORBAN. The red blindfold will be lovely, excellency. TIEKH NUNEH OB KHRELEH BEZORG VA KHRUBE BOYAST INO BEGERAM. The water-soaked bread crumbs are delicious, thank you. I must have the recipe. %% VAXOLOGY There is a computer named VAX, Which is totally loaded with hacks, But the real piece of crap Is the overflow trap, Which an old-PC register lacks. It's got byte-string instructions galore, But the packed decimal format is poor, And the halfword length means That it isn't worth beans, Just like the 360's of yore. Oh, the branch mnemonics are losing, And the right to left numbers confusing, But the thing that's a pain, An efficiency drain, Is the minuscule page size they're using. Well, they give you lots of good stuff, And the address space size is enough, But you can't do an "exch", And it makes you say "bletch", When you see all the RSX cruft. %% Visionary Leadership ... the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature's rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice gather into gems. %% WHILE YOU WERE OUT IN A MEETING Mr./Mrs./Miss/ Ms./Rev./Massa/ _____________________________________________ (name) Check One ( ) Telephoned. ( ) Did not Telephone. ( ) Thought about telephoning, but then changed his or her mind. ( ) Telephoned, but could not for the LIFE of him or her remember why. ( ) Telephoned, then hung right up, but I am certain it was him or her. ( ) Wants you to call and attempt to leave a message for him or her. ( ) Wants to fire you. ( ) Wants to reveal a sordid episode from his or her past involving a goat. ( ) Wants to end World Hunger in our lifetime. ( ) Wants your body. ( ) Wants for nothing. ( ) Wants to tell you the joke about the man who finds out that he has only eight hours to live, so he goes home and makes love with his wife once, twice, three times, and finally they fall asleep, and at 3 A.M. he tries to wake her up, and she says, "Not AGAIN! Some of us have to get up in the morning!" ( ) Ate paste as a child. ( ) Has the clap. %% WHY TEACHING IS LIKE HAVING SEX 1) It's a lot more work than it looks. 2) You can't bluff your way through it. 3) You don't want to have to look at the manual in the middle of it. 4) A bad 50 minutes can send you into therapy. 5) You don't realize how little you know about it until you've actually done it once. %% Waves A cell, a breath, a spark of life Floating on an endless sea I could swim or I could fly But when I screw my thoughts to try The waves return to comfort me %% What I Did During My Fall Semester On the first day of my fall semester, I got up. Then I went to the library to find a thesis topic. Then I hung out in front of the Dover. On the second day of my fall semester, I got up. Then I went to the library to find a thesis topic. Then I hung out in front of the Dover. On the third day of my fall semester, I got up. Then I went to the library to find a thesis topic. I found a thesis topic: How to keep people from hanging out in front of the Dover. -- Sister Mary Elephant [Student Statement for Black Friday] %% Who is John Galt? An explorer, the greatest explorer that ever lived. The man who found the fountain of youth. John Galt spent years looking for it. He crossed oceans, and he crossed deserts, and he went down into forgotten mines, miles under the earth. But he found it on the top of a mountain. It broke every bone in his body, it tore the skin off his hands, it made him lose his home, his name, his love. But he climbed it. He found the fountain of youth, which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never came back. Why didn't he? Because he found that it couldn't be brought down. %% Who is John Galt? Do you know the legend of Atlantis? ... The Isles of the Blessed ... Atlantis was a place where hero spirits lived in a happiness unknown to the rest of the world. They reached it without dying, because they carried the secret of life within them. Atlantis was lost to mankind ... Some of them thought it was underground, hidden in the heart of the earth. But most of them said it was an island. A radiant island in the Western Ocean. Perhaps what they were thinking of was America ... they never stopped looking for it, because they knew that that was what they had to find. Well, what about John Galt? He found it ... John Galt was a millionaire, a man of inestimable wealth. He was sailing his yacht one night, in mid-Atlantic, fighting the worst storm ever wreaked upon the world, when he found it. He saw it in the depth, where it had sunk to escape the reach of men. He saw the towers of Atlantis shining on the bottom of the ocean. It was a sight of such kind that when one had seen it, one could no longer wish to look at the rest of the earth. John Galt sank his ship and went down with his entire crew. They all chose to do it ... %% Who is John Galt? John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire -- until the day when men withdraw their vultures. %% William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives. %% YOU WALKED THROUGH MY DREAM LAST NIGHT by: Randy Sommers You walked through my dream last night, and it really isn't fair. You walked through my dream last night, me here and you there. It was a restless, relentless dream this kind goes on and on. Flowing like a stream, into a deep, deep pond. You walked through my dream last night, and oh, it really shows. You walked through my dream last night, now everybody knows. Your steps were light and subtle, they really were quite kind. I knew I was in trouble, when you read my mind. You walked through my dream last night, I now have dreams to spare. You walked through my dream last night, this really isn't fair! I'm so helpless, It's so real, I know this dream is true. Tell me how you feel, when it happens to you. I'll walk through your dream some night, and then you'll wake to see. You walked through my dream that night, and now your here with me. -- (c) 1988 Rick Kill (aka Randy Sommers) %% _ / \ |\_/| |---| | | | | _ |=-=| _ _ / \| |/ \ / \| | | ||\ | | | | | \> | | | | | \ | - - - - |) ) | / \ / \ / \ / \ / | | | | | | -- Michael Westlund (d90-mwd@sigma.sm.luth.se) %% `O' LEVEL COUNTER CULTURE Timewarp allowed: 3 hours. Do not scrawl situationalist graffiti in the margins or stub your rollups in the inkwells. Orange may be worn. Credit will be given to candidates who self-actualize. 1: Compare and contrast Pink Floyd with Black Sabbath and say why neither has street credibility. 2: "Even Buddha would have been hard pushed to reach Nirvana squatting on a juggernaut route." Consider the dialectic of inner truth and inner city. 3: Discuss degree of hassle involved in paranoia about being sucked into a black hole. 4: "The Egomaniac's Liberation Front were a bunch of revisionist ripoff merchants." Comment on this insult. 5: Account for the lack of references to brown rice in Dylan's lyrics. 6: "Castenada was a bit of a bozo." How far is this a fair summing up of western dualism? 7: Hermann Hesse was a Pisces. Discuss. %% o b o A G I E L m p a o b o r z f M A G I C z c W E L L y o n m p a !!!! FROBOZZ Magic Robot Company !!!! Hello, master! I am a late-model robot, trained at MIT Tech to perform various simple housekeeping functions. Instructions for use: To activate me, use the following formula-- TELL ROBOT, something to do (CR) The comma is mandatory. Command me as you will! Warranty: No warranty is expressed or implied. At your service! %% you are here (c) 1988 meredith tanner (gypsy) you got a photograph memory of a storybook romance you can live in the future with competition like that you can live in the past the real world don't stand a chance you can throw away a lifetime you got a photograph picture just to make a moment last of a girl you used to know tomorrow never comes she ain't your little girl no more even if you wait a thousand years you have to let her go and your heart might be a million miles away maybe you spend every evening but you are here waiting by the phone for the call that says you're going somewhere never coming home yeah things will be so different no one to tell you what to do but there's nowhere else to lay the blame when everything's up to you %% ,---. ,,'''''',,, ( ) ,'' '', ,,'' /'' ,''''', ', ,,'' O ,' ', ', ,,'' ) ', ; '---------. `''''DD,,,,,,,''\ /'''',,,;, ),,,,--------. \ | / '''''/ / / / / // ,------/ / / / ROFF! /|\ ///------' ,--======'==' ROFF! ( %% ---------- / \ / REST \ / IN \ / PEACE \ / \ | | | | | | | | | | | 1001 | *| * * * | * _________)/\\_//(\/(/\)/\//\/|_)_______ %% //-n-\\ _____---=======---_____ ====____\ /.. ..\ /____==== // ---\__O__/--- \\ Enterprise... Surrender or we'll \_\ /_/ send back your *&^$% tribbles !! %% Infatuation If only I could touch her soul And teach her ivory horse to fly. Such humble strength, her muscles flow Like ripples in a lullaby. If only she could hear my heart That beats upon the wings of doves When e'er she runs. And when she parts It pounds like thunderclaps, my love. I wonder, when at last she tried To count her freedoms, did she cry? How could she flee from arms so wide? She never turned to say good-bye. My God! What hand will ease this pain, Massage my sorrow? Hold me tight Tomorrow, let me dream again. Please, not another sleepless night. If only I could let her go, Pretend her ivory horse is gone And, like the other puppets, show I'm bound to nowhere, bound to none. %% Night Sonnet When frightened wakest thou in darkest night Unsure if ghost or dream did thee alight, Remind thyself of how I loved thee so When life upon this earth my soul did know. Think then of joyous days together shared; No other happiness with that compared. But soft, my dearest one, why dost thou cry-- Thinkst thou that love so strong could ever die? Its vessel gone, now boundless it remains, Expanded into natural domains; Though changed in form, still physic'ly expressed; My love and I through it, do still exist. For as the dark, by night, I thee embrace; And as the sun, by day, caress thy face. -- (c) LJ %% The Fifth Concerto of Richard Halley It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance. %% Thus Spake the Master Programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." %% Thus spake the master programmer: "Let the programmer be many and the managers few -- then all will be productive." %% Thus spake the master programmer: "When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave." %% Thus spake the master programmer: "Without the wind, the grass does not move. Without software, hardware is useless." %% Thus spake the master programmer: "You can demonstrate a program for a corporate executive, but you can't make him computer literate." %% You are invited to the 1st annual PEOPLE'S ELECTRICAL COLLECTIVE BARBECUE BIG BIG BIG Featuring: 180 Tons of charcoal briquets whole herds of roasted animal carcasses pyrotechnic displays BRING THE KIDS BRING YOUR WIG (bring your own water) ***** FREE WHOLE BODY X-RAYS FOR ALL ***** April 26th to May 18th at the Chernobyl Reactor Complex Rural Route 3, Kiev, USSR Sponsored By The Ukrainian Chemical and Nuclear Workers Collective and the Socialist People's Party of the Ukraine %% (0) (0) | ___, , | | _***_{}' ({}.@@@. | | (o_o)/, '\@*_*@ | | ( / \ ____ / / ) | | _\ \_ \__/ _\ \_ | """"""""""""""""""""""""" _screeeeeit_scrissssssh_ The fuzzies have volunteered to wash the inside of your computer screen. (they claim you never do and it is filthy). %% //-n-\\ _____---=======---_____ ====____\ /.. ..\ /____==== // ---\__o__/--- \\ \_\ /_/ %% Doggerel Above the day's lavender ending, a ray Of gold by the eagle's plumage is caught-- It shines on the marsh below as if wrought Of the last ember of diminishing day. Like a rigid scythe slicing from the sky Slow circles, the eagle scans the reeds for prey, While below in the puddles and ponds, frogs stay Motionless, watching the bird borne on sigh. The frogs watch above this majestic king Of the currents, sovereign of heavens, who may fly Among clouds. With envy, the frogs silently cry, And are awestruck by this spectacular thing. With the sun, the eagle now flies off to nest. One sharpened raptor cry he now lets ring, And then, with single metered stroke of wing, He mounts a breeze to bear him lightly west. Left behind in the puddles, the frogs still have dreams Of grace of feather and voice. Inspired, a frog tests His leap--plop, splash--and soars, and gives his best Croak and makes song--equal to birds, it seems. The frogs, seeing this, are soon struck by the thought That they might possess an eagle's grace. Then each beams To himself and hops and croaks. And the pond teems With frogs, all thanking the bird for the art he brought. -- Mike Robinson 5/5/87 %% New Product Announcement from Black & Decker Ever wondered if your parking ticket would be blown away by the wind, or that it would be placed without regard to aesthetics on your windscreen wiper ? If so, this is the device for you. An all plastic parking ticket holder, which fits snugly on your windscreen is available for $9.95. A wide range of colors to suit your car. You will never miss a ticket again. %% Ouch, Mosquito ============== by Mitchell Peck Submitted by Hugh Cushing Ouch mosquito, silent by night, Why pierce my skin, so white? You grow plump, as a leech. Stop! I beseech (in vein). I have no choice. Why waste my voice, When only a slap will do? Ouch, I am bitten! What ho, you are smitten! Yo mosquito, fuck you. %% SOME FAMOUS BILLS "My mother was a fish" -Vardaman -As I Lay Dying -- Bill Faulkner "Words, words, words!" -Hamlet -Hamlet -- Bill Shakespeare "I am not a Womanizer!!!" -- Bill Clinton "Oh Noooooooooo!" -- Mr. Bill "Congress shall pass no law concerning..." -- Bill of Rights "Help! I'm being devalued!!" -- Dollar Bill "$75.95" -- Phone Bill "THPTT" -- Bill the Cat "Hulk just want to smash!!" -- Bill Bixby "and then I'll kill your children.....and their pets" -- Bill Munney "Go easy on him Ward" -- Billingsley "Vhat???" -- Billy Crystal Bill Tell Overture -- Rossini "10^9" -- Billion "All right I'll take a shower" -- Bill Taft %% She's Gone When she's gone Her dress still passes by, The air still holds her breath, And someone tries to smile When I remember I cry. When I cry I think I see her smile And something takes my breath As I see her dress pass by Then I remember She's gone. %% The First Fantastic Flop of Sir Galliwag M.D. (Doctor of the Multiverse) ============================================= by (beef) Chow (mein), Rob Woiccak (TNETG1FN@CLVM) One day while I, the great Doctor Sir Galliwag, was out romping in the multiverse, I stopped to visit the home of my good friend: the Sheikh Ali-Wa Benn. Much to my distress, I found the palace in a ruckess. I soon learned from the palace chamberlain, Deskial Hmabi, that the Sheikh had disappeared. At this, I began an investigation to determine the Sheikh's whereabouts. The chamberlain gave me Benn's agenda for the day. First a breakfast and then a shave. Following that was a luncheon where he had failed to appear. Suddenly, I had an idea! I ran to the vestibule where I had seen a new pot that confirmed my notion. Calling Deskial into the room, I proceeded to find the Shiekh in the large vase. Flabbergasted, he asked "How...what...?" "Simple," I replied, "a Bennie shaved is a Bennie urned." %% Alone From childhood's hour I have not been As others were - I have not seen As others saw - I could not bring My passions from a common spring - From the same source I have not taken My sorrow - I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone - And all I lov'd - I lov'd alone - Then - in my childhood, in the dawn Of a most stormy life - was drawn From ev'ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still - From the torrent, or the fountain - From the red hill of the mountain - From the sun that round me roll'd In its autumn tint of gold - From the lightning in the sky As it pass'd me flying by - From the thunder and the storm - And the cloud that took the form When the rest of Heaven was blue Of a demon in my view - -- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) %% COMPUTER LETS YOU TRAVEL IN TIME! Japanese terminal lets anyone visit the past -- and future! %% Dry Sorrow I never thought I'd miss my tears Or curse the boy who, in his pride, Exclaimed in fury fraught with fear ``You'll never see me cry again.'' For now I've naught but misty years To ease the pain that twists inside Like hunger when I think I hear The boy who aches to cry again %% Famous Maker Recipes ==================== by Aaron Stern Submitted by Hugh Cushing Jerry Garcia's Brownies ----------------------- Ingredients: 1 ounce marijuana 10 American dollars 1 1987 BMW Procedure: 1) Get fucked up. 2) Send a roadie in the BMW to the store to buy $10 worth of brownies. 3) Eat, man! %% ONLY WORDS I wish my pen was brush and pallette, wielded with gentle strokes over the tapestry of the page. Images of Mars, of distant worlds, come to mind, splattered brilliant red and deep, deep blue across boundaries of time and space onto a blank, white canvas. Minute shells holding the universe within, yet baked in a summer sun in shades of rose and peach, impress themselves on textured cloth. Sweet whiskers and porcelain white fur in curled, purring sleep, or the dreams therein given the multidimension of fantasy, find expression on flat media. I wish each pen stroke was a brush stroke giving life to color and shape. But, alas, I have only words. -- (c) Marjorie Smith %% SEX:CHAPTER 2-SEX DURING THE STONE AGE (see chapter 36-How to arouse a 25-year-old suburban housewife) %% Sacrifice How, sweet Christ, did you survive Spreading love, like honey On a million hungry eyes A swarm of hungry eyes Why sacrifice your mortal life Will their need replenish Your need for love. Oh why Did you forsake a wife And I wonder ... Christ, when your life was lost Did you smile toward heaven? Freed at last: you paid the cost And died upon the cross %% To a Young Girl Lithe hatchling, breastless, Hipless chicken; pecking for The perpetual worm out of arid dirt; Cooped each night with That morning's loudest crow: You are in My roost now, My feathered extrovert. If I feed you well, It's to watch you grow, and then, Oh, impudent pullet with whom I am stricken, Up to the chopping block We will go. -- John Cowles %% You: knock-knock Them: who's there? You: banana ... Them: banana who ? You: banana banana (Them: surprised look) You: knock-knock Them: who's there? You: banana ... Them: banana who ? You: banana banana (Them: surprised and somewhat confused look) You: knock-knock Them: who's there? You: banana ... Them: banana who ? You: banana banana (Them: exasperated look) You: knock-knock Them: who's there? You: orange Them: orange who? You: orange you glad that I didn't say banana again? Nauseating, isn't it? But it's good if you immediately follow it with: You: say Knock-Knock Them: Knock-Knock You: who's there? .... hahahahhahahahahahahahha ..... %% (1/2) / 3 | 2 3 x 3.14 (1/2) | z dz cos (--------) = ln(e ) / 9 The integral, from one to root three, Of z to the second dz, Times the cosine Of 3 pi over nine Is the log of the third root of e. %% (__) (__) (__) (oo) (OO) (xx) /-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/ / | || / | || / | || * ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----|| ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ Cow Cow 10 miles from Cow 1 mile from nuclear waste dump nuclear waste dump %% A Puff Ball The blue sweater, put on in the morning, has been laid in the tall golden grass of summer, Because of the thick heavy summer air that hangs from the sky. His big, soft, brown eyes search the ground for his prize, a gift from God. There it lies, dull grey in its small roundness, looking soft and porous against the hard brown earth. A worn tennis shoe, dirty from an earlier gathering of stream moss and frogs, Comes Slowly Down upon the grey ball. A soft grey cloud of dust shoots upward from the ball to fill the air and cover the golden grass with flakes of grey. The day is now complete-- A small child has found a wonder of God in the House of Nature-- A Puff Ball. -- Marjorie Smith, November 1969 %% ACTUAL ANNOUNCEMENTS TAKEN FROM CHURCH BULLETINS 1. This afternoon there will be a meeting in the South and North ends of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends. 2. Tuesday at 4:00 P.M. there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk, please come early. 3. Wednesday, the ladies Liturgy Society will meet. Mrs. Johnson will sing, "Put me in My Little Bed" accompanied by the pastor. 4. Thursday at 5:00 P.M. there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers Club. All wishing to become little mothers, please see the minister in his study. 5. This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Smith to come forward and lay an egg on the altar. 6. The service will close with "Little Drops of Water." One of the ladies will start quietly and the rest of the congregation will join in. 7. On Sunday, a special collection will be taken to defray the expenses of the new carpet. All those wishing to do something on the new carpet, please come forward and get a piece of paper at the end of the service. 8. The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind and they may be seen in the church basement Friday. %% I think I've got the hang of it now :w :q :wq ZZ :wq! ^d ^D ^C quit exit X Q :!QUIT bye CtrlAltDel ~~q :~q logout save/quit zz ZZ ZZZZ ^H ^@ ^L ^E ^X ^I ^T ? help helpquit helpexit ?Quit ?q ?x ZZ bye %% Medical Terminology for the Layman Artery - the study of fine paintings. Barium - what you do when CPR fails. Caesarean section - a district in Rome. Colic - a sheep dog. Congenital - friendly. Dilate - to live long. Fester - quicker. G.I. series - baseball games between teams of soldiers. Hangnail - a coat hook. Medical staff - a doctor's cane. Minor operation - digging coal. Morbid - a higher offer. Nitrate - cheaper than day rate. Node - was aware of. Organic - church musician. Outpatient - a person who has fainted. Post-operative - a letter carrier. Protein - in favor of young people. Secretion - hiding anything. Serology - study of English knighthood. Tablet - a small table. Tumor - an extra pair. Urine - opposite of you're out. Varicose veins - veins which are very close together. Benign - what you be after you be eight. %% Shall I Sue Shall i sue, shall I seek for grace? Shall I pray, shall I prove? Shall I strive to a heavenly joy, With an earthly love? Shall I think that a bleeding heart Or a wounded eye Or a sign can ascend the clouds To attain so high? Silly wretch forsake these dreams, Of a vain desire O bethink what high regard Holy hopes do require. Favour is not won with words, Treasure is not bought. Favour is not won with words, Nor the wish of a thought. -- John Dowland (1563? - 1626) %% TOO MANY DAVES Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave? Well, she did. And that wasn't a smart thing to do. You see, when she wants one and calls out, "Yoo Hoo! Come into the house, Dave!" she doesn't get ONE. All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run! This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves' As you can imagine, with so many Daves. And often she wishes that, when they were born, She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm. And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim. And one of them Shadrach. And one of them Blinkey. And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey. Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face. Another one Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face. And one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff. One Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff. And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed. And one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed. And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt. And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt. And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate... But she didn't do it. And now it's too late. -- Dr. Seuss "The Sneetches and Other Stories" %% W A N T E D G O O D W O M A N Must be able to clean, cook, sew, dig worms and clean fish. Must have boat and motor. Please send pictures of boat and motor. -- Sign seen in VFW hall in Westland, Mich. %% ``... or the One'' This theatre is yours, my lord The players dance at your command Placid 'neath you puissant hand Shadows in a storm And I'm your actor, nothing more I'll play a soldier in a war Who loves the cross but dreams of whores Dare I question why Must I hate this man again Is not this man your son again Oh must I beg to die again Strike me tender kiss Free me from your gentle arms For I'm a man and not your pawn Behold the glory of the dawn Seen through song of flesh ... Are you too large to heed my call To let me love as one for all Good Christ if you're a man at all Let the curtain fall %% |||||||||||||| || __ __ || || $$ $$ || \|| >> ||/ || ________ || | -//----- | \\_//_______// ___// | | /__// | | | | __________// \\__________ / $ / **** \ $ \ / / ** \ \ / /| ** |\ \ / / | ** | \ \ / / | ** | \ \ ^ ^__|______$Z$**$Z$______|__^ ^ \ * $Z$**$Z$ * / \________*___$Z$**$Z$___*________/ | $Z$**$Z$ | J. PIERPONT FLATHEAD CHAIRMAN Bank of Zork VAULT *722 GUE* Frobozz Magic Vault Company %% (__) (oo) M M O0O OOO /-------\/ --- MM MM O O O O / | || M M M O O O O * ||----|| M M O0O OOO ~~ ~~ COW %% THE NETWORK SONG A host is a host from coast to coast And no one will talk to a host that's close Unless of course the host that's close Is busy, hung, or dead! -- David Lesher (wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu) %% The Fourth Concerto of Richard Halley It was a "NO" flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no necessity for pain -- why then is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity? -- we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom? ... The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of a rebellion -- and of a desperate quest. %% awaiting spring in the tantrums of gray march winds that slap the air like leather, we hurry to tend the diminishing warmth hidden in secrecy against the night. i can remember now only that it was so cold-- the earth asleep among voices reaching into the sky for miles, the winter inhabiting the fingers like light. relentlessly we paint the shadowy figures of ourselves upon the darkened wall-- the limbs in upward motions the silence like prayer. %% mapping the space the body is anchored in distances-- death-symbols letter the land like lights. reaching the shore, i held the sand in my hands to my face and chanted, this is the meaning of dreams: that there is no final, more connective place than this language like the very air. (memory will be like this-- blood and saliva turning into rain) the landscape rains. we examine the falling surfaces as if they were glass, and take flight. %% untracked a gust hits my face as i swing side to side the ancient chairlift grunts as we pass another tower up top the congregation stands assembled bright hats, dark goggles, they look like giant ninja locusts in a Japanese sci-fi thriller at once the swarm swoops down on the white powder virgin before us we defile her feathery blanket insatiately carving our turns, chased through the snow by the comet tails that shimmer at our heels when it's over we look up in silence at the serpentine swaths we have cut then move up the mountain once more ninja locusts from hell in search of winter's heaven -- jc %% (__) (__) (__) (\/) ($$) (**) /-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/ / | 666 || / |=====|| / | || * ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----|| ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Another Lonely Man He's just another lonely man Hugs his knees and soaks his bed He holds his head with shaking hands Watching teardrops falling red And WHO will save this dying man Hold his head and clear his eyes And let him walk YOUR fertile lands Who will help him, who will try? No one, He's just another lonely man %% Computer Program Virtually Eliminates Machine Errors Spokesmen for a local electronic firm have announced a computer program that through fresh application of an old technique - virtually eliminates lost time due to malfunction of computer components. Called OREMA (from latin "oremus", meaning "let us pray"), the program offers prayers at selected time intervals for the continued integrity of memory units, tape transports, and other elements subject to depravity. Basically liturgical in structure, OREMA uses standard petitions and intercessions stored on magnetic tapes in Latin, Hebrew, and FORTRAN. It holds regular maintenance services thrice daily on an automatic cycle, and operator intervention is required only for mounting tapes and making responses, such as "Amen", or "And With Thy Spirit", on the console typewriter. Prayers in Hebrew and FORTRAN are offered directly to the CPU, but Latin prayers may go to peripheral equipment for transfer to the CPU by internal subroutines. Although manufacturer supplied prayer reels cover all machine troubles known today, the program will add punch card prayers to any tape, as needed, after the final existing AMEN block. Classified prayer reels are available for government installations. In trials on selected machines, OREMA reduced by 98.2 percent the average down time due to component failure. The manufacturer's spokesman emphasized, however, that OREMA presently defends only against malfunction of hardware. Requestor errors and other human blunders will continue unchecked until completion of a later version to be called SIN-OREMA. -- W. S. Minkler, Jr., American Nuclear Society, Jan. 1965 %% EARTH smog | bricks AIR -- mud -- FIRE soda water | tequila WATER %% MURPHY'S COMPUTER LAWS 1. Murphy would have never used one. 2. Murphy would have loved them. %% wenweewazboiz ------------- yup wen wee waz boiz and times whas tite you know we made dew wit out new toiz or fanzy close and weewaz happee for wat we hat %% "... The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'!" "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested. "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is, 'The Aged Aged Man.'" "Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself. "No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it is called you know!" "Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. "I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is "A-sitting on a Gate": and the tune's my own invention." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" %% "...'fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming." -- Siddartha, "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny %% "And what will you do when you grow up to be as big as me?" asked the father of his little son. "Diet." %% "Anything else, sir?" asked the attentive bellhop, trying his best to make the lady and gentleman comfortable in their penthouse suite in the posh hotel. "No. No, thank you," replied the gentleman. "Anything for your wife, sir?" the bellhop asked. "Why, yes, young man," said the gentleman. "Would you bring me a postcard?" %% "Bondage" On the side of the road Is a speed limit sign. A new baby girl Is born blind. My brother gets drafted His blood forms a lake. Beneath the apple tree In the grass is the snake. A climber stops climbing He's too full of doubt A small hungry boy Again goes without. Bondage runs some people's lives. Other's lives it just kills. It comes from within and from without. It's chains lock up our wills. Poor kid from town Puts himself through school Alexandre Wins the duel. Have a little money Live life with ease Play your music out Don't want to tease The book says exactly What the author feels. "The truth will set you free" As the woman kneels. -- (c) 1988 Karen A. Post %% "Darling", said the young bride, "tell me what's bothering you. We promised to share all our joys and sorrows, remember?" "But this is different," protested her husband. "Together, darling," she insisted, "we will bear the burden. Now tell me what our problem is." "Well," said the husband, "we've just become the father of a bastard child." %% "Darling," he breathed, "after making love I doubt if I'll be able to get over you -- so would you mind answering the phone?" %% "Darling," she whispered, "will you still love me after we are married?" He considered this for a moment and then replied, "I think so. I've always been especially fond of married women." %% "Etc." Here's a three-letter word Used by more than a few To make people think They know more than they do. %% "First, I'm going to buy you a few drinks and get you a little tight," said the guy aggressively. "Oh, no, you're not," said the girl. "Then I'll take you to dinner at the most exclusive restaurant in town." "Oh, no, you won't." "Then I'll take you to my apartment and mix up a pitcher of daiquiris." "Oh, no, you won't." "Then I'm going to make violent, mad, passionate love to you." "Oh, no, you're not." "And I'm not going to take any precautions either!" said the guy. "Oh, yes, you are!!" said the girl. %% "Found it," the Mouse replied rather crossly: "of course you know what 'it' means." "I know what 'it' means well enough, when I find a thing," said the Duck: "it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?" %% "Gee, Mudhead, everyone at Morse Science High has an extracurricular activity except you." "Well, gee, doesn't Louise count?" "Only to ten, Mudhead." -- Firesign Theater %% "Gentlemen of the jury," said the defense attorney, now beginning to warm to his summation, "the real question here before you is, shall this beautiful young woman be forced to languish away her loveliest years in a dark prison cell? Or shall she be set free to return to her cozy little apartment at 4134 Mountain Ave. -- there to spend her lonely, loveless hours in her boudoir, lying beside her little Princess phone, 962-7873?" %% "God built a compelling sex drive into every creature, no matter what style of fucking it practiced. He made sex irresistibly pleasurable, wildly joyous, free from fears. He made it innocent merriment. "Needless to say, fucking was an immediate smash hit. Everyone agreed, from aardvarks to zebras. All the jolly animals -- lions and lambs, rhinoceroses and gazelles, skylarks and lobsters, even insects, though most of them fuck only once in a lifetime -- fucked along innocently and merrily for hundreds of millions of years. Maybe they were dumb animals, but they knew a good thing when they had one." -- Alan Sherman, "The Rape of the A*P*E*" %% "Hello, Police Department." "This is Thomas Parrish, 903 Sylvester Court. I've just been sexually molested by a pervert, right here in my own home. It was horrifying!" "Just remain calm, sir, and tell me about it." "Well, the man came in the window wearing a ski mask. I was napping on the bed, in just my pajamas, and the TV set was on so I didn't hear anything. Suddenly he had his great big old calloused hand over my mouth, holding me down. I tried to scream... he was pulling my pants off. I was so frightened! He held a knife to my throat and undressed so quickly. What could I do? I couldn't stop him. He was huge. A great, hairy, beefy man, more than fifty pounds heavier than I am, and hung like... Oh! it was terrible. He had an erection, and he knelt on my shoulders and forced the awful thing down my throat; forced me to suck it. Yes, officer! There was no escaping this man. Finally, when I thought I would faint, he got off me and turned me over on my tummy, forcing my legs apart with his knees, and oh! I'm so embarrassed to say it, he put that huge thing... It must have been a foot long, and I don't know how thick... into my... Just a minute." "What's the matter, mister?" "Listen, I have to hang up now, he's getting out of the shower." %% "How did you spend the weekend?" asked the pretty brunette secretary of her blonde companion. "Fishing through the ice," she said. "Fishing through the ice? Whatever for?" "Olives." %% "I believe you have the wrong number," said the old gentleman into the phone. "You'll have to call the weather bureau for that information." "Who was that?" his young wife asked. "Some guy wanting to know if the coast was clear." %% "I can do a score of things that can't be done. I can find a thing I cannot see, and see a thing I cannot find. The first is time, and the second is spots before my eyes. I can touch a thing I cannot feel, and feel a thing I cannot touch. The first is your heart, and the second is sad and sorry." -- James Thurber (1894-1961), "The Thirteen Clocks" %% "I need a camel that can go without water for at least three weeks," the American said to an Algerian camel merchant. "Is it possible?" "All things are possible," replied the merchant. He proceeded to take a camel out of his barn and lead him to a tank of water. After the camel had drunk it's fill and was about to lift it's head out of the tank, the merchant picked up two nearby bricks, one in each hand, ran behind the camel and whacked him in the testicles. The camel let out a gigantic "Whhoooosh!" and sucked up what seemed like twenty more gallons of water. The American stared incredulously at the camel merchant. "My god, man!" he exclaimed, "doesn't that hurt?!" The merchant shrugged. "Only if you get your thumbs in between the bricks." %% "I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland" %% "I'm looking for adventure, excitement, beautiful women," cried the young man to his father as he prepared to leave home. "Don't try to stop me. I'm on my way." "Who's trying to stop you?" shouted the father. "Take me along!" %% "If there's ever anything I can do for you -- or, more to the point, to you, don't hesitate to ask." "*What?*" "Which word didn't you understand?" %% "My mother," said the sweet young steno, "says there are some things a girl should not do before twenty." "Your mother is right," said the executive "I don't like a large audience, either." %% "No name yet but I want something meaning 'new'...'" I wish you were the only one That I have ever touched, And I was new to what we do Just learning to touch, like you. It hurts to look at you sometimes, See the wonder in your eyes. As images of other times Run through my mind innocence dies. How I wish you were the only one, Just as I am first to you. So you could feel as special As I do when I'm with you. Yet... Even the past seems not to be When I am in your arms. In my heart you are the first, The rest just hourglass sands. You have become the only one, The first, not one of many. Everyday and night brings wonder, For to me all things seem new - With you... Is this the way love is? All the past has been erased? I've never felt this way before And to you I come left chaste. -- (c) 1988 Karen A. Post October 1988 %% "No, I understand now," Auberon said, calm in the woods -- it was so simple, really. "I didn't, for a long time, but I do now. You just can't hold people, you can't own them. I mean it's only natural, a natural process really. Meet. Love. Part. Life goes on. There was never any reason to expect her to stay always the same -- I mean `in love,' you know." There were those doubt-quotes of Smoky's, heavily indicated. "I don't hold a grudge. I can't." "You do," Grandfather Trout said. "And you don't understand." -- John Crowley, "Little, Big" %% "Ode to a Fool" To be a fool on "All Fools Day," Is really no disgrace. It takes a fool to call a fool A fool right to his face. It's sad when we're called fools for things We're oft misunderstood at Yet, fitting, we should have a day For something we're so good at. -- Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." %% "Ode to a Mom on Mothers' Day" It's the time of the year To salute 'Mother Dear' Giving candy or cards as an uplift. Tho, dispensing such fluff Don't seem payment enough For the stuff that we made her put up with. She'd praise and admonish And sometimes astonish By granting us reprieves For the times when we'd fall And most dreadful of all, For wiping our nose on our sleeves. -- Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." %% "Ode to a Mom" $5,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." %% "Our school, madame, postulates, first of all, that since the science of mathematics is an abstract science, it is best inculcated by some concrete example." Said the Queen, "But that sounds rather complicated." "It occasionally leads to complications," Jurgen admitted, "through a choice of the wrong example. But the axiom is no less true." "Come, then, and sit next to me on this couch if you can find it in the dark; and do you explain to me what you mean." "Why, madame, by a concrete example I mean one that is perceptible to any of the senses -- as to sight or hearing, or touch --" "Oh, oh!" said the Queen, "now I perceive what you mean by a concrete example. And grasping this, I can understand that complications must of course arise from a choice of the wrong example." -- James Branch Cabell, "Jurgen" %% "Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he'd be hurt if..." "He was going to suck my blood!" "Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we'll be hurt if they don't live our way." ... "The thing that puzzles you," he said, "is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he'd be hurt if you didn't let him? That's his decision to be hurt, that's his choice. What you do about it is your decision, you choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake through his heart. If he doesn't want the holly stake, he's free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices." "When you look at it that way..." "Listen," he said, "it's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do." -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" %% "Seven years and six months!" Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. "An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked MY advice, I'd have said `Leave off at seven' -- but it's too late now." "I never ask advice about growing," Alice said indignantly. "Too proud?" the other enquired. Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. "I mean," she said, "that one can't help growing older." "ONE can't, perhaps," said Humpty Dumpty; "but TWO can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven." -- Lewis Carroll [Through the Looking-Glass] %% "Shit Happens," as interpreted by world religions: EXISTENTIALISM: Shit doesn't happen; shit is. JEHOVAH's WITNESSES: No shit happens until Armageddon. SECULAR HUMANISM: Shit evolves. REFORM JUDAISM: Got any Kaopectate? CHRISTIAN SCIENCE: When shit doesn't happen, don't call a doctor--pray. TAOISM: Shit happens. CONFUCIANISM: Confucious says, "Shit happens". BUDDHISM: If shit happens, it isn't really shit. HINDUISM: This shit has happened before. PROTESTANTISM: If shit happens, it happens to someone else. CATHOLICISM: If shit happens, you deserved it. ISLAM: If shit happens, kill the person(s) responsible. JUDAISM: Why does shit always happen to US? %% "Souls_of_Us" deep down, we know, smile, amused at our antics rejoice at our discovery. sometimes i feel your knowingness, the glowing roots trailing, taproot to truth. other times i let myself become distracted, misled, lost in illusion blind behind the blowing sands of predicament. why create me so alone? god, i feel you singing in the ground, echo in the sky, surge seas, but ignorance stains your light as it flows through me, a window tined with limitation. we have shared such light, resonated crystal harmonies tasted sweet spirit flow entwine absorbed the velvet dark silence -- why must i disconnect? the horror of falling from your shadow pervades this world of passions, feeds our clumsy clinging illusions, our precious naivety. how i long for us to dance again in dyadic orbit, twin suns turn in spiral embrace join and form again, spinning flowing threads so exquisitely traced. around, within, beside -- where are you? yes. everywhere and more. dance along, expand, release: open eyes across the sands of time. -- 11/86 %% "THE DERIVATIVE SONG" (To the tune of "There'll be Some Changes Made") You take a function of x and you call it y, Take any x-nought that you care to try, You make a little change and call it delta x, The corresponding change in y is what you find nex', And then you take the quotient and now carefully Send delta x to zero, and I think you'll see That what the limit gives us, if our work all checks, Is what we call dy/dx, It's just dy/dx. -- Tom Lehrer, AMM, 81 (1974) 490: %% "THE MASOCHISM TANGO" You caught my nose In your left castanet, love; I can feel the pain yet, love, Ev'ry time I hear drums. And I remember the rose That your teeth used to clench, love; With the thorns underneath, love, Sticking into your gums! Your heart casts a spell that bewitches; The last time I needed twenty stitches. To sew up the gash You made with your lash As we danced to the Masochism Tango! -- Tom Lehrer %% "THE PROFESSOR'S SONG" (To the tune of "If You Give Me Your Attention" from "Princess Ida") (Gilbert and Sullivan) My diagrams are models of true art, you must agree, And my handwriting is famous for its legibility. Take a word like "minimum" (to choose a random word), [The professor writes "/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/"] For anyone to say he cannot read that, is absurd. The anecdotes I tell get more amusing every year, Though frankly, what they go to prove is sometimes less than clear, And all my explanations are quite lucid, I am sure, Yet everybody tells me that my lectures are obscure, And I can't think why. -- Tom Lehrer, AMM, 81 (1974) 745: %% "THERE'S A DELTA FOR EVERY EPSILON" There's a delta for every epsilon, How sad, how cruel, how tragic, It's a fact that you can always count upon. How pitiful, and other There's a delta for every epsilon adjectives that I might mention. And now and again, The matter merits our attention. There's also an N. If an epsilon is a hero, Just because it is greater than But one condition I must give: zero, The epsilon must be positive It must be mighty discouragin' A lonely life all the others live, To lie to the left of the origin. In no theorem A delta for them. This rank discrimination is not for us, We must fight for an enlightened calculus, Where epsilons all, both minus and plus, Have deltas To call their own. -- Tom Lehrer, AMM, 81 (1974) 612: %% "That wife of mine is a liar," said the angry husband to a sympathetic pal seated next to him in a bar. "How do you know?" the friend asked. "She didn't come home last night, and I asked her where she'd been, she said she had spent the night with her sister Shirley." "So?" "She's a liar. I spent the night with her sister Shirley." %% "The Good Ship Enterprise" (to the tune of "The Good Ship Lollipop") On the good ship Enterprise Every week there's a new surprise Where the Romulans lurk And the Klingons often go berserk. Yes, the good ship Enterprise There's excitement anywhere it flies Where Tribbles play And Nurse Chapel never gets her way. See Captain Kirk standing on the bridge, Mr. Spock is at his side. The weekly menace, ooh-ooh It gets fried, scattered far and wide. It's the good ship Enterprise Heading out where danger lies And you live in dread If you're wearing a shirt that's red. -- Doris Robin and Karen Trimble of The L.A. Filkharmonics %% "The Keyboard Prayer" Our keyboard who art in memory. Hello be thy name. Thy operating system come, Thy commands be done, At the printer as it is on the screen. Give us this day our daily data, And forgive us our I/O errors, As we forgive those whose logic circuits are faulty. Lead us not into frustration. Deliver us from power surges. For thine is the algorithm, The application, And the solution, Looping forever and ever, Return. %% "The Purple Cow" I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one, But I can tell you anyhow, I'd rather see than be one. Later, by the same poet: Yes, I wrote "The Purple Cow," I'm sorry now I wrote it, But I can tell you anyhow, I'll kill you if you quote it. %% "The Telecom Blues" (with apologies to Janis Joplin) Oh Lord, won't yah buy me, a faster modem. My friends got 1200s, I sure envy 'em. Or a 2400, I'd blow them away. Oh Lord, send a modem, now what do yah say? Oh Lord, won't ya buy me, a DDS line? 56 KB would sure be so fine. I'd upload those programs in new record time. Oh Lord, won't yah buy me a DDS line? Oh Lord, won't yah buy me, a link made of glass. T1 was okay, but fiber's got more class. No more VCO, I'll send out the real thing. Oh Lord, baseband networks are what you should bring. Oh Lord, won't yah buy me a satellite link. Hook it to Rockville, or now that I think... To Brookfield, OH that would tickle me pink. Oh Lord, won't yah buy me a satellite link. %% "Then what is magic for?" Prince Lir demanded wildly. "What use is wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?" He gripped the magician's shoulder hard, to keep from falling. Schmendrick did not turn his head. With a touch of sad mockery in his voice, he said, "That's what heroes are for." ... "Yes, of course," he [Prince Lir] said. "That is exactly what heroes are for. Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does, but heroes are meant to die for unicorns." -- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn" %% "There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't-- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you CAN make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "They spend years searching for their natural parents, convinced their parents will be happy to see them. I mean, really, can you imagine someone being happy to see an orphan? Nobody wants them... that's why they're orphans!" The speaker is Anne Baker, founder and guiding force behind Orphan-Off, an organization dedicated to keeping orphans confused about the whereabouts of their natural parents. She is a woman with a mission: "Basically, what we do is band together to exchange information about which orphans are looking for which parents in what part of the country. We're completely computerized. "The idea is to throw the orphans as many red herrings and false leads as possible. We'll tell some twenty-three-year-old loser that his real parents can be found at a certain address on the other side of the country. Well, by the time the kid shows up, the family is prepared. They look over the kid's photos and information and they say, 'Oh, the Emersons... yeah, they used to live here... I think they moved out about five years ago. I think they went to Iowa, or maybe Idaho.' "Bam, the door shuts in the kid's face and he's back to zero again. He's got nothing to go on but the orphan's pathetic determination to continue. "It's really amazing how much these kids will put up with. Last year we even sent one kid all the way to Australia. I mean, really. Besides, if your natural parents were Australian, would you want to meet them?" -- National Lampoon (September, 84) %% "Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly. "In the past year strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts. There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down soggy potato chips." "But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito. "Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made good copy." -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% "We friends, yes?" The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and looked into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any feeling the boy had experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory. The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy's inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead junky whisper. "With veins like that, Kid, I'd have myself a time!" -- William Burroughs %% "We've decided to have the budgie put down." "Oh, is he very old then?" "No, we just don't like him." "Oh. How do they put budgies down anyway?" "Well, it's funny you should be asking that, as I've been reading a great big book called "How To Put Your Budgie Down". And as I understand it, you can either hit them over the head with the book, or shoot them there, just above the beak." "Mrs. Conkers flushed hers down the loo." "Oh, you don't want to do that, because they breed in the sewers and pretty soon you get huge evil smelling flocks of soiled budgies flying out of peoples lavatories infringing their personal freedoms." -- Monty Python %% "Welcome back for you 13th consecutive week, Evelyn. Evelyn, will you go into the auto-suggestion booth and take your regular place on the psycho-prompter couch?" "Thank you, Red." "Now, Evelyn, last week you went up to $40,000 by properly citing your rivalry with your sibling as a compulsive sado-masochistic behavior pattern which developed out of an early post-natal feeding problem." "Yes, Red." "But -- later, when asked about pre-adolescent oedipal phantasy repressions, you rationalized twice and mental blocked three times. Now, at $300 per rationalization and $500 per mental block you lost $2,100 off your $40,000 leaving you with a total of $37,900. Now, any combination of two more mental blocks and either one rationalization or three defensive projections will put you out of the game. Are you willing to go ahead?" "Yes, Red." "I might say here that all of Evelyn's questions and answers have been checked for accuracy with her analyst. Now, Evelyn, for $80,000 explain the failure of your three marriages." "Well, I--" "We'll get back to Evelyn in one minute. First a word about our product." %% "Well, it's a little rough... it might not be necessary to drag him 40 blocks. Maybe just four. You could put him in the trunk for the first 36 blocks, then haul him out and drag him the last four; that would certainly scare the piss out of him, bumping alone the street, feeling all his skin being ripped off..." "He'd be a bloody mess. They might think he was just some drunk and let him lie there all night." "Don't worry about that. They have a guard station in front of the White House that's open 24 hours a day. The guards would recognize Colson... and by that time of course his wife would have called the cops and reported that a bunch of thugs had kidnapped him." "Wouldn't it be a little kinder if you drove about four more blocks and stopped at a phone box to ring the hospital and say, 'Would you mind going around to the front of the White House? There's a naked man lying outside in the street, bleeding to death...'" "... and we think it's Mr. Colson." "It would be quite a story for the newspapers, wouldn't it?" "Yeah, I think it's safe to say we'd see some headlines on that one." -- H. Thompson [talking to R. Steadman on C. Colson, ex-Marine captain, now born again, of Watergate fame] %% "What do you give a man who has everything?" the pretty teenager asked her mother. "Encouragement, dear," she replied. %% "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." -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" %% "What was the worst thing you've ever done?" "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me... the most dreadful thing." -- Peter Straub, "Ghost Story" %% "What's that thing?" "Well, it's a highly technical, sensitive instrument we use in computer repair. Being a layman, you probably can't grasp exactly what it does. We call it a two-by-four." -- Jeff McNelly, "Shoe" %% "When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?" "What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?" "I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said. %% "Why did you spend so much time parked in that fellow's car last night?" demanded the irate mother. "I could hear the giggling and squealing for a good half hour." "But, mom," answered her daughter, "if a fellow takes you to the movies you ought to at least kiss him good night." "I thought you went to the Stork Club?" countered the mother. "We did." %% "You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young!" "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen!" -- Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% 'First, the fish must be caught.' That is easy: a baby, I think, could have caught it. 'Next, the fish must be bought.' That is easy: a penny, I think, would have bought it. 'Now cook me the fish!' That is easy, and will not take more than a minute. 'Let it lie in a dish!' That is easy, because it already is in it. 'Bring it here! Let me sup!' It is easy to set such a dish on the table. 'Take the dish-cover up!' Ah, that is so hard that I fear I'm unable! For it holds it like glue -- Holds the lid to the dish, while it lies in the middle: Which is easiest to do, Un-dish-cover the fish, or dishcover the riddle? -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% 'IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY?' [** 1/2] First aired October 18, 1968. Miranda, a telepath, is jealous of Spock's greater abilities in forming a mind-link with Kollos, an alien so ugly that the very sight of him can drive a man insane. %% 'LET THAT BE YOUR LAST BATTLEFIELD' [*/2] First aired January 10, 1969. Two two-toned beings try to get Kirk to take sides in their racial disputes. I think one of these guys also was the Riddler of Batman fame. %% (German philosopher) Georg Wilhelm Hegel, on his deathbed, complained, "Only one man ever understood me." He fell silent for a while and then added, "And he didn't understand me." %% *** A NEW KIND OF PROGRAMMING *** Do you want the instant respect that comes from being able to use technical terms that nobody understands? Do you want to strike fear and loathing into the hearts of DP managers everywhere? If so, then let the Famous Programmers' School lead you on... into the world of professional computer programming. They say a good programmer can write 20 lines of effective program per day. With our unique training course, we'll show you how to write 20 lines of code and lots more besides. Our training course covers every programming language in existence, and some that aren't. You'll learn why the on/off switch for a computer is so important, what the words *fatal error* mean, and who and what you should blame when you make a mistake. Yes, I want the brochure describing this incredible offer. I enclose $1000 is small unmarked bills to cover the cost of postage and handling. (No live poultry, please.) *** Our Slogan: Top down programming for the masses. *** %% *** DO YOU HAVE A RESTLESS URGE TO PROGRAM? *** Do you want the instant respect that comes from being able to use technical terms that nobody understands? Do you want to strike fear and loathing into the hearts of DP managers everywhere? If so, then let the Famous Programmers' School lead you on... into the world of professional computer programming. *** IS PROGRAMMING FOR YOU? *** Programming is not for everyone. But, if you have the desire to learn, we can help you get started. All you need is the Famous Programmers' Course and enough money to keep those lessons coming month after month. *** TAKE OUR FREE APTITUDE TEST *** To help determine if you are qualified to be a programmer, take a moment to try this simple test: 1: Write down the numbers from zero to nine and the first six letters of the alphabet (Hint: 0123456789ABCDEF). 2: Whose picture is on the back of a twenty-dollar bill? 3: What is the state capital of Idaho? If you managed to read all three questions without wondering why we asked them, you may have a future as a computer programmer. %% *** STUDENT SUCCESSES *** Many of our students have gone on to achieve great success in all fields of programming. One former student developed the concept of the personalized form letter. Does the phrase, "Dear Mr.(insert name), You may already be a winner!," sound familiar? Another student writes "After only five lessons I sold a "My Most Unforgettable Program" article to Corrosive Computing magazine. Another of our graduates writes, "I recently completed a database-management program for my department manager. My program touched him so deeply that he was speechless. He told me later that he had never seen such a program in his entire career. Thank you, Famous Programmers' school; only you could have made this possible. Send for our introductory brochure which explains in vague detail the operation of the Famous Programmers' School, and you'll be eligible to win a possible chance to enter a drawing, the winner of which can vie for a set of free steak knives. If you don't do it now, you'll hate yourself in the morning. %% *** When Love is Hurt, And wings are lead, And words are always wrong, A heart is burnt, A heart is dead, And hoarseness is the song, The fragile world Of eyes and hearts Is crumpled with a breath, And of the whole Are only parts, And death again, and death . . . Too often mentioned Hearts and eyes, When will you find a place That has a voice, And hears your cries, And gives a face a face . . . %% --- /\ V 3 | | z**2 dz cos(3*pi/9) = ln (e**1/3) | \/ 1 The integral of z squared, dz from 1 to the square root of 3 times the cosine of 3 PI over nine Is the log of cube root of e %% ... But among the children of the Great Society there were those whose skins were black. And lo! Their portion was niggardly, and of the fatted calf they were sucking hind teat ... Now it came to pass that a prophet rose up amongst them, and they called him King. And he went unto Pharaoh and said, "Let my people go to the front of the bus." But Pharaoh answered: "In the fullness of time and with all deliberate speed shall this thing come to pass. When ye shall prove yourselves worthy, shall ye have your just portion -- yea, verily, like unto a snowball in Hell." -- "The Begatting of a President" %% 12 + 144 + 20 + 3(4) 2 ---------------------- + 5(11) = 9 + 0 7 A dozen, a gross and a score, plus three times the square root of four divided by seven plus five times eleven is nine squared and not a bit more. %% A Mexican and a Texan worked together for a construction firm, and while they were good friends, they had a friendly rivalry over whose wife was the better cook. One weekend, as the Texan's wife was out of town, the Mexican invited the Texan to have supper with his family. The Texan accepted, and that evening sat down to some the best stew that he had ever eaten. "Damn! That stew is fantastic!" he exclaimed to his host. "What kind of meat is it?" "Rabbeet stew," replied the Mexican. "Rabbit?" replied the Texan. "There aren't any rabbits around here." "Si, my freend, the rabbeets make the beeg noise, and I shoot theem." "Rabbits don't make any noise..." "Si, my freend, they say meeyow, meeyow!" %% A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. %% A Poem To Me Mudder (On Mudder's Day) When me prayers were poorly said Who tucked me in me widdle bed And spanked me butt 'till it was red... Me Mudder. Who took me from me cozy cot And put me on the ice cold pot And made me pee if me could not... Me Mudder. And when the morning light had come And in me bed me dwibbled some Who wiped me tiny widdle buns... Me Mudder. Who would me hair so gently part And hug me tightly to her heart And sometimes squeeze me 'till me fart... Me Mudder. %% A Requiem For Today's Technologist A computer is my lover The only life I've ever known I've given it my soul And in return I've got it's own. I tried to love a human But he filled my days with pain The ache was so intense, I swore I'd not love man again. My love went to the computer For it was quick and smart, And it would never hurt me - Until it became my heart. The life in me has died - The greatest pain I've ever known - From the computer as my lover And the empty soul I own. %% A business executive is consumed by jealousy: he suspects his wife of cheating on him. The suspicion grows and grows, and one morning as he drives to work he can't take it any more. He thinks to himself, "she probably just waited until I left so she could meet with her lover." When he gets to his office, he calls home. The maid answers. He says, "Hello. Is my wife there?" "Yes, sir", the maid whispers. "Is she with her lover?" The maid pauses, and then says, "Yes, sir, she is, and I must say that I feel terrible about how she treats you." The man yells, "That no good **#*&!!. If you feel as badly as you say you do, you must do this for me: go to my dresser and get my gun. Check to make sure that it's loaded. Then go upstairs and shoot both that cheating two-timing whore and her lover. Dispose of the gun, and then come back to the phone and tell me that it's over. Don't worry -- I'll protect you." The man hears footsteps, a drawer being opened, a click, more footsteps, silence... and then two shots. More footsteps. Finally the maid comes back to the phone and says "It's done." The man asks, "What did you do with the gun?" "I threw it behind the statue in the garden", the maid replies. "Statue in the garden? Say, what number is this, anyway?" %% A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test", said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy." Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too". %% A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat." The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that, the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been an architect." The computer scientist, who had listened to all of this said, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?" %% A famous basketball player was killed in the crash of a DC-3. Next thing he knew, he was standing in line at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter noticed the extra-tall fellow standing in line, dropped his regular work and rushed out to greet him. "Come right in! We've been waiting for you!" St. Peter dragged him inside and began a personally-guided tour of Heaven. The basketball player said, "I don't wish to seem ungrateful, but I was having a really great career and don't understand why I had to get killed just now." St. Peter said, "Well, you see, it's like this-- We're starting a team Up Here, and we had to recruit some talent." They enter a very fancy gymnasium where people are practicing basketball. The basketball player recognizes some of them, and decides that Heaven may not be so bad after all. One idiosyncratically-dressed person is running up and down the sidelines, screaming at everyone. "Who's THAT guy?" the new arrival asks St. Peter. "That's God. He thinks he's !" < >: insert generic basketball coach. %% A guy returns from a long trip to Europe, having left his beloved dog in his brother's care. The minute he's cleared customs, he calls up his brother and inquires after his pet. "Your dog's dead," replies his brother bluntly. The guy is devastated. "You know how much that dog meant to me," he moaned into the phone. "Couldn't you at least have thought of a nicer way of breaking the news? Couldn't you have said, `Well, you know, the dog got outside one day, and was crossing the street, and a car was speeding around a corner...' or something...? Why are you always so thoughtless?" "Look, I'm sorry," said his brother, "I guess I just didn't think." "Okay, okay, let's just put it behind us. How are you anyway? How's Mom?" His brother is silent a moment. "Uh," he stammers, "uh... Mom got outside one day..." %% A lady goes into the neighborhood grocery store in her small Northeastern town and goes to the butcher. LADY: Hello. Are you new in town? BUTCHER: Yes, I am. LADY: Welcome to . BUTCHER: Thank you. How may I help you? L: I would like a Maine Turkey, please. B: (puzzled) Okay, here. (Hands her a turkey) L: (turns over turkey and looks in its asshole) Hey, this turkey is from Massachusetts. B: So it is. Sorry. How about this one? (Hands her another turkey) L: (again looking in turkey's asshole) Look, stop trying to fool me! This Turkey is from Pennsylvania!!! B: Okay, okay, I think you'll like this one. L: (again looking in turkey's asshole) Yes! Thank you! Finally a turkey from Maine! You said you're new around here right? B: Yes. L: Where did you come here from? B: (pulling down his pants and mooning her) You're the expert! You tell me !!!!!!!!! %% A little girl in a school in USSR was asked to use "communist" in a sentence. She said, "My cat just had a litter of kittens and they are all communists". A month later the same little girl was asked to use the word "capitalist" in a sentence. She said, "My cat had a litter of kittens and now they are capitalists". The teacher was shocked and ask what had happened to the kittens. The little girl responded, "Well they have opened their eyes now!" %% A man came home from work and as he entered the house he yelled, "Hi, honey, I'm home." There was no response. He walked through the house and saw a note on the refrigerator. It read "I'm out with the girls and I'll be home about 8. Either fix yourself something to eat, or wait for me and we'll eat when I get home." Well, he decided to wait until his wife returned. However, his stomach started to growl and he remembered that he had an apple left over from his lunch. He got the apple, polished it a little, and heard the doorbell ring. He went to the door and there stood a little blond haired girl holding out a little paper bag. "Trick or treat", she said. He looked at the girl, looked at the apple, thought how hungry he was, looked at the girl again, and with a slight sigh dropped his apple in the bag. The little girl looked down in the bag, looked up again, and complained, "You stupid son-of-a-bitch. You broke my cookies!" %% A man from AI walked across the mountains to SAIL to see the Master, Knuth. When he arrived, the Master was nowhere to be found. "Where is the wise one named Knuth?" he asked a passing student. "Ah," said the student, "you have not heard. He has gone on a pilgrimage across the mountains to the temple of AI to seek out new disciples." Hearing this, the man was Enlightened. %% A man goes to a tailor to try on a new custom-made suit. The first thing he notices is that the arms are too long. "No problem," says the tailor. "Just bend them at the elbow and hold them out in front of you. See, now it's fine." "But the collar is up around my ears!" "It's nothing. Just hunch your back up a little ... no, a little more ... that's it." "But I'm stepping on my cuffs!" the man cries in desperation. "Nu, bend you knees a little to take up the slack. There you go. Look in the mirror -- the suit fits perfectly." So, twisted like a pretzel, the man lurches out onto the street. Reba and Florence see him go by. "Oh, look," says Reba, "that poor man!" "Yes," says Florence, "but what a beautiful suit." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% A man walks into a bar and says: "I'd like a shot of twelve-year-old Scotch". The bartender, who figures the guy is just being obnoxious, reaches down under the bar and pours him a shot of bar Scotch. The man takes one sip and says: "Hey, bartender, I asked you for some twelve-year-old Scotch -- this is eight-year-old Scotch." The bartender reaches behind the bar for the twelve-year-old Scotch, pours a shot, hands it to the man and says "I've got to hand it to you -- most guys who come in here asking for twelve-year-old Scotch have never even had it -- they're just being pricks. But you really know your Scotch -- this is on the house." A drunk has been sitting at the other end of the bar watching this conversation. He walks up to the man, hands him a glass and says "Taste this." The man does -- and spits it out yelling, "This tastes like piss!" To which the drunk replies, "It is -- but how old am I?" %% A man was traveling cross-country one summer from New York to LA. He arrived in Needles CA late one night and pulled into an Exxon for some gas. When he pulled up to the gas pumps, he noticed that all of the lights were off. Suddenly, he heard a faint sound from outside. He wasn't sure what he'd heard, so he rolled down his window and heard a faint cry, "Help... help... help". He got out of his car, and sure enough there was a guy stooped down in the corner, stark naked with his wrists tied to his ankles. He walked up to the guy and said, "Hey, man, what happened to you?" "These guys pulled me out of my car, took my money, my wallet, my clothes, tied my wrists to my ankles, and then stole my car!!" "Damn!", replied the first man as he unzipped his pants. "This just hasn't been your day, has it?" %% A man went to a doctor to have his penis enlarged. Well, this particular procedure involved splicing a baby elephant's trunk onto the man's penis. Overjoyed, the man went out with his best girl to a very fancy restaurant. After cocktails, the man's penis crept out of his pants, felt around the table, grabbed a hard roll and quickly disappeared under the tablecloth. The girl was startled and exclaimed, "What was that?" Suddenly the penis came back, took another hard roll and just as quickly disappeared. The girl was silent for a moment, then finally said, "I don't believe I saw what I think I just saw... can you do that again?" With a bit of an uncomfortable smile the man replied, "Honey, I'd like to, but I don't think my asshole can take another hard roll!" %% A mother and her daughter came to the doctor's office. The mother asked the doctor to examine her daughter. "She has been having some strange symptoms and I'm worried about her," the mother said. The doctor examined the daughter carefully. Then he announced, "Madam, I believe your daughter is pregnant." The mother gasped. "That's nonsense!" she said. "Why, my little girl has never even been out with a man, let alone... let alone..." She turns to the girl and said, "Tell the doctor, Susie!" "Yes, Mumsy," said the girl. "Doctor, I have never so much as kissed a man!" The doctor looked from the mother to daughter, and back again. Then, silently he stood up and walked to the window. He stared out. He continued staring until the mother felt compelled to ask, "Doctor, is there something wrong out there?" "No, Madam," said the doctor. "It's just that the last time anything like this happened, a star appeared in the East and I was looking to see if another one was going to show up." %% A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell. She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion. "Well, it's quite nice," he replied, but don't you think it would be better if ..." "If what?" asked the composer. "If ... if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?" %% A naive young priest is moved to a parish in a bad neighborhood of Manhattan and is quite bewildered by the legion of hookers who are constantly approaching him to whisper, "Five bucks for a blowjob, buddy." Finally, he can stand being in ignorance no longer, and approaches one of the nuns. "Excuse my presumption, Sister," says the young priest, "but could you please tell me what a blow job is?" "Five bucks, just like anywhere else," she replied. %% A ninety-year-old man and his ninety-year-old wife went to a lawyer to file for divorce. "But I don't understand," the lawyer said, "After all these years together, why do you suddenly want a divorce?" "We've wanted one all along," the man said, "We were just waiting for the kids to die." %% A novel approach is to remove all power from the system, which removes most system overhead so that resources can be fully devoted to doing nothing. Benchmarks on this technique are promising; tremendous amounts of nothing can be produced in this manner. Certain hardware limitations can limit the speed of this method, especially in the larger systems which require a more involved & less efficient power-down sequence. An alternate approach is to pull the main breaker for the building, which seems to provide even more nothing, but in truth has bugs in it, since it usually inhibits the systems which keep the beer cool. %% A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly, "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked. %% A personal ad from an unidentified newspaper announces that a "formerly single man" seeks a single or married woman. %% A phobia is by definition an irrational fear. Claustrophobia is an irrational fear of enclosed spaces. Ailurophobia is an irrational fear of cats. (And, as a friend of mine has observed, tooraloorailurophobia is an irrational fear of Irish cats.) -- Marty Helgesen %% A proper elderly English couple visiting Australia decided to hire a car to take a look at the outback. "We know it's rough country, but it's safe and decent, isn't it?" the husband inquired of the rental-agency manager. Upon being assured that it was, the couple drove off. Later that day, they returned, upset and angry. "You said it was decent country," the Englishwoman upbraided the rental agent, "but we hadn't driven too far when we saw a man in a field copulating with a kangaroo!" "And not too long after that," complained her husband, "a one-legged aborigine leaning against a tree by the side of the road grinningly waved at us with one hand while he brazenly masturbated himself with the other!" "Guv'nor," responded the Aussie, "yer wouldn't expect a poor bugger like that, with only one leg, to catch a 'roo, would you?" %% A reader reports that the Army calls them "vertically deployed antipersonnel devices." You probably call them bombs. %% A reader reports that when the patient died, the attending doctor recorded the following on the patient's chart: "Patient failed to fulfill his wellness potential." %% A sinner and a priest are golfing one day the the sinner missed a 3yrd putt and exclaimed ' Damn!! Missed !!'. Now the priest was shocked by this and replied, ' My son, you should not swear like that lest God strike you down.' 'God would never do that.' the sinner replied. Well the game went on and the sinner just wasn't having the best of times playing golf and he was constantly swearing and saying 'Damn! Missed'. Finally at the 18th hole the sinner is about to put. If he gets this put he will win the game. He takes a deep breath... Winds up.... Puts... The ball rolls towards the hole.. and.. he missed. ' DAMN ! MISSED !!' he screamed. Suddenly, great big clouds filled the air, gale-force wind was blowing, the sky went dark. *BOOOM* A bolt of lightning streaks thru the sky and the priest is fried to a crisp. The clouds roll away, the wind stops and the sky lights up again. And you hear and echoing sound of a voice in the distance ' Damn.... Missed...' %% A woman goes to her doctor who verifies that she is pregnant. This is her first pregnancy. The doctor asks her if she has any questions. She replies, "Well, I'm a little worried about the pain. How much will childbirth hurt?" The doctor answered, "Well, that varies from woman to woman and pregnancy to pregnancy and besides, it's difficult to describe pain." W: "I know, but can't you give me some idea?" Dr: Grab your upper lip and pull it out a little. (This needs to be done by the joke teller) W: Like this? Dr: A little more. W: Like this? Dr: No. A little more. W: Like this? Dr: Yes. Does that hurt? W: A little bit. Dr: Then stretch it over your head! %% A woman was married to a golfer. One day she asked, "If I were to die, would you remarry?" After some thought, the man replied, "Yes, I've been very happy in this marriage and I would want to be this happy again." The wife asked, "Would you give your new wife my car?" "Yes," he replied. "That's a good car and it runs well." "Well, would you live in this house?" "Yes, it is a lovely house and you have decorated it beautifully. I've always loved it here." "Well, would you give her my golf clubs?" "No." "Why not?" "She's left handed." %% A young couple jumped out of their car and dashed into the park. They hurriedly found a secluded spot and began to make frenzied, passionate love. Shortly thereafter, as they were driving away, the young man turned to her and said, "If I had known you were a virgin, I'd have taken more time." She replied, "If I had known you had more time, I'd have taken off my pantyhose." %% A young honeymoon couple were touring southern Florida and happened to stop at one of the rattlesnake farms along the road. After seeing the sights, they engaged in small talk with the man that handled the snakes. "Gosh!" exclaimed the new bride. "You certainly have a dangerous job. Don't you ever get bitten by the snakes?" "Yes, upon rare occasions," answered the handler. "Well," she continued, "just what do you do when you're bitten by a snake?" "I always carry a razor-sharp knife in my pocket, and as soon as I am bitten, I make deep criss-cross marks across the fang entry and then suck the poison from the wound." "What, uh... what would happen if you were to accidentally *sit* on a rattler?" persisted the woman. "Ma'am," answered the snake handler, "that will be the day I learn who my real friends are." %% A young man asked his father to lend him $50 for a blowjob, whereupon his father solemnly replied, "When I was young we used to settle for a kiss." The son retorted, "OK, how about $50 for a long low kiss?" %% A young man working in a porno' shop is left in control while the owner leaves for lunch. The owner's departing words are: "Make me happy, make some deals." A lovely young women enters the establishment and asks: "What are your prices on the dildos?" "The white ones are $9.95 and the black ones are $18.95." "I'll take the white one." Yet another lovely young women enters the establishment: "What are your prices on the dildos?" "The white ones are $9.95 and the black ones are $18.95." "I'll take the black one." When a hose-bag slut of a painted lady walks in she asks: "What are your prices on the dildos?" "The white ones are $9.95 and the black ones are $18.95 and the plaid one is $50.00." She replied: "I'll take the plaid one." The store keep returning from his lunch enquires about any sales that where made. The young man replies: "I sold a white dildo for $9.95, a black dildo for $18.95, and your thermos for fifty bucks:-)" %% A young married couple had their first child. Their original pride and joy slowly turned to concern however, for after a couple of years the child had never uttered any form of speech. They hired the best speech therapists, doctors, psychiatrists, all to no avail. The child simply refused to speak. One morning when the child was five, while the husband was reading the paper, and the wife was feeding the dog, the little kid looks up from his bowl and said, "My cereal's cold." The couple is stunned. The man, in tears, confronts his son. "Son, after all these years, why have you waited so long to say something?". Shrugs the kid, "Everything's been okay 'til now". %% AQUARIUS (Jan 20 - Feb 18) You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive. You lie a great deal. On the other hand, you are inclined to be careless and impractical, causing you to make the same mistakes over and over again. People think you are stupid. %% ARIES (Mar 21 - Apr 19) You are the pioneer type and hold most people in contempt. You are quick tempered, impatient, and scornful of advice. You are not very nice. %% Acceleration Enclosed in steel Wheels devouring road A course from me to me Magnified to the nth degree Windswept hair Daring the world to catch me Bowie is background to the chase Challenge me to win this race I am BondJamesBond James Dean Steve McQueen Machine in my control Break the barrier of mediocrity's sin So alive, I am, I am, I win -- The Ice Princess %% Accent joke: A Fortune 500 corporation decided that it needed to expand its ethnic diversity. However, they did not wish to lower their standards, so the implemented a test to screen applicants. On the first day of the new testing program, three black applicants arrived. The first was taken aside for testing. The personnel officer explained the purpose of the test, and stated that they would start with a spelling test. "Please spell the word 'before'." The applicant thought, and responded "befo'." B E F O : befo'." Needless to say, he failed. As is usual in jokes involving a sequence of three experiences, the second applicant fared similarly. The third applicant was asked the same question. "Befo'," he responded. "B E F O R E, befo'." The personnel administrator was delighted, and move on to the second phase of the test. "Now," she said, "please use the word in a sentence." The applicant responded: "Befo'. Two plus two be fo'." %% According to the FAA, the propeller blade didn't break off, it was just a case of "uncontained blade liberation." %% According to the tax bill signed by President Reagan on December 22, 1987, Don Tyson and his sister-in-law Barbara run a "family farm." Their "farm" has 25,000 employees and grosses $1.7 billion a year. But as a "family farm" they get tax breaks that save them $135 million a year. %% 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% After taking the trip of a lifetime, our reader sent his twelve rolls of film to Kodak for developing (or "processing," as Kodak likes to call it) only to receive the following notice: "We must report that during the handling of your twelve 35mm Kodachrome slide orders, the films were involved in an unusual laboratory experience." The use of the passive is a particularly nice touch, don't you think? Nobody did anything to the films; they just had a bad experience. Of course our reader can always go back to Tibet and take his pictures all over again, using the twelve replacement rolls Kodak so generously sent him. %% After watching an extremely attractive maternity-ward patient earnestly thumbing her way through a telephone directory for several minutes, a hospital orderly finally asked if he could be of some help. "No, thanks," smiled the young mother, "I'm just looking for a name for my baby." "But the hospital supplies a special booklet that lists hundreds of first names and their meanings," said the orderly. "That won't help," said the woman, "my baby already has a first name." %% Algie's last letter to Lidia was written only a few days before he died, but reached her some weeks later, as he had neglected to mark it 'Correo Aereo'. In this letter he reported the discovery of several new contradictions in terms and mentioned, among other things, that Piero della Francesca died on the same day that Columbus discovered America, and that there is in Mexico a rat poison called The Last Supper. Such information is hard to come by these days; now that Algie was gone, Lidia could not readily think of another source. -- Shirley Hazzard, "Nothing in Excess" %% All he did was take the ball and run every time they called his number -- which came to be more and more often, and in the Super Bowl Thomas was the whole show. But the season is now over; the purse is safe in the vault; and Duane Thomas is facing two to twenty for possession. Nobody really expects him to serve time, but nobody seems to think he'll be playing for Dallas next year either, and a few sporting people who claim to know how the NFL works say he won't be playing for ANYBODY next year; that the Commissioner is outraged at this mockery of all those Government-sponsored "Beware of Dope" TV shots that dressed up the screen last autumn. We all enjoyed those spots, but not everyone found them convincing. Here was a White House directive saying several million dollars would be spent to drill dozens of Name Players to stare at the camera and try to stop grinding their teeth long enough to say they hate drugs of any kind... and then the best running back in the world turns out to be a goddamn uncontrollable drugsucker. But not for long. There is not much room for freaks in the National Football League. Joe Namath was saved by the simple blind luck of getting drafted by a team in New York City, a place where social outlaws are not always viewed as criminals. But Namath would have had a very different trip if he'd been drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals. -- Hunter S. Thompson %% An Aggie was appointed ambassador to Japan. Two weeks before officially reporting to the embassy, he went from geisha house to geisha house. While making love to a geisha girl, he heard her repeat, "Yaki-san, yaki-san." Right away the Aggie thought to himself, "I've learned my first Japanese word. It must be an expression of joy." When he reported to the embassy, he received his first assignment, which was to escort the prime minister of Japan around the golf course. After having played a couple of holes, the prime minister teed-off and made a hole-in-one. The prime minister jumped up and down shouting, "Bonsai! Bonsai!" Quickly, thinking that this was the perfect chance to show off the new Japanese word that he'd learned, the Aggie exclaimed, "Yaki-san, yaki-san!" The prime minister turned to the Aggie and replied, "What do you mean, wrong hole?" %% An American couple were touring the Sahara and thought it would be nice to spend the day in the desert on camel back. so they rented a camel from Abdul's Rent-a-Hump. Well they were crusing around the desert for about an hour and it was getting pretty hot when all of a sudden the camel come to a dead stop. I mean it wouldn't even blink. They dismounted, which was quite a drop, and try as they might they couldn't get that camel to budge. About a half hour of frustration later a camel maintenance man happened by. They gave him a description of what had happened and the man proceeded to give the camel the once over. He went back to his camel and grabbed a six foot long two by four and went to the back of the camel, took a batters stance, reared back and WHACK!!!!!! PSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSH. With which the camel relaxed and lowered its self to the ground ready to be remounted. The couple was grateful but curious. "What was the problem" they asked. The man responded "Vapor Locked." %% An American tourist went into a restaurant in a Spanish provincial city and asked to be served the specialty of the house. When the dish arrived he asked what kind of meat it contained. "These, senor," explained the waiter in halting English, "are the cojones -- the what you say, the testicles -- of the bull killed in the ring today. The tourist gulped but tasted the dish and found it delicious. Returning the following evening, he asked for the same dish. When it was served, he commented to the waiter, "But these -- these cojones -- are much smaller than the ones I had yesterday." "True, senor, but the bull -- he does not ALWAYS lose." %% An Israeli soldier was checking travelers' papers on a road, when a man and a heavily pregnant woman on a donkey came by. "Your names please?" said the the soldier. "My name is Mary," said the woman. "And mine is Joseph," said the man. "Oh," said the soldier, a little taken aback, "And where are you going?" "To Bethlehem." "Your reason for going there?" "To pay our taxes to the government." "Tell me," said the soldier, "are you going to name the baby Jesus?" "Of course not," said the woman, "What do you think we are, Puerto Ricans?" %% An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint. As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used "next time". Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system. This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile". -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" %% An icicle It runs and runs and never tires Down and down and never up. A stream %% An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him. "Well, zayda, it's sort of like this. Einstein says that if you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like an hour. But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an hour seems like a minute." The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a moment and says, "And from this he makes a living?" -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% An old maid wanted to travel by bus to the pet cemetery with the remains of her cat. As she boarded the bus, she whispered to the driver, "I have a dead pussy." The driver pointed to the woman in the seat behind him and said, "Sit with my wife. You two have a lot in common." %% Ancestry When speaking of our ancestry, My mother's eyes would shine, And proudly she would tell us all: "You're of the Tudor line." But father with a smile would say: "While bearing that in mind, You keep your eyes on goals ahead; Not those that be behind." "You have a noble ancestry, But all are dead and gone, 'Tis you who have to prove your worth, Not those who've journeyed on." "And back along that Tudor line, 'Tis sorry truth I state, There may be some you can't approve, And even some you'd hate." "The way to prove your ancestry, As what you are yourself; Not by the charted family tree, In book upon the shelf." "So try to be an ancestor, Within the time allowed, Of whom your children's children, In the future can be proud." %% And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?" %% Another doctor reports that in a recent issue of the *American Journal of Family Practice* fleas were called "hematophagous arthropod vectors." %% Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat. "You want to count it?" he asked Yonderboy. "No," the Panther Modern said. You'll pay. You're a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name." -- William Gibson, "Neuromancer" %% At McClellan Air Force base in Sacramento, California, civilian mechanics were placed on "non-duty, non-pay status." That is, they were fired. %% BIOCHEMISTRY Element: Woman Symbol: WO Discoverer: First discovered by Adam in pure form. Physical properties: 1) Boils at any temperature 2) Freezes at nothing. 3) Melts when properly treated 4) Very bitter if not used well 5) Unstable under pressure Occurrence: Surplus quantities in urban areas Chemical properties: 1) Possesses great affinity for gold, silver, platinum and precious stones. 2) Reacts violently if left alone. 3) Has ability to absorb great quantities of food. 4) Turns green if placed beside better looking specimen. Test uses: 1) Highly ornamental 2) Useful as an equalizer in distribution. 3) Useful as a catalyst in acceleration of HIS spirits. 4) Most effective income reducing-agent known to man (this guy didn't have kid(s) - rjs) CAUTION: HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE IN INEXPERIENCED HANDS %% Barbara Walters was doing a documentary on the customs of American Indians. After a tour of a reservation they were on, she was curious as to the number of feathers in the headdresses. She asked a brave who had only one feather in his headdress. His reply was, "Me have only one squaw, me have only one feather." She asked another brave, feeling the first fellow was only joking. This brave had four feathers in his headdress. He replied, "Me have four feathers, because me sleep with four squaws." Still not convinced the number of feathers indicated the number of squaws involved, she decided to interview the Chief. Now the Chief had a headdress full of feathers which, needless to say, amused Ms. Walters. Ms. Walters: "Why do you have so many feathers in your headdress?" Chief: "Me Chief, me fuck-em all, big, small fat, tall, fuck-em all." Ms. W: "You ought to be hung!" Chief: "You damned right, me hung. Big like buffalo, long like snake." Ms. W: "You don't have to be so hostile!" Chief: "Hoss-style, dog-style, wolf-style, any-style, me fuck-em all." Ms. W: "Oh, dear!" Chief: "No deer, me no fuck deer. Asshole too high and fuckers run too fast. No fuck-em deer." %% Barney Theme Song I love you, you love me, I brainwash your kids with TV Buy my stuff, spend spend spend, I just want to be your friend -- Karl Rademacher, gsu0010@ecn.uxa %% Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of his followers. One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing. "Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile? What is your Purpose in Life, anyway?" Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU". (The Chinese ideogram for NO-THING.) Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened. Primarily because nobody understood Chinese. -- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters" %% Before he went off to the wars, King Arthur locked his lovely wife, Guinevere, into her chastity belt. Then he summoned his loyal friend and subject Sir Lancelot. "Lancelot, noble knight," said Arthur, "within this sturdy belt is imprisoned the virtue of my wife. The key to this chaste treasure I will entrust to only one man in the world. To you." Humbled before this great honor, Lancelot knelt, received his king's blessing and took charge of the key. Arthur mounted his steed and rode off. Not half a mile from his castle, he heard hoofbeats behind him and turned to see Sir Lancelot riding hard to catch up with him. "What is amiss, my friend?" asked the king. "My lord," gasped Lancelot, "you have given me the wrong key!" %% Bill had just returned from a week of honeymooning, and his best friend asked him how it went. "The first night we did it nine times," Bill said. "The second night, eight times. The third night, seven times. The fourth night, six times. The fifth night, five times. The sixth night, four times, and the last night, nothing!" "Nothing?" his pal asked. "How come?" "Hey, you ever tried putting a marshmallow in a parking meter?" %% CANCER (June 21 - July 22) You are sympathetic and understanding to other people's problems. They think you are a sucker. You are always putting things off. That's why you'll never make anything of yourself. Most welfare recipients are Cancer people. %% CAPRICORN (Dec 23 - Jan 19) You are conservative and afraid of taking risks. You don't do much of anything and are lazy. There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. Capricorns should avoid standing still for too long as they take root and become trees. %% CHIP AHOY I bought the latest computer; It came completely loaded. It was guaranteed for 90 days, But in 30 was outmoded. -- Bill Ihlenfeldt, "The Wall Street Journal" %% COMMENT Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% Chapter VIII Due to the convergence of forces beyond his comprehension, Salvatore Quanucci was suddenly squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed, and never heard from again. %% Come... Dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes...And let's go home. -- Watchmen %% Dallas Cowboys Official Schedule Sept 14 Pasadena Junior High Sept 21 Boy Scout Troop 049 Sept 28 Blind Academy Sept 30 World War I Veterans Oct 5 Brownie Scout Troop 041 Oct 12 Sugarcreek High Cheerleaders Oct 26 St. Thomas Boys Choir Nov 2 Texas City Vet Clinic Nov 9 Korean War Amputees Nov 15 VA Hospital Polio Patients %% Death and the dying. by C. J. Morgan I stand by and watch you dying There's nothing I can do The "experts" say you're fine but how can I believe them I've seen you die before I know the signs Why can't they listen Why can't they see I care Please let me in beyond those walls The death you seek is final There's no turning back when you find what you don't want Please let me in beyond those walls Can't you see I'm there Can't you see I care Throughout the days I say What could I have done What can I do How can I show I'm there How can I show I care And above the rest how can I say I love you -- copyright (c) 1988 by C. J. Morgan. May only be distributed for personal non-profit use. %% Desperate about the state of her social life, a young woman resorted to the Personal Ads in the back of her local paper. In the ad she made it quite clear that what she was advertising for was an expert lover; she already had plenty of sensitive friends and meaningful relationships and what she now wanted was to get laid, to put it bluntly. Phone calls started coming in, with each caller testifying to his sexual prowess, but none quite struck the young woman's fancy. Until one night her doorbell rang. Opening the door she found a man with no arms or legs, who informed her that he was there in response to her advertisement. "I'm terribly sorry," she stammered, "but my ad was quite explicit. I'm really looking for something of a sexual expert, and you... uh... don't have all the..." "Listen," the man interrupted her, "I rang the doorbell, didn't I?" %% Does anyone know how to get chocolate syrup and honey out of a white electric blanket? I'm afraid to wash it in the machine. Thanks, Kathy. (front desk, x17) p.s. Also, anyone ever used Noxema on friction burns? Or is Vaseline better? %% Don't forget about the importance of the family. It begins with the family. We're not going to redefine the family. Everybody knows the definition of the family. [Meaningful pause] A child. [Meaningful pause] A mother. [Meaningful pause] A father. There are other arrangements of the family, but that is a family and family values. I've been very blessed with wonderful parents and a wonderful family, and I am proud of my family. Anybody turns to their family. I have a very good family. I'm very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It's one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it. I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family -- which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be ... The very beginnings of civilization, the very beginnings of this country, goes back to the family. And time and time again, I'm often reminded, especially in this Presidential campaign, of the importance of a family, and what a family means to this country. And so when you pay thanks I suppose the first thing that would come to mind would be to thank the Lord for the family. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes of Harvard Medical School inhaled ether at a time when it was popularly supposed to produce such mystical or "mind-expanding" experiences, much as LSD is supposed to produce such experiences today. Here is his account of what happened: "I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for a moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): `A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.'" -- The Consumers Union Report: Licit & Illicit Drugs %% Driving through a Swiss city one day, Alfred Hitchcock suddenly pointed out of the car window and said, "That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen." His companion was surprised to see nothing more alarming than a priest in conversation with a little boy, his hand on the child's shoulder. "Run, little boy," cried Hitchcock, leaning out of the car. "Run for your life!" %% During a grouse hunt in North Carolina two intrepid sportsmen were blasting away at a clump of trees near a stone wall. Suddenly a red-faced country squire popped his head over the wall and shouted, "Hey, you almost hit my wife." "Did I?" cried the hunter, aghast. "Terribly sorry. Have a shot at mine, over there." %% During a session with a marriage counselor, the wife snapped at her husband: "That's not true, I do enjoy sex!" Then, turning to the counselor, she added: "But this fiend expects it three or four times a year!" %% During a visit to America, Winston Churchill was invited to a buffet luncheon at which cold fried chicken was served. Returning for a second helping, he asked politely, "May I have some breast?" "Mr. Churchill," replied the hostess, "in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat." Churchill apologized profusely. The following morning, the lady received a magnificent orchid from her guest of honor. The accompanying card read: "I would be most obliged if you would pin this on your white meat." %% Ed, a traveling salesman, had his car break down in the middle of a blizzard. He trudged to a nearby farmhouse where the farmer told him that, while they were short of beds, he could sleep with his daughter. She proved to be eighteen and beautiful. So they went to bed, and shortly, Ed made a pass at the daughter. "Stop that!" she said. "I'll call my father." He desisted. But half an hour later he made another attempt. "Uh, stop ... that," she said. "I'll call my father." But she moved closer to him, so he made a third try. This time, no protest, no threat. Just as Ed, satisfied, was about to drowse off, she tugged at his pajama sleeve. "Could we do that again?" she asked. Ed obliged, and this time fell asleep only to be awakened by the tug at his sleeve. "Again?" And again Ed obliged. But when his sleep was once more interrupted by the tugging at his pajama sleeve, Ed indignantly pulled it away from her and mumbled, "Stop that! Or I'll call your father." %% Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American homes is 110 volts per hour. This is very fast. In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows why it would want to. The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current, lightning, static, and European. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% Eugene d'Albert (noted German composer) was married six times. At an evening reception which he attended with his fifth wife shortly after their wedding, he presented the lady to a friend who said politely, "Congratulations, Herr d'albert; you have rarely introduced me to so charming a wife." %% Every morning, the crowd on Coney Island beach was startled to see a jogger with the build of a pro football player but a head the size of a baseball. Finally, some brave young man got up the nerve to stop him and ask, "What happened to give you such a small head?" The jogger sadly told the story of finding a magic lamp on the beach, which produced a beautiful genie when rubbed. The genie said, "I now give you one wish. Do you want a quick fuck or a little head?" %% Everyone in the smart nightclub was amazed by the old gentleman, obviously pushing 70, tossing off manhattans and cavorting around the dance floor like a 20-year old. Finally curiosity got the best of the cigarette girl. "I beg your pardon, sir," she said, "but I'm amazed to see a gentleman of your age living it up like a youngster. Tell me, are all of your faculties unimpaired?" The old fellow looked up at the girl sadly and shook his head. "Not all, I'm afraid." he said. "Just last evening I went nightclubbing with a girlfriend -- we drank and danced all night and finally rolled into her place about two A.M. We went to bed immediately, and I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. I woke around three-thirty and nudged my girl." "Why, George," she said in surprise, "we did that fifteen minutes ago." "So you see," the old boy said sadly, "my memory is beginning to fail me." %% Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as "Garfield Gets Spayed", and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: "In Search of Excellence", "Finding Excellence", "Grasping Hold of Excellence", "Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It", etc. -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence" %% FATHER'S DAY I sit here in a dither With thoughts that wander thither And try so very hard To write my Dad a card. It's not an easy time, There are no words that rhyme.... With Father. I don't know why I bother! -- Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." %% FIGHTING WORDS Say my love is easy had, Say I'm bitten raw with pride, Say I am too often sad -- Still behold me at your side. Say I'm neither brave nor young, Say I woo and coddle care, Say the devil touched my tongue -- Still you have my heart to wear. But say my verses do not scan, And I get me another man! -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% FILLED MY SOUL I heard the force of the universe last night. I heard the solar wind as it brushed gently against my face. I heard the energy of the stars, their birth, their life, and I heard their death. I heard the storms on Jupiter and the volcanos on Io. I heard the mad-dash expansion of the Milky Way, of the universe itself. As I walked out on the porch And lifted my face toward the heavens, I heard the force of the universe last night. Of course, it was only the distant whine of tires on the interstate, but I heard the force of the universe last night, And if filled my soul. %% Face ---- On a frosty window pane The lonely skies sing In lines of ice Writ long and thin Against a brooding night, While greying branches Uproot the moon And noiseless all the snowflakes fall Soft, moist and gentle. And in that deepening silence hangs A face that stares me down Mocks my eyes Rapes my soul Profanes my very being With its touch. %% Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike. Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning Christmas tree. The piano is missing. You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level 4. The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog. %% For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours. -- Henri Poincare, "Science et Methode" %% Former Vice President Spiro Agnew, a California resident, recently filed for a state tax refund. He says the bribes he took while governor of Maryland in the sixties (which he had to pay back to the state) weren't really his money to begin with so he shouldn't have to pay tax on them. %% Friends were surprised, indeed, when Frank and Jennifer broke their engagement, but Frank had a ready explanation: "Would you marry someone who was habitually unfaithful, who lied at every turn, who was selfish and lazy and sarcastic?" "Of course not," said a sympathetic friend. "Well," retorted Frank, "neither would Jennifer." %% Fumbling The Future How Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer -- by Smith and Alexander William Morrow and Co. Starring Bob Taylor, Butler Lampson, Dave Liddle, Gary Starkweather, Jack Goldman, Peter McColough, John Ellenby, Jerry Elkind, Shelby Carter, ... Stacey's Bookstore in Palo Alto sold out their first shipment in two days. (Palo Alto Research Center, Parc, is where Xerox did the research.) %% GEMINI (May 21 - June 20) You are a quick and intelligent thinker. People like you because you are bisexual. However, you are inclined to expect too much for too little. This means you are cheap. Geminis are known for committing incest. %% GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY #21 -- July 30, 1917 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. %% Gary Hart and his wife Lee have decided to repeat their marriage vows. Mrs. Hart said that the wedding will be exactly the same as their first, except they've decided to skip the rice thing. %% Grace Aluminum gulls Down the airport approach Over the last freeway and gliding Until it's over. Then the concrete, the tons of motion, And the tires Chirping a complaint That smells burnt a mile away. Like the retired dancers' Bad leg, It's all paid for. Solely the personal opinions of Richard Gisselquist. Lift- so slowly, An arm to pull away Slow motion snicks Into a sudden steel breeze. Badly contorted Face in to the sun, Flesh Slowly pulling from the bone- This world is killing us. It is time to go- It was time long ago Laughter has gone ahead. And when I am done The wind shall have me for its own And leave my fetters hanging On a chilly Knife-edged breeze. %% Grover Cleveland, though constantly at loggerheads with the Senate, got on better with the House of Representatives. A popular story circulating during his presidency concerned the night he was roused by his wife crying, "Wake up! I think there are burglars in the house." "No, no, my dear," said the president sleepily, "in the Senate maybe, but not in the House." %% Harry constantly irritated his friends with his eternal optimism. No matter how bad the situation, he would always say, "Well, it could have been worse." To cure him of his annoying habit, his friends decided to invent a situation so completely black, so dreadful, that even Harry could find no hope in it. Approaching him at the club bar one day, one of them said, "Harry! Did you hear what happened to George? He came home last night, found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, and then turned the gun on himself!" "Terrible," said Harry. "But it could have been worse." "How in hell," demanded his dumfounded friend, "could it possibly have been worse?" "Well," said Harry, "if it had happened the night before, I'd be dead now." %% Harry was delighted when he found a young woman who accepted his proposal of marriage as he was sensitive about his wooden leg and a bit afraid no one would have him. In fact, he couldn't bring himself to tell his fiancee' about his leg when he slipped the ring on her finger, nor when she bought the dress, nor when they picked the time and place. All he kept saying was, "Darling, I've got a big surprise for you," at which she blushed and smiled bewitchingly. The wedding night came and went, and the young couple were at last alone in their hotel room. "Now don't forget, Harry, you promised me a big surprise," said the bride. Unable to say a word, Harry turned out the lights, unstrapped his wooden leg, slipped into bed, and placed his wife's hand on the stump. "Hmmmmm," she said softly, "that IS a surprise. But pass me the Vaseline and I'll see what I can do!" %% Harry, a golfing enthusiast if there ever was one, arrived home from the club to an irate, ranting wife. "I'm leaving you, Harry," his wife announced bitterly. "You promised me faithfully that you'd be back before six and here it is almost nine. It just can't take that long to play 18 holes of golf." "Now, wait," said Harry. "Let me explain. I know what I promised you, but I have a very good reason for being late. Fred and I tee'd off right on time and everything was find for the first three holes. Then, on the fourth tee Fred had a stroke. I ran back to the clubhouse but couldn't find a doctor. And, by the time I got back to Fred, he was dead. So, for the next 15 holes, it was hit the ball, drag Fred, hit the ball, drag Fred... %% He had been bitten by a dog, but didn't give it much thought until he noticed that the wound was taking a remarkably long time to heal. Finally, he consulted a doctor who took one look at it and ordered the dog brought in. Just as he had suspected, the dog had rabies. Since it was too late to give the patient serum, the doctor felt he had to prepare him for the worst. The poor man sat down at the doctor's desk and began to write. His physician tried to comfort him. "Perhaps it won't be so bad," he said. "You needn't make out your will right now." "I'm not making out any will," relied the man. "I'm just writing out a list of people I'm going to bite!" %% Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the month. According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China. The words "Coca-Cola" translate into Chinese as either (depending on the inflection) "wax-fattened mare" or "bite the wax tadpole". Bite the wax tadpole. There is a sort of rough justice, is there not? The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to bite a wax tadpole. Coke -- it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad, but broad satiric vistas do not open up. -- John Carrol, San Francisco Chronicle %% Here's another car ad we'll never see: For the fourth year in a row (1987-90) the Camaro is the most stolen car in the USA. Fourteen of the 20 most stolen cars in the USA in 1990 were GM products. %% Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who's willing to pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop for lumber, hardware, and toasters all in one location. Notice I say "shop for", as opposed to "obtain". This is the major drawback of home centers: they are always out of everything except artificial Christmas trees. The home center employees have no time to reorder merchandise because they are too busy applying little price stickers to every object--every board, washer, nail and screw--in the entire store ... Let's say a piece in your toilet tank breaks, so you remove the broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if he has a replacement. The employee, who has never is his life even seen the inside of a toilet tank, will peer at the broken part in very much the same way that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at an electronic calculator, and then say, "We're expecting a shipment of these sometime around the middle of next week". -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff, Bell Labs %% Hug O' War I will not play at tug o' war. I'd rather play at hug o' war, Where everyone hugs Instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles And rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, And everyone grins, And everyone cuddles, And everyone wins. -- Shel Silverstein %% I disapprove of the F-word, not because it's dirty, but because we use it as a substitute for thoughtful insults, and it frequently leads to violence. What we ought to do, when we anger each other, say, in traffic, is exchange phone numbers, so that later on, when we've had time to think of witty and learned insults or look them up in the library, we could call each other up: You: Hello? Bob? Bob: Yes? You: This is Ed. Remember? The person whose parking space you took last Thursday? Outside of Sears? Bob: Oh yes! Sure! How are you, Ed? You: Fine, thanks. Listen, Bob, the reason I'm calling is: "Madam, you may be drunk, but I am ugly, and ..." No, wait. I mean: "you may be ugly, but I am Winston Churchill and ..." No, wait. (Sound of reference book thudding onto the floor.) S-word. Excuse me. Look, Bob, I'm going to have to get back to you. Bob: Fine. -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!" %% I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), "A Modest Proposal" %% I read about a professor who once wrote (sorry, I don't have my source handy) on a student's paper: "Ten more lines of randomly selected BS and I would have failed you and anyone who looked like you." %% I said I'm two and a half billion years old because when I was young the earth was two billion years old and now it is four and a half billion years old so I must be two and a half billion years old. -- Paul Erdos %% I think for the most part that the readership here uses the c-word in a similar fashion. I don't think anybody really believes in a new, revolution- ary literature --- I think they use `cyberpunk' as a term of convenience to discuss the common stylistic elements in a small subset of recent sf books. -- Jeff G. Bone %% I wanted to give you something special for your birthday, so I baked you the biggest and fanciest birthday cake I could. Unfortunately, it was so big and heavy that I couldn't lift it onto the cart to deliver it. I tried to construct a lever to lift it onto the cart, but it didn't work. So I made a bigger lever and tried to lift it onto the cart, but it didn't work. So, I made an even bigger lever, but try as I could I couldn't lift the cake. Fortunately, as I was doing this, my friend Nate, the biggest and strongest person I know walked by, and without any trouble at all, lifted the cake onto the cart without any help at all. Which only goes to show, "Better Nate than lever." %% I went into a bar feeling a little depressed, the bartender said, "What'll you have, bud"? I said," I don't know, surprise me". So he showed me a nude picture of my wife. -- Rodney Dangerfield %% INVENTORY Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% If a schlemazl sold umbrellas, it would stop raining; if he sold candles, the sun would never set; and if he made coffins, people would stop dying. %% If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled- up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and repeat the sequence. You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around your own apartment? -- William S. Burroughs %% If you're like most homeowners, you're afraid that many repairs around your home are too difficult to tackle. So, when your furnace explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it. The "professional" arrives in a truck with lettering on the sides and deposits a large quantity of tools and two assistants who spend the better part of the week in your basement whacking objects at random with heavy wrenches, after which the "professional" returns and gives you a bill for slightly more money than it would cost you to run a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. And that's why you've decided to start doing things yourself. You figure, "If those guys can fix my furnace, then so can I. How difficult can it be?" Very difficult. In fact, most home projects are impossible, which is why you should do them yourself. There is no point in paying other people to screw things up when you can easily screw them up yourself for far less money. This article can help you. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% Ignis Fatuus I am illusion Creation of your desires Your dreams and ambitions Shape-shifting chimera I reflect your soul I am myriad loves I play for you I pray for you My strength is only yours Without you Will I not be? Will I disappear? Let the illusion die Before it kills us Let me be weak Let me sleep And dream of her -- Cynthia Schaefer (The Ice Princess) %% Impressions What impressions hide behind the eye-liner Are they as shallow as she looks or something finer Than the superficial mask reveals Who is the black/white sheepdog girl She is her own heroine in a whirl Of anger that never heals She refuses their love so is accused of lust All that remains is to put her trust In the orgasmic way the music feels %% In "Pissing in the Snow: Ozark Mountain Folktales", Vance Randolph tells of a wizened old country doctor who could treat anything. Well it seems one time, one of the mountain folk came into his office with three complaints. "Doc," he said, "I can't taste nothin', I can't tell the truth, and I can't remember nothin' besides." Well the old Doc thought about this for a minute and went back into the apothecary, and made of two capsules full with cow hooey, and gave them both to the man, and telling him to take one immediately, chewing well. Well, the man did as he was told, bit down and started chawing, then yelled out, "Yeachhhhh... this stuff tastes like shee-it." "Uh huh," the doctor said, "Well I see that you can taste, and you're certainly telling the truth now. And the next time that you're memory is acting up, just take the other pill." And the old Doc charged the man fifteen bucks and sent him on his way, and never did hear no trouble from him much after that. %% In St. Louis there is an oriental rug store that advertizes "semi-antique" rugs. %% In a forest a fox bumps into a little rabbit, and says, "Hi, junior, what are you up to?" "I'm writing a dissertation on how rabbits eat foxes," said the rabbit. "Come now, friend rabbit, you know that's impossible!" "Well, follow me and I'll show you." They both go into the rabbit's dwelling and after a while the rabbit emerges with a satisfied expression on his face. Comes along a wolf. "Hello, what are we doing these days?" "I'm writing the second chapter of my thesis, on how rabbits devour wolves." "Are you crazy? Where is your academic honesty?" "Come with me and I'll show you." As before, the rabbit comes out with a satisfied look on his face and a diploma in his paw. Finally, the camera pans into the rabbit's cave and, as everybody should have guessed by now, we see a mean-looking, huge lion sitting next to some bloody and furry remnants of the wolf and the fox. The moral: It's not the contents of your thesis that are important -- it's your PhD advisor that really counts. %% In recent discussions on today's serious diseases, one of the most serious has been neglected:anneurisms. Although it is more properly categorized as an event (like a heart attack) than a disease, there are many variations which many people not be aware of: * People at sporting events frequently suffer from Fanneurisms. * Baseball fans in particular have Stan-the-manneurisms. * People from Southern California have Tanneurisms while * people from New Jersey have Rosanne-rosannadanneurisms. * Buddhist monks often have Yin-Yanneurisms and * overweight people suffer from Fat-in-the-canneurisms. * On the highway, people get Vanneurisms but * truckers uniquely suffer from Carrivanneurisms. * Japanese movie fans have Rodanneurisms. * Much of the middle class suffer from Suburbanneurisms. * Woman most often have Manneurisms while * men usually have Womanneurisms. %% In the beginning was the DEMO Project. And the Project was without form. And darkness was upon the staff members thereof. So they spake unto their Division Head, saying, "It is a crock of shit, and it stinks." 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 assistant Technical Director spake thus unto the Technical Director, saying, "It containeth that which aids growth and it is very strong." And, Lo, the Technical Director spake then unto the Captain, saying, "The powerful new Project will help promote the growth of the Laboratories." And the Captain looked down upon the Project, and He saw that it was Good! %% In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", inquired Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play". At this Minsky shut his eyes, and Sussman asked his teacher "Why do you close your eyes?" "So that the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. %% In the morning, laughing, happy fish heads In the evening, floating in the soup. (chorus): Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads; Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up. Yum! You can ask them anything you want to. They won't answer; they can't talk. (chorus): I took a fish head out to see a movie, Didn't have to pay to get it in. (chorus): They can't play baseball; they don't wear sweaters; They aren't good dancers; they can't play drums. (chorus): Roly-poly fish heads are NEVER seen drinking cappucino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women. (chorus): Fishy! (chorus): -- Fish Heads %% It is always preferable to visit home with a friend. Your parents will not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all to themselves and because in the presence of your friend, they will have to act like mature human beings. The worst kind of friend to take home is a girl, because in that case, there is the potential that your parents will lose you not just for the duration of the visit but forever. The worst kind of girl to take home is one of a different religion: Not only will you be lost to your parents forever but you will be lost to a woman who is immune to their religious/moral arguments and whose example will irretrievably corrupt you. Let's say you've fallen in love with just such a girl and would like to take her home for the holidays. You are aware of your parents' xenophobic response to anyone of a different religion. How to prepare them for the shock? Simple. Call them up shortly before your visit and tell them that you have gotten quite serious about somebody who is of a different religion, a different race and the same sex. Tell them you have already invited this person to meet them. Give the information a moment to sink in and then remark that you were only kidding, that your lover is merely of a different religion. They will be so relieved they will welcome her with open arms. -- Playboy (January 1983) %% It is said that the Limbic system of the brain controls the four Fs: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction. %% It seems there were these three strings (yes, I said strings) who were thirsty on hot afternoon, so they stopped into a bar to have some beer. They took a table in a nice cool corner and called a waiter over. "We'd like a pitcher of beer, please," said one. The waiter squinted his eyes a little and said in a mean voice, "Sorry, we don't serve strings here," and walked away. Well, the strings were a little taken aback, but one got a little plucky, went up to the bar and said, "Either serve me a beer now or throw me out!" He hit the sidewalk a few seconds later. The second string was outraged, ran up to the bar, and hit the sidewalk just as fast. Now the third string was also outraged, but he was also quite thirsty, so he snuck into the bathroom for a quick disguise. First he tied himself in a knot, frizzed both of his ends, and headed back to the bar. The waiter and the bartender both looked at him suspiciously and said, "Ain't you one of them strings?" And the string replied, "Nope. I'm afraid not." %% It seems there were two frogs sitting on a lilly pad, when all of a sudden, a fly came along. One frog put out his tongue, ate the fly, and started laughing hysterically. Soon the other frog joined in the laughter. Later in the day, the other frog ate a fly and the two frogs burst out in laughter. As time went on, the frogs enjoyed the flies so much that the sight of a fly would cause them to double up with pleasure (if it's possible for frogs to double up!). But of course, the most pleasure came when the fly was actually eaten. A third frog hopped up to the first two and asked what was so funny. The first frog answered "Time." "Huh?" asked the third frog. The second frog explained: "Time's fun when your having flies" %% It was a dark and stormy night. I had just come from a rare meeting with my boss, and he had just given me a grilling. As I endured his roast, I kept wondering what was at stake here. I was bone tired from my dog-day afternoon. It was raining cats and dogs outside, while hailing taxicabs. I caught a greyhound to The Lion's Den for a rip-roaring time. After monkeying with the gals and horsing with the guys, I hoofed my way home. As I walked through my door, I noticed this good-looking doll had followed me home. It seems that there were some strings attached to my monkey business. She started buttering me up and said that she wanted some bread. It seems my loafing around was going to cost me some dough. I shelled out the cash so she'd clam up. Before she left, I asked her what her name was. She said, "Pearl." Then she left, so I turned on the radio to this really tubular station, sat back, listened to the music, and shortly thereafter, found myself on the open road to sleep. %% It was a month after Trotsky had left Russia in disgust with the revolution. Lenin was absolutely heartbroken. He agonized over Trotsky's departure, and sorely missed his companionship. Then late one day, he received a telegram from Trotsky in Western Europe: YOU WERE RIGHT I WAS WRONG THIS IS A REVOLUTION. (to be recited: "YOU were right! *I* was wrong! THIS--is a revolution!) Lenin was ecstatic--Trotsky was validating everything they had fought for. He wanted to share his euphoria with someone, but no one was around. He spied an old woman sweeping the street, and rushed out to greet her. "Good news! Good news!" he shouted gleefully, "Look at this telegram from Trotsky! He forgives me!" The old woman eyed the message suspiciously, and asked, "You call this good news?" Puzzled, Lenin said, "What do you mean?" The old woman said, "Here, read it--(with the inflection of an old Jewish woman)--You were RIGHT? I was WRONG? THIS is a REVOLUTION??" %% It was in a bar in midtown Manhattan and the Frenchman and the American were talking about love over some dry Martinis. "Deed you know, sir," the Frenchman said, "that een my country thair are 79 different ways how to make the REAL, passionate luff?" "Do tell?" said the American. "Well, that's amazing. In this country there's only one." "Just one?" the Frenchman said, condescendingly. "And what eez that?" "Well, there's a man and a woman, and --" "Sacre bleu!!" exclaimed the Frenchman. "Numbair 80!" %% It was the next morning that the armies of Twodor marched east laden with long lances, sharp swords, and death-dealing hangovers. The thousands were led by Arrowroot, who sat limply in his sidesaddle, nursing a whopper. Goodgulf, Gimlet, and the rest rode by him, praying for their fate to be quick, painless, and if possible, someone else's. Many an hour the armies forged ahead, the war-merinos bleating under their heavy burdens and the soldiers bleating under their melting icepacks. -- The Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% It's not "elderly" or "senior citizens" anymore. Now it's "chronologically experienced citizens." %% James McNeill Whistler's (painter of "Whistler's Mother") failure in his West Point chemistry examination once provoked him to remark in later life, "If silicon had been a gas, I should have been a major general." %% Jesus took his disciples up the mountain, and gathering them around him, he taught them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are they that mourn. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are they who thirst justice. Blessed are you when persecuted. Blessed are you when you suffer. Be glad and rejoice for your reward is great in heaven... And Simon Peter asked, "Do we have to write this down?" And Andrew asked, "Are we supposed to know this?" And James asked, "Will we have a test on it?" And Phillip asked, "What if we don't know it?" And Bartholomew asked, "Do we have to turn this in?" And John asked, "The other disciples didn't have to learn this." And Matthew asked, "When do we get out of here?" And Judas asked, "What does this have to do with the real life?" And one of the Pharisees present asked to see Jesus' lesson plans and inquired of Jesus his terminal objectives in the cognitive domain... %% Joan, the rather well-proportioned secretary, spent almost all of her vacation sunbathing on the roof of her hotel. She wore a bathing suit the first day, but on the second, she decided that no one could see her way up there, and she slipped out of it for an overall tan. She'd hardly begun when she heard someone running up the stairs; she was lying on her stomach, so she just pulled a towel over her rear. "Excuse me, miss," said the flustered little assistant manager of the hotel, out of breath from running up the stairs. "The Hilton doesn't mind your sunbathing on the roof, but we would very much appreciate your wearing a bathing suit as you did yesterday." "What difference does it make," Joan asked rather calmly. "No one can see me up here, and besides, I'm covered with a towel." "Not exactly," said the embarrassed little man. "You're lying on the dining room skylight." %% John and Joan Cowpoke were riding west in their covered wagon .. Being as they were from the east (obviously) they were fascinated with the Indians and the west in general... They stopped in front of the Indian and listened to what he was muttering... Injun: Two horses, one brown, one black...Three riders, man smoke pipe, wear hat,,woman wear bonnet,, child,5... three cattle,milkers... The easterners were astonished by this... Cowpoke: You can tell all that from listening to the ground? Injun: No, run over me, half hour ago... %% Just because they found Martin Bormann's skull doesn't mean he's dead, my best beloved; for everyone knows that competent observers from every neutral country have reported sighting an old man in Argentina whose head is wrapped in bandages, and only the hunted eyes show, winking and blinking beneath the thousands of cranial splints... -- William T. Vollman, "You Bright and Risen Angels" %% Just yesterday, a college student came up to me and asked me a serious question: "Reverend Chuck," he asked, "what are the most important things in life?" He honestly expected a complex answer, all full of philosophy and other types of thinking, but instead I gave her the straight-forward, no bull answer: "Money and Jesus," I said. %% Kennedy Tower, Delta 418, with you marker inbound. Delta 418, Kennedy, roger, we'll send the equipment. (for the non-pilots in the audience, Delta flight 418 called the Kennedy control tower saying that it had just joined the frequency and was passing the outer marker, inbound to the airport. An outer marker is a radio navigation facility typically about 5 miles from the field. Thus Delta 418 is about to land. The control tower responded by saying they would get the "equipment" ready -- this is a euphemism for fire trucks and ambulances.) %% LEO (July 23 - Aug 22) You consider yourself a born leader. Others think you are pushy. Most Leo people are bullies. You are vain and dislike honest criticism. Your arrogance is disgusting. Leo people are thieves. %% LIBRA (Sept 23 - Oct 22) You are the artistic type and have a difficult time with reality. If you are a man, you are more than likely gay. Chances for employment and monetary gains are excellent. Most Libra women are prostitutes. All Libra people die of Venereal disease. %% La fille qui n'a point d'amy La fille qui n'a point d'amy comment vitelle? Elle ne dort ne nuict ne jours, nois toujoures veille. Ce sont emours qui la reneille et qui la garde de dormir A qui dira elle sa pensee la fille qui a n'a point d'ammy? (The girl with no lover, how does she live? She sleeps not night or day but is ever wakeful. It is desire which wakens her, and which holds her from sleep. To whom will she tell her thoughts the girl with no lover.) -- Francesko Layolle (ca. 1475-ca. 1550) %% Lady Astor was giving a costume ball and Winston Churchill asked her what disguise she would recommend for him. She said, "Why don't you come sober, Mr. Prime Minister?" %% Leslie West heads for the sticks, to Providence, Rhode Island and tries to hide behind a beard. No good. There are still too many people and too many stares, always taunting, always smirking. He moves to the outskirts of town. He finds a place to live--huge mansion, dirt cheap, caretaker included. He plugs in his guitar and plays as loud as he wants, day and night, and there's no one to laugh or boo or even look bored. Nobody's cut the grass in months. What's happened to that caretaker? What neighborhood people there are start to talk, and what kids there are start to get curious. A 13 year-old blond with an angelic face misses supper. Before the summer's end, four more teenagers have disappeared. The senior class president, Barnard-bound come autumn, tells Mom she's going out to a movie one night and stays out. The town's up in arms, but just before the police take action, the kids turn up. They've found a purpose. They go home for their stuff and tell the folks not to worry but they'll be going now. They're in a band. -- Ira Kaplan %% Liberty Hulse of Middle Island was steadying an unidentified blonde woman who was crying and appeared near a state of collapse. ``You have to eat,'' Hulse said to the woman. ``You have a beautiful family, and you have to take care of them too.'' Hulse explained to reporters that the woman ``hasn't eaten for weeks'' because of anxiety over the fate of two dogs who were ostensibly buried in the cemetery in Middle Island about 60 miles east of New York City. Hulse said she also paid to have her dog buried there, and she expressed concern that the cemetery might be bulldozed as a health hazard because of an estimated quarter of a million animals buried there. ``Are they going to bulldoze it?'' she asked. ``Over my dead body, because they will have to kill me first.'' -- (UPI) Enraged pet owners curse cemetery owners, 7/9/91 %% Long Island Iced Tea 1/2 oz. gin 1/2 oz. vodka 1/2 oz. rum (didn't say light or dark or flavored) 3/4 oz. tequila 1/2 oz. triple sec 1/2 oz. orange juice 3/4 oz. sour mix (for whiskey sours) 1/2 oz. cola Shake with ice cubes and then strain into frosted glass. %% Love's Drug My love is like an iron wand That conks me on the head, My love is like the valium That I take before my bed, My love is like the pint of scotch That I drink when I be dry; And I shall love thee still, my dear, Until my wife is wise. %% Maggie and Tom are a couple with a passion for ice cream. They stopped at the local ice creamery, then returned to their car with double scoops of chocolate almond fudge. No sooner had they settled back to enjoy their cones than two birds landed on the car hood and began to chirp and flutter and peck at the windshield. Finally Maggie rolled down her window and placed the rest of her cone on the hood. The birds quieted down and began to eat the cone. "Maggie, you're wonderful," said Tom. "How did you think of doing that?" "Oh, it wasn't hard to figure out," said Maggie. "It's just another example of stilling two birds with one's cone." %% Man Man is something that should be overcome. Thus live your life of obedience and war! What good is long life? What warrior wants to be spared? I do not spare you, I love you from the heart, my brothers in war! %% Miller. A lot of people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this like... lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. I'll give you an example. Show you what I mean. Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of shrimp" -- out of the blue. No explanation. No point in looking for one either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness. Otto You eat a lot of acid, Miller? Back in Hippie days? %% Miller Flying saucers, which are really... yeah, you got it... time machines. I think a lot about this kind of stuff. I do my best thinkin' on the bus. That's how come I don't drive, see. Otto You don't even know how to drive. Miller I don't want to know how. I don't want to learn. See, the more you drive, the less intelligent you are. %% Miller I'll give you another instance. You know the way everybody's into weirdness right now? Books in all the supermarkets about Bermuda Triangles? UFOs? How the Mayans invented television? That kind of thing. Otto I don't read them books. %% Miller Well, the way I see it, it's exactly the same. There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine. People get so hung up on specifics, they miss out on seein' the whole thing. Take South America for example. In South America, thousands of people go missing every year. Nobody knows where they go. They just like disappear. But if you think about it for a minute, you realize something. There had to be a time where there was no people, right? Otto Yeah, I guess. Miller Well where did all these people come from? Hmmm? I'll tell you where. The Future. Where did all these people disappear to? Hm? Otto The past. %% Moving along a dimly light street, a man I know was suddenly approached by a stranger who had slipped from the shadows nearby. "Please, sir," pleaded the stranger, "would you be so kind as to help a poor unfortunate fellow who is hungry and can't find work? All I have in the world is this gun." %% Murray and Esther, a middle-aged Jewish couple, are touring Chile. Murray just got a new camera and is constantly snapping pictures. One day, without knowing it, he photographs a top-secret military installation. In an instant, armed troops surround Murray and Esther and hustle them off to prison. They can't prove who they are because they've left their passports in their hotel room. For three weeks they're tortured day and night to get them to name their contacts in the liberation movement.. Finally they're hauled in front of a military court, charged with espionage, and sentenced to death. The next morning they're lined up in front of the wall where they'll be shot. The sergeant in charge of the firing squad asks them if they have any lasts requests. Esther wants to know if she can call her daughter in Chicago. The sergeant says he's sorry, that's not possible, and turns to Murray. "This is crazy!" Murray shouts. "We're not spies!" And he spits in the sergeants face. "Murray!" Esther cries. "Please! Don't make trouble." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% My friends, I am here to tell you of the wondrous continent known as Africa. Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31. We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in Africa. Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule: Up at 6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00. Pretty soon we were back in bed by 6:30. Now Africa is full of big game. The first day I shot two bucks. That was the biggest game we had. Africa is primarily inhabited by Elks, Moose and Knights of Pithiests. The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their annual conventions. And you should see them gathered around the water hole, which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water. They weren't looking for a water hole. They were looking for an alck hole. One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my pajamas, I don't know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. That's a tough word to say, tusks. As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out. But in Alabama the Tusks are looser, but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying. We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed. So we're going back in a few years... -- Julius H. Marx, "Groucho" %% NOTICE Office of Civilian Defense Ottawa Instruction to patrons on premises in case of Nuclear bomb attack. 1. Stay clear of all windows. 2. Keeps hands free of glass, bottles, cigarettes, etc. 3. Stand away from bar, tables, orchestra, equipment and furniture. 4. Loosen necktie, unbutton coat and any other restrictive clothing. 5. Remove glasses, empty pockets of all sharp objects such as pens, pencils, etc. 6. Immediately upon seeing the brilliant flash of Nuclear explosion, bend over and place your head firmly between your legs. 7. Then kiss your ass goodbye. %% Never take a resume seriously. Resumes only make money for the people who write the resumes. No resume ever tells an employer how many times a job applicant has had the clap. Why, indeed, would anyone hire a person based on a resume written by a professional liar? If the applicant is a man, the employer must ask only one question: did the applicant go to TCU? If the applicant is a woman, the employer may simply ask: does she have a tongue that can lick the paint off a dormitory wall? -- Dan Jenkins, "Baja Oklahoma" %% Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo pilosophorum. (Nothing so absurd can be said, that some philosopher has not said it.) -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% No violence, gentlemen -- no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture! -- Sherlock Holmes %% No, son, you lose. 'Cause this is a Smith & Wesson I'm holdin' here, an' a Smith & Wesson beats four aces. -- Canada Bill Jones %% Not long ago, a teaching hospital installed a computer to interview patients visiting its Gynecology department. Apparently several of the programmers were not familiar with Medicine. One of the questions it asked was, "Are you having your monthly period now?" If the answer was 'yes', the computer would sent the woman away and make a new appointment -- in four weeks time. Think about that one for a minute. %% Now she speaks rapidly. "Do you know *why* you want to program?" He shakes his head. He hasn't the faintest idea. "For the sheer *joy* of programming!" she cries triumphantly. "The joy of the parent, the artist, the craftsman. "You take a program, born weak and impotent as a dimly-realized solution. You nurture the program and guide it down the right path, building, watching it grow ever stronger. Sometimes you paint with tiny strokes, a keystroke added here, a keystroke changed there." She sweeps her arm in a wide arc. "And other times you savage whole *blocks* of code, ripping out the program's very *essence*, then beginning anew. But always building, creating, filling the program with your own personal stamp, your own quirks and nuances. Watching the program grow stronger, patching it when it crashes, until finally it can stand alone--proud, powerful, and perfect. This is the programmer's finest hour!" Softly at first, then louder, he hears the strains of a Sousa march. "This ... this is your canvas! your clay! Go forth and create a masterwork!" %% Now, you might ask, "How do I get one of those complete home tool sets for under $4?" An excellent question. Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and where they have a food section specializing in cardboard cartons full of Raisinets and malted milk balls manufactured during the Nixon administration. In either the hardware or housewares department, you'll find an item imported from an obscure Oriental country and described as "Nine Tools in One", consisting of a little handle with interchangeable ends representing inscrutable Oriental notions of tools that Americans might use around the home. Buy it. This is the kind of tool set professionals use. Not only is it inexpensive, but it also has a great safety feature not found in the so-called quality tools sets: The handle will actually break right off if you accidentally hit yourself or anything else, or expose it to direct sunlight. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% 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!" %% On his was back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed. -- William Gibson, "Neuromancer" %% On the occasion of Nero's 25th birthday, he arrived at the Colosseum to find that the Praetorian Guard had prepared a treat for him in the arena. There stood 25 naked virgins, like candles on a cake, tied to poles, burning alive. "Wonderful!" exclaimed the deranged emperor, "but one of them isn't dead yet. I can see her lips moving. Go quickly and find out what she is saying." The centurion saluted, and hurried out to the virgin, getting as near the flames as he dared, and listened intently. Then he turned and ran back to the imperial box. "She is not talking," he reported to Nero, "she is singing." "Singing?" said the astounded emperor. "Singing what?" "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you..." %% Once there lived a mother mouse with her two young children. They lived in a lonely area in the fields, and they had few neighbors. The nearest general store was all the way across the cornfields, but one day the mother needed to get some groceries. Her children feared for her safety, and pleaded that she not go, but she reassured them and went on her way. Suddenly, she felt herself being sucked up by a huge force. She was pulled into the huge piece of machinery,tossed around brutally, and finally was spit back out on to the field. Clothes ripped, hair mussed, she decided to just head home. Her children saw her state and were quite upset. "Mommy, mommy!", they cried. "What happened?" "It was horrible!" responded the mother mouse."I've been reaped !" %% 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. %% Once there was a marine biologist who loved dolphins. He spent his time trying to feed and protect his beloved creatures of the sea. One day, in a fit of inventive genius, he came up with a serum that would make dolphins live forever! Of course he was ecstatic. But he soon realized that in order to mass produce this serum he would need large amounts of a certain compound that was only found in nature in the metabolism of a rare South American bird. Carried away by his love for dolphins, he resolved that he would go to the zoo and steal one of these birds. Unbeknownst to him, as he was arriving at the zoo an elderly lion was escaping from its cage. The zookeepers were alarmed and immediately began combing the zoo for the escaped animal, unaware that it had simply lain down on the sidewalk and had gone to sleep. Meanwhile, the marine biologist arrived at the zoo and procured his bird. He was so excited by the prospect of helping his dolphins that he stepped absentmindedly stepped over the sleeping lion on his way back to his car. Immediately, 1500 policemen converged on him and arrested him for transporting a myna across a staid lion for immortal porpoises. %% Once upon a time there was a beautiful young girl taking a stroll through the woods. All at once she saw an extremely ugly bull frog seated on a log and to her amazement the frog spoke to her. "Maiden," croaked the frog, "would you do me a favor? This will be hard for you to believe, but I was once a handsome, charming prince and then a mean, ugly old witch cast a spell over me and turned me into a frog." "Oh, what a pity!", exclaimed the girl. "I'll do anything I can to help you break such a spell." "Well," replied the frog, "the only way that this spell can be taken away is for some lovely young woman to take me home and let me spend the night under her pillow." The young girl took the ugly frog home and placed him beneath her pillow that night when she retired. When she awoke the next morning, sure enough, there beside her in bed was a very young, handsome man, clearly of royal blood. And so they lived happily ever after, except that to this day her father and mother still don't believe her story. %% Once upon a time there were three brothers who were knights in a certain kingdom. And, there was a Princess in a neighboring kingdom who was of marriageable age. Well, one day, in full armour, their horses, and their page, the three brothers set off to see if one of them could win her hand. The road was long and there were many obstacles along the way, robbers to be overcome, hard terrain to cross. As they coped with each obstacle they became more and more disgusted with their page. He was not only inept, he was a coward, he could not handle the horses, he was, in short, a complete flop. When they arrived at the court of the kingdom, they found that they were expected to present the Princess with some treasure. The two older brothers were discouraged, since they had not thought of this and were unprepared. The youngest, however, had the answer: Promise her anything, but give her our page. %% One evening he spoke. Sitting at her feet, his face raised to her, he allowed his soul to be heard. "My darling, anything you wish, anything I am, anything I can ever be... That's what I want to offer you -- not the things I'll get for you, but the thing in me that will make me able to get them. That thing -- a man can't renounce it -- but I want to renounce it -- so that it will be yours -- so that it will be in your service -- only for you." The girl smiled and asked: "Do you think I'm prettier than Maggie Kelly?" He got up. He said nothing and walked out of the house. He never saw that girl again. Gail Wynand, who prided himself on never needing a lesson twice, did not fall in love again in the years that followed. -- Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead" %% One evening, a priest was walking down a street in the seamy section of downtown. A prostitute approached him with the following words: "Hey father, how about a blow-job for ten dollars?". While not being familiar with much crude sexual vernacular, he knew what the woman was and that she was making some sort of a sexual gesture. Of course, he refused and continued down the street. For the rest of the walk back to the rectory he kept rolling the word "blowjob" around in his head trying to figure out what it meant. He finally makes it back to the rectory still puzzled as to what, specifically, is a blowjob. Upon entering the rectory he happens upon one of the nuns who worked in his parish. Concerned that he may have to deal with this term later on, (we all know what wonderful sexual counselors priests are) he decides to risk embarrassing the nun to see if she knows what a blowjob is. "Hey, sister," he reluctantly asks, "what's a blowjob?" To which the nun replies, "Ten dollars, same as downtown." %% One hysterical woman screamed: ``They killed my babies! They killed my babies!'' -- (UPI) Enraged pet owners curse cemetery owners, 7/9/91 %% One night when his charge was pretty high, Micro-Farad decided to seek out a cute little coil to let him discharge. He picked up Milli-Amp and took her for a ride on his Megacycle. They rode across the Wheatstone bridge, around the sine waves, and stopped in the magnetic field by the flowing current. Micro-Farad, attracted by Milli-Amp's characteristic curves, soon had her fully charged and excited, her resistance to a minimum. He laid her on the ground potential, raised her frequency, and lowered her reluctance. He pulled out his high voltage probe and inserted it into her socket, connecting them in parallel and began short circuiting her resistance shunt. Fully excited, Milli-Amp mumbled: "OHM-OHM-OHM." With his tube operating at a maximum and her field vibrating with his current flow, it caused her shunt to overheat, and Micro-Farad was rapidly discharged and drained of every electron. They Fluxed all night trying various connections and sockets until his magnet had a soft core and lost all of its field strength. Afterwards, Milli-Amp tried self-induction and damaged her solenoids. With his battery fully discharged, Micro-Farad was unable to excite his field, so they spent the night reversing polarity and blowing each others fuses. -- Eddie Currents, "The Sex Life of an Electron" %% One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. -- Ken Olsen [president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984] %% One spring evening, after a hard rain, grandpa and grandson were sitting out on the porch, talking. Grandpa spied a worm crawling up out of its hole and said to his grandson, "Sonny, if you can get that there worm back down its hole, I'll give you five dollars." "Sure!", says sonny, and runs in the house. Out he runs an instant later with a can of hairspray, grabs the worm, and sprays it with the hairspray as it dangles earthward. He then slips the stiff worm back into its hole and turns to his grandpa with a huge smile on his face. "Well, I'll be. That was pretty smart there, boy.", he says. "Here's your fiver.", he adds as he fishes out a bill. By then it's almost dark, and they say their goodnights and part. The next day sonny's playing out on the porch, and grandpa comes out of the house and gives him a five. "But you gave me my five yesterday, grandpa.", he remarks. "Yep, I know. This is from your grandma." %% Overheard in a bar: Man: "Hey, Baby, I'd sure like to get in your pants!" Woman: "No, thanks, I've already got one ass-hole in there now." %% PARK'S LAW OF TAXES AND INSURANCE: Whatever goes up, stays up. %% People of all sorts of genders are reporting great difficulty, these days, in selecting the proper words to refer to those of the female persuasion. "Lady," "woman," and "girl" are all perfectly good words, but misapplying them can earn one anything from the charge of vulgarity to a good swift smack. We are messing here with matters of deference, condescension, respect, bigotry, and two vague concepts, age and rank. It is troubling enough to get straight who is really what. Those who deliberately misuse the terms in a misbegotten attempt at flattery are asking for it. A woman is any grown-up female person. A girl is the un-grown-up version. If you call a wee thing with chubby cheeks and pink hair ribbons a "woman," you will probably not get into trouble, and if you do, you will be able to handle it because she will be under three feet tall. However, if you call a grown-up by a child's name for the sake of implying that she has a youthful body, you are also implying that she has a brain to match. %% People who write position papers often find themselves in an enviable position. They are hired to write papers for both sides of the position. A good position paper will have many words in it like "superincumbence," "egress," and "plurification." You will not often find the phrase "lightweight dropcase limp-wristed motherfucker" in a serious position paper. Charts and multiplication tables should always be included in position papers. They should look complicated enough to make Albert Einstein stagger across the room for a Tylenol. A good position paper will never underestimate the value of a semicolon. -- Dan Jenkins, "Baja Oklahoma" %% Plumbing is one of the easier of do-it-yourself activities, requiring only a few simple tools and a willingness to stick your arm into a clogged toilet. In fact, you can solve many home plumbing problems, such as annoying faucet drip, merely by turning up the radio. But before we get into specific techniques, let's look at how plumbing works. A plumbing system is very much like your electrical system, except that instead of electricity, it has water, and instead of wires, it has pipes, and instead of radios and waffle irons, it has faucets and toilets. So the truth is that your plumbing systems is nothing at all like your electrical system, which is good, because electricity can kill you. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% Pupils Struggle with Economics Questions Here are some answers to questions asked of seventh- and eighth-grade students by the Foundation for Teaching Economics: Q: Are you part of the economic system? A: I'm a deduction on my parents' taxes. Q: Why do people pay taxes? A: To help out the government -- so they government doesn't have to pay for everything. %% Risch's decision procedure for integration, not surprisingly, uses a recursion on the number and type of the extensions from the rational functions needed to represent the integrand. Although the algorithm follows and critically depends upon the appropriate structure of the input, as in the case of multivariate factorization, we cannot claim that the algorithm is a natural one. In fact, the creator of differential algebra, Ritt, committed suicide in the early 1950's, largely, it is claimed, because few paid attention to his work. Probably he would have received more attention had he obtained the algorithm as well. -- Joel Moses, "Algorithms and Complexity", ed. J. F. Traub %% Roy Rogers gets a new pair of boots, but a mountain lion eats the boots. To get even, Roy chases (insert colorful description as needed) and kills (after long fight - to be described in vivid detail) the lion, and returns carrying the lion back to camp. When he returns, Dale Evans exclaims, "Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that ate your new shoes." %% SAFETY I can live without Someone I love But not without Someone I need. %% SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22 - Dec 21) You are optimistic and enthusiastic. You have a reckless tendency to rely on luck since you lack talent. The majority of Sagittarians are drunks or dope fiends or both. People laugh at you a great deal. %% SCORPIO (Oct 23 - Nov 21) You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted. You will achieve the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics. Most Scorpio people are murdered. %% SPRING As I awoke this morning When all sweet things are born, A bird perched softly on my sill To signal coming morn. The bird was fragile, young, and gay, And sweetly did it sing, Hummed softly with a cheery song, So too my heart did sing. The sun gave to his feathers glow, And as he paused, a lull, I gently closed the window, And crushed his little skull. %% Sam went to his psychiatrist complaining of a hatred for elephants. "I can't stand elephants," he explained. "I lie awake nights despising them. The thought of an elephant fills me with loathing." "Sam," said the psychiatrist, "there's only one thing for you to do. Go to Africa, organize a safari, find an elephant in the jungle and shoot it. That way you'll get it out of your system." Sam immediately made arrangements for a safari hunt in Africa, inviting his best friend to join him. They arrived in Nairobi and lost no time getting out on the jungle trails. After they had been hunting for several days, Sam's best friend grabbed him by the arm one morning and yelled at him: "Sam, Sam, Sam! Over there behind that tree there's and elephant! Sam -- Get your gun -- no, no, not THAT gun -- the rifle with the longer barrel! Now aim it! QUICK! SAM! QUICK! No! Not that way -- this way! Be sure you don't jerk the trigger! Wait SAM! Don't let him see you! Aim at his head!" Sam whirled around, took aim, and killed his friend. He was put in prison and his psychiatrist flew to Africa to visit him. "I sent you over here to kill and elephant and instead you shoot your best friend," the psychiatrist said. "Why?" "Well," Sam replied, "there's only one thing in the world that I hate more than elephants and that is a loudmouth know-it-all!" %% School Daze It seems one day I had decided to cut class The better prepared with a forged hallway pass Really it seemed like the plan for a wonderful day But it just wasn't a game old teach' wanted to play Asleep in the lunchroom when she gave me a start It was time for class and she wanted me to take part Todays subject it seems was English Lit. A subject I cared for not even a bit "Sit down and write a sonnet", said she "Though heaven knows a poet you'll never be" She told me to compose just any old verse And quietly wondered who had raised this curse But when I returned to my blissful dream She lost all patience and started to scream "Now wake right up and finish your poem" I handed her this and headed for home %% Scott L. Pickard, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works, calls them "ground-mounted confirmatory route markers." You probably call them road signs, but then you don't work in a government agency. %% Scream In The Night I woke up last night, and I saw your face towering over me I lay there in horror, frozen in place hands groping horribly What will you do, how long will it last this time I wonder I feel your body, press against mine dragging me under I cry in horror, but no sound comes out as you force yourself on me Mother can't you hear me, as I scream and shout this terrible man all I see Suddenly I scream, aloud in the night kicking and tearing your hair And then I realize, through all of my fright you're no longer there I sit up in the bed, and I'm alone again, but I'm not really You're still not dead, I still feel the pain of what you did to me %% Seems George was playing his usual eighteen holes on Saturday afternoon. Teeing off from the 17th, he sliced into the rough over near the edge of the fairway. Just as he was about to chip out, he noticed a long funeral procession going past on a nearby street. Reverently, George removed his hat and stood at attention until the procession had passed. Then he continued his game, finishing with a birdie on the eighteenth. Later, at the clubhouse, a fellow golfer greet George. "Say, that was a nice gesture you made today, George. "What do you mean?" asked George. "Well, it was nice of you to take off your cap and stand respectfully when that funeral went by," the friend replied. "Oh, yes," said George. "Well, we were married 22 years, you know." %% Senator Orrin Hatch said that "capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life." %% Sentenced to two years hard labor (for Sodomy), Oscar Wilde stood handcuffed in driving rain waiting for transport to prison. "If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners," he remarked, "she doesn't deserve to have any." %% So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark]. With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to flop up onto the land and evolve. Richard and I were inching toward it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and -- I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us. Many people would have panicked at this point. But Richard and I were not "many people." We were experienced waders, and we kept our heads. We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of our feet never once went below the surface of the water. We ran all the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads. -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV" %% So there I was, snuggled in the leather seat of my brand new Ferrari. I had the oiled wood gear shift in one hands, and the leather wrapped Momo in the other. And, I had the stereo cranking "Born to be Wild"... Only one problem, I was upside down, under six feet of water... %% So we get to my point. Surely people around here read things that aren't on the *Officially Sanctioned Cyberpunk Reading List*. Surely we don't (any of us) really believe that there is some big, deep political and philosophical message in all this, do we? So if this `cyberpunk' thing is just a term of convenience, how can somebody sell out? If cyberpunk is just a word we use to describe a particular style and imagery in sf, how can it be dead? Where are the profound statements that the `Movement' is or was trying to make? I think most of us are interested in examining and discussing literary (and musical) works that possess a certain stylistic excellence and perhaps a rather extreme perspective; this is what CP is all about, no? Maybe there should be a newsgroup like, say, alt.postmodern or something. Something less restrictive in scope than alt.cyberpunk. -- Jeff G. Bone %% Some 1500 miles west of the Big Apple we find the Minneapple, a haven of tranquility in troubled times. It's a good town, a civilized town. A town where they still know how to get your shirts back by Thursday. Let the Big Apple have the feats of "Broadway Joe" Namath. We have known the stolid but steady Killebrew. Listening to Cole Porter over a dry martini may well suit those unlucky enough never to have heard the Whoopee John Polka Band and never to have shared a pitcher of 3.2 Grain Belt Beer. The loss is theirs. And the Big Apple has yet to bake the bagel that can match peanut butter on lefse. Here is a town where the major urban problem is dutch elm disease and the number one crime is overtime parking. We boast more theater per capita than the Big Apple. We go to see, not to be seen. We go even when we must shovel ten inches of snow from the driveway to get there. Indeed the winters are fierce. But then comes the marvel of the Minneapple summer. People flock to the city's lakes to frolic and rejoice at the sight of so much happy humanity free from the bonds of the traditional down-filled parka. Here's to the Minneapple. And to its people. Our flair for style is balanced by a healthy respect for wind chill factors. And we always, always eat our vegetables. This is the Minneapple. %% TAURUS (Apr 20 - May 20) You are practical and persistent. You have a dogged determination and work like hell. Most people think you are stubborn and bull headed. You are a Communist. %% THE BEY OF ALGIERS The randy old Bey of Algiers Who'd confined his cock-poking to queers, Tried a cunt for a change, And remarked : "It felt strange ... Just think what I've missed all these years!" %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #10: SIMPLE SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #12: LITHP This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an "S" in its character set; users must substitute "TH". LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #13: SLOBOL SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or lack of it, of its compiler. Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they compile, SLOBOL compilers allow you to travel to Bolivia to pick the coffee. Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to compile. Weary SLOBOL programmers often turn to a related (but infinitely faster) language, COCAINE. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17: SARTRE Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTRE have no purpose; they just are. Thus SARTRE programs are left to define their own functions. SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed, and are no fun at parties. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: C- This language was named for the grade received by its creator when he submitted it as a class project in a graduate programming class. C- is best described as a "low-level" programming language. In fact, the language generally requires more C- statements than machine-code statements to execute a given task. In this respect, it is very similar to COBOL. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: FIFTH FIFTH is a precision mathematical language in which the data types refer to quantity. The data types range from CC, OUNCE, SHOT, and JIGGER to FIFTH (hence the name of the language), LITER, MAGNUM and BLOTTO. Commands refer to ingredients such as CHABLIS, CHARDONNAY, CABERNET, GIN, VERMOUTH, VODKA, SCOTCH, and WHATEVERSAROUND. The many versions of the FIFTH language reflect the sophistication and financial status of its users. Commands in the ELITE dialect include VSOP and LAFITE, while commands in the GUTTER dialect include HOOTCH and RIPPLE. The latter is a favorite of frustrated FORTH programmers who end up using this language. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #5: VALGOL From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. Here is a sample program: LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START IF PIZZA = LIKE BITCHEN AND GUY = LIKE TUBULAR AND VALLEY GIRL = LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2 THEN FOR I = LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100 DO*WAH - (DITTY**2) BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT) SURE LIKE BAG THIS PROGRAM REALLY LIKE TOTALLY (Y*KNOW) IM*SURE GOTO THE MALL When the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message: GAG ME WITH A SPOON!! %% THE WOMBAT The wombat lives across the seas, Among the far Antipodes. He may exist on nuts and berries, Or then again, on missionaries; His distant habitat precludes Conclusive knowledge of his moods. But I would not engage the wombat In any form of mortal combat. %% 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 (1893-1967) %% TROTTOIR "Three steps to the slab, not quite" precise, my eyes took in my feet and then she WALTZED by, the air about her blue swirling skirt disturbed, "Ahh!" lost count. %% Talking Pinhead Blues: Oh, I LOST my ``HELLO KITTY'' DOLL and I get BAD reception on channel TWENTY-SIX!! Th'HOSTESS FACTORY is closin' down and I just heard ZASU PITTS has been DEAD for YEARS.. (sniff) My PLATFORM SHOE collection was CHEWED up by th' dog, ALEXANDER HAIG won't let me take a SHOWER 'til Easter ... (snurf) So I went to the kitchen, but WALNUT PANELING whup me upside mah HAID!! (on no, no, no.. Heh, heh) %% Tender Moments Tender moments When I touched you in the evening time When the sunlight glistened on your eyes I remember Tender moments When the night was late and goodbyes were long When I think of you and sing your song I remember Tender moments I remember Each time I saw your face Each time I help your hand Each time we kissed All those Tender moments When unspoken words can say so much When in silence gazes turn to touch I'll remember Tender moments %% That's Science Fiction *Society*. This leads to an amusing in-joke in John Brunner's recent "Muddle Earth" in which the female lead possesses the "LASFS gene -- Love At Second if not First Sight". -- David Goldfarb, goldfarb@ocf.berkeley.edu %% The Boot-It Song (sung to the tune of Michael Jackson's "Beat it") You gotta have your printout for the meeting at two, The system says your jobs at the head of the queue, Right then the thing dies but you know what to do, BOOT IT. You always get so worried when the system runs slow, And when it finally crashes, man you feel so low, But computers make mistakes (they're only human you know) So BOOT IT, Call the local guru to BOOT IT, BOOT IT, Go ahead re-institute it. If you're not lucky, get the book off the shelf, But if you are, it'll do itself. BOOT IT, BOOT IT, Then go find the guy who screwed it! Operating systems are built to bounce back, Whether it's a Cray or a Radio Shack. BOOT IT, BOOT IT %% The Gary Hart Fight Song Come on, all you ladies and men, Gary Hart is runnin' again, We think he's got one hell of a chance, As long as he keeps on his pants Go to the polls, Cast your vote, He'll take you out on his boat! And it's one, two, three, Who you votin' for? Cast mine for lover boy, Fight inflation, give ladies joy! And it's five, six, seven, Hart's the guy for me, Vote for him now what do ya say, We know he's not gay! All you people give him a shove, A vote for Hart is a vote for love, Once elected he'll change your life, Get him in office and away from your wife, Spin the wheel, Roll the dice, His running mate's Donna Rice. And it's one, two, three, Who you votin' for? Cast mine for lover boy, Fight inflation, give ladies joy! And it's five, six, seven, Hart's the guy for me, Vote for him now what do ya say, We know he's not gay! %% The Martian landed his saucer in Manhattan, and immediately upon emerging was approached by a panhandler. "Mister," said the man, "can I have a quarter?" The Martian asked, "What's a quarter?" The panhandler thought a minute, brightened, then said, "You're right! Can I have a dollar?" %% The Minnesota Board of Education voted to consider requiring all students to do some "volunteer work" as a prerequisite to high school graduation. %% The Pope is working on a crossword puzzle one Sunday afternoon. He stops for a moment or two, scratches his forehead, then asks the Cardinal, "Can you think of a four-letter word for 'woman' that ends in 'u-n-t?'" "Aunt," replies the Cardinal. "Say, thanks," says the Pope. "You got an eraser?" %% The Split-Atom Blues Gimme Twinkies, gimme wine, Gimme jeans by Calvin Kline ... But if you split those atoms fine, Mama keep 'em off those genes of mine! Gimme zits, take my dough, Gimme arsenic in my jelly roll ... Call the devil and sell my soul, But Mama keep dem atoms whole! -- Milo Bloom, "Bloom County" %% The USENET computer network `I have someone to meet...' At three in the afternoon of Thanksgiving Monday My Spanish poem left Bath. To UKC at Kent then by line To MCVAX in Holland. All that evening it was travelling thru Europe North and South from Stockholm to Barcelona. And by satellite across to SEISMO at New York. From SEISMO it ploughed West all night Down the backbone 'Til by the morning it was hitting Berkeley and Stanford, the Pacific; Ready for the great leap to Hawaii, Then onto Melbourne and Kyoto, Last landing Auckland. Fanning out all week thru broad America Down smalltown campuses and engineering labs My poem has outstrippt Byron in his fame With its publishing speed. The computer lines sing right round the World `I have someone to meet...' %% The Worst She Can Say is No "Get a load of that chick!" "Dude- You gotta ask her out." "Weellll, I dunno..." "Look. The worst she can say, is 'No'" "Hey! You're right!" "I'm always right!" "The worst she can say...is 'No'!" "Idunnoifyou'vebeennoticingmebutI'vebeennoticingyouand Iwaswonderingifyou'd like to go out with me!" Oh my god you little Geek! Get away before I freak! I'm a babe and you are not. You can't handle what I've got! I'm too hot, too hot for you.. You ugly, stupid, zitfaced scum, You asked me out; you MUST be dumb. Well you can beg until you're blue, But you're not even fit to lick my shoe. I'm too hot, too hot for you. Ha ha ha! Don't make me laugh! I want a whole man, not a half. You wet your pants, I'm so sure. Too bad wimp-itis has no cure. I'm too hot, too hot for you. I've got a bitchin bod and a killer face, I'm god's gift to the male race. I'm the queen of babes supreme, But you'll only see me in you dreams. I'm too hot, too hot for you. "Well? What'd she say??" "Well, she didn't say no..." -- Barry and the Bookbinders %% The Yuppie's Prayer Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray my Cuisinart to keep. I pray my stocks are on the rise, And that my analyst is wise, That all the wine I sip is white And that my hot tub's watertight, That racquetball won't get too tough, That all my sushi's fresh enough. I pray my cordless phone still works, That my career won't lose its perks, My microwave won't radiate, My condo won't depreciate. I pray my health club doesn't close And that my money market grows. If I go broke before I wake, I pray my Volvo they won't take. That's all for now. %% The big problem with pornography is defining it You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in." So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked. -- Dave Barry, "Pornography" %% The boss returned from lunch in a good mood and called the whole staff in to listen to a couple of jokes he had picked up. Everybody but one girl laughed uproariously. "What's the matter?" grumbled the boss. "Haven't you got a sense of humor?" "I don't have to laugh," she said. "I'm leaving Friday." %% The defense attorney was hammering away at the plaintiff: "You claim," he jeered, "that my client came at you with a broken bottle in his hand. But is it not true, that you had something in YOUR hand?" "Yes," he admitted, "his wife. Very charming, of course, but not much good in a fight." %% The description on the package of Stouffer's Veal Tortellini with Tomato Sauce says it contains "exquisite egg pasta." The list of ingredients, however, includes "cooked noodle product." %% The devout Jew was beside himself because his son had been dating a shiksa, so he went to visit his rabbi. The rabbi listened solemnly to his problem, took his hand, and said, "Pray to God." So the Jew went to the synagogue, bowed his head, and prayed, "God, please help me. My son, my favorite son, he's going to marry a shiksa, he sees nothing but goyim..." "Your son," boomed down this voice from the heavens, "you think you got problems. What about my son?" %% The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" %% The doctor wanted to write a prescription, so he reached in his pocket and pulled out a thermometer. "Shit," he muttered, "Some asshole has my pen." %% The honeymooning couple agreed it was a fine day for horseback riding. After a mile or so, the bride's mount cantered under a low tree and a branch scraped her forehead lightly. The groom dismounted, glared at his wife's horse, and said, "That's number one." The ride then proceeded. After another mile or so, the bride's horse stumbled over a pebble and the lady suffered a slight jostling. Again, her man leapt from his saddle and strode over to the nervous animal. "That's two," he said. Five miles later, the bride's horse became frightened when a rabbit crossed its path, reared up and threw the girl. Immediately, the groom was off his horse. "That's three!", he shouted, and pulling out a pistol, he shot the horse between the eyes. "You brute!" shrieked his bride. "Now I see the kind of man I married! You're a sadist, that's what!" The groom turned to her coolly. "That's one," he said. %% The letter from the Air Force colonel in charge of safety said that rocket boosters weighing more than 300,000 pounds "have an explosive force upon surface impact that is sufficient to exceed the accepted overpressure threshold of physiological damage for exposed personnel." In other words, if a 300,000-pound booster rocket falls on someone, he or she is not likely to survive. %% The man standing at the bar (in court, unfortunately) was well- dressed, alert and obviously intelligent. The judge asked him how he pleaded to the charge of rape and, much to the magistrate's surprise, he replied, "Not guilty by reason of insanity, your Honor." "Insanity?" exclaimed the judge. "Yes, sir," said the defendant. "I'm just crazy about it." %% The men sat sipping their tea in silence. After a while the klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream." "Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other. "Why?" "How should I know? What am I, a philosopher?" %% The new patron was amazed by the cleanliness of the restaurant. A waiter approached the table. "Good afternoon, sir. What may I serve you?" "I'll have the steak dinner," the man answered. As the waiter headed for the kitchen, the diner noticed that he wore a spotless white apron and clean white gloves. Soon the waiter returned, bearing a casserole dish on a cart which he uncovered to reveal two tempting filet mignons. From a covered pocket in his apron he produced a small pair of shining silver tongs and with them he transferred the meat from the steaming casserole to the diner's plate. "We never touch anything with our hands," he explained. The waiter continued serving. "Confidentially," he said, "we even have a special set of rules about visiting the lavatory. Do you see this little piece of string attached to my apron?" "Yes," the diner replied. "I noticed that all the aprons had one." The waiter put a large browned potato on the plate with his tongs. "Well," he began, "if I should have to go to the bathroom, that string comes in very handily. I simply unzip my pants and take it out with that piece of string. That way everything stays sanitary." "But how do you put it back?" "I don't know about the other guys," the waiter confided, "but I use the tongs." %% The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball... You've got to start way down, at the bottom, when you're six or seven years old. You can't wait until you're fifteen or sixteen. You've got to let it grow up with you, and if you're successful and you try hard enough, you're bound to come out on top, just like these boys have come to the top now. -- Babe Ruth [in his 1948 farewell speech at Yankee Stadium] %% The people of Halifax invented the trampoline. During the Victorian period the tripe-dressers of Halifax stretched tripe across a large wooden frame and jumped up and down on it to `tender and dress' it. The tripoline, as they called it, degenerated into becoming the apparatus for a spectator sport. The people of Halifax also invented the harmonium, a device for castrating pigs during Sunday service. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The radio was screaming: "Power to the People--Right On!" John Lennon's political song, ten years too late. "That poor fool should have stayed where he was," said my attorney. "Punks like him only get in the way when they try to be serious." "Speaking of serious," I said. "I think it's about time to get into the ether and the cocaine." "Forget ether," he said. "Let's save it for soaking down the rug in the suite. But here's this. Your half of the sunshine blotter. Just chew it up like baseball gum." I took the blotter and ate it. My attorney was now fumbling with the salt shaker containing the cocaine. Opening it. Spilling it. Then screaming and grabbing at the air, as our fine white dust blew up and out across the desert highway. A very expensive little twister rising up from the Great Red Shark. "Oh, jesus!" he moaned. "Did you see what God just did to us?" -- Raoul Duke, "Rolling Stone", issue 95, Nov. 11, 1971 %% The resident began his examination of an Elderly man by asking him what brought him to the hospital. The man replied, "an ambulance." %% The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all. The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces. Even though twenty-four parts in twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive. "Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a fierce host which out-numbers Lankhamar's inhabitants by fifty to one -- and equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city." "How?" demanded Fafhrd. Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know." -- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar" %% The way my jeweler explained it, it's like insurance. Six months' pay isn't much to keep my wife from sleeping around. A diamond -- pure, sparkling, natural, flawless, forever. The way marriage should be but never quite is. People grow and change and sometimes want to take their clothes off with strangers. So when you invest in a fine piece of diamond jewelry, you're not only making an investment, you're making a statement. You're telling the woman you love that you've just spent a lot of your hard-earned money on her. Now she owes you the kind of loyalty that only precious jewelry can buy. Isn't she worth it? The Honeymoon's Over: from $ 5000 The Seven Year Itch: from $10000 No More Lunchtime Quickies: from $15000 Divorce Would Be More Expensive: from $42000 A diamond is for leverage. BeDears %% The wise man's eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this is also vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? As the fool. -- Ecclesiastes 2:14-16 %% The young male race horse came from a long line of winners, and did wonderfully in time trials. However, in actual races he proved a little too romantic, and could never quite bring himself to pass a mare. So one day the trainer went to him and told him he'd have to be castrated. The young horse, knowing that it was either this or the glue factory, took it philosophically. After all, having the operation was almost a certain guarantee of a long and illustrious racing career. After a short recovery period, the horse was again run in time trials, and found to do as well as ever. But the first time he actually ran in a race, he only went about ten paces, before getting a dejected look on his face, turning around, and ambling back to the starting gates. "What's the matter?" asked the trainer, "you were doing great!" "Yeah, well how would you feel" replied the horse, "if five thousand people took one look at you and shouted `they're off!'?" %% The young man took a blind date to the amusement park. They went for a ride on the Ferris wheel. The ride completed, she seemed rather bored. "What would you like to do next?" he asked. "I wanna get weighed," she said. So he took her over to the weight guesser. Next they rode the roller coaster. After that he bought her some popcorn and cotton candy, then he asked what else she would like to do. "I wanna get weighed," she said. I really latched onto a square one tonight, thought the boy, and using the excuse that he had developed a headache, he took the girl home. The girl's mother was surprised to see her home so early, and asked, "What's wrong, dear, didn't you have a nice time tonight?" "Wousy," said the girl. %% Them Toad Suckers How 'bout them toad suckers, ain't they clods? Sittin' there suckin' them green toady frogs! Suckin' them hop toads, suckin' them chunkers, Suckin' them a leapy type, suckin' them flunkers. Look at them toad suckers, ain't they snappy? Suckin' them bog frogs sure make's 'em happy! Them hugger mugger toad suckers, way down south, Stickin' them sucky toads in they mouth! How to be a toad sucker, no way to duck it, Get yourself a toad, rear back, and suck it! -- Mason Williams %% Then there's the atmosphere--half the time you can eat the air, it's got so much stuff floating around in it. It takes the edge out of the colors. Down here even the traffic lights are pastel. And people! With a lot of these folks you'd have to check their green cards just to make sure that they are Earthlings. Then there's the police. In Portland, when some guy goes bananas, the cops rope off a sixteen block area around him and call a shrink from the medical school who stands atop a patrol car with a megaphone and shouts, "OK! THIS! ALL! STARTED! WHEN! YOU! WERE! THREE! YEARS! OLD! ON! ACCOUNT! OF! YOUR MOTHER! RIGHT? SO! LET'S! TALK! ABOUT! IT!" Down here they don't waste that kind of time. The LAPD has SWAT teams composed of guys who make Darth Vader look like Mr. Peepers. Before they go to bust a bookie joint they mortar it first. -- M. Christensen, "A Portland Innocent in LA" %% There are several kinds of doctors, and it is told that they can be differentiated by the following method. General Practitioners know nothing and do little. Surgeons know little and do everything. Internists knows everything and do nothing. Pathologists know everything and can do everything, but it's usually too late. %% There are some goyisha names that just about guarantee that someone isn't Jewish. For example, you'll never meet a Jew named Johnson or Wright or Jones or Sinclair or Ricks or Stevenson or Reid or Larsen or Jenks. But some goyisha names just about guarantee that every other person you meet with that name will be Jewish. Why is this? Who knows? Learned rabbis have pondered this question for centuries and have failed to come up with an answer, and you think ___you can find one? Get serious. You don't even understand why it's forbidden to eat crab -- fresh cold crab with mayonnaise -- or lobster -- soft tender morsels of lobster dipped in melted butter. You don't even understand a simple thing like that, and yet you hope to discover why there are more Jews named Miller than Katz? Fat Chance. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% There are two couples that want to convert to Catholicism. They go and see a priest and he tells them that the first requirement is to abstain from sex for thirty days. Thirty days later, the couples come back to see the priest. He asks the first couple if they passed the test. "Father, we didn't so much as TOUCH one another during the last month. "Congratulations," the priest replies, "you are now qualified to enter the Church." Then, the priests asked the second couple how they did. "Well, Father," the husband says, "everything was going just fine until the 27th day. My wife bent over the freezer to get something out, and I just happened to notice that she didn't have any panties on. I couldn't stand it any more, so I walked over to her, dropped my pants, and slipped it to her right there." "That's DISGUSTING!", the priest bellows. "I can never let you into the Church after something like that." "I understand Father," the man replies sadly, "they won't let us into Safeway anymore either." %% There was a cage with several apes in it. In the cage there was a banana hung on a string, and stairs under it. Before long an ape went to the stairs to get the banana, but as soon as it even touched the stairs, all apes were sprayed with water. After a while the same ape or another one made another attempt, with the same result: all apes are sprayed. If later another ape tries to climb the stairs, the others will try to prevent it. Now they took one ape from the cage and put in a new one. The new ape saw the banana, and wanted to climb the stairs. To his horror all other apes attacked him. After another attempt he knew: if he wanted to climb the stairs, he would be beaten up. Then they removed a second ape and replaced it by another new one. The newcomer went to the stairs and got beaten up. The previous new ape took part in the punishment with enthusiasm. A third old ape was replaced by a third new one. The new one made it to the stairs and got beaten up as well. Two of the apes who beat him have no idea why they may not climb the stairs. They replace the fourth old ape, and the fifth, etc. until all apes which have been sprayed with water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no ape ever tries to climb the stairs. One day a new, young ape asks, "But Sir, why not?" "Because that's the way we do things around here, my boy." %% There was a knock on the door. Mrs. Miffin opened it. "Are you the Widow Miffin?" a small boy asked. "I'm Mrs. Miffin," she replied, "but I'm not a widow." "Oh, no?" replied the little boy. "Wait 'til you see what they're carrying upstairs!" %% There was a mad scientist (a mad SOCIAL scientist) who kidnapped three colleagues, an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician, and locked each of them in separate cells with plenty of canned food and water but no can opener. A month later, returning, the mad scientist went to the engineer's cell and found it long empty. The engineer had constructed a can opener from pocket trash, used aluminum shavings and dried sugar to make an explosive,and escaped. The physicist had worked out the angle necessary to knock the lids off the tin cans by throwing them against the wall. She was developing a good pitching arm and a new quantum theory. The mathematician had stacked the unopened cans into a surprising solution to the kissing problem; his desicated corpse was propped calmly against a wall, and this was inscribed on the floor in blood: THEOREM: If I can't open these cans, I'll die. PROOF: Assume the opposite ... %% This 600-pound guy decides he can't go on living this way, so he seeks the help of a clinic and proceeds to go on a drastic diet. It works: four months later he's down to 160 pounds and feeling great, except for one problem. He's covered with great folds of flesh where the fat used to be. He calls up the clinic, and the doctor tells him not to worry. "There's a special surgical procedure to correct this condition," the doctor assures him. "Just come on over to the clinic." "But doctor," says the one-time fatty, "you don't understand. I'm too embarrassed to be seen in public like this." "Don't give it another thought," says the doctor. "Simply pull up all the folds as high as they'll go, pile the flesh on top of your head, put on a top hat, and come on over." The guy follows the instructions and provokes no comments until he reaches the clinic and is standing in front of the admitting nurse's desk, dying of self-consciousness. "The doctor will be right with you," says the nurse. "Say, what's that hole in the middle of your forehead?" "My belly button," blurts out the guy. "How d'ya like my tie?" %% This Pole got married, but he was too dumb to know what to do on his wedding night. "For God's sake, Stan," said his bride, "you take that thing you play with and you put it where I pee." So he got up and threw his bowling ball in the sink. %% This Polish guy ordered a pizza with everything on it. When it came out of the oven, the guy asked him if he'd like it cut into four or eight pieces. "Make it four," said the Pole. "I'll never be able to eat eight." %% This fella catches a leprechaun. (I'm sure you all know the standard beginning of leprechaun stories. We'll skip this part...) ...so finally the leprechaun says, "Aye, ye shall have yar wish." "When?" "Tonight, whilst ye are asleep, it shall come ta ye." That night, he wakes up to a knock on the door. He opens it to see a burning cross on his front lawn, and 6 white-robed, hooded figures on his front porch. The leader, rope in hand, walks up to him and says, "Are yew the one that wanted tuh be hung lahk a nigger?" %% This guy is walking down the beach one fine sunny day, feeling good, when suddenly he sees this woman with no arms or legs in a wheelchair, sobbing like crazy. He decides to be gallant, "What's wrong, miss?" "I......I'm 21 and I I've never been kissed... " So this guy, he decides, what the hell, let's cheer up the poor lady. He leans over and gives her a long wonderful kiss. This does wonders, and the woman's face lights up and she grins from ear to ear, and the guy wanders away feeling wonderful. Well, next week, the same guy is walking along the same beach, and sees the same girl who is once again sobbing her eyes out. Gallant to the end, our hero says, "What's wrong, miss, can I help?" "I...I'm 21 and I've never been fucked..." The guy picks her up out of her chair, cuddles her close, and brings her over to the shore, and throws her into the water. "Now you're fucked!" %% This yuppie had just gotten his first BMW and wanted to show it off to his friends. So he goes motoring up Broadway, and parks at his friends apartment. He was so excited that he forgot to look when he opened the door. Just then, a taxi comes screaming up and neatly removes the door from the car, along with the guy's right arm. The guy jumps out of his car and starts screaming, "My BMW, my BMW!" The taxi driver comes running up, and says, "Listen, you're in shock, your arm was taken off and you're losing a lot of blood." The yuppie just notices that his arm was ripped off and starts to yell, "My Rolex, my Rolex!!" %% Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does. As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians. The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease. I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter S. Thompson's disease. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" %% Three girls and Feldstein were brought before the presiding judge. The girls had been arrested for soliciting and the man was arrested for selling ties without a license. "What do you do for a living?" the judge asked, pointing at the first girl. "Your honor, I'm a model," she replied. "Thirty days," was the sentence. The judge turned to the second girl. "What do you do for a living?" he asked. "Your honor, I'm an actress." "Thirty days." Then he turned to the third girl. "And how about you?" he demanded. "Well, your honor, I'm a prostitute. I'm not proud of it, but it's the only way I can support my mother and my children since my husband's been laid off." "For telling the truth," he said, "I'm going to suspend sentence. Furthermore, here's $100 to help your family out." Now he turns to Feldstein, arrested for selling ties illegally. "And you," he said, "what do you do for a living?" "Your honor, I'm a prostitute. I'm not proud..." %% Tie? You want me to wear a *tie*? Listen: There's only one time in a man's life when he should have a rope knotted around his neck, and that time ain't yet come for me. -- Canada Bill Jones %% Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), "The Bum" %% To A Quick Young Fox: Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp, Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice? Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp -- Zow! Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice. -- Lazy Dog %% To the habitual reader, reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), "The Bum" %% Top Intellectual Societies in the World -------------------------------------------- NAME Address IQ to get in Percentile of Population -------------------------------------------- MENSA - 1701 W 3rd St | INTERTEL - PO Box 1083 Brooklyn, NY 11223 | Tulsa, OK 74101 133 98% | 138 99% TRIPLE NINE SOCIETY - 6017 27 Ave, NE Seattle, WA 98115 150 99.9% INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY 12 N Church Rd Saddle River, NJ 07458 150 99.9% FOUR SIGMA SOCIETY - Box 795 Berkeley, CA 94701 164 99.997% (I believe this group is defunct, due to lack of members) PROMETHEUS SOCIETY - 13 Speer St Somerville, NJ 08876 164 99.997% MEGA SOCIETY - 103 Vincennes Rd Charlottesville, VA 22901 172 99.9999% %% Top Ten Excuses Why You Haven't Graduated Yet 10. Recurring bouts of malaria slow research. 9. Cost of translation from Ancient Sumerian limits obtainability of important research materials. 8. Can't remember anything that happened in 1986. 7. Six month sabbatical to train for World Bellyflop Championships (placed sixth, highest U.S. finisher). 6. I.M. coaching position a lifelong responsibility. 5. Certain I can win with a female gnome paladin. 4. Could type a lot faster on a Dvorak keyboard. 3. Wasted time memorizing UUCP map of the US and Australia. 2. Thought the major field exam was "just a joke" until too late. And the Best Reason for Not Yet Graduating: 1. Could have finished years ago, but wanted dissertation to rhyme. %% Two Englishmen struck up a conversation with an American in the club car of a train headed east out of Chicago. "I say," queried the younger Englishman, "have you ever been to London?" The American laughed. "It was my home for two years during the war," he said. "Had some of the wildest times of my life in that old town." The older Englishman, a little hard of hearing, asked, "What did he say, Reggie?" "He said he's been to London, father," the younger Englishman replied. After a little lull in the conversation, the young man asked, "You didn't, by any chance, meet a Hazel Wimbleton in London, did you?" The American almost fell off his chair. "Hot Pants Hazel!" he exclaimed. "My God, I shacked up with that horny broad for three months just before I came back to the States!" "What did he say, Reggie?" the older Englishman wanted to know. "He says he knows mother," the younger Englishman responded. %% Two Poles walk into the post office and the first thing that catches their eye is a bunch of "Wanted" posters, in particular a shot of a mean-looking black guy beneath a banner that says "Wanted for Rape." "You know," said on Pole to the other, "they get all the good jobs." %% Two buddies had been out drinking for hours when their money finally ran out. "I have an idea," croaked Al. "Lesh go over to my housh and borrow shum money from my wife." The two of them reeled into Al's living room, snapped on the light, and lo and behold, there was Al's wife making love on the sofa to another man. This state of affairs considerably unnerved Al's friend but didn't seem to affect the husband. "Shay, dear, you have any money for your ever-lovin' hushban?" he asked. "Yes, yes," she snapped. "Take my purse from the mantle, and for Pete's sake, turn off those lights." Outside they examined the purse, and Al proudly announced, "There's enough here for a pint for you and a pint for me. Pretty good, eh, old buddy?" "But, Al," protested his friend, somewhat sobered by the spectacle he'd just witnessed, "what about that fellow back there with your wife?" "The hell with him," replied Al. "Let him buy his own pint." %% Two gay guys, Larry and Phil, were driving down the highway when they were rear-ended by a huge semi. Somewhat shaken, they maneuvered over to the side of the road, where Phil instructed Larry to get out and confront the truck driver. "Tell him we're going to sue, sue, sue!" he shrieked. Obligingly, Larry got out and went around to the cab of the truck to deliver this message to the huge, burly driver, whose response was to snarl, "Ah, why doncha suck my cock." "Phil," said Larry, coming back to their car, "I think we're going to be able to settle out of court." %% Two little kids, aged six and eight, decide it's time to learn how to swear. So, the eight-year-old says to the six-year-old, "Okay, you say `ass' and I'll say `hell'". All excited about their plan, they troop downstairs, where their mother asks them what they'd like for breakfast. "Aw, hell," says the eight-year-old, "gimme some Cheerios." His mother backhands him off the stool, sending him bawling out of the room, and turns to the younger brother. "What'll you have?" "I dunno," quavers the six-year-old, "but you can bet your ass it ain't gonna be Cheerios." %% Two longtime friends sipped Scotch in a local bar and talked about their troubles. "And on top of everything else," said the first, "my wife has cut me down to just once a week." "That's too bad," agreed his friend, "but it could be worse. I know two guys she's cut off altogether. %% Two men looked out from the prison bars, One saw mud-- The other saw stars. Now let me get this right: two prisoners are looking out the window. While one of them was looking at all the mud -- the other one got hit in the head. %% Two morticians alternated in sharing the responsibility of covering the night shift. One early morning about 3:00 am, a body was brought into the mortuary, and the mortician began work. When he had unclothed the corpse, he noticed a cork in the anus. Removing it, the strains of "Hello, Dolly, well, hello, Dolly...!" were plainly heard being sung. He put the cork back, and the singing stopped. Pulling it out again, the same song started, "You're lookin' swell, Dolly!". Amazed, he telephoned his partner, and insisted he come immediately to see something very unusual. Roused from sleep, the partner asked if it could wait until morning. It took great persistence, but finally the partner agreed to dress and come down to the shop. When he got there, he said, "Now what was it that was so important you had to get me out of bed at this ungodly hour?" The man said, "Come into the embalming room." They go into the embalming room, and the first partner says, "Now watch." He pulls out the cork, and the anus takes off singing again. The partner looks at him disgustedly and says: "You brought me down here at 3 in the morning to hear some asshole sing Hello Dolly"? %% UGLY LITTLE BOY GO AWAY, ugly little boy, we don't want you playing with us. And stop watching us from behind your mother's curtains. Stupid! To think we don't see you! Ugly little boy, DON'T TOUCH ME. Go and make love to your sister. Keep it in the family. Ugly little boy, tear your head to pieces as you hear our laughing voices singing in the sun. %% VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22) You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while making love. Virgos make good bus drivers. %% Visiting a lawyer for advice, the wife said, "I want you to help me obtain a divorce. My husband is getting a little queer to sleep with." "What do you mean?" asked the attorney. "Does he force you to indulge in unusual sex practices?" "No, he doesn't," replied the woman, "and neither does the little queer." %% WALK ALONG Walk behind me There are no eyes there No time for clipped wings and daggers Fill, fill the drained cup And seal my lips! Walk behind me then, But bring along the caress of the evening wind Oh bring the sun along So your shadow merges with mine. %% WARNING TO ALL PERSONNEL: Firings will continue until morale improves. %% We have some absolutely irrefutable statistics to show exactly why you are so tired. There are not as many people actually working as you may have thought. The population of this country is 200 million. 84 million are over 60 years of age, which leaves 116 million to do the work. People under 20 years of age total 75 million, which leaves 41 million to do the work. There are 22 million who are employed by the government, which leaves 19 million to do the work. Four million are in the Armed Services, which leaves 15 million to do the work. Deduct 14,800,000, the number in the state and city offices, leaving 200,000 to do the work. There are 188,000 in hospitals, insane asylums, etc., so that leaves 12,000 to do the work. Now it may interest you to know that there are 11,998 people in jail, so that leaves just 2 people to carry the load. That is you and me, and brother, I'm getting tired of doing everything myself! %% We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point in mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" %% We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant. ... I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk white BMW and her Jordache smile. There had been a fight. I had punched her boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls. Everyone told him, "You ride the bull, senor. You do not fight it." But he was lean and tough like a bad rib-eye and he fought the bull. And then he fought me. And when we finished there were no winners, just men doing what men must do. ... "Stop the car," the girl said. There was a look of terrible sadness in her eyes. She knew about the woman of the tollway. I knew not how. I started to speak, but she raised an arm and spoke with a quiet and peace I will never forget. "I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the tollway belle's for thee." The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie. Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day. -- Peter Applebome, International Imitation Hemingway Competition %% We're Knights of the Round Table We dance whene'er we're able We do routines and chorus scenes With footwork impeccable We dine well here in Camelot We eat ham and jam and spam a lot. We're Knights of the Round Table Our shows are formidable But many times We're given rhymes That are quite unsingable We're opera mad in Camelot We sing from the diaphragm a lot (Xylophone FX on knight's heads) In war we're tough and able, Quite indefatigable Between our quests We sequin our vests And impersonate Clark Gable It's a busy like in Camelot Solo: I have to push the pram a lot... (No, on second thought let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place...) %% Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them... Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely, able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed, undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished. All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important, became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem, destroying Subject-Object by becoming them. Time passed, unheeded. Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes. -- Wayfarer %% Well, punk is kind of anti-ethical, anyway. Its ethics, so to speak, include a disdain for ethics in general. If you have to think about something so hard, then it's bullshit anyway; that's the idea. Punks are anti-ismists, to coin a term. But nonetheless, they have a pretty clearly defined stance and image, and THAT is what we hang the term `punk' on. -- Jeff G. Bone %% What is involved in such [close] relationships is a form of emotional chemistry, so far unexplained by any school of psychiatry I am aware of, that conditions nothing so simple as a choice between the poles of attraction and repulsion. You can meet some people thirty, forty times down the years, and they remain amiable bystanders, like the shore lights of towns that a sailor passes at stated times but never calls at on the regular run. Conversely, all considerations of sex aside, you can meet some other people once or twice and they remain permanent influences on your life. Everyone is aware of this discrepancy between the acquaintance seen as familiar wallpaper or instant friend. The chemical action it entails is less worth analyzing than enjoying. At any rate, these six pieces are about men with whom I felt an immediate sympat - to use a coining of Max Beerbohm's more satisfactory to me than the opaque vogue word "empathy". -- Alistair Cooke, "Six Men" %% What you get when you have a green ball in one hand and a green ball in your other hand? Kermit the frog's complete undivided attention. %% What's the difference between the National Security Council and a Day Care Center? Adult Supervision. %% When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul. -- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi %% 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!" %% When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him. -- Raphael Aloysius Lafferty %% While away at a convention, an executive happened to meet a young woman who was pretty, chic, and intelligent. When he persuaded her to disrobe in his hotel room, he found out she had a superb body as well. Unfortunately, the executive found himself unable to perform. On his first night home, the executive padded naked from the shower into the bedroom to find his wife swathed in a rumpled bathrobe, her hair curled, her face creamed, munching candy loudly as she pored through a movie magazine. And then, without warning, he felt the onset of a magnificent erection. Looking down at his throbbing member, he snarled, "Why you ungrateful, mixed-up son of a bitch! Now I know why they call you a prick!" %% While hunting, a man saw a beautiful nude woman come running out of the woods and disappear across the clearing. Just as she got out of sight, three men dressed in white uniforms came running out of the same woods. "Hey, you," yelled one of them, "did you see a woman come by here?" "Yes," replied the hunter. "What's the trouble?" "She's an inmate of the county asylum, and gets loose every now and then. We're trying to catch her." "I can understand that," said the hunter, "But why is one of you carrying two buckets of sand?" "That's his handicap," said the spokesman, "he caught her last time." %% While visiting our country, a lovely French maiden found herself out of money just as her visa expired. Unable to pay her passage back to France, she was in despair until an enterprising sailor made her a sporting proposition. "My ship is sailing tonight," he said. "I'll smuggle you aboard, hide you down in the hold and provide you with a mattress, blankets and food. All it will cost you is a little love." The girl consented, and late that night the sailor sneaked her on board his vessel. Twice each day thereafter, the sailor smuggled a large tray of food below decks, took his pleasure with the little French stowaway and departed. The days turned into weeks, and the weeks might have turned into months if the captain hadn't noticed the sailor carrying food below one evening and followed him. After witnessing this unique bit of barter, he waited until the sailor had departed and then confronted the girl, demanding an explanation. She told him the whole story. "Hmmm," mused the captain. "A clever arrangement, and I must say I admire that young seaman's ingenuity. However, miss, I feel it is only fair to tell you that this is the Staten Island Ferry." %% Why are you doing this to me? Because knowledge is torture, and there must be awareness before there is change. -- Jim Starlin, "Captain Marvel #29" %% Will Rogers, having paid too much income tax one year, tried in vain to claim a rebate. His numerous letters and queries remained unanswered. Eventually the form for the next year's return arrived. In the section marked "DEDUCTIONS," Rogers listed: "Bad debt, US Government -- $40,000." %% With deep concern, if not alarm, Dick noted that his friend Conrad was drunker than he'd ever seen him before. "What's the trouble, buddy?", he asked, sliding onto the stool next to his friend. "It's a woman, Dick," Conrad replied. "I guessed that much. Tell me about it." "I can't," Conrad said. But after a few more drinks his tongue and resolution both seemed to weaken and, turning to his buddy, he said, "Okay. It's your wife." "My wife!!" "Yeah." "What about her?" Conrad pondered the question heavily, and draped his arm around his pal. "Well, buddy-boy," he said, "I'm afraid she's cheating on us." %% YOU TOO CAN MAKE BIG MONEY IN THE EXCITING FIELD OF PAPER SHUFFLING! Mr. TAA of Muddle, Mass. says: "Before I took this course I used to be a lowly bit twiddler. Now with what I learned at MIT Tech I feel really important and can obfuscate and confuse with the best." Mr. MARC had this to say: "Ten short days ago all I could look forward to was a dead-end job as a engineer. Now I have a promising future and make really big Zorkmids." MIT Tech can't promise these fantastic results to everyone, but when you earn your MDL degree from MIT Tech your future will be brighter. SEND FOR OUR FREE BROCHURE TODAY! %% Ya gotta feel sorry for all them convicts in New Hampshire, stampin' out license plates that say "Live free or Die." %% You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare, giving everything an eerie, macabre appearance. The air is filled with flickering sparks of ash and a heavy smell of brimstone. The walls are hot to the touch, and the thundering of the volcano drowns out all other sounds. Embedded in the jagged roof far overhead are myriad twisted formations composed of pure white alabaster, which scatter the murky light into sinister apparitions upon the walls. To one side is a deep gorge, filled with a bizarre chaos of tortured rock which seems to have been crafted by the Devil himself. An immense river of fire crashes out from the depths of the volcano, burns its way through the gorge, and plummets into a bottomless pit far off to your left. To the right, an immense geyser of blistering steam erupts continuously from a barren island in the center of a sulfurous lake, which bubbles ominously. The far right wall is aflame with an incandescence of its own, which lends an additional infernal splendor to the already hellish scene. A dark, foreboding passage exits to the south. -- Adventure %% You can imagine the excitement when a Martian spaceship landed in a sunny suburban field and proved to be filled with intelligent, amicable beings. Jane Pauley managed to be the first television personality on the scene, and the chief Martian agreed to an exclusive interview on the "Today" show the next morning. As the cameras started to roll, she told the Martian how curious people on Earth were about his people, so she thought she'd just ask him a few general questions. The Martian graciously said that was fine with him. "Tell me," said Pauley, nervously clearing her throat, "do all of your people have seven fingers and toes?" "Yes," said the Martian, waving his slender green appendages in the air. "And two heads? Everyone has those?" "Oh yes," said the Martian, nodding both enthusiastically. "And also those lovely diamonds and rubies embedded in their chests as you do?" asked Pauley. "Certainly not," snapped the Martian. "Only the Jews." %% You know, all of these rules that may be completely correct for normal people, make no sense for prodigies. To say that Bach should pay any attention to how he was socially adjusted is just a bad joke. -- Paul Erdos %% You see, this faggot walks into a Texas bar and orders a strawberry daquiri. The bartender looks him over with amusement and says: "We don't serve faggots, buddy, why don't you get out of here before the boys come in and kick your ass?" The faggot whimpers a little and lisps, "Pleasse misssture I am soooo thurstay...." Well, the bartender feels somewhat sorry for him and hands him a beer on the house on the condition that he drink it in the back and leave as soon as he's done. A little while later, a hulking cowboy walks in and up to the bar. He slams his fist on the bar and hollers, "I am so damn thirsty, I could lick the sweat off of a bulls' balls!" From the back of the bar comes the cry... "Moo, moo, buckaroooooo!!!" %% You see, this girl wakes up one morning, rolls over and sees an elephant in the bed with her. Almost in shock, she says, "Did I pick you up in the bar last night?" "Uh-huh.", the elephant replies. "Did I bring you home?" "Uh-huh." "Did we, uh, fool around?" "Uh-huh." "Lord, I must have been tight!" "Not any more." %% You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day. -- Sherlock Holmes %% You've heard the definition of a drug: any substance which, when injected into a laboratory animal, produces a publication. %% Young men and young women may work systematically six days in the week and rise fresh in the morning, but let them attend modern dances for only a few hours each evening and see what happens. The Waltz, Polka, Gallop and other dances of the same kind will be disastrous in their effects to both sexes. Health and vigor will vanish like the dew before the sun. It is not the extraordinary exercise which harms the dancer, but rather the coming into close contact with the opposite sex. It is the fury of lust craving incessantly for more pleasure that undermines the soul, the body, the sinews and nerves. Experience and statistics show beyond doubt that passionate excessive dancing girls can hardly reach twenty-five years of age and men thirty-one. Even if they reached that age they will in most instances be broken in health physically and morally. This is the claim of prominent physicians in this country. -- Quote from a 1910 periodical %% Your home electrical system is basically a bunch of wires that bring electricity into your home and take if back out before it has a chance to kill you. This is called a "circuit". The most common home electrical problem is when the circuit is broken by a "circuit breaker"; this causes the electricity to back up in one of the wires until it bursts out of an outlet in the form of sparks, which can damage your carpet. The best way to avoid broken circuits is to change your fuses regularly. Another common problem is that the lights flicker. This sometimes means that your electrical system is inadequate, but more often it means that your home is possessed by demons, in which case you'll need to get a caulking gun and some caulking. If you're not sure whether your house is possessed, see "The Amityville Horror", a fine documentary film based on an actual book. Or call in a licensed electrician, who is trained to spot the signs of demonic possession, such as blood coming down the stairs, enormous cats on the dinette table, etc. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% [On randomly generated sentences.] I think that it is hard to read such material without amusement. I feel a little admiration as well. I would never write, 'It happened one frosty look of trees waving gracefully against the wall.' I almost wish I could. Poor poets endlessly rhyme love with dove, and they are constrained by their highly trained mediocrity never to write a good line. In some sense, a stochastic process can do better; it at least has a chance. -- J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals, and Noise" %% ``After all, 13 years of being battered, pushed and otherwise tormented is a long, long time. On the other hand ... you can't expect me just to run away,'' he said. -- L.A. Police Chief Darryl Gates, as quoted in the UPI story, "L.A. police chief rejects suggestion of retirement", 7/9/91 %% oh no godzilla guns and planes cannot stop him tokyo is ablaze -- haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6 %% on motives Summoned by loss and loneliness, the Muse comes to me now, spun from the thinnest air bearing a gift of poetry I'll use to exorcise the ghosts of doubt and care. In happier times she'll not so quickly sing her songs, and then I'll barren be of words laid out as beads upon a string my verse I find but when I sadness see. Now sorrow rules and I shall have my say thus between silence and eloquence I slide and use the verse to hold the dark at bay awaiting dawn, a turning of the tide. Perhaps one day I'll reach some joyful time, til then I'll patch my walls with fragile rhyme. %% page 46 ...a report citing a study by Dr. Thomas C. Chalmers, of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, which compared two groups that were being used to test the theory that ascorbic acid is a cold preventative. "The group on placebo who thought they were on ascorbic acid," says Dr. Chalmers, "had fewer colds than the group on ascorbic acid who thought they were on placebo." page 56 The placebo is proof that there is no real separation between mind and body. Illness is always an interaction between both. It can begin in the mind and affect the body, or it can begin in the body and affect the mind, both of which are served by the same bloodstream. Attempts to treat most mental diseases as though they were completely free of physical causes and attempts to treat most bodily diseases as though the mind were in no way involved must be considered archaic in the light of new evidence about the way the human body functions. -- Norman Cousins [Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient] %%  %%  *END We're sorry, the cookie you have reached is not in service, please check the cookie and dial again, or ask the operator for assistance. In case you really WERE looking for the index, here it is: *END COOOFF.SRC Offensive Cookies COONOF.SRC New offensive cookies from Ben COOOCU.SRC Offensive Cookies from Columbia *END Sincerely, the mismanagement... %% __________________________________ I've got my Nomex underwear on, | ENTERING TAXACHUSETTS | an asbestos pad under my monitor | Prepare to surrender all your | and a fire extinguisher by my modem. | fireworks, firearms, ammunition, | | cash and other assets. Fasten | Send your flames to: _____ | seatbelts and put on helmet. | | 55 | | "We know what is best for you" | Tom Swenson | MPH | ---------------------------------- toms@shunix.dmc.com ----- || || CIS: 76114,2037 | | || || Fax: (508)869-3116 | | || || I can take the heat! ##################################################### %% -------------------------- / Gold Zorkmid \ / T e n T h o u s a n d \ / Z o r k m i d s \ / \ / |||||||||||||||||| \ / !|||| ||||! \ | ||| ^^ ^^ ||| | | ||| OO OO ||| | | In Frobs ||| << ||| We Trust | | || (______) || | | | | | | |__________| | \ / \ -- Lord Dimwit Flathead -- / \ -- Beloved of Zorkers -- / \ / \ * 722 G.U.E. * / \ / \ / ----------------------- %% JABBERWOCKY And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. "And thou hast slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% T H I S IS A T E S T O F T H E E M E R G E N C Y B R O A D C A S T I N G S Y S T E M I F T H I S H A D B E E N A R E A L E M E R G E N C Y Y O U W O U L D H A V E B E E N I N S T R U C T E D T O P A N I C ! ! ! %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17: SARTRE Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTRE have no purpose; they just are. Thus SARTRE programs are left to define their own functions. SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed, and are no fun at parties. THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: C- This language was named for the grade received by its creator when he submitted it as a class project in a graduate programming class. C- is best described as a "low-level" programming language. In fact, the language generally requires more C- statements than machine-code statements to execute a given task. In this respect, it is very similar to COBOL. THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: FIFTH FIFTH is a precision mathematical language in which the data types refer to quantity. The data types range from CC, OUNCE, SHOT, and JIGGER to FIFTH (hence the name of the language), LITER, MAGNUM and BLOTTO. Commands refer to ingredients such as CHABLIS, CHARDONNAY, CABERNET, GIN, VERMOUTH, VODKA, SCOTCH, and WHATEVERSAROUND. The many versions of the FIFTH language reflect the sophistication and financial status of its users. Commands in the ELITE dialect include VSOP and LAFITE, while commands in the GUTTER dialect include HOOTCH and RIPPLE. The latter is a favorite of frustrated FORTH programmers who end up using this language. %% ____________< /____________>_>_>_>_>_|/ / / / / / / This is a cockDIP, like a cockroach except made from a burned-out integrated circuit. Never let these get inside your lunchbox! %% ___ lim V 3 = 2 3->4 %% , . ___\\|/=/--/ \_=/--\-\// . . -| .|.||- \\__/()-_/ -_/ \ :\- -- Bleack! _|: | /_ . \___/-_/\ / | | || o /|>| || . . =| \__/ , %% A man, in 1937, as Stalin's terror was raging through Moscow, packed his bags every night before he went to sleep, in case he should have to escape. Finally, one night, sure enough. KNOCK! KNOCK! He gets up out of bed, kisses his wife, takes his bag and leaves. A few minutes late, he's back. Wife looks at him, "What happened?" "It's absolutely nothing," he replies. "Just the house on fire." %% A rabbit was out hopping one day when he came across a bottle, he nudged it a bit and the cork fell off. A genie floats out. "You get one wish for opening the bottle" (A cheap genii, must have been cutbacks that year.) The rabbit thought a bit and said "I've always enjoyed music." (A cultured rabbit.) "Could you make me a piano for a symphony?" So this become a case of "Hare today, grand tomorrow." %% XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX X X X X \ / X X X V X X X O OX X X \___##X___/ X X ##X## X X ___#X###___ X X / X#### \ X X _X_###___ X X /X V \ X X X X XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX %% "Are you going to see him Samoa?" "Don't be Sicily, he's a Spain in the neck." %% "Comrades, we have established beyond a doubt that it is possible to build socialism in one large country - like the Soviet Union. But is it possible to built it in a very small country, say, Switzerland." "Of course it is - but what have you got against the Swiss?" %% "I came to Berkeley," said Ray, "I saw Kathy and Karen, and I had lunch with them." "Oh, NO!" I cried with the sudden inspiration that wouldn't wait. "Veni, vidi, lunchi! I CAME, I SAW, I LUNCHED!!" %% "I don't mean to Russia, but Venic she leaving?" "Well, she said she wasn't going to Rumania here another day." %% "Somewhere in communist Russia I'll bet there's a little boy who has never known anything but CENSORSHIP and OPPRESSION. But maybe he's heard about AMERICA, and he dreams of living in this land of FREEDOM and OPPORTUNITY! Someday, I'd like to meet that little boy... AND TELL HIM THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT THIS PLACE!!" "Calvin, be quiet and eat the stupid lima beans." %% "Why would we care about a U.F.O.?" said Louis Achitoff, a spokesman for the eastern region of the F.A.A., in an interview. "If the pilot's up there with a clearance and at the right altitude, we don't care what planet he comes from." %% "You know, we'll never have to worry about Ray Charles dying from anorexia; there's a physics principle stating that if he does suffer from some such disorder, he will eventually recover. Oh, come now! Surely you've heard of the Reversibility of Light Rays?" %% 'FOR THE WORLD IS HOLLOW, AND I HAVE TOUCHED THE SKY' [**] First aired November 8, 1968. McCoy, suffering from a fatal disease, finds himself romantically entangled with the priestess governing a planetoid/ spaceship on a collision course with another planet. %% ( WARNING: If you're offended by words like "cock" and "pussy", don't read this joke. ) This couple is lying in bed one morning, and she takes it in mind to tell him the dream she had the night before. "Honey, I dreamed I was at a cock auction: there were extra-large cocks going for $90 or so, medium-size cocks selling for $50, and itty-bitty ones for $1.50." "Say, was mine in the auction?" the man inquires a bit anxiously. "Honey, yours would've been too big to get in the door." A couple of days later they're lying in bed again, and the man says, "You wouldn't believe what I dreamed last night: that I was at a pussy auction. There were great big ones, and little hairy ones, oh, all kinds." "Well, did you see mine?" she asks. "Baby," he says, "the auction was IN your pussy!" %% (2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <- iN where `o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a single character, and `i' represents the APL iota. %% +----------+ V | /\ | / \ | / \ | / Does \ yes | / this \------+ \ program/ \ halt?/ \ / \ / \/ |no V +-------+ | stop | +-------+ %% A Catholic and a non-Catholic were carpooling to work one morning, when a brick fell out of the sky, which startled the driver and caused him to swerve off the road and into a telephone pole, totaling the car. The two stumbled out of the wreckage, both feeling quite fortunate to be alive. The Catholic crossed himself. Then the non-Catholic crossed himself in an accentuated manner. "Hey," said the Catholic, "I thought you were a non-Catholic, so how come you just crossed yourself?" "Just checking," replied the non-Catholic, crossing himself again, "spectacles, testicals, wallet, pen." %% A couple I know were discussing their wallpaper, which had just been hung. Dov was annoyed at Debby's indifference to what he felt was a poor job. "The problem is that I'm a perfectionist and you're not," he finally said to her. "Exactly!" she replied. "That's why you married me and I married you!" %% A hindu, a rabbi, and a lawyer are traveling together and need to stop for the night. So they stop at the next farmhouse, and find lodging, with the qualification that the house is only big enough for two of them, and one will have to sleep in the barn. oyo the hindu volunteers and goes out to sleep in the barn while the lawyer and rabbi sleep in the house. A few minutes later, however, the lawyer and rabbi hear a knock on the door, and opening it, find the hindu who protests "There is a cow in the barn. Surely you can't expect me to sleep with cattle." So the rabbi and the lawyer agree that perhaps the rabbi should trade places with the hindu, and the rabbi goes out. Within a short time, the hindu and the lawyer are getting ready to go to sleep, when again there is a knock on the door. Opening the door they find the rabbi protesting, "There is a pig in the barn. Surely you can't expect me to sleep with a pig!". Weary of the whole problem by this time, the lawyer pulls the rabbi into the house, grabs a blanket and heads for the barn. Almost immediately, there is a third knocking at the door, and opening the door they find the pig and the cow. "Surely you can't expect us to sleep with a lawyer." %% A lawyer named Strange was shopping for a tombstone. After he had made his selection, the stonecutter asked him what inscription he would like on it. "Here lies an honest man and a lawyer," responded the lawyer. "Sorry, but I can't do that," replied the stonecutter. "In this state, it's against the law to bury two people in the same grave. However, I could put ``here lies an honest lawyer''." "But that won't let people know who it is" protested the lawyer. "Certainly will," retorted the stonecutter. "people will read it and exclaim, "That's Strange!" %% A man has some worries about his wife's virtue and fidelity. So, he gets himself a parrot and spends months teaching to parrot to talk so he can have the parrot spy on his wife. He sets the parrot up in their house and has him start watching the wife. The man comes home one day and asks the parrot if he saw anything. The parrot says "Yes, the milkman came to the front door". "Then what", asks the man. " Your wife invited him in", says the parrot. "What else??" "The milkman starts taking off his clothes" "Yeah Yeah, what else happened???" "Your wife took off her clothes" "Oh no, what else???!?" "They were naked and started kissing and hugging" "My God", cried the man "What happened next??" "I don't know", said the parrot "I got a hard on and fell off my perch". %% A man was arrested one night for running across Red Square yelling "Khrushchev is a fool! Khrushchev is a fool!" He was arrested and given 10 years - 5 for slandering the leader, and 5 for revealing a state secret. %% A nice young worker from Australia Post ( yes they do exist ), was sorting through her regular envelopes, when she discovered a letter addressed as follows: GOD c/o Heaven Upon opening the envelope, a letter enclosed told of how a little old lady who had never asked for anything in her life, was desperately in need of $100 and was wondering if God could send her the money. Well the young lady was deeply touched and made a collection from her fellow workmates and collected $90 and sent it off to the old lady. A few weeks later another letter arrived addressed to God, so the young lady opened it and it read "Thank you for the money, God, I deeply appreciate it, however I only received $90. It must have been those bastards at the Post Office." %% A sailor was going on his first shore leave in 6 months and he was starved for female companionship. He decided that he would marry the first available woman that he saw. So, after leaving the ship and checking into a hotel, he headed for a nearby bar. Of course, the first woman he saw was old and ugly, but he asked her to marry him and she accepted. They went to the courthouse and were quickly married. He dragged her back to the hotel with him and rushed her into his room. He undressed and got into bed but she disappeared into the bathroom. He waited a minute then called to her. "Honey, I'm ready for you," he called. "Just a minute, I'm taking off my wig," she answered. He waited then called again. "Okay, just let me take out my teeth," she said this time. The sailor waited patiently then said, "I can't wait much longer. Hurry up." "Almost done, I just need to remove my wooden leg," she replied. The sailor lost his patience with this remark and yelled, "Well, I'm tired of waiting. You know what parts I want...just throw them out here!" %% A woman diagnosed as having a brain tumor was told by her doctor that she would need the transplant of a one-pound brain. The doctor then asked, "What type of brain do you want?" "What type?" the woman asked. "Yes," replied the doctor. "There is a substantial difference in price. For example, a one-pound brain of a surgeon costs $60,000, while you can get a one-pound brain of a nuclear physicist for $50,000, and so on. "Can you give me a one-pound lawyer's brain? Ever since I was a little girl I've dreamed of being a trial attorney." "That's $250,000," the doctor replied. "Why so much? the woman asked. "That's over four times what a surgeon's brain costs." "Do you have any idea how many lawyers it takes to produce a pound of brain?" the doctor replied. %% A woman goes in to see her doctor. She says, 'Doctor, I have this terrible problem! Every time I go to the bathroom, nickels come out!' The doctor says, 'Don't worry. Just go home, rest with your feet up, and come back in a week.' She comes back a week later, very upset. 'Doctor, it's getting worse! Every time I go to the bathroom now, *quarters* come out!' The doctor says, 'Don't worry. Go home, rest with your feet up, and come back in a week.' Another week later, she returns, on the edge of hysteria. 'Doctor, it's terrible! Every time I go to the bathroom, SILVER DOLLARS come out!! What's wrong with me?!?!' The doctor says, 'Relax!! You're just going through your change!' %% An 80 year woman married an 85 year old man. After about 6 months together the woman wasn't feeling well and she went to her doctor. The doctor examined and said Congratulations Mrs. Jones, you're going to be a mother. "Get serious Doctor, I'm 80". "I know" said the Doctor, "this morning I would have said it was impossible, but this afternoon you are a medical miracle". "I'll be damned" she replied and stormed out of the office. She walked down the hall and around the corner to where the telephones were. In a rage, she dialed her husband. "Hello" she heard in his familiar halting voice. She screamed "You rotten son of a bitch. You got me pregnant!" There was a pause on the line. Finally her husband answered "Who's calling please?" %% An American deaf person meets two German deaf persons, and the latter two aren't too friendly. The American asks why, and the first German indicates that he became deaf due to American bombing during the war. The second German indicates the same. The Germans then ask the American how he became deaf. The American answers, "German measles." %% An Arab diplomat visiting the U.S. for the first time was being wined and dined by the State Department. The Grand Emir was unused to the salt in American Foods (french fries, cheeses, anchovies, etc.), and was constantly sending his manservant Abdul to fetch him a glass of water. Time and time again Abdul would scamper off and return with a glass of water, but then came the time when he returned empty-handed. "Abdul, you bastard son of an ugly camel, where is my water?" demanded the Grand Emir. "A thousand pardons, O Illustrious One," stammered the wretched Abdul. "White man sit on well." %% An F-4 was flying escort with a B-52 and generally making a nuisance of himself by flying rolls around the lumbering old bomber. The message for the B-52 crew was, "Anything you can do, I can do better." Not to be outdone, the bomber pilot announced that he would rise to the challenge. The B-52 continued its flight, straight and level, however. Perplexed, the fighter pilot asked, "So? What did you do?" "We just shut down two engines." %% And then there was Pac-Bell's resident expert on fiber-optic communications. Sort of a specialist in light conversation. %% At a convention of biological scientists one researcher remarks to another, "Did you know that in our lab we have switched from mice to lawyers for our experiments?" "Really?" the other replied, "Why did you switch?" "Well, for two reasons. First we found that lawyers are far more plentiful, and second, the lab assistants don't get so attached to them." %% At a doctors' convention in Switzerland, a conversation was taking place in a tavern after the day's lectures were over. An Israeli doctor said, "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one person and put it in another and have him looking for work in six weeks." A German doctor said, "That's nothing. In Germany, we can take a lung out of one person and put it in someone else and have him looking for work in four weeks." A Russian doctor said, "In my country, medicine is so advanced that we can take half a heart from one person, put it in another, and have them both looking for work in two weeks." An American doctor, not wanting to be outdone, said, "That's nothing. We can take an asshole out of Hollywood, put him in the White House, and have half the nation lookin for work the next day." %% At an elegant dinner party, Lady Astor once leaned across the table to remark, "If you were my husband, Winston, I'd poison your coffee." "And if you were my wife, I'd beat the shit out of you," came Churchill's unhesitating retort. %% At the Olympics in the Soviet Union, Brezhnev started a speech at the opening ceremonies. He began as follows: "Oh...." "Ooooo...." "Oh...." "Ooo...." "Ooohh." until one of his advisors quietly pointed out that the Olympic symbol was not a part of the speech to read. %% Because of one paragraph the bank took off of his property, it was clause and effects. %% COWBOY WALLY BEER "Real beer. Manly beer. Ripsnortin' pukearama. Dammit." -- The Cowboy Wally Show %% Churchill was given to reading in the bathtub and, while staying at the White House, he once became so engrossed in an account of the Battle of Fonteney that he forgot President Roosevelt was due to drop by to discuss the upcoming conference in Yalta. At the appointed hour, the President was wheeled into Churchill's quarters only to be informed that the Prime Minister had not finished bathing. Roosevelt was about to apologize for the intrusion and depart when Churchill, puffing his customary cigar, strode into the room stark naked and greeted the nonplussed world leader with a terse, "What are you staring at, homo?" %% During the darkest days of World War II, when each night brought waves of Luftwaffe bombers raining death and destruction on a near-defenseless London, Prime Minister Churchill went on the air to address the British people. "I read this morning's paper that Herr Hitler plans to wring England's neck like that of a chicken," he began, "and I was reminded of what the Irish poacher said as he stood on the gallows. Its seems the poor fellow was approached by a well-meaning if somewhat overzealous priest who, in horrific detail, described the unfading torments of Hades which awaited him if he did not repent of his misdeeds. The condemned man listened patiently to all that the priest had to say, and when he was done, grinned broadly and replied, 'Eat it raw, fuzz nuts.'" %% Eager to know the result of a physics exam he had taken, my brother asked his teacher, "How far am I from making an 'A' in this course?" Replied the instructor, "Do you want that in light years?" %% For three years, the young attorney had been taking his brief vacations at this country inn. The last time he'd finally managed an affair with the innkeeper's daughter. Looking forward to an exciting few days, he dragged his suitcase up the stairs of the inn, then stopped short. There sat his lover with an infant on her lap! "Helen, why didn't you write when you learned you were pregnant?" he cried. "I would have rushed up here, we could have gotten married, and the baby would have my name!" "Well," she said, "when my folks found out about my condition, we sat up all night talkin' and talkin' and decided it would be better to have a bastard in the family than a lawyer." %% Found on a company cafeteria door: I wished now that I had gone to the restaurant across the street where the food had at least the merit of being tasteless. %% Fred walks into a psychiatrists office one day and says to the psychiatrist, "Doc, I don't understand what's going on with me. It's really strange, sometimes I feel like a teepee." The doctor thinks about it for a while and then urges the man to continue. So, the man continues, "And sometimes I feel like a wigwam." To which the doctor says "I wouldn't worry about it, Fred, you're just two tents." %% God decided to take the devil to court and settle their differences once and for all. When Satan heard this, he laughed and said, "And where do you think you're going to find a lawyer?" %% He had a lot of trouble in geometry, he thought the thing opposite the right angle in a right-angled triangle was a hippopotamus. %% I once had a friend named Joe Gordon. He was a miner who worked down in southeast Ohio in the coal mines. One fine Monday morning in the spring, Joe was shaving and listening to the radio when the disk jockey said, "... and we hope you all remembered that Daylight Savings time started over the weekend. Otherwise, you're an hour late!" "Oh no!" Joe thought to himself. "I'm going to be late for work!!" So Joe hopped in his car and drove off to work. Now, it just so happens that in the area where Joe lived, the roads were very narrow, and little more than ruts in the ground. It was impossible to pass anyone on these roads. Therefore, you can understand how upset Joe got when he rounded a hill and saw in front of him a little old lady driving 3 miles per hour!! After about five minutes of this, Joe got really ticked. He was thinking of someway to get rid of this lady, when he saw an emergency telephone off to the side of the road. So what does he do? He hops out of his car, runs over to the phone booth, and calls the cops, who come and arrest the little old lady!! Do you know what the charges were??? Simple: Contributing to the delinquency of a miner !!! %% I've decided to try my hand at art. My first painting will be an outdoor portrait: a great field, in the middle of which stands a lone gong. A stylized characterization of the West Wind will be blowing softly over the gong. I will call it: "Gong With the Wind." %% In filling out a job application, he put as his school, Vietnam, Clash of 1973. %% It seems that there was this American who was visiting up in the northern part of Canada and decided that he wanted to become an Eskimo. So, one night while hanging out at the area bar, he met some Eskimos and told them of his desire. "So, you want to be an Eskimo, huh? Well, there are three s steps you must complete before you can truly be an Eskimo," said the first Eskimo. "Yes," said the second Eskimo, "first you must drink an entire bottle of Yukon Jack by yourself, then you must kill a polar bear, and lastly, you must make love to an Eskimo woman. "That's easy enough," said the American. "Let's get to it!" So, they sat and watched the American drink himself silly on a whole bottle of Yukon Jack. Soon, he could barely walk or talk and he got up and stumbled out of the bar mumbling, "polar bear, polar bear." The 2 Eskimos laughed thinking that he would never make it home. About 4 hours later, the American showed up at the bar. He was head to toe bruises, scrapes and cuts. The 2 Eskimos were nothing but astounded. Then, the American asked, "Now where's that Eskimo bitch I gotta kill?" %% Living in Moscow in 1977, there was a report on the short-wave radio that some Soviet musician had defected in New York. The NEXT DAY, somebody said, "You know what a Soviet trio is? -- A Soviet quartet returning from New York." %% On a bright, warm spring day, somewhere on Vancouver Island a certain resident of East Indian origin was shaking his rug on his front porch. A passerby saw him, couldn't help himself and blurted, "What is the problem? Can't get it started?" %% On the morning of my son's wedding, he noticed that one of the tires on his car was flat. He went to a nearby garage to have the tire changed, and while the attendant was working, my son nervously exclaimed, "I'm getting married this afternoon." The attendant looked at him, shook his head and said, "Gee, today really isn't your day, is it?" %% One afternoon The Sea rolled into the office of Alfred Werner, clinical psychologist. The doctor smiled; he hadn't seen his old friend in ages. "Well, well! Long time no sea! How are you doing?" "Swell," replied the Sea saltily. "Then what, Pacifically, is the problem?" "Well," the Sea swished sadly, "I'm getting tired of just going in and out every day, in and out, in and out, in and--" "I understand," Dr. Werner interrupted hastily, "but I fear there's nothing to be done about it. For you see, my friend, you're just fit to be tide." %% One day a city dweller decided to take a ride in the country. He hopped into his fancy, imported sportscar, zipped out along the big highway for a while, then got off and drove along a very rural dirt road in the middle of farm country. After a while, he came across a farmer who was out in the fields, driving a tractor. Funny thing was, the farmer didn't seem to be wearing any pants. "Hey farmer, how come you're not wearing any pants?" "Well, city boy, th' other day I went out a-workin' in the fields, an' I plum fergot t' wear mah shirt. Got back to th' house that night, and mah neck was stiffer than a oak-wood board. Now this here's mah wife's idea." %% One is reminded of the society for the preservation of sea otters whose motto was "Do unto otters as you would have otters do unto you." %% One morning Jim Donini strolled over to my camp site located by the generator. He brought news of a recent arrival I had to meet. John Long was his name and climbing was his game. John was brash and outspoken with a precocious appetite for the most difficult routes-- of which he had a familiar list. Produced by Peter Haan, this catalog recorded only hard Yosemite routes done in the past two years. -- Jim Bridwell, "Largo's Apprenticeship" 1970 %% Recently, Munich, Germany was having a severe problem with there dog population. It was skyrocketing beyond belief. In a matter of a couple of weeks, the population doubled and then even tripled. They had to put together a special emergency committee to solve the problem. But, the dogs continued to multiply. The dogs started to infest Munich's neighboring city's. One day, the committee got a call from a nearby mill. The man was frantic. "Please, you've got to send help! The hills are alive with the hounds of Munich!" %% Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, an honest lawyer and an old drunk are walking down the street together when they simultaneously spot a hundred dollar bill. Who gets it? The old drunk, of course, the other three are mythological creatures. %% Seems a fire started on some grassland near a farm in Indiana. The fire department from the near-by town was called to put the fire out. The fire proved to be more than the small town fire department could handle. Someone suggested that a rural volunteer fire department be called. And though there was doubt that they would be of any assistance, the call was made. The volunteer fire department arrived in a dilapidated old fire truck. They drove straight towards the fire and stopped in the middle of the flames. The volunteer firemen jumped off the truck and frantically started spraying water in all directions. Soon they had snuffed out the center of the fire, breaking the blaze into two easily controllable parts. The farmer was so impressed with the volunteer fire department's work, and so grateful that his farm had been spared, that right there on the spot he presented the volunteer fire department with a check for $1000. A local news reporter asked the volunteer fire captain what the department planned to do with the funds. "That should be obvious," he responded, "the first thing we're gonna do is get the brakes fixed on that damned fire truck." %% Shortly after Churchill had grown a moustache, he was accosted by a certain young lady whose political views were in direct opposition to his own. Fancying herself something of a wag, she exclaimed, "Mr. Churchill, I care for neither your politics nor your moustache." Unabashed, the young statesman regarded her quietly for a moment, the wryly commented, "Suck my dick." %% Sir Winston carried on a life-long feud with Labour Party leader Aneurin Bevan and, on one occasion, while Mr. Bevan was delivering as unusually long speech to the House of Commons, Churchill slumped into his seat and appeared to doze off. When Bevan noticed this, he inquired in his loudest voice, "Must the right honorable gentleman fall asleep during my speech?" Receiving no reply, Mr. Bevan continued until, a few minutes later, the sound of snoring was distinctly audible to all present. This time Mr. Bevan slammed his hand on the rail and fairly shouted, "Until now, the Conservative Party had usually managed to conceal the fact that it was asleep." Without even opening his eyes, Churchill quiped, "Flake off, touch-hole" and unconcernedly resumed his nap. %% Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% Some Christmas Cheer??? Ever hear of Glogg? It's a scandinavian holiday drink. Here's how it is made: Needed: fifth of dry Red Wine fifth of Aquavit (I used Vodka to good effect) 1 and 1/2 inch piece of cinnamon 10 cardammon seeds 1 cup raisins 4 dried figs 1 cup blanched or flaked almonds a few pieces of dried orange peel 5 cloves 1/2 lb. sugar cubes Heat up the wine and hard stuff (which may be substituted with wine for the faint of heart) in a big pot after adding all the other stuff EXCEPT the sugar cubes. Just when it reaches boiling, put the sugar in a wire strainer, moisten it in the hot brew, lift it out and ignite it with a match. Dip the sugar several times in the liquid until it is all dissolved. Serve hot in cups with a few raisins and almonds in each cup. Enjoy. N.B. Aquavit may be hard to find and expensive to boot. Use it only if you really have a deep-seated desire to be fussy, or if you are of Swedish extraction. %% Some go up, some go down Some go thirsty, some just drown "That's the law 'round here" Said the King of Sunset Town -- Mark Dadgar, NeXT SysAdmin, mdadgar@wma.com %% THE PHILOSOPHER'S SONG -- by The Bruces Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable; Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could drink you under the table David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel; And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel. There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya' 'Bout the raising of the wrist. Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed... John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill. Plato, they say, could stick it away, Half a crate of whiskey every day. Aristotle, Aristotle, was a bugger for the bottle, Hobbes was fond of his dram; And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am." Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed, A lovely little thinker, But a bugger when he's pissed. -- Monty Python %% THE REAL ANSWER: Marijuana is still illegal because enough people have not yet stood up together and said: `` THIS IS STUPID!! I WANT CANNABIS HEMP LEGAL!!! FOR PRODUCTS; FOR MEDICINE; FOR FOOD; FOR FUN; FOR GOODNESS'S SAKE! ISN'T THAT WHAT LIFE'S ALL ABOUT ? '' -- Richard William Jones, rj3@oak2.doc.ic.ac.uk %% The form ruler Russia and his wife were called Tsar and Tsarina, so clearly their children were called Tsardines. %% There it was. It was small, plastic, round, looking for all the world like a cap, or a plug, to some inconceivably important machine. They all stood around it, staring, wondering, thinking about where it came from. Nobody knew. Experts were called in. They, too, were baffled. Days passed. Then someone new arrived. He took one look at it and was astounded. The mere sight of it surprised him to no end. People started to think that he knew what it was. Finally they asked him. "Do you know what it is?" they asked him. "No," he said, "but I have one at home just like it." %% There once was this swami who lived above a delicatessen and one day had decided to make a stop in to the deli for some liver. Well he went in and ordered the liver. And while the clerk was weighing out the liver the boss(who was known to be real cheap-skate) whispered to the clerk, "Weigh down upon the swami's liver." %% There was once a pastor who happened to be a golf fanatic. One particular Sunday morning, he decided that it was so golf-perfect outside that he called in sick and took off to the golf course. This did not go unnoticed by the angel Gabriel and he promptly notified St. Peter of the transgression. St. Peter agreed that this was indeed a serious offense and that it must be punished. The pastor came to a short par 3, and promptly hit a hole-in-one. Gabriel asked St. Peter- "I thought you were going to punish him!! Instead, you granted him a hole-in-one, his life's dream!!" "Ahhh," replied St. Peter, "but who is he going to be able to tell??" %% There was once a salesman who had an outstanding record for selling toothbrushes. His boss, wondering at this unlikely success, sent a man out to follow the salesman on rounds to see what pitch he gave that brought such good results. It was soon found that this particular salesman went to the corner of a busy street and opened up his briefcase, and on one side was the assortment of toothbrushes, and on the other side a bag of potato chips and a small bowl of brownish stuff. He would grab a likely customer and give them the following pitch. "Good morning, ma'am, this is a commercial promotion for ------- brand of chip dip. Would you care to give it a try?" At that point the person would try it, then spit it out and scream in utter disgust. "This tastes like shit!" The salesman would smile and say, "It is. You want to buy a toothbrush?" %% There was once a young man who was very fond of illicit vegetable matter that is commonly smoked to get high. Anyway, one day, while he was cleaning his stash of extremely potent stuff ( high oil content) he was called to the phone. His friend, who had already consumed a great portion of the matter thought he would help out in the cleaning. Unfortunately, he was new to the game so he tried to separate the stems and seeds by cleaning the pot with a soap solution. Needless to say, when the hero of our story returned from the phone he was extremely upset, to say the least. However, he didn't have time to cry since the phone call informed him that his wife's car had broken down and he had to go out to help her fix it. He scooped up the messy bag of soapy resinous cannabis and drove out to the broken down car. When he arrived he immediately realized that the car had run out of oil. Unfortunately, he didn't have any oil, but he did have the bag of greasy marijuana. He put the wet pot into the cars engine and started up the car. It ran fine until it exploded a quarter mile down the road. There is a moral. You know what it is? - A washed pot never oils. %% There was this class you see, and they had been studying Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They were just about to wrap up this section of their study. The teacher wanted to make sure that the students knew their material. "Billy, use the word Rotterdam in a sentence." Billy replies, "We have been studying Rotterdam this week in class, and I hope to visit there one day. "Good work Billy!" says the teacher. She continues "Nancy, I want you to use the word Rotterdam in a sentence. Nancy replies,"Rotterdam is a seaport in southwest Netherlands in the Rhine delta." "Very, very good," the teacher says, "I am very impressed!" She then calls on the class cut-up. "O.K. Brian, here is your chance to show the class what you can do. Use the word Rotterdam in a sentence. Brian stands up and says "My sister went into the refrigerator, took my apple and ate it and I hope it Rotterdam teeth! %% There were three men sitting on a beach gawking at females. A somewhat attractive brunette walks by. The fist guy says, "I give her a 6"; the second says, "I give her a 7"; the third says, "I give her a 1." The other two look at him and wonder. An even better looking woman, this time a blonde, walks by. The first man says, "She gets an 8"; the second says, "She is an 8+"; and the third says, "She is a 3". Again the other two wonder about him. This time an absolutely perfect-looking redhead strolls by. The first man says excitedly, "She is a TEN!!"; the second says, "She gets an 11 !!", and the third says "She is a six". The first two guys finally ask him, "WHAT is your problem--that redhead has it all!! She has a perfect body and you give her a SIX!!" Man Budweiser scale" The other two ask, "What the hell is that??" "That's how many clydesdales it would take to pull her off my face." %% This man goes into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender brings him his glass and starts to turn when all of a sudden a small man, about a foot tall jumps onto the table and kicks the drink all over the man! The bartender jumps in surprise and says, "Oh, my god! What was that?" To which the patron replies, "He's with me.", and orders another drink. The same sequence of events is repeated again while the bartender watches in dumbfoundment. Then the little man runs off to do other mischievous things to other people in the bar. The bartender then asks the man, "Where did you meet this fellow?" "Well, I was in an antique shop and I bought an old lamp and when I got home I started polishing it up and POOF!, out came this genie." He said that I could have 1 wish and then he would disappear forever. "Yes, yes.", said the bartender anxiously, "What did you wish for?" "Well", said the man, "I wished for a 12 inch prick!!!" %% Two farmers were talking about an upcoming election. The first farmer said "Say, your six boys all grew up to be good Democrats didn't they?". The second farmer replied "All except Jake, he learned to read" %% Weyland-Yutani \ /\ / \ / \ / \/ \/ Building Better Worlds %% When the noted playwright George Bernard Shaw sent him two tickets to the opening night of his new play with a note that read: "Bring a friend, if you have one," Churchill, not to be outdone, promptly wired back: "You and your play can go fuck yourselves." %% While serving as a subaltern in the Boer War, the young Churchill was asked by a superior officer to give his opinion of the Boers as soldiers. "They're assholes, sir," he ventured, then paused briefly and added, with a whimsical smile, "They're assholes." %% _ _ / \ o / \ | | o o o | | | | _ o o o o | \_| | / \ o o o \__ | | | o o | | | | ______ | |__/ | / ___--\\ | ___/ / \--\\ \\ \ ___ <__ x x __\ | | / / \\ \\ )) \ ( " ) | | -------(---->>(@)--(@)-------\----------< >----------- | | // | | //__________ / \ ____) (___ \\ | | // __|_| ( --------- ) //// ______ /////\ \\ // | ( \ ______ / <<<< <>-----<<<<< / \\ // ( ) / / \` \__ \\ //--------------------------------------------------------------\\ Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether. -- H. S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" %% "What?" you cry. "Wizards sometimes must endure torture?" And it is true, for being a wizard does not exempt you from any of the trials and tribulations experienced by other humans. But I would ask you to consider just what you mean by "torture." What of those occasions when you save a kingdom and then are forced to sit there and listen for hours to endless numbers of boring elected officials extolling your praises while the kingdom's tax collectors repossess nine-tenths of what you gainfully earned at your task? Is this not torture? What about the times when you are on the verge of creating a spell that will give you inner peace at last and your spouse bursts into your study and tells you to clean up the mess because all of your in-laws are coming to stay for three weeks, and we will have to set up a bed in here because Aunt Sadie needs a place to sleep? Is this not torture? And say you are attending a wizard's convention and are sure that your gold production spell will win first prize in the competition, and then they give the award to the animal husbandry spell of some part-time wizard because the judge has a particular fondness for pigs? Is this not -- but why belabor the obvious? By now you surely see my point. Laugh in the face of torture! It is, after all, no worse than what they do to you every other day of the week. -- Ask Ebenezum: The Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms Answers the Four Hundred Most Asked Questions about Wizardry, fourth edition %% "Why don't you conjure a legendary city, full of magic spells and mystic beasts, out of thin air?" the uninformed client asks. "Well, where would you put it?" the wise wizard replies. "Have you seen the price of real estate?" -- Ebenezum The Wizard's Handy Guide To Better Wizard/Client Relationships, fourth edition %% 'Never trust another sorcerer' is a saying unfortunately all too common among magical practitioners. Actually, there are many instances where one can easily trust a fellow magician, such as cases where no money is involved, or when the other mage is operating at such a distance that his spells can't possibly affect you. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XIV %% (father figure his remains just a face in my memory) heavy-lidded somber-visage familiar but not its bags-under-the-eyes stillness a cosmetic mock-up lips-of-grey aimed sky-ward (the sneer is gone) his remains just a hand in my memory) cold folded-knuckles across a chest gone-granite plaster-of-paris prayer-hands chipped-nails and workaday-callouses ever-ready stabbing-finger (the dirt is gone) his remains just a voice in my memory) drill-sergeant volume set too-low drunken-bellow un-heard vocal-blades practice-sharp now sheathed scornful words force-removed a verbal tattoo-gone-bad (the rasp is gone) his remains just a casket in my memory) bronze-handles glint smiling sun-ward dirt-walls crumble and are vanguard as closing-mahogany-lid sends him fate-wise taxi-ed down-ward free and home-at-last (the pleasure is mine) -- (C) 1987 Stan Zachery Zukowski %% A man was walking through the park with his 3 year old son and they saw two dogs mating. The boy asked his dad, " Daddy, what're those dogs doing?" And dad, not wanting to lie to his son but also not wanting to be to graphic, said, " Well, son... They're ....um.... they're making puppies.". " Aw that's nice", replied his son. Dad was very relieved that his son would accept that and drop the subject. Now later that night, the boy walked into Mom and Dad's room and caught them going at it. " Hey Daddy, what're you and Mom doing?" "Um...Er... Well Son, we're making you a little brother." " Aww, flip her over Dad, I want a puppy!" %% A mother mouse was taking her large brood for a stroll across the kitchen floor one day when the local cat, by a feat of stealth unusual even for its species, managed to trap them in a corner. The children cowered, terrified by this fearsome beast, plaintively crying, "Help, Mother! Save us! Save us! We're scared, Mother!" Mother Mouse, with the hopeless valor of a parent protecting its children, turned with her teeth bared to the cat towering huge above them and suddenly began to bark in a fashion that would have done any Doberman proud. The startled cat fled in fear for its life. As her grateful offspring flocked around her shouting "Oh, Mother, you saved us!" and "Yay! You scared the cat away!" she turned to them purposefully and declared: "You see how useful it is to know a second language?" %% A priest was walking along the cliffs at Dover when he came upon two locals pulling another man ashore on the end of a rope. "That's what I like to see", said the priest, "A man helping his fellow man". As he was walking away, one local remarked to the other, "Well, he sure doesn't know the first thing about shark fishing." %% A truck driver was driving down the road one day and sees a hippie hitch-hiking. The truck driver picks him up and the two continue down the road. The guys hair is really long but the trucker decides not to say anything. After about 15 or 20 minutes of total silence, the hippie says, 'Well?' 'Well, what?' responded the truck driver. 'Aren't you going to ask me whether I'm a man or a woman?' asked the hitch-hiker. 'Doesn't matter,' replied the trucker, 'I'm gonna fuck you anyway.' %% A wizard is only as good as his spells," people will often say. It is telling however, that this statement is only made by people who have never been wizards themselves. Those of us who have chosen to pursue a sorcerous career know that a knowledge of spells is only one small facet of the successful magician. Equally vital are a quick wit, a soothing tongue, and, perhaps most important, a thorough knowledge of back alleys, underground passageways, and particularly dense patches of forest, for those times when the spell you knew so well doesn't quite work after all. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I %% A wizard must always know how to use words. Practice smiling as you recite the following simple exercise. First: "The spell has not worked. It is best that you get out of your house before it explodes." Second: "The spell has not worked, It is best I get out of here before you explode." And third: "The spell has not worked. Will you please pay me the rest of my retainer before your money explodes with you?" Delivering lines like these with conviction is the sign of a professional sorcerer. -- The Wizard Finals: A Study Guide (Third Edition) Ebenezum, Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms %% A wizard must do his best not to judge any person or thing on their first appearance. Many a human or other intelligent creature will have hidden depths to their personalities which you will only discover as you get to know them and work with them; and hidden cash reserves, which you can bill them for regularly as this aforementioned knowledge process takes place. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LVI %% A wizard's reputation is his bond, or so the sages say. And, as all learned men know, a reputation is difficult to build, and all too easily besmirched. The wizard with a fallen reputation is often led to less savory forms of employ, and, while these sometimes pay better than whatever the wizard was doing before, they are not the sort of thing one writes home to Mother about. The successful wizard, therefore, should develop three or four reputations simultaneously, and then, happily, will have one for every occasion. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XIII %% After dispatching the rest of the pitch, I prepared to belay the lad. He started with robust ease, using his face climbing skills on the large edges that garnished one side of the crack. But the edges vanished at the bolt and the climb became more typical of Yosemite; in a word-- smooth. John attacked the crack with force. His muscles bulged and his veins popped. He neared the polished six- inch-wide vertical crux section with little left but courage. Lactic acid crescendoed as panic replaced what little technique he had. He tried to slump onto the rope for a cheater's rest but I was having none of it and paid out slack in kind. If he made it up, I wanted him to know he had done it on his own. His face flushed with effort, his once powerful arms quivered, but his heart wouldn't quit until the synapse collapsed. Just then I took pity and divulged the secret rest hold he hadn't seen behind his back. John's hand shot to it like a chameleon's tongue. Saved! Air flooded into his lungs in great vacuum-cleaner rushes. After a short rest he swam his way to the top and my congratulations. -- Jim Bridwell, "Largo's Apprenticeship" 1970 %% And what do you do if you come upon a dark cave? Then the knowledgeable wizard would say: "Into darkness, let there be light." And the truly knowledgeable wizard would add: "Let there also be cheese, bread, fresh vegetables, plenteous members of the opposite sex, and enough mead to make it a thoroughly enjoyable weekend!" -- Thirty Days to Better Wizardry, by Ebenezum, Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms, fourth edition %% And what is the professional wizard's greatest reward for completing a particularly arduous and dangerous task? Is it the accolades of a grateful populace? Is it huge amounts of gold and silver tossed about his feet? Is it the complementary vacation in the pleasure gardens of Vushta, or his official removal from the tax rolls? Although all of these other factors are important for the wizard to feel truly honored, they pale before the professional wizard's basic and oh-so-necessary demand: The stipulation that he never has to repeat that particularly arduous and dangerous task, or one even remotely like it, for as long as he shall live. Truly professional wizards, after all, must set priorities. -- How to Hire a Wizard and Still Profit From the Upcoming Netherhells Crisis, by Ebenezum, Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms (book still in progress) %% At the base, John announced his desire to lead the first pitch, a chimney of confining dimensions. I thought, Good enough--it would be hard to fall out due to John's already sturdy stature. Off he charged like bull at the cape. With a display of power, if not grace, he soon found himself at the belay. I followed using the practiced technique of a Yosemite regular, and quickly arrived at his side. -- Jim Bridwell, "Largo's Apprenticeship" 1970 %% Beginnings and endings are, for the most part, artificial constructs. You say you begin when you are born, but what of those months spent growing in the womb? Endings are hazier still, for further things may occur that extend and enlarge the earlier story. And that is my final sentence on the subject. Or perhaps this one is the final sentence. No, most assuredly what I write now is the final word on the matter. But now that I think upon it, perhaps this-- -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LVII (Abridged) %% Being trapped in the Netherhells is not the most fearsome thing that can happen to you. It is, in fact, probably no worse than being trapped in a cave for a weekend with all your spouse's relatives, and, in most cases, will not lead to total drooling gibbering madness, as is the popular misconception. If, on the other hand, you find yourself trapped in the Netherhells for a weekend with all your spouse's relatives, well, sometimes drooling and gibbering can be fun. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXIII %% Casual amusement can be one of a wizard's greatest problems. After all, when one can conjure virtually anything, what can one do to 'get away from it all?' Different wizards arrive at different solutions for their entertainment. A sorcerer of my acquaintance decided to increase his physical prowess through a vigorous program of exercise but found that his new muscles were wont to rip through his robes midconjure. Another mage decided to develop the interplay between tongue and teeth so that he could exactly reproduce any insect noise imaginable. He became so successful at this that they discovered his corpse one midsummer's eve, suffocated by six thousand three hundred and two amorous katydids. And the wizard who tried to start personal communications between humans and sheep... well, the less said the better. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XLIV %% Contrary to rumor, working side by side with a group of fellow wizards is not the most unpleasant task in which a magician might participate. In fact, I can think of numerous other experiences, such as breaking both arms and legs while being pursued by a ravenous demon, which, under certain conditions, could conceivably be even worse. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXII %% Ebenezum: There are a number of ways of dealing with extreme stress. For example, when all about you is going wrong and it looks as if you might not survive your current circumstances, it is often helpful to think of a pleasant thought. Interviewer: Do you mean, for example, how good it will feel to strangle, pummel, and utterly destroy my enemy? Ebenezum: Well, no, you do not quite have the spirit of it. Think rather of a flower, or rather, a group of flowers. Picture bright yellow daisies, or stately red roses, full and fragrant. And now that you have this thought in your mind, think how lovely those flowers will look on the grave of your enemy once he has been strangled, pummeled, and utterly destroyed. It is only in this way that the besieged wizard may find inner peace. -- Conversations With Ebenezum; A Series of Dialogues With the Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms, fourth edition %% Even for a wizard there will often come times when someone close to you, perhaps even your spouse, criticizes your habits by comparing them to those of animals. This is distinctly unfair to the animals, who have far better habits than we in many areas. When, for example, have you seen a frog collecting taxes or a squirrel running for electoral office? Present arguments like these to those people who criticize you. If they still do not see the wisdom of your ways, you may then feel free to bite them. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. IX %% Every sorcerer should explore as much of the world as he can, for travel is enlightening. There are certain circumstances, such as a major spell gone awry, or an influential customer enraged at the size of your fee, where travel becomes more enlightening still. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. V %% Favorite Tabloid Headlines: * Baby born with winning lotto ticket * Princess Di to become an American * Elvis' face appears in Maytag window during rinse cycle * Bigfoot ate my twins * Jane Wyman: "Life with Ron prepared me for 'Falcon Crest' role" * Why Mr. T. sleeps with a night-light * Exclusive: Why Pulitzer panel shuns tabloids -- Extracted from a rec.humor article %% For T. M., wherever I may find her Never had I felt so good, and never have I felt so bad. Words passed, tales told, secrets exposed at long last to a kindred soul. Words past, slipped away into the jagged edges of my memory. I strain to recall what happened, why everything fell to pieces, but I cannot find you. Where have you gone? Where were you all those days and nights? The shell one uses is just a tool. Seth I. Rich Math/Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University Rabbits on walls, no problem. %% Heaven is: an American salary, an English house, a Chinese cook, and a Japanese wife. Hell is: a Chinese salary, a Japanese house, an English cook, and an American wife. -- Peter Kegelman %% Heroics can be costly and involve some degree of personal danger for the participating wizard. But for the truly resourceful magician, this does not have to be! Consider the advantages of long-distance magic, by which you may gain all the publicity value and save all the expense. But, you say, don't heroes have to be present at the battle? For the properly prepared mage, nothing could be more heroic than a well-timed combination of printed handbills, subtly placed rumor, and perhaps a brief personal appearance tour. Still expensive? Nonsense! Do you know how much a heroic wizard can charge for personal appearances? -- Ebenezum The Wizard's Handy Pocket Guide To Everyday Wizardry %% In a world that was totally objective and fair, size should make no difference in the worth of any individual or creature. But, then again, wizards should not have to work for a living, either. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXIX %% In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff [head of RCA] made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." ... There is nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form. ... It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but _add_ itself on to what we already are. -- Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (1964) %% In magic, as in all true professions, there are rules by which you must play. At least, you must play by them until such time as you can get away with something else. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I (Preface) %% It is a mistake to think of all demons as being exactly alike. Some are short while others are tall; some are yellow, others are blue; some are nasty and others are extremely nasty. Some of the nastiest are quite fast as well. Should you encounter one of these, it is a mistake to think at all. Much more appropriate are such responses as running, screaming, and the very rapid formation of a last will and testament. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. IX %% It is of tremendous importance, when a wizard enters a battle, that he should have prepared sufficient spells beforehand to meet anything that he might face during the coming fight. It is even more important that the wizard act bravely during the course of the fight, so that he might do credit to the names of wizards everywhere. And what happens should the magician's army lose the fray? Of the greatest importance of all, therefore, is the wizard's insistence that, before the battle, he be paid in full. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. III %% It seems that Mary Poppins has moved to California. Yep, she has started a business telling people's fortunes. But, she doesn't read palms or tea leaves, she smells one's breath. Thats, right, the sign outside reads: Super California Mystic Expert Halitosis %% John was outspoken, to say the least but only because he could usually back up his words with action. He started using the pure brute strength of his powerful arms, his feet flailing for purchase. Through the echo chamber of the flake, I could hear his locomotive breathing, amplified. Once again he was desperate, but his great heart and the desire of his ego kept him afloat. He'd thrashed and struggled to the crux, but now hadn't a clue. His life signs ebbed as I shouted down instructions which he followed to the letter. A hand flashed to the finned edge of the flake and his head and torso popped into view, gasping for air. A few power pulls and he'd done it. -- Jim Bridwell, "Largo's Apprenticeship" 1970 %% Magic weapons can, on occasion, be of great use, yet one more part of the truly rounded wizard's arsenal of tricks, spells, and remarks for all occasions. However, the thoroughly prepared mage will find certain spells of even more importance than these, especially those enchantments which produce magic wings, magic carpets, and magic running boots, for those times when the rest of you arsenal fails you completely. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LVII %% Magicians must exercise caution in all things. Each of you has heard the story of the mage who perfected the gold producing spell, only to be crushed by his newfound wealth. Less well known is the story of the sorcerer who turned everyone he didn't like into a toad, until the day he exercised the spell on an entire unfriendly village and was found the next morning hopped to death. Then, of course, there is the extremely unpleasant story of the wizard who doubled as a gentleman farmer, and his perfection of a manure abundance spell. Whether this latter mage is still alive or not is open to debate, for no one has ever had the wherewithal to visit the scene of his accident to find out. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XII %% Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says the treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up. Man bursts into tears. "But doctor . . . I am Pagliacci." %% Monday: In Christian countries, the day after the football game. -- paraphrased from Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" -- he used baseball instead %% Nothing is quite so unexpected as the truth. If, for example, you find your spells inadequate to defeat the local dragon, immediately go to your employers and apologize profusely. They should be so taken aback by your show of humility that you will have plenty of time to hastily vacate the area, allowing the dragon to eat your employers rather than you, and thus halt any ugly rumors they might have spread about your competence. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXIII %% One day a man comes home from work and sees his newlywed wife sliding down the banister. When she got to the bottom, she climbed the stairs and slid down again. Somewhat confused, the husband asks his bride, 'honey, what in the world are you doing?' 'Oh,' replies the woman, 'I'm just warming up your dinner.' %% Perhaps I have given you the wrong impression. A wizard's life is not all fame, fortune and frivolity. There must be periods of rest as well, when a wizard should find a safe retreat where he can seclude himself from sorcery and restore his health and vitality in the proper ascetic atmosphere. While lengthy retreats can deplete a wizard's fortunes, I have always preferred the ascetic atmosphere present in the pleasure gardens of Vushta, where a dozen handmaidens can attend to your every need. And the budget-conscious sorcerer should be sure to ask about their special mid-week retreat package plans. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XCV (Special annual supplement) %% Q: And how do professional wizards cope with stress? A: Stress? The real wizard doesn't even recognize the meaning of the word. Why are you still asking me questions? Can't you see I'm busy? This spell is two days overdue! You're sitting on my reference books! -- "A Conversation with Ebenezum, Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms," Wizard's Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Spring) %% Real World, The (n.) 1: The place generally used when referring to non-programming activities. 2: Where a computer science student goes after graduation; used pejoratively ("poor slob, he got his degree and had to go out into THE REAL WORLD"). Among programmers, discussing someone in residence there is not unlike talking about a deceased person. -- THE HACKER'S DICTIONARY %% Reasoned decision is important, and there comes a time in every wizard's life when he must decide what goal he should pursue to give true meaning to his life. Should it be money, or travel, or fame? And what of leisure and the love of women? I myself have studied many of these goals for a number of years, examining their every facet in some detail, so that, when the time comes to make that fateful decision of which I spoke, it will be reasoned in the extreme. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXI %% Regarding the nationalization of industry or private property: "Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings." -- Adolf Hitler to Herman Rauschning, pre-WWII "Why Does Socialism Continue to Appeal to Anyone?", Robert Hessen %% Religion is a personal matter, and those of us in the sorcerous profession would do well to steer clear of it. Still, you will find some situations, say a spell accidentally demolishing someone's holy temple, where you will be given the choice of (1) conversion to their belief, or (2) being sacrificed to their deity. It is only at times like this when one realizes the true depth and beauty of religions, at least until one can find some way out of town. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXI %% Reunions can be a wonderful thing, especially when neither of the reunited parties manage to recall what separated them in the first place. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Wizard's Digest Condensed edition %% So you think you know great, nail-biting excitement, you think you know truly abject fear, you think you know total and complete despair, you think you know the incredibly degenerate underside of this world we live in, and the ridiculously despicable lengths that your fellow man can sink to, more rotten, more putrid than the lowest form of fungus... Oh. You are a sorcerer as well. Then perhaps you do. -- Further Conversations with Ebenezum, Vol. III %% Some mages balk at performing spells during an ocean voyage, preferring instead to dabble in sorcery in tiny rooms, precariously perched atop the aerie towers that this sort of magician always seems to favor. The logic of this preference has always eluded me. After all, should something go amiss with either your spell or your relationship with your employer, just think how much easier it is to swim than it is to fly. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXVIII %% Some people think of wizards as nothing more than men in pointy hats who like to go around turning people into toads. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Perhaps wizards should come together and agree on a saying or two to better humanize their profession; for instance, "Wizards are wonderful!" or "Take a wizard to lunch!" Yet I doubt this will ever occur, for wizards are by and large a solitary breed. Still, this should not stop you from trying to understand my procession. If you should offer, for example, to take a wizard to lunch, I imagine he would go gladly. And if you were to tell a wizard he wasn't wonderful, I'm sure he would be quite happy to turn you into a toad. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I %% That evening at camp a friend, Phil Gleason, stopped by and suggested that I have a try at a new route he'd been working on. Fed up with it himself, he offered me the route. As we talked, I could see the keen interest in John's eyes, so suggested that he might come along with Mark Klemens, my usual partner, and me--if he wanted. Without hesitation he grabbed at the chance. The next morning I was awakened by the drumming of John's pacing feet outside my tent. We threw some gear into a pack and walked to the coffee shop. We were too lazy to make something for ourselves, it was free because the waitress lusted for me as I did for her. After breakfast John still looked confused about the payment of the bill as we rode the shuttle bus toward the climb. The bus took us to the Ahwahnee Hotel, only a short walk from the route. Within a few minutes we stood at the base. As foretold, the flake arched above, leaning and overhanging. We drew stones and Klemens won the lead. -- Jim Bridwell, "Largo's Apprenticeship" 1970 %% The Last Word When I felt my head bow, I knew you had beaten me. I shed no tears - not near you - But held my neck bare For the blow I had been frightened Ever to accept, even in words. And now, in spite of it all, Plummeting it came. Frozen, we both waited For it's fall. Most of what you gave me I have taken into my heart And forgotten with my mind But this I remember well: The bones in my neck And the strain in your shoulders As you heaved up that huge Double blade and snapped your wrists To swing the handle down And hearing the axe's edge Nick through my flesh And creak into the block. -- Wes Peters, July 1982 %% The common folk have many sayings, all about it being darkest before the dawn and clouds with silver linings and suchlike. We in the magical trade like to express our opinions of these matters somewhat differently. A lifetime of experience will have taught the average sorcerer that no matter how hopeless the situation seems, no matter how painful and fraught with danger his options may be, no matter how close he may be to an indescribably hideous death and perhaps even eternal damnation, still, the good wizard knows, it can always get worse. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XLVI (General Introduction) %% The professional wizard, it is said, should always watch his hands. Actually, the truly professional wizard should watch a great many other things as well, including the reactions of his audience, the door or window that constitutes the nearest exit, and, perhaps most important, the constantly fluctuating interest rates on his retirement account in the First Bank of Vushta. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VI %% The sages put great stock in saying that every ending is truly a beginning, or every beginning an ending, or insisting that there are no endings or beginnings, or remarking that there is nothing new, and we are doomed to endlessly repeat ourselves. Or have I said all this before? -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LXXXVII %% There are as many styles of magic as there are magicians. While much of magic is gaudy, noisy, and easily appreciated by the masses, it goes without saying that some of the finest sorcery is also the most subtle; small, delicate changes in the fabric of being that often can only be discerned by another wizard's practiced eye. Occasionally, even a wizard as learned as myself will experience a twinge of regret that I have not yet conquered some of the most delicate aspects of my art; that, for example, I have not learned the Eastern finger magic, where, by the turn of a knuckle, the mage may make the flowers sing. And perhaps some day my fingers might learn that art, on the day they become tired from constantly carrying about the large amounts of gold I receive for performing the more gaudy and noisy magic that pays so well. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VII %% There comes a time when a wizard must put his fate totally in the hands of another. This takes great courage, and great faith in the ability of others to perform some function that is beyond you. But there are benefits to this course of action as well. Should this task reach a successful conclusion, it will show you the worthiness of your fellow beings, and lead you to trust in the providence of the universe. And, of course, should the task not be successful, there is always someone else to blame. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXVII %% There comes a time when every wizard should retire, and pass the mantle of responsibility on to younger shoulders. It behooves us, then, to teach our successors well, so that the new wizard may do honor to our names, attract the very best of clients, and be well enough paid to support our retirement home in Vushta. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LXXI %% There is talk in some learned circles in our major cities about whether or not satyrs, centaurs, griffins and certain other fantastic beasts really exist, or are only the product of the popular imagination. As a wizard, I, of course, tend to side with the satyrs, centaurs and griffins, especially when these beasts begin to doubt the existence of any learned circles in our major cities. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXVI %% There is the truth, and there are lies, and there is nothing on Earth or in the Netherhells that does not fall under one of these two headings, with the exception of politics. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LXXXVIII %% There once was this guy who was a dolphin lover. He loved dolphins so much he had a swimming pool installed in his backyard and had dolphins swimming in it. He loved his dolphins. The one thing he feared was about his dolphins dying on him, he wished they would live forever. He heard from a distant source that if he feed his his dolphins 'live seagulls' they would forever. So he attempted to steal some live seagulls to feed his dolphins. He went to to zoo and sneaked out with some live seagulls to bring home. When he got there he noticed a lion sitting on his front porch. But the lion was very meek and tame and it sat there like it was out of it. So very carefully the man tip toed and sneaked pass the lion and made it into his house with the sea gulls. The next day the man was arrested and charged with: Transporting gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises!! %% There was a country doctor who was the only doctor for miles around. He wanted to go on a fishing trip so he called the vet and asked him to look after things while he was gone. The vet asked, "Is anything happening?" The doctor replied, "Mrs. Jones is about due but I don't think the baby will come before I get back. Anyway, if it does, just deliver it. This is her third and the first two went really easily." The vet said "OK" and the doctor went on the fishing trip. When he returned, he called the vet. "How did things go while I was gone?" The vet replied "Pretty good." Dr: "Did Mrs. Jones have her baby?" Vet: "Yes, it was a 8 pound boy. Everyone's doing fine." Dr: "Did you have any trouble?" Vet: "Well, there was just one little problem." Dr: "What was that?" Vet: "I had a terrible time getting her to eat the afterbirth!" %% These two pollacks were out hunting in the woods one day when one says to the other, 'I gotta shit really bad!' 'Well, go ahead,' says the other. 'I don't have nothin' to wipe with,' says the first. 'You got a handkerchief?' asks his friend. 'Yeah,' says the first pole, 'but what am I gonna use to blow my nose later on?' 'Well, do you have a dollar?' 'Yeah, I got a dollar.' 'Well,' the second continues, 'why don't you wipe with that?' 'Okay,' says the first and runs off into the forest. After about thirty minutes, the guy is starting to get worried about his friend. He is just about to start off after him when he sees him coming out of the brush. 'Where the hell have you been? It doesn't take thirty minutes to take a shit.' 'Yeah,' says the other, 'but do you know how long it takes to wipe with three quarters, two dimes and a nickel?' %% Times Are Tough Times Are Hard Here is your Fucking Christmas Card %% What did Snow white say when told she was pregnant? I'd like to thank all the little people who made this possible. (Presumably this event started on the day that she was feeling Happy...) %% When one first arrives in Vushta, one should beware of street sellers offering forbidden delights near the outskirts of town. These first delights are far more shoddy in nature than those to be had in the inner City, and can be actively unpleasant if you do not have an affinity for goats. -- Vushta on Twenty-Five Pieces of Gold a Day, by Ebenezum, Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms, revised, updated fourth edition %% When there appears to be no hope; when all around you are screaming like lost souls and every spell you try fails to work; when it appears that chaos and evil will at last triumph over good -- then it is truly time for a vacation. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXV %% When traveling, the sages say, one must always be prepared to accept local customs. Yet there are areas of this very kingdom where one might find it customary to tax a wizard into poverty; to insist a wizard should not be paid, for magic exists only for the common good; or even to tar and feather a wizard unsuccessful at his task. Contrary to the sages, when one is traveling in these areas, one should be prepared to avoid local customs altogether. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VI %% With little hesitation I picked through the hardware and selected one nut (knowing the necessary size) and two carabiners, then started off. John looked bewildered, but said nothing, perhaps out of respect. I climbed up, clipped and moved past the bolt--purposely neglecting the rest spot. An interior crack on one side of the main fissure occasionally accepted the chosen nut. But then again, sometimes it didn't. This time it didn't and the nut slid uninhibited and unhindered down to the bolt. John's alarmed voice warned me of the mishap while I moved through the crux section. I replied casually that I was aware of the fallen protection and that it didn't matter. Actually, I had soloed the route several times and felt solid, but certainly didn't want to let on to John and thus ruin the effect of my cool composure. -- Jim Bridwell, "Largo's Apprenticeship" 1970 %% Wizards are constantly subject to negative publicity. A case in point. One elderly wizard of my acquaintance, whenever he was bothered by unexpected guests, would immediately cast one of three spells upon them, either turning them to stone, transforming them into segmented worms, or blasting them entirely out of the kingdom. Now, some wrong-headed do-gooders, hearing about the aged mage's predilections, formed an angry torch-bearing mob, forcing the now wronged wizard to flee to a distant kingdom altogether. How much better it would have been if the aged wizard had thought to inform the populace of the true benefits of the spells he used on those who came to bother him! For example, those people who have experienced it will tell you that nothing is more restful than being turned to stone, while transformation into a worm brings you closer to the earth. As to being totally blasted from the wizard's domain, I challenge you: Can you think of any other way you can travel such a great distance for free? -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XVI %% Wizards encounter periods of crisis from time to time. It comes with the job, right along with the robes and the pointy hat. Now, some wizards thrive on crisis, and there is quite a bit of gold to be made, should the wizard survive, by thrusting oneself into the thick of things. The more experienced mage, however, makes ample use of soothsaying spells, so that he may collect the monies, reassure the populace, and still have time to leave the area before the thick of things arrives. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. IV %% Wizards should not go seeking revenge, killing, or death in general. After all, revenge, killing, and death in general have a way of showing up whether you are looking for them or not. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I %% Wizards, like all mortals, need their rest. Casting spells, righting wrongs, and putting a little away for your old age can all be draining occupations. The true wizard must therefore always insist on a good night's sleep, and a few days' respite between tasks. After some particularly grueling work, a couple of weeks in the country are not out of line. In the aftermath of truly major assignments, of course, nothing less than a seaside vacation will do. And what of those situations in which a wizard's work affects the very world around him, perhaps the fabric of the cosmos itself? Well, be advised that prime accommodations in Vushta must be reserved at least two months in advance. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXIII %% You see, there were these two old men who loved baseball. They loved to go to games, watch games, listen to games on the radio, and talk baseball. However, they both knew they were reaching the end of their lives and thus decided to make a pact with each other. Whichever of the two was to die first, he would try to come back in some way and let the other know if there was baseball in heaven. Well, as the story goes, one of the men soon took sick and passed away, leaving his friend alone. But not more than a week had passed since the funeral when a ghost appeared to the old man as he was watching the Red Sox-Yankees game. (Ed.-Death=Red Sox) He looked closely and realized that it was indeed the ghost of his old friend. He had been able to come back! "You've made it back!" said the old man. "Yes, but I've got good news and bad news," said the ghost. "Tell me, my friend, is there baseball in heaven?" said the old man. "Well, yes, there is, that's the good news." "Wonderful! Now, what's the bad news?" "The bad news is...You're pitching tomorrow." %% Your average ghost is a much more complex and interesting individual than is generally imagined. Just because someone is dragging chains or has one's head perpetually in flames does not necessarily make them of a lesser class. Some ghosts, especially those with heads attached and mouths to speak through, are actually quite good conversationalists, with other-worldly stories by the score. In addition, ghosts generally subscribe to the happy custom of disappearing completely at dawn, a habit many living associates and relatives might do well to cultivate. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VI (Appendix B) %% o o \___XXX___/ XXXXX __XXXXX__ / XXX \ V %% poetry the child sits on the rug rubbing mother's makeup on the white wall fingerstreak lightning bolts shoot in random colors and directions, she sits admiring her first work mascara comets streak before her eyes lipstick teddy bears dance down the hall wonders of the universe in eye shadow and blush dazed, she absorbs her impressionist world savoring it today before the adults remind her it's just a stain i'll never grow u_up, not me jc %% "Are those cocktail-waitress fingernail marks?" I asked Colletti as he showed us these scratches on his chest. "No, those are on my back," Colletti answered. "This is where a case of cocktail shrimp fell on me. I told her to slow down a little, but you know cocktail waitresses, they seem to have a mind of their own." -- The Incredibly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O. C. and Stiggs National Lampoon, October 1982 %% "Before I begin, I'd like to recite the Lawyer's Prayer: Lord, please let there be strife and misery among your people, Lest your servant starve..." -- Clonezone takes on lawyers, from "Badger" %% "But... surely, your merciful Holiness... SOME should be exempt from such a draft?" "EXEMPT?! ... Oh, all *right*. No DEAD people." -- Cerebus %% "Can you operate it, Spock?" "Well, Jim, this computer was designed and constructed 300 million years ago by a totally alien race of methane-breathing, squidlike beings who built it using technologies unknown to us and used it for purposes we cannot conceive of and then mysteriously vanished leaving no shred of documentation as to its operation. It may take a few moments." %% "For the love of Jesus, Mr. Chiun." "Now you've done it." "For Jesus? Oh, no. We never got a day's work from Him." -- Everyone's favorite Sinanju assassins, Remo and Chiun, from the DESTROYER %% "I feel the Need..." "The Need..." "FOR SPEED!" -- Maverick and Goose in "TOP GUN" %% "I'm through with takin' falls And bouncing off the walls; Without that gun I'd have some fun And kick you in the..." "NOSE!" "Nose? Dat don't rhyme wit 'walls'!" "No, but THIS does!" >*KRUNCH!*< -- Eddie Valiant in ROGER RABBIT %% "Olive" is probably one of those flexible terms like "jinnan-tonyx"; if you must have something, use a brandied grape (fill a jar with fresh white grapes; cover with 6 parts (or more) brandy to 1 part powdered sugar; seal and leave for several weeks). I'm not sure what you'd use for xamphuor, but everything else in this matches the recipe from the book. We also call it a Jupiter sunrise when served \\very// quickly; otherwise it turns a green color hideous enough to warn incautious drinkers. %% "People these days are reluctant to read the canonical texts, but they love fiction. Not all fiction, mind you, for they are sick of exemplary themes and far prefer the obscene and fantastic. How low contemporary morals have sunk! Anyone concerned about public morality will want to retrieve the situation." -- Li Yu, in "The Carnal Prayer Mat" c. 1657 A.D. %% "THE VEIDT METHOD: I will give you bodies beyond your wildest imaginings." -- Another piece of Moore irony in WATCHMEN %% +-----+ * _\o' \---\/====/ The | ___ | | /\ `\|/' ~\\___\ / _/ ___..' Archdruid | | | | `7l== * * * -=O=- \_ / / -~_--' ~~~ ...| |.| |....../_l.................'/|\`...._/_`--_/_/-'~..................... %% +--------------+ V | /\ | / \ | / \ yes +--+---+ / I \------>| I am | \ think/ +------+ \ / \ / \/ | V +-------+ | stop | +-------+ %% A city boy went duck hunting in the country one day. While hunting he shot a duck which fell on the property of a farmer. The boy crawled over the fence to claim his kill. But, the farmer, seeing what had happened rushed out with his shotgun and yelled, "See here! That duck belongs too me!" The city boy replies, "But I shot the duck, therefore it belongs to me!" The farmer says, "It fell on my property so it belongs to me!" They continue to argue, each claiming ownership of the duck. After awhile the farmer says, "We should settle this the old-fashioned way." The city boy asks, "What is the 'old-fashioned way'?" The farmer explains, "First, I kick you in the groin. Then, you kick me in the groin and we continue in this fashion until one of us gives up. The one who wins gets the duck." The city boy, willing to do anything to get his duck and leave, agrees to the contest. The farmer draws back his leg and kicks the city boy in the groin with all his might. The city boy, in horrible pain, falls to the ground moaning and groaning. After about 10 minutes of this, the city boy stands up shakily and croaks, "Its my turn now." The farmer says, "Oh, you can have the duck", and leaves. %% A guy is in a bus station, and goes into the men's room to piss. When he walks in he sees a leprechaun with the most enormous dick he had ever seen. As he pees, he cannot avoid spying on the giant member of the tiny man dressed in green. The leprechaun zips up and the man asks him if he is indeed a real leprechaun. The little man says, "Aye me boy, I'm a leprechaun, and I can grant you three wishes." "Oh neat," comes the reply, "What do I need to do?" "Well, havin' such a large cock makes it a bit awkward with the ladies, the thing not fittin' and all... I'll grant you your three wishes if you wouldn't mind suckin' me dick until I come." The man is a bit taken aback, but agrees, because he knows he can wish for anything he wants later. After the green man has come, he starts to walk away. The guy says, "Hey, what about my three wishes?" The leprechaun asks, "How old are you me boy?" "25," he says. "Aren't you a bit too old to still be believin' in leprechauns?" %% A guy was bragging to this woman in a bar. "I can bend this horse shoe with my bare hands..." "That's nothing," she said, "I can tie up 10 miles of phone line with my mouth!!!!" %% A philanthropist decides to donate his prize dolphins to the local zoo. Upon making his donation, he reveals that the dolphins can be kept alive indefinitely by feeding them live myna birds. The zoo, not happy with the prospect of depleting their myna bird collection, decides to send an expedition to Africa to pick up some of the birds. The bird seekers land their helicopter in a large clearing in the middle of the jungle, and go off to seek their prey. They search all the trees, the myna bird bars, the bird baths; in short, all the places myna birds hang out. When they get back to the clearing, they discover that a pride of lions has taken up residence there. As the lions all appear very sleepy, they decide to tiptoe their way back to the safety of their helicopter. But, alas, when they get back to the helicopter, the game warden pops out and writes them a citation for "Transporting mynas over sedate lions for immortal porpoises." [Other versions of the punch line:] [ * Transporting Mynahs over a stately lion for immortal Porpoises * [ "FOR CROSSING STATE LIONS WITH OBSCENE PORPOISES!" [ Carrying gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises. %% A rejection notice slip a Chinese economic journal found somewhere on the Internet: We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity. -- Source: Mark Seiden, Wired %% A traveling-salesman type was opening up new sales territories in Africa. One day he fell ill. Since he was a man of action, he sought immediate medical attention. Even though the only nearby facility was a witch doctor, he went to see the man. The witch doctor looked him over, then cut a long, thin strip from a piece of leather and gave it to the man, saying, "Chew on this, and by the time it's all gone, you'll feel better." As mentioned, the salesman was a man of action, so he spent the rest of the day chewing on the piece of leather. Nonetheless, he didn't feel better, in fact, as you might imagine, he felt worse. So he went back to the witch doctor and said, "Doctor, the thong is ended but the malady lingers on!" %% A truckers son was playing outside when the trucker decided to watch TV. The boy soon came to the patio, slung the door open, ate a jelly bean, bit the cat on the ear and ran off. He did this a few more times until the dad stopped him and asked what he was doing. The boy replied he was playing trucker. When the dad asked him to explain the boy said, "I doing like a trucker, poppin pills, eating pussy and haulin ass." %% Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, "In onion there is strength." Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also signed the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the ex-Slaves citizenship. the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% An American, a Cuban, a Russian, and a Mexican are all driving down the road in the same car. The Cuban pulls out a big cigar and lights up, takes two puffs and throws the cigar out the window. The American sees this and has a fit. 'Why'ed you throw that brand new cigar out the window???', says the American. 'We have lots where that came from.', says the Cuban. About this time the Russian opens a brand new bottle of Vodka, takes two swigs, then throws the rest out the window. Again, the American has a fit. 'Why'ed you throw a excellent bottle of Russian Vodka out the window?', the American screams. 'We have lots where that came from.', says the Russian. Just then, the American throws the Mexican out the window!!!! %% An Italian and a Russian were standing at a bus stop one morning, waiting to go to work. Every so often, the Italian would give his middle finger a delicate sniff and exclaim: "Ah, Miranda!" Naturally, the Russian was perplexed. However, he did not feel bold enough to say anything to the Italian. The next morning came round, though, and these two were at the bus stop again. "Ah, Miranda!" said the Italian. "Hm," thought the Russian to himself, "if he does this again tomorrow, I'm definitely going to ask him." Sure enough, the next day the two were there and the Italian gave his middle finger yet another delicate sniff. "Ah, Miranda!" By now the Russian was burning with curiosity. He asked the Italian why he kept sniffing his finger. "Itsa simple," the Italian said. "Every morning Ia giva my girlfriend a finger-fuck. Thata way, I got something to remember her fora the whole day." The Russian was intrigued. He was lost for the whole day, daydreaming during work. The next day, the two were at the bus stop again. The Italian sniffed his middle finger and said: "Ah, Miranda!" The Russian, on cue, buried his face in his shoulder, and inhaling deeply, drew it down the length of his arm. "Ah, Nanushka!" %% CLOISTERED Stands silent and serene in cool, crisp air of fall that plays with golden leaves littering the courtyard. Leaves sc att er ed and FLUNG across the cloistered square. Sweet smile, radiating from soul cloistered by the ebony folds of her long black habit, knows peace and love and quiet meditation. Remembering the laughing, giggling children (on Market Street), firm lover's hand on her waist (lungs full of sweet ocean spray), old men playing at checkers (but really watching young women), pizza eaten hot (burns roof of mouth), deer flee as horse gallops past (girl laughing, hair blowing), wide open spaces. Serene and silent and smiling, her steps echo down cloistered halls. Smile sweet as she wipes the tear from her eye. -- Marjorie Smith %% During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe. Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and this was called the Pilgrim's Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by Indians, who came down the hill rolling their war hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porposies on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a way of thinking about the world, and as such is a way of thinking about editors. The process of editing is Emacs, but Emacs is more than the process of editing. When you ask what Emacs does, you are asking a question with no answer, because Emacs doesn't do, it is done to. Emacs just is. ... I hope this makes things clearer. -- Scott Dorsey (kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov) %% Eventually, the Ramones conquered the Geeks. History call people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlic in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March killed him because they thought he was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% Fiery energy lanced out, but the beams struck an intangible wall between the Gubru and the rapidly turning Earth ship. "Water!" it shrieked as it read the spectral report. "A barrier of water vapor! A civilized race could not have found such a trick in the Library! A civilized race could not have stooped so low! A civilized race would not have..." It screamed as the Gubru ship hit a cloud of drifting snowflakes. -- Startide Rising, by David Brin %% France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. The Marseillaise was the theme song of the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. Then the Spanish gorillas came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon's flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear him any children. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% From the coffee-colored skies, rain dripped incessantly on the grounds of the deCroissant estate and on the upturned mugs of Link Sausage, private eye, and his girl friend Patti, who knew they had to split this case - deCroissant may have been totally flaky, but his French wife, Miette, had been the toast of three continents until someone (either deCroissant himself or possibly Miette's hard-boiled lover, Poche) had cracked under the pressure of shelling out for the lady's expensive tastes and had scrambled her brains sometime early on this tart spring morning, leaving Link and Patti no choice but to grill both men before either had a chance to waffle his way out of the current jam. -- Lynda Carraher (From ''Son of 'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night''') %% I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others. -- Howard Roark %% If you can get access to the victim's key chain is to switch all his keys for keys that look exactly the same, but don't fit the locks he's trying to open. If you can be around for this one, it's much more fun to watch the person go crazy as he cannot open anything he owns. %% In Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called "Candy". Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% In modern Europe, as in ancient Greece, it would seem that even inanimate objects have sometimes been punished for their misdeeds. After the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was condemned to be demolished, but the bell, perhaps out of regard for its value, was spared. However, to expiate the crime of having rung heretics to prayers, it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried and disinterred, by way of symbolizing its new birth at passing into Catholic hands. Thereafter it was catechized, and obliged to recant and promise that it would never again relapse into sin. Having made this ample and honourable amends, the bell was reconciled, baptized, and given, or rather sold, to the parish of St. Bartholomew. But when the governer sent in the bill for the bell to the parish authorities, they declined to settle it, alleging that the bell, as a recent convert to Catholicism, desired to take advantage of the law lately passed by the king, which allowed all new converts a delay of three years in paying their debts. -- Sir James G. Frazer, "Folklore In The Old Testament" %% In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athen was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought the Parisians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart. You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me; my study is so full of it now that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon. And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn't a fingermark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do. But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share. But I get it without asking for it - at least, so it appears to me - and this worries me. -- Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat" %% It is either through the influence of narcotic potions, of which all primitive peoples and races speak in hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, penetrating with joy all of nature, that those Dionysian stirrings arise, which in their intensification lead the individual to forget himself completely. . . .Not only does the bond between man and man come to be forged once again by the magic of the Dionysian rite, but alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Birth of Tragedy %% It seems there were three monks who enjoyed raising plants and were trying to keep a flower shop running, selling unique and exotic plant life. One day, some children where playing behind the shop and were eaten whole by an extremely rare man-eating plant. The parents, needless to say, were outraged, and demanded that the friars get rid of the dangerous plant. The friars refused. So the parents and the people of the town tried several ways to get the friars to consent, but finally they asked Hugh, the town blacksmith, (undoubtably the strongest man around), to run the friars out of town. Your waiting for the moral... Can you guess? "Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars!" %% Monday morning Rain-drenched parks with bone-bare trees greet my failing feet. The pale daylight is no bombard for my wall-like shades, nor the wind my Monday morning. %% On Krat's main screen appeared the holo image of a man, and several dolphins. From the man's shape, Krat could tell it was a female, probably their leader. "...stupid creatures unworthy of the name `sophonts.' Foolish, pre-sentient upspring of errant masters. We slip away from all your armed might, laughing at your clumsiness! We slip away as we always will, you pathetic creatures. And now that we have a real head start, you'll never catch us! What better proof that the Progenitors favor not you, but us! What better proof..." The taunt went on. Krat listened, enraged, yet at the same time savoring the artistry of it. These men are better than I'd thought. Their insults are wordy and overblown, but they have talent. They deserve honorable, slow deaths. -- David Brin, "Startide Rising" %% Once there was a King who was loved by all of his subjects, especially because of the hunting excursions he shared with them. As will happen, one day he died and his eldest son took the throne. Now this new king was an animal-lover to the core, and immediately outlawed all forms of hunting and fishing. His subjects accepted this for only a short time before they ousted him. This is a truly significant event, because it's the first time a reign was called on account of the game. %% Once upon a time, there was great king with very beautiful queen and 10 faithful knights. They enjoyed their peaceful lives until the enemy attacked them, and the king had to leave his wife to his knights to go to the battlefield. Even if he trusted his 10 knights, to make everything perfect, he devised a special iron panty(underwear) for the queen. It has a hall so that a person wearing it can piss, but it is designed to cut off everything inserted into that hall. He forced his wife to wear that masterpiece, locked it, and left. Finally war was over, and he checked his knights as soon as he arrived from battlefield. He ordered them to put off their pants, and checked if they still have their penis. Nine of them has none, so he ordered soldiers to execute them with anger. Now, he turn around and said to that very faithful knight. "Well, there is nobody to trust. You are the most faithful subordinate, and I would like to give you half of my land, my friend" But, but, he could not say anything, because he had no tongue. %% One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. During the War, Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% POZZO: He used to dance the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the fandango and even the hornpipe. He capered. For joy. Now that's the best he can do. Do you know what he calls it? ESTRAGON: The Scapegoat's Agony. VLADIMIR: The Hard Stool. POZZO: The Net. He thinks he's entangled in a net. -- Samuel Beckett, "Waiting for Godot" %% Psychoanalysis through behavior at Urinals It has been found that much can be discovered about a person and their personality traits by observing their behavior while at a urinal. The following is a list of categories and the behavior that the members exhibit. Shy: Stands very close to the urinal and uses both hands so neighbor can't see. Very Shy: Pretends to go and comes back later when no one is around. Casual: looks around, whistles, or sings. Curious: Leans over to look at neighbor's equipment. Pisses in neighbor's pocket. Competitive: Stands back about 5 feet. Challenges others to distance contests. Outgoing: Strikes up conversation with anyone within 10 urinals of self. Macho: Bangs tool on side of urinal instead of shaking it off. Paranoid: Keeps looking behind in case of attack by gay AIDs carrier. Drunk: holds urinal for support. Pisses on his own shoe. Showoff: Stands with back to urinal. Slings tool over shoulder Confused: Stands looking puzzled at urinal. Asks where the paper is. This is usually a woman who has wandered into the wrong washroom. %% Saw, n. A trite popular saying, or proverb. (Figurative and colloquial.) So called because it makes its way into a wooden head. %% Scene: A court room in Oklahoma where a person is on trial for murder. There is strong evidence indicating guilt; however, there is no corpse. In the defense's closing statement the lawyer, knowing that his client is guilty and that it looks like he'll probably be convicted, resorts to a clever trick. 'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have a surprise for you all,' the lawyer says as he looks at his watch. 'Within 1 minute, the person presumed dead in this case will walk into this court room,' he says and he looks toward the courtroom door. The jury, somewhat stunned, all look on eagerly. A minute passes. Nothing happens. Finally the lawyer says: 'Actually, I made up the previous statement. But you all looked on with anticipation. I, therefore, put it to you that there is reasonable doubt in this case as to whether anyone was killed and insist that you return a verdict of not guilty.' The jury, clearly confused, retires to deliberate. A very few minutes later, the jury returns and a representative pronounces a verdict of guilty. 'But how?' inquires the lawyer. 'You must have had some doubt; I saw all of you stare at the door.' Answers the representative: 'Oh, we did look. But your client didn't.' %% Spock was waiting for them when they got to the conference room. "Captain, I've run the data we collected through the computer." "Well, Spock, you must be a very proud young man. So what's the deal with these council weasels?" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked "Am I my brother's son?" God asked Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Issac, stole his brother's birthmark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello's interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% The Unquiet Grave (Folk ballad) Cold blows the wind o'er my true love And a few small drops of rain, I never had but one true love, And he in the grave is lain. My lips they are as cold as clay, My breath is earthy and strong, If you should kiss my cold white lips, Your life would not be long. %% The apocryphal friend-of-a-friend brought a can of chunky beef stew on board an airliner. At some point he emptied the contents into the barf bag. Later during some minor turbulence he pantomimed using the bag in the conventional way. When the flight attendant asked if she could dispose of the bag for him, he replied, "Not yet, there are some choice bits that I haven't finished with yet," and proceeded to pick out chunks from the bag and eat them. According to my informant, everyone nearby immediately tossed their cookies. %% The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that runs west from Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what's that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo," and in another, written only hours later as "being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow." The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay of San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a "good place to go. It's very easy to believe that everyone you meet there is also a space traveler. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying 'hi.' Until you've settled in and get the hang of the place it is best to say 'no' to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of." The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs and sand, palm trees, breakers and sunsets are described in the Guide as "boffo. A good one." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted "hurrah." Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies and errors. In one of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miquel Cervantes. He wrote "Donkey Hote". The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost." Then his wife dies and he wrote "Paradise Regained." -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick Raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Samuel Morse invented a code for telepathy. Louis Pastuer discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the "Organ of the Species". Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers. The First World War, cause by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harlod mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by George Bernard Shaw, and the victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense. In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% There was an influential businessman who found out that his wife was having an affair with the butcher and the produce man in a local grocery store. Needless to say, he was quite furious and figured she and her lovers weren't fit to live, so he decided to kill them. Not wanting to risk his prominence in the business world, he decides to hire a bum off the street who desperately needed some money. So he finds a bum named Artie and offers him a buck to kill his wife and her lovers the next time she goes to the store. So the next day, the business man's wife went shopping and flirts first with the butcher and then the produce man as she usually does. However Artie shows up at the store and, as per his instructions, strangles the butcher, the produce man, and last but not least, the businessman's unfaithful wife. Well, the assassin quickly tries to escape but is caught by the security guards who haul him off to the police. It didn't take long for the press to catch hold of the story and printed the following headline: FLASH!! ARTIE CHOKES THREE FOR A DOLLAR IN LOCAL SUPERMARKET!!!!! %% Thinking quickly, the IBM System Jock uttered an incantation in EBCDIC and made the sign of the Terminated Fork. The UNIX Guru only smiled and trapped him in a recursive SED script. %% Tips for aliens in New York: Land anywhere. Central Park, anywhere. No one will care or indeed even notice. Surviving: get a job as a cabdriver immediately. A cabdriver's job is to drive people anywhere they want to go in big yellow machines called taxis. Don't worry if you don't know how the machine works and you can't speak the language, don't understand the geography or indeed the basic physics of the area, and have large green antennae growing out of your head. Believe me, this is the best way of staying inconspicuous. If your body is REALLY weird, try showing it to people in the streets for money. Amphibious life forms from any of the worlds in the Swulling, Noxios, or Nausalia systems will particularly enjoy the East River, which is said to be richer in those lovely life-giving nutrients than the finest and most virulent laboratory slime yet achieved. Having fun: this is the big section. It is impossible to have more fun without electrocuting your pleasure center.... -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Two guys in a coffee shop. The first guy said to the second, "Do you see that mute over there? I wonder how he orders coffee?" The waitress just passing by, says, "Oh, if you want to know, ordering coffee is easy for him. You have to see him ordering coffee with milk." She blushed and continued, "I have to give him a few slaps before he remove his hands." %% T O O MUC H S E X MAKESYO UREYESG OFUNNY %% We are all born with the same mark below, And the bigger it is, the more we know: If you could see it, soon would nature show All the great wonders she can do for us. Therefore, be willing, ladies, all of you, To learn the harm that these our snakes can do, And all the remedies that you should know In order to escape some bad distress -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), "Snake Charmers" %% Without the Greeks, we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns - Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in "The Illiad", by Homer. Homer also wrote the "Oddity", in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% if you can pick your nose in private, can you pick someone else's nose in public, and if so, what do you think their response would/should be? %% n a+b --- = x, donc Dieu existe. Repondez! n -- Leonhard Euler %% the sand remembers once there was beach and sunshine but chip is warm too -- haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6 %% you: Can you speak ? sucker: no. you: How does it feel to be dumber than a ? %% you: How's your boat? sucker: Boat? you: I heard you were getting a little dinghy (again, sp?) %% "...while I know many people who emphatically believe in reincarnation, I have never met or read one who could satisfactorily explain population growth." -- Spider Robinson %% "But when we got into the street I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends." %% "Emergency!" Stiggs screamed, ejecting himself from the tub like it was a burning car. "Dial 'one'! Get room service! Code red!" Stiggs was on the phone immediately, ordering more rose blossoms, because, according to him, the ones floating in the tub had suddenly lost their smell. "I demand smell," he shrilled. "I expecting total uninterrupted smell from these f*cking roses." Unfortunately, the service captain didn't realize that the Stiggs situation involved fifty roses. "What am I going to do with this?" Stiggs sneered at the weaseling hotel goon when he appeared at our door holding a single flower floating in a brandy glass. Stiggs's tirade was great. "Do you see this bathtub? Do you notice any difference between the size of the tub and the size of that spindly wad of petals in your hand? I need total bath coverage. I need a completely solid layer of roses all around me like puffing factories of smell, attacking me with their smell and power-ramming big stinking concentrations of rose odor up my nostrils until I'm wasted with pleasure." It wasn't long before we got so dissatisfied with this incompetence that we bolted. -- The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O. C. and Stiggs, National Lampoon, October 1982 %% "I lie awake, staring out at the bleakness of Megadon. City and sky become one, merging into a single plane, a vast sea of unbroken grey. The twin moons, just two pale orbs as they trace their way across the steely sky. I used to think that I had a pretty good life here, just plugging into my machine for the day, then watching Templevision or reading a Temple Paper in the evening. My friend Jon always said it was nicer here than under the atmospheric domes of the Outer Planets. We have had peace since 2062, when the surviving planets were banded together under the Red Star of the Solar Federation. The less fortunate gave us a few new moons. I believed what I was told, I thought it was a good life, I thought I was happy. Then I found something that changed it all..." -- Anonymous, 2112 %% "In general, [UNIX] has been hacked on by a plethora of graduate students for many years. When done this way, things don't tend to be reliable or well-implemented. I'm sure the designers of UNIX would like to have a clean slate and start over." -- Dave Cutler, NT lead architect %% "It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "Life," he said, "is like a grapefruit." "Er, how so?" "Well, it's sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast." "Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?" -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "Never mind what I said," the Lord spake. "Doth thou listen to every crazy idea that comes thy way?" And Abraham grew ashamed. "Er -- not really... no." "I jokingly suggest thou sacrifice Isaac and thou immediately runs out to do it." And Abraham fell to his knees, "See, I never know when you are kidding." And the Lord thundered, "No sense of humor. I can't believe it." -- Without Feathers -- Woody Allen %% "Starring Chevy Chase" is a code phrase that means, "You have too much leisure time." %% "Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more desire to throw a stone than you had." "Satan!" "Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kindhearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise -- perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it -- and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Mysterious Stranger" %% (picture- a ship out at sea, the distinguished captain on deck, surveying his surroundings...) A sailor rushes up, out of breath, and says, "Captain, captain, there's a pirate ship out there!! What will we do?" The captain, very calm and cool, says, "Well, bring up a hundred men from below and bring me my red shirt." The sailor asks, "But why the red shirt?" Our brave captain replies, "So the men won't see me bleed." But then another sailor rushes up. "Captain, captain, look! There's ANOTHER pirate ship!" And the captain responds, "Very well, bring up a hundred men from below and bring me my brown pants." %% A chicken walks into a library and up to the front desk. The librarian stares at it. Finally, the chicken says, "Baaawwwk!" The librarian continues to stare, confused. The chicken again goes, "Baaawwwk!" The librarian thinks, then gives the chicken a book. The chicken takes the book and leaves. The next day the chicken returns with the book under one wing. It walks up to the desk, drops the book, and says, "Baaawwwk! Baaawwwk!" So the librarian gives the chicken two books. The chicken takes the two books and leaves. The following day, the chicken returns, drops off the two books, and says, "Baaawwwk! Baaawwwk! Baaawwwk!" to which the librarian gives it three books. The chicken leaves. But the librarian is getting suspicious. The next day, the chicken goes through the whole routine, gets four books, and leaves. But this time the librarian decides to follow it. The chicken walks out of town, through the woods, over a small bridge, and up to the edge of a pond where a frog is sitting on a lily pad. As the librarian watches, the chicken gives each book to the frog who in turn throws it back on the ground, saying, "Riddit!" (read it) %% A cow is a completely automated milk-manufacturing machine. It is encased in untanned leather and mounted on four vertical, movable supports, one at each corner. The front end of the machine, or input, contains the cutting and grinding mechanism, utilizing a unique feedback device. Here also are the headlights, air inlet and exhaust, a bumper and a foghorn. At the rear, the machine carries the milk-dispensing equipment as well as a built-in flyswatter and insect repeller. The central portion houses a hydro-chemical-conversion unit. Briefly, this consists of four fermentation and storage tanks connected in series by an intricate network of flexible plumbing. This assembly also contains the central heating plant complete with automatic temperature controls, pumping station and main ventilating system. The waste disposal apparatus is located to the rear of this central section. Cows are available fully-assembled in an assortment of sizes and colors. Production output ranges from 2 to 20 tons of milk per year. In brief, the main external visible features of the cow are: two lookers, two hookers, four stander-uppers, four hanger-downers, and a swishy-wishy. There is a similar machine known as a bull. It gives no milk but has other uses. %% A favorite easy punch recipe is equal parts pink champagne (any cheap brand) and 7-Up. Then add scoops of raspberry sherbert. It gets foamy, is light and refreshing, and still alcoholic. To dress it up a little, soften the sherbert and put it in a jello ring or mold and refreeze it. Then remove it from the mold and float it in the punch bowl. %% A girl comes out of a bar late at night and notices a guy walking around the parking lot waving his hands over the roof of the cars. This puzzles her so she goes and asks the guy what he is doing. In a very slurred drunken voice he says "I am looking for my car." The girl says "that doesn't make sense - you should look for the right colour or the right model." The guy says "All I remember is that it had a red light, a blue light and a siren on top." %% A group of guys used to get together once a week to play poker. Well, one of the guys died; but his ghost continued to join in the poker games as before. On one of these evenings, the ghost got five beautiful hearts in his very first hand, and he bet his stack. Unfortunately, one of the flesh-and-blood players had a full house and raked in the pot -- another case where the spirit was willing but the flush was weak. %% A guy is lying in the middle of the aisle in a movie theater. The usher comes by and tells the guy he has to move. The guy just lays there and moans. The usher goes and gets the manager. The manager tells the guy he has to move. The guy just lays there and moans. The manager calls the police. The policeman tells the guy he has to move. The guy just lays there and moans. The policeman says "oh, a wise guy eh? Where are you from anyway?" The guy says "the balcony." %% A hunter hired a Maine guide to lead him though the wilderness. By the end of the third day, the hunter discovered that they were walking in circles. "We're lost," complained the hunter. "I thought you were the best guide in Maine." "I am," replied the guide, "but we're in New Hampshire now.' %% A new priest has just given his first sermon. Afterwards, he asks an older priest how he did. "Well," the elder remarks, "it was a bit dull. You could liven up the sermon if you drink a bit of vodka before your next sermon." The youth follows his advice, and the next day, delivers a rousing oratory that lifts the churchgoers out of their seats. He returns to the old priest and inquires "Hey, man, like how'd I do?" "Well," the old cleric replies, "there are a few little details you forgot.... "There are ten commandments, not twelve. "There were twelve apostles, not ten. "David `slew' Goliath, not `kicked the living shit out of' him. "There is a *taffy* pulling contest at St. *Peter*'s next week, not a *Peter* pulling contest at St. *Taffy*'s. "The Virgin Mary is not to be referred to as mary-with-the-cherry, "And lastly, one never refers to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as...Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook." %% A stranger had just arrived in the mining town and was spending the evening at the local saloon. After a few drinks, he mentioned to the bartender that he hadn't seen a single woman in the entire town. The bartender replied, "Nope. Ain't no women in this town!" "No women? What do the men do for... er..." "Oh, for sex? Did you see all those pigs in the streets?  That's the answer, right there." Shaking his head incredulously, the stranger settled back to his drinking. Within a short time, however, the liquor had convinced him that he wanted to try out a pig himself. He had watched several miners walk upstairs to the trysting rooms with squealing piglets under their arms. Now, he was game to make his move. He wandered out to the back of the saloon and chose a nice fat, pink sow. As he walked to the stairs, the entire saloon went quiet. In the embarrassing hush, all eyes were upon him. "What's the matter? I thought all you fellows did this?" "Yeah, but that's Black Bart's girl," replied the barkeep. %% A wild life photographer goes on an expedition to South America to photograph the legendary and hitherto unseen foo bird. On the way he attempts to hire porters from a tribe of Pygmys. They warn him of the dreaded curse on all who look upon the bird and refuse to join. Undaunted the intrepid photographer continues to the banks of the Amazon where he sets up a blind and waits. After several days, lo and behold, a foo bird flies directly over the river. In a rush of excitement, the photographer rushes out of the blind and snaps off a shot. No sooner has he done this then a huge, evil smelling flock of foos congregate over his head and completely cover him in guano. The slimy stuff starts to harden and restrict his breathing. He frantically tries to get the stuff off but to no avail. Finally in desperation, he throws himself into the river. A large crocodile promptly eats him. The moral? It the foo shits, wear it. %% A woman went into a hospital one day to give birth. Afterwards, the doctor came to her and said, "I have some... odd news for you." "Is my baby all right?" the woman anxiously asked. "Yes, he is," the doctor replied, "but we don't know how. Your son (we assume) was born with no body. He only has a head." Well, the doctor was correct. The Head was alive and well, though no one knew how. The Head turned out to be fairly normal, ignoring his lack of a body, and lived for some time as typical a life as could be expected under the circumstances. One day, about twenty years after the fateful birth, the woman received a phone call from another doctor. The doctor said, "I have recently perfected an operation. Your son can live a normal life now: we can graft a body onto his head!" The woman, practically weeping with joy, thanked the doctor and hung up. She ran up the stairs saying, "Johnny, I have a wonderful surprise for you!" "Oh no," replied The Head, "not another HAT!" %% All dentists must hum a medley of Barry Manilow tunes during root canal work. %% All statements contained herein may be accurate, but might also be carefully designed lies intended to induce an angry response. -- Mike Chapman, mike@hopper.acs.virginia.edu %% An American couple is in Paris, a much awaited trip, when suddenly the wife dies of a heart attack. The husband decides to have her buried there as the visit to France was something they had longed for for many years. All arrangements are made when he suddenly realizes that he doesn't have a black hat for the funeral. The hotel concierge tells him that what he wants is a "chapeau noir." So off he goes to find a store open late. First he meets a gendarme and in his fractured French asks, "M'sieur, ou pouvais-je acheter un capeau noir?" -*- The policeman is a bit surprised but, after thinking a bit, gives our friend directions. The store--if that is what it is--looks a little seedy and run down, but the man behind the counter looks friendly so in goes our friend. He speaks first: "M'sieur, je veux acheter un capeau noir." "Mais, monsieur, j'ai des capeaux rouges, des capeaux blancs, et des capeaux marrons, mais pas des capeaux noires. Pourquoi avez vous besoin d'un capeau noir?" "Ma femme est morte." "O Monsieur! Quelle beau sentiment!" -*- The story hinges on the pun: chapeau(hat) -- capeau(slang for condom) %% As part of an experimental exchange program, three guys from MIT, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon :-) are sent to a school on the West Coast. The first night there they decide to go out to dinner and get to know each other. As soon as dinner is over, coincidentally, all three get up from the table and go to the restroom. The student from MIT finishes first, goes to the sink, and washes his hands with a vengeance, making sure the soap touches every bit of his skin. He does this twice. The Princeton man is next and he washes his hands quickly, barely touching the soap. So these two stand around waiting for the Carnegie Mellon guy to wash up, and are shocked to see him walk right past the sink without giving it a look! After a few minutes back at the table, the MIT student can't resist, and says: "You know, at MIT they teach us to do things thoroughly." Picking up on his lead, the guy from Princeton says: "And at Princeton they teach us to do things quickly." Not to be outdone, the third responds: "Well, at Carnegie Mellon they teach us not to piss on our hands!" %% At least 75 times in your life, someone will tell you that something is "for your own good." It will never be for your own good. %% At least once in your life, you will step in a substance so hideous that you will have to throw out your shoes. %% At least once in your life, you'll miss a belt loop at the back, and no one will tell you about it. %% Bright-eyed little boys do not catch foul balls. Pudgy half-drunk adults wearing baseball gloves catch foul balls. %% Chaucer and Shakespeare happened to die at the exact same instant, and therefore went to be admitted to heaven at the same time. Upon arriving at the Pearly Gates, they were met by St. Peter St. Peter: " Unfortunately, we only have one slot available. To be fair, I want you both to write a four line poem using the word "Timbuktu". Whoever writes the best poem will be admitted to heaven." Chaucer and Shakespeare, both being competitive by nature, readily agreed. It was decided that Chaucer would go first. Chaucer's poem: " I gazed across the blowing sand a very tired and thirsty man, A caravan came into view making its' way to Timbuktu." St. Peter and Shakespeare both agreed that that was a very good poem. Then it was Shakespeare's turn. Shakespeare's poem: " Tim and I a hunting went we found three damsels in a tent, as they were three, and we were two, I bucked one and Timbuktu" Chaucer suddenly began to feel very warm ... %% During the invasion of Sicily in World War II, General George ("Blood 'n' Guts") Patton was preparing to take the city of Palermo. He checked with his meteorologists and learned the day he had chosen would be incredibly rainy. So he issued an order to place copies of the New York "Times" immediately beneath the tailgates of the transports carrying his troops. In this way the men could keep their feet dry. His staff was mystified. Why the "Times"? Why not the New York "Daily News"? Patton was adamant; and one did not argue with the General. As five tons of old copies of the "Times" were being loaded, the General issued one of his greatest quotes to the assembled war correspondents: "THESE ARE THE 'TIMES' THAT DRY MEN'S SOLES." %% Eleven seconds after the warranty expires on your $17,000 car, the engine will make a knocking sound that exactly duplicates the drum solo from Inna Gadda Da Vida. %% Every few thousand years a random lottery is held and one person is granted immortality. The latest winner is Dick Clark. %% Every single trip to the laundromat results in the loss of one important item of clothing. %% Everyone *knows* cats are on a higher level of existence. These silly humans are just to big-headed to admit their inferiority. Just think what a nicer world this would be if it were controlled by cats. You wouldn't see cats having waste disposal problems. They're neat. They don't shit all over the place. They don't have sexual hangups. A cat gets horny, it does something about it. They keep reasonable hours. You *never* see a cat up before noon. They know how to relax. Ever heard of a cat with an ulcer? What are the chances of a cat starting a nuclear war? Pretty negligible. It's not that they can't, they just know that there are much better things to do with ones time. Like lie in the sun and sleep. Or go exploring the world. %% For each time you say the phrases "touch base," "networking," or "bottom line," you will spend one month in hell. %% Four minutes before the conclusion of any worth-while TV program, you will get a phone call from your cousin, the one called Loose Lips. %% GETTING THINGS DONE AROUND HERE IS LIKE - - - TWO ELEPHANTS - MAKING LOVE!!!!! . It all happens at a high level; . It's always accompanied by a lot of roaring and screaming; . It takes two years to see any results! %% Gas station attendants are hired based on their lack of knowledge regarding directions. %% Hans and Gretchen were walking along the shore one Sunday afternoon when they spotted a dock projecting into the harbour. They decide to walk to the end of the dock and sit down to rest (chat, have a smoke or whatever). Gretchen, in her infinite boredom, suggests to Hans, ``While we walk to the end of the dock, why don't you count the number of slats used to build it, and I'll count the number of slits between the slats?'' Hans replies, ``Ja, sehr gut, I will count the slats, and you will count the slits.'' So the couple merrily troops down the dock. Hans counts, ``One slat!'' Gretchen counts, ``One slit!'' ``Two slats!'' ``Two slits!'' And, well, you know how the natural numbers work. Eventually Hans and Gretchen approach the end of the dock. ``327 slats!'' ``327 slits!'' ``328 slats!'' They reach the end of the dock. Gretchen is puzzled. ``Hans! There are no more slits! What does it mean?'' Hans turns to Gretchen and says (brace yourselves), ``When you're out of slits, you're out of pier!'' %% Harry just looked at me and said, "You've got a scoop of ice cream in your shirt pocket." I felt a little foolish, what with the creamy melted goo leaking out down the front of my shirt and all, and then it was kind of a windy day and so these leaves that usually just whirl on by you ever-so romantically on blustery fall afternoons and then wander once again skyward freely and happily were getting stuck to this God-forsaken goo that was by now running down my shirt like a river in the spring time when it's just starting to get warm out again and you say to yourself 'oh it's so nice out but i'm sure it won't last' and so the leaves just kind of got stuck there and looked up at me kind of mournfully cause they wouldn't get to be like the leaves in that old song my mom used to sing: 'come little leaves said the wind one day, come over to the meadow with me and play..' and that was somewhat sad, i might have thought, but i no longer remember. %% If there are two ways to pronounce a name, you'll always pick the wrong one. %% If worthiness in me Were as immense as my desire, Pity, now still asleep, awake would be. But since desire and strength Do not go well together, Suffer I must the length of all my woes, my lord. And you I do not blame-- I blame myself for this: Great beauty finds its bliss-- I see and I confess In a much greener age. %% If you are in the shower and you think you hear the doorbell ring you throw on a towel and almost kill yourself running down the stairs. There's soap in your eyes and shampoo in your hair and you holler "I'm coming." The towel falls off and you put it back on and finally you fling the door open and meet a person with a copy of The Watchtower under his arm. %% If you know someone who has had a moustache for more than three years, never let that man sleep on your sofa. %% If you preface a joke by saying, "This is really funny," no one will laugh. %% If you rip the tag off your mattress, you'll be the first person actually arrested, tried and convicted for doing so. %% It seems that there were these 3 pregnant Indian Squaws, all due to give birth at about the same time. The first squaw gave birth to a boy, and the birthing was done on a deer hide. The 2nd also gave birth to a boy, but this was done on a bear hide. And, the third had twins, two boys, and she did this on a hippopotamus hide. I guess *THIS* shows us that the sons of the squaw on the hippopotamus hide is equal to the sum of the squaws on the other two hides. %% It was over in a flash. The neutron bombs were delivered with so little warning, none of the government officials were able to get to their shelters in time. But the neutron bombs were designed to wipe out only people, and they were designed well. Buildings stood and petunias blossomed. Somehow, Dave had survived. The last boy on Earth. AS he sat down in his room, reading a Frederic Brown novel, the phone rang. Without thinking, Dave picked it up. "Dave, this is Kevin. Are you going to be at the SF club meeting tonight?" Suddenly realizing what was happening, Dave reacted. "Kevin? But I thought I was the last person alive!" "Nah, the whole group's still going strong!" "But...how?" "Same as you. You read a lot, don't you?" "A novel a day." "So, your walls are lined with books, aren't they?" "Sure." "Best radiation absorbers ever. Hardly a fan got burned, worldwide. Anyway, the meeting's at the usual place. 7:30. See you there" And that's how fandom took over the world. %% Jesus has just stopped the crowd from stoning Mary Magdalene to death and is berating the self-pious with the famous speech, "Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone..." Right about then, a rock comes winging through the air and hits Jesus on the head. He whirls around and shouts "Jeez, Mom, c'mon! I'm trying to make a point, here!" %% Just after the end of World War 2, it was decided that the borders between Poland and Russia should be redrawn. A surveyor was out one day looking over the proposed border when he noticed a little house right smack dab on the line. Well he was unsure as to which country the house belonged to, so he decided to let the occupants choose which country they wanted to be a part of. He knocked on the door and an old man answered. "Well, old man. I'm here to tell you that you have a choice of country. Which is it, do you want to be part of Poland or Russia?" The man thought for a moment and said decisively, "Poland!" The surveyor was taken aback by the old man's vehemence and said, "Why did you choose Poland." The old man countered with, "Well, if I have to go through just one more of these Russian winters...." %% Let's say you want to go to the 11th floor. Two elevator doors open at the same time. You get on elevator one. Elevator two immediately zooms up to the 11th floor. Elevator two goes down to the basement. A janitor toting a bucket of slime gets on. The elevator goes up to the ground floor. The janitor gets off. Several people get on the elevator. It goes back down to the basement, picks up another janitor with a bucket of slime, and then stops at every intervening floor on its way up to the 11th. %% Like almost all old [more than 70 years], large [more than 10,000 people] institutions, the government did not get to be as successful as it is by acting the way it does now. -- Paraphrased by estell%fidler.decnet@nwc.navy.mil from the original statement by Robert Townsend, in "Up the Organization". %% Most men take only 2-3 minutes to relieve themselves. Women's Restrooms always have long lines. %% Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave people. Also we saw Caesar invade Britain -- "not that those barbarians had done him any harm, but because he wanted their land, and desired to confer the blessings of civilization upon their widows and orphans," as Satan explained. Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review before us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through those ages, "leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake, and other signs of the progress of the human race," as Satan observed. 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." He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen. "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." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Mysterious Stranger" %% No matter how much you try to avoid it, you will spend at least five minutes of your life watching Mr. T on television. %% No matter what seat you take in a movie theatre, the seat directly in front of you will soon be occupied by a six-foot tall woman with a beehive hairdo that scrapes the ceiling. When you move away from the Beehive Lady, you will find yourself sitting in front of a foul-smelling man who truly believes that he has a supporting role in the film. Thus he will talk to the characters on the screen for the length of the picture. %% ONCE upon a time a company realized it had to make cutbacks. The old familiar story. They had 3 secretaries, only one of which they could afford to keep, so by the agreement of company officers a test was devised to measure the honesty of the three. At the end of the month, each of their paychecks contained an extra $500. When the first woman picked up her check and looked at it, she noticed the error and notified the payroll department immediately. The second, noticing the error, said: "You have overpaid me, but I will keep the money for a year, deposit it in a high yield account, and at the end of the year you will get your money back and half the interest I earned." When the third woman saw her extraordinary windfall, she stuffed the check in her purse, spun on her heels, and went home. Which secretary did they keep? The one with the best hooters. %% Once there was a mad scientist who worked by himself in his laboratory. He was so lonely that one day, he decided to clone himself. Everything worked perfectly, except that the clone had a very foul mouth. The scientist worked with the clone, but, alas, he could not make the clone clean up his language. He got so tired of the clone's language that one day he pushed him off the end of a cliff. A policeman rushed up to him, and yelled "You are under arrest! You are under arrest!" "What for ?",the mad scientist asked. And the answer was: For making an obscene clone fall. %% Once upon a time there was a flock of geese. Like all geese, they would fly south for the winter and north for the summer. And, like all geese, they would fly in one of those impressive "V" formations with the lead gander out in front. Well, it seems that there was one goose named DeeDee (or Dee for short), who had a great deal of difficulty following the lead gander's instructions. Maybe it was due to a mechanical defect in her (sorry ladies) wings, or maybe it was just brain damage due to flying through polluted air. At any rate, when the flock would turn right, Dee would fly the other way, often crashing into the other geese in the formation. Needless to say, this spoiled a great looking formation and proved to be *very embarrassing*. In order to take care of the problem, the lead gander told her that she would have to fly at the end of the formation, thus avoiding any mid-air crashes and saving the lead gander much face. When describing the problem and his solution to it, the lead gander told a reporter from the Audubon Society magazine: "Dee, who flaps last, flaps left" %% Once upon a time, (Couldn't think of a better beginning) there was this guy named Bill. Well Bill wanted to throw a party. And he didn't want to have just any party he wanted to do something new. So he thought and thought, and finally he came up with a new idea. A mood party. He would invite a bunch of people and they would all dress up as different moods and everyone could try and guess what a persons mood was. Finally the day and moment of the party was upon him. The first guest had rung the bell. When he answered it there was a woman all dressed in green. Bill said "Lemmie guess, your jealousy, right?" and she said that he was right. Not much later a man with a scowl on his face dressed all in red came to the door. Bill said "No problem, your rage." The man said "You got it." As more and more people arrived the party was hitting full swing. Bill wasn't having much trouble in identifying the moods that people were dressed as, and if he did everyone else helped. Until the last person arrived. The man was naked with the exception of a pear that his dick was stuck into. Bill could not figure out this mans mood. Everyone tried and nobody could tell. Finally they asked the man what his mood was. "I'm fucking dis pear". %% Once upon a time, in a far-off land, there was a kingdom in which the king was fond of history and ancient things. He would collect historical objects, dress in royal threads from bygone eras, and generally try to live ancient traditions. One day the king issued a royal proclamation, as kings are wont to do now and then. Of course, he wrote the proclamation in the language of 200 years ago, rich in antiquated spellings, obsolete words, now-defunct verb forms, etc. The general population, of course, could make neither head nor tail of the proclamation. A vast legal muddle ensued. The courts, called upon to untangle the mess, pronounced a ruling that, henceforth, all royal proclamations must be written in modern, currently accepted prose. In other words, We can't have archaic and edict, too. %% Once upon a time, in the Kingdom of the Pearls, there lived an extremely cultured pearl named Michael. Michael was a pearl of high ideals and great aspirations, and, in the hopes of better serving his fellow pearls, he went to law school, graduated, and opened a legal clinic. He became well known for his charitable services to less fortunate pearls. But alas, after a few years, he began to burn out. He paid less and less attention to his cases. Eventually, he dropped out completely and became a beachcomber, spending his days lying on the strand with grains of sand sticking to his filthy, unwashed body. And his relatives, filled with sorrow at this sight, all chanted, A gritty pearl is Michael, LLD. %% Once, a group of 20 college computer jocks decided to buy a house and start their own fraternity (a la "Revenge of the Nerds"). In order to have more space for their assorted collection of micros, minis, and mainframes (not to mention the Cray in the basement), they decided to turn the largest room upstairs into the house sleeping quarters. "After all," they reasoned, "a bedroom is only used for sleeping between programming assignments! What else??" Over the door of the sleeping quarters, they hung a sign which read: Hacks' Bedroom: Twenty Men, Nuts Into Computers %% One day a mother stork was caring for her baby stork while her husband was out. The baby was crying because it wanted it's father and the mother replied that "Your father is out delivering babies to human parents and making them very happy." The next evening the mother was out spreading the joy and the baby stork was was now crying for it's mother. Dad told the baby the "Mother will be home soon, right after she is finished spreading happiness to all the human parents". Well, that very next evening it was the parents turn to worry as baby was gone from the nest and they didn't know where he was. The next morning, baby flies in and the parents immediately ask him where he has been all night. "Well, I've just been scaring the hell out of college students!" %% One day an Italian, a Jew, and a Greek died in an accident at the same time and went before St. Paul at the Pearly Gates. St. Paul thought the trio had lived good lives and wanted to give them another chance... "Alright gentlemen, you have one more chance. However, you must give up the one thing in your life that matters to you most...Give up your favorite thing, or you will instantly lose this chance which I have granted you." Well, the three instantly agreed, and *POOF* were back on Earth, alive as could be. They were walking down the street in the city, when they passed a restaurant with pasta, 'just like Mom used to make.' The Italian tried to resist his urges, but couldn't, and at the first bite of linguini, *POOF*, he vanished. "Poor guy," said the remaining two, and they continued down the street. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a quarter rolled down the sidewalk in front of them. The Jew tried as hard as he could to resist his urges, but finally, he bent over to pick up the quarter... And *POOF*, the Greek disappeared. %% One day the Shah of a middle-eastern country decided his son the Shan was old enough to have a body guard. He searched his kingdom until he found the right person for the job. As it turned out, he was well suited for the task and watched after the Shan dutifully. As the Shan got older, the body guard decided he could probably slip off for awhile without consequence. As luck would have it the Shan was epileptic, had a fit and died while he was gone. When the Shah found out about it, he called the body guard and asked: "Where were you when the fit hit the Shan?" %% One evening in a store in Wakiki, a Hawaiian stockboy was sweeping the floors and stocking the shelves. As he was doing so, he popped the top off of some Diet Coke and was having a swig. (After eating a lot of poi in his life, he needed to lose just a little weight.) Well, he dropped the can and the brown cola spread all over the floor. He went to get a mop to clean up the mess, but instead, he slipped in the liquid and fell on his can. (Oops, no pun intended, there.) His co-workers thought that was a pretty funny sight, and burst into song, "In the spillage, the diet spillage, the H'waiian slips tonight." %% One month after moving into your dream house, you will get new next-door neighbors who will display a predilection for dismantled cars, rabbit cages oversized tents and the music of Kool and the Gang. %% One night in Texas, the madam of the Chicken Ranch was visiting with some friends in the parlor, while her girls satisfied the paying customers upstairs. The friends noticed two distinct reactions when the customers left for home: most would just say goodnight and leave with a smile, but occasionally one of the younger men would leave singing in a strange foreign language. Finally, after this had happened several times, the madam's friends were overcome by curiosity. "Who ARE those guys?" they asked. "Oh, the singers?", the madam laughed. "Why, they're new customers! BRAND new, if you know what I mean." "That explains the singing," they said, "but what in the world is that foreign language they're singing in?" The madam replied, "Gypsy: the voice of a new penetration." %% One night, a man comes home slightly drunk and his wife (who is suspecting he's cheating on her) questions his whereabouts... Wife: "Where were you??" Man: "I was at this new bar called the Golden Bar. Everything is golden" Wife: "Sure you were. There's no such place!" Man: "There is! They have huge golden doors, a golden floors, and even golden urinals!" Wife: "Oh, I BELIEVE you 100%" So, the next day the wife looks through the phone book for this golden bar. She's surprised when she finds a Golden Bar located across town. She decides to call up and check this out for herself... Wife: "Is this the Golden Bar?" Bartender: "Yes it is.." Wife: "Do you have huge golden doors?" Bartender: "Yes we do..." Wife: "Do you have golden floors??" Bartender: "We have them, too..." Wife: "What about golden urinals?" Bartender (speaking away from phone) "Hey Max, I think we have a lead on the guy that went in you alto-sax." %% Only after you are hopelessly lost will you realize that you left the directions at home. %% Only two magazines can be stacked up in bathrooms -- National Geographic and Reader's Digest. Issues must be at least five years old. %% Our Hero was travelling through the mountains on his quest for the Holy Grail, when a fierce storm blew up and his steed caught some horsey sickness. He hied to a monastery, and asked the abbot for a replacement, citing their loyalty to God. It was the winter season, and nightfall was approaching as they looked through the stables. All of the other horses were sneezing a coughing also, until they came to a stable, where a large shaggy dog story(oops) resided. The knight asked for him, to which the abbot replied, "Oh, no, it is still stormy and getting dark. I wouldn't send a knight out on a dog like this." %% People that have fuzzy dice hanging from their rear-view mirrors often suffer from insomnia. %% People will say "Watch your step" to you only after you have taken a vicious fall. %% President Eisenhower's Mother had a sister; this lady constantly had trouble in bright sunshine because her nose was so sensitive that the skin peeled off every summer. Her doctor made a simple remedy, a small cone of paper (like a Dunce's cap) which she stuck onto her nose at the first sign of sun. Do you believe this? I didn't until Mick Jagger sang about it. Ike's Aunt gets nose hat is fact, son %% Real programmers don't document their code. The brilliance of the program itself is self-evident, and anyone who can't figure it out isn't a real programmer. %% Real programmers don't eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Real programmers eat whenever they want to, and only with food from vending machines. Vending machines don't serve quiche. %% Real programmers don't program in BASIC. BASIC is for 12-year-old pimple-faced computer geeks who think Pac-Man is "cool". %% Real programmers don't program in LISP. Any language with more parenthesis than actual code is for airheaded wienies who can't write real programs. %% Real programmers don't program in PASCAL. PASCAL is for pencil-pushing pinstripes who think structure is good and spontaneous hacks are bad. %% Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan: both have 12 letters! Milhous starts with an 'm', Wilson starts with a 'w', which is an 'm' upside down! Gerald Ford, George Bush: both have 6 letters in the first name and 4 in the last! Both start with 'g'! Nixon was not shot from a warehouse, and Reagan was not shot in a theater! In fact, both men are still alive! Nixon is married to Mrs. Nixon, Reagan is married to Mrs. Reagan! Both men were elected president exactly twice! Both were elected on Tuesdays! Both men ran for governor of California! Reagan was born in 1911, Nixon was born 1913, two years apart! Both lived in the same house and used the same office! Nixon had tapes of everything said to him, Reagan has a script of everything he is going to say! Both were involved in scandals ending in -gate: Watergate, Contragate! Believe it, or what! %% Rush hour starts when you leave the house. It ends when you reach the office. %% Seems there was a witch named Beatrice who lived in the little town of Clearwater. She was famous for her brews and potions. If you needed a love potion, or potion of Cure Dianthroritis, she was the one to contact. The drinks, however, were not very tasty, as they were made with all sorts of herbs and spices, many of them bitter and foul-smelling. She bought all her ingredients at Herb's Herbs, the local Wholistic Drug and Natural Medicine Shoppe. She was one of Herb's most favored customers, and he even extended her credit, since she had given him a brew that made his wife, well, frisky. One day, a traveling preacher came to town, and Herb attended the revival. He became converted to Christianity (which lent credence to the effectiveness of the Clearwater Revival) and realized that his new beliefs and Beatrice's witchcraft were in conflict. Therefore, with a deep sense of loss (she was a good customer), he reluctantly told his employees that they could no longer sell herbs and spices to the witch, Beatrice. In fact, he had to put a sign by the cash registers, "We will sell no thyme for Bea's wine." %% Several people are passing the baby around, saying such things as "He has such a nice smile," and "He has such beautiful eyes." When it is your turn to hold the baby, you will say, "He has such a load in his pants and it's leaking right through." %% So anyway this old fella goes out & hires himself a hooker. Things went along well until he asked "So, how'm She said "Oh, about 3 nots." he: "3 knots? I never heard that before; whadda mean?" she " You're not hard, you're not in, & you're not getting your money back!" %% So this guy wants to have a luau. He needs a pig for a luau, so he goes to a pig farm. He asks the farmer for a twenty-pound pig. The farmer goes into the pen, searches around awhile. He picks up a pig, puts the tail in his mouth, and begins swinging the pig around for a few seconds. He puts the pig down, and says, "Nope, not quite twenty pounds." He picks up another, puts the tail in his mouth, swings the pig around awhile, and declares, "This one's twenty pounds!" He brings the pig out, and the man says in a shocked tone, "You can't weigh a pig like that!" "Sure I can.", said the farmer, "Watch this." He called his son over and asked him to weigh the pig. The boy came over, picked up the pig, put its tail in his mouth, and swung it around awhile. He put the pig down and said, "This one weighs twenty pounds." The man still looked perplexed, so the farmer told the boy to get his mother so that she can weigh the pig. After five minutes, the boy returned alone. "She can't come out just yet." the boy said, "She's weighing the mailman." %% The Chuckles The Clown episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show must be playing on some channel, somewhere, at all times. %% The Last Man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door. He was tired. He was homesick. He wanted to quit. He had nowhere else to go. There was another knock. This time followed by the reedy alien whine, "Ten minutes to show time." Show time at Walazars Sideshow of the Stars! The home of freaks and sole survivors. %% The battery will not die when your car is parked in the driveway. The battery will die on Dec. 31 at 10 p.m., when your car is the only one left in the office parking lot. %% The cable TV repairman who tells you to stay home from work all day because he doesn't know when he'll drop by, will drop by at 6 p.m. %% The coming thing, Cowboy thinks. Live forever in a bodily incarnation of the eye-face, not limited to the speed of artificially enhanced neurotransmitters but approaching the speed of light, extending the limits of the interface, the universe. Brain contained in a perfect liquid-crystal analog. Nerves like the strings of a steel guitar. Heart a spinning turbopump. The Steel Cowboy, his body a screaming monochrome flicker, dispensing justice and righting wrongs. Who was that masked AI? Dunno, pardner, but he left this silver casting of a crystal circuit. To Cowboy, it sounded pretty good. -- Walter Jon Williams, "Hardwired" %% The garbage bag full of leaves or wrapping paper or cardboard boxes will never break. The garbage bag full of egg shells, coffee grounds, and potato salad will always break. %% The macho coach of Bruiser State saw the referee call a five yard penalty on his team. The coach ran out to the ref and yelled into his face "YOU STINK, REF!!!" The referee picked up the ball and said "Oh, really?" He walked 15 yards further down field and yelled, "How do I smell from here?" %% The more you hate a song, the harder it will be to get that song out of your head. %% The movie St. Elmo's Fire was made to prove to us that each and every one of us can feel the urge to strangle people. %% The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected. No further information is available. %% The officer who just stopped you for going one kilometer over the speed limit has never in his 20-year career let anyone off with "just a warning". %% The post office is required to deliver a minimum of two bills per day to each house. There is no maximum. %% The question that you will be asked most often in your life is "Do you want fries with that?" %% The shoebox where you store papers and receipts has been lined with a vaporizing agent that dissolves anything of real importance. %% The somewhat old and crusty vicar was taking a well-earned retirement from his rather old and crusty parish. As is usual in these cases, a locum was sent to cover the transition period. This particular man was young and active, and had the strange notion that church should also be active and exciting. As a consequence he was more than a little disapointed with the dull and tradition-bound church. He decided to do something about it. For his first Sunday, he didn't wear the traditional robes and vestments, but lead the service wearing a nice 2-piece suit. The congregation was horrified! He changed the order of the service. The congregation was horrified! Then came the children's lesson. For this he came out of the pulpit, and sat on the communion table. The congregation was mortified! He sat there swinging his legs against the table as the children gathered around him. The congregation were totally beside themselves! He asked the children, "What's small, brown, furry and eats nuts?" There was total silence. He asked again, "What's small, brown, furry and eats nuts?" Total silence. Eventually, one timid youngster put up his hand and said, "Please, Sir, I know the answer is Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me." %% The stain on your blouse is imperceptible under the lights of your laundry room, but at the restaurant tonight, it will be so noticeable that complete strangers will stop by your table to point it out. %% The teacher explains to the students that she wants them to start at 'A' and continue to 'Z' giving a word that begins with that letter and to use it in a sentence. She calls for volunteers for 'A' and see's Dirty Johnny's hand wave up and down. She does't want to call on him because he may say something like "Ass", so she calls on Mary instead. "Apple. The apple is red," says Mary. The teacher says, "Good, now 'B'" and again calls on someone other than Dirty Johnny because he might say "Bitch"... Sharon says, "Ball. The ball is round." This goes on until she reaches 'R'. She calls for volunteers and only sees Dirty Johnny. She hesitates but decides that 'R' is pretty harmless. "A Rat," says Johnny. With a sigh of relief the teacher prompts him, "And the sentence..." "A big fuckin' rat, with a tail this fuckin' long." %% The traveling salesman took the cute young pickup to a motel in the early afternoon. As he was pumping away, she gasped, "There's a man in the room with us!" "The hell with the hotel dick," he grunted without missing a stroke. "It ain't him," she squealed. "It's the truant officer!" %% The tuning knob in your car radio will break, and become permanently tuned to a polka-rock station. %% The woman who sits next to you on the bus is wearing a perfume known as Eua du Terrible. She has a 200-liter drum of the stuff and sticks her head in it every morning. %% The zoo had been planning to mate their two gorillas, but the male died. Searching for an alternative, the zookeeper decided to ask the cage cleaner, Kowalski. So the zookeeper asked him "Will you mate with the gorilla for $1000?" Kowalski looked thoughtful for a moment, then said "I dunno, I'll have to ask the wife." The next day, Kowalski came in and said to the zookeeper "OK, I'll do it, but on three conditions. First, no kissing on the lips. Second, the children will have to be raised Catholic. And third, give me a month to raise the $1000!" %% There is a small but very powerful magnet directly below the living room floor of your house. Attached to this magnet are dozens of lost keys. %% There was a crowd of bees flying around one day. These bees were most peculiar, in that they were powered by gasoline, rather than the allergenic goodies that bees usually eat. As the crowd flew along, periodically a bee or two would start to sputter; it would fly down to a gas station, drink up the gas spilled in fueling a car, and then fly up and rejoin the crowd. One bee began to sputter a little, but flew right by an open gas station. As he passed the second station, he coughing badly, but still he flew on. Finally, as he was on his last fumes, he dove down to a station and gassed up. When he rejoined the crowd, his neighbor challenged him: "Look, you passed right by an open station when you started to get low. You passed another station when you were perilously low. And finally, you ran out of gas just in time to glide into that last station. Are you crazy?" He replied, "Well, it's like this. The first station was a Gulf station. I really don't like Gulf at all. The second station was a Texaco station. That's even worse. But the third station was an Esso station. Let me tell you, Esso is my brand of gasoline. You know what they say don't you..There's an Esso Bee in every crowd!" %% There was a local campus paper at one of the universities I attended that had a "joe in the street" weekly question in which they printed your picture and your responses to the questions asked. Anyway, a friend of mine, known for his somewhat outrageous humor was asked: "Assuming you believed in reincarnation, what would you like to come back as?" He responded quickly, "Well, either a) a floral scented tampon, to have all the fun, and avoid the mess, or b) an elevator in the engineering building so that engineers could go up and down on me all day." Well, they printed it. Everyone was amused. Except for the engineers. One day, while he was going to class, minding his own business, a group of about 15 engineers grabbed him, stuffed his in the elevator in the engineering building and taped him to a chair for 4 hours. %% There was an old man said, "I fear That life, my friends, is a bubble Still, with all due respect to a Philistine ear, A limerick's best when its double." %% There was once an agricultural extension of a community college that was into growing big fruit. Now we're really talking big fruit here: they grew blueberries the size of oranges and strawberries the size of grapefruits. Not only were they big, but they were also the sweetest, juiciest, most luscious fruit you've ever tasted. Realizing the commercial value of such fruit, before attempting large scale cultivation, they decided to insure these fruit. But in order to get something insured, you need to have it valued for insurance purposes. What do academics know about insurance anyway? So they look in the phone book, and call the first entry: the Acme Insurance Valuation Service. These two guys show up and they are pretty shady looking characters; they're not wearing lab coats, they're wearing trenchcoats! The guys from Acme pick up the fruit and start walking out with it. The scientists are surprised and incensed, and ask "Are you going to value them here, or give us a receipt, or what?" The two guys from Acme reply "We have come to seize your berries, not to appraise them." %% There was once was this guy who began farting a great deal. The smell was quite embarrassing, but what was worse was the sound which was a loud "HONDA!" He went to a number of doctor (of course) and none of them could help him (as is always the case in these tales). Finally out of desperation he went to an old chinese doctor and explained his problem. Without any examination the doctor said, "You have an abscessed tooth, have it fixed and your problem will be solved." So he went to a dentist, and sure, enough he did have an abscessed tooth, which he had repaired, and his "HONDA" farts went away as well. So he went back to the chinese doctor and said, "What's the punch line?" -- or was it, "How did you know that I had an abscessed tooth?" "Because", said the chinese doctor, "everybody know that ... ... abscess make the fart go HONDA!" %% There was this Rabbi that naturally used to perform the circumcisions for the young males of the congregation. When he had first become a Rabbi he started to save the foreskins in a big jar of formaldehyde, he didn't know exactly what he was going to do with them, but what the heck. One day he was talking to his friend, who just happened to be a leather worker, and asked him if there might be something he could do with these hundreds of preserved foreskins. the friend said "sure, I'll make something nice for you". About a week later the Rabbi stops by the leather shop to see the results and the friend hands him a small box. Inside the box is a very nicely made wallet. "It's very nice", states the Rabbi to the friend, "The hand stitching is superb!" "That's not even the best part", says the friend. "If you stroke it it turns into a SUITCASE!" %% There was this rich lady, who lived in a large mansion. She was so rich, she even had an artist that would paint pictures only for her. One day, she was standing in the salon, gazing at the far wall, which was relatively blank. She called up Louie. "Louie, I want you to paint me a mural on my salon wall that would depict General Custer's last thoughts." Louie replied,"Oui, Madam, but for such a work, I would need two weeks of complete privacy." Well, the lady agreed, and at the end of the two weeks, she gave a party for all her "high society" friends. She stood in front of the veiled masterpiece, and decided she wanted her friends to see it before her. So, she watched her guests for their reaction as she pulled the cord that dropped the veil. As the veil fell away, the guests' mouths dropped in shock. The lady then whirled around and saw the mural. It was a picture of a large cow with a halo over it, and all around it were indians making love. "Louie!" she screamed, grabbing him by the throat, "I asked for Custer's last thoughts! What is the meaning of this????" To which Louie replied,"Eeet ees, Madam,...Holy Cow, Look at all the f**king indians!!". %% These 3 couples, Jewish, Irish and Greek, are at the Pearly Gates waiting to be interviewed by St. Peter for admission into the Devine Kingdom. The Jewish couple is approached by St. Peter. "So you are Jewish, eh?", asks St. Peter. "Tell me what is your wife's name, sir." "Penny", replies the Jewish man. "Aha just as I expected" shouts St. Peter, "typical jew, greedy with nothing on your mind but money. Even had to get yourself a wife who reminds you of money. Sorry, but your not wanted here.". Our interviewer then goes up to the Irish couple and says "Tell me what is your wife's name, sir." "Sherry", replies the Irish man. "Aha just as I expected" shouts St. Peter, "typical Irishman, a drunkard with nothing on your mind but booze. Even had to get yourself a wife who reminds you of the devil's brew. Sorry, but your not wanted here.". Just then the Greek man turns to his wife and says "come on Fanny let's get out of here we don't stand a chance". %% These two guys are stranded out in the desert with no food (and little water). They're starving to death, when they come upon a rotting carcass of some unfortunate animal. Realizing he will starve if he doesn't eat, one of the guys forces himself to eat the rotting chunks of flesh. He asks his friend if he wants any, since there's more than he can choke down. His friend refuses, saying he couldn't bear to eat it. Later, his body can't stand the putrid, pustulant meal and he vomits. His friend eagerly begins scooping up the vomit and eating it. "I thought you couldn't bear to eat that stuff," he says. "Yeah, but now it's HOT!" %% These two guys were sitting in a bar that had a spittoon. The spittoon was filled almost to the brim with old tobacco juice, phlegm, and other refuse/ secretions. After a few, one guy says to the other, "I'll give you $100 if you take a sip from that spittoon." The other guy immediately grabs the spittoon and, lifting it to his lips, takes a healthy slug. "All right, you win," says the first guy, but his friend keeps gulping down the goop pouring out of the spittoon. "Please stop, you're making me sick," says the first guy, but his friend keeps chugging the phlegm. "I can't stand it, I'll give you another $100 if you stop!" Finally, the spittoon is empty, and the guy puts it down and belches. "Why didn't you stop" asks his disgusted friend? "I tried to, but it was all one piece!" %% This aged, shut-in old lady goes to the doctor (not uncommon). "Doctor!" she says. "Lately I've developed this terrible problem!" "I have terrible gas," she confides. "It doesn't smell bad, though, and it's very quiet. But it's uncomfortable and disturbing, and I sure hope you can help me!" "Hmmm..." says the doctor. "We'll have to approach this cautiously. Tell you what to do. Have the nurse get you these pills, here, and take one every day for the next two weeks. Then come back for another visit." Two weeks later, she rushes into his office. "Doctor, the problem has gotten MUCH WORSE! Not ONLY do I STILL have the gas, but now it smells TERRIBLE!" "Great!" says the doctor. "The pills are working fine! Now that we have your nose cleared up, let's go to work on your ears!" %% This fairly wealthy lady was waiting on a parking spot. As the person pulled out this young guy in a Porsche zipped by her into the parking spot. He got out of the car and said, "You can do this when you are young and agile." She looked at him, stomped on the gas, and creamed his car with her Cadillac. She leaned out the window and said, "you can do this when you are old and rich!" %% This nice, old Jewish man really wanted to win the lottery. So, one week, he goes to synagogue and he says (good Yiddish accent mandatory), "Oy, Lord of heaven and earth, imagine how much good I could do with ze money I vould vin if I von the lottery! Imagine how much charity I could give! Help me vin the lottery and I will spent ze money wisely!" He doesn't win the lottery. The next week, he goes to synagogue again and says, "Oh, lord of heaven and earth, you must not have heard me last veek! Imagine how many lives I could make easier with ze money from ze lottery! Help me vin ze lottery!" Once again, he doesn't win. The third week, he goes to synagogue again and prays in a similar vein. Suddenly, he hears a voice from the heavens: "Help me, help me!" He says, "Lord of heaven and earth, what can I do to help you?" "Buy a TICKET!" %% Those people who have been claiming that "month" and "orange" are rhymeless are obviously not cognizant of the following classic: From The Ganges to the Blornge Walked the Rajah every month While chewing on an orange And reading from the Grunth. The Blornge is a real river, the Grunth a real anthology of religious writings. Or so it was claimed when I first read this! %% Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said, "It was a Mechanical Engineer. Just look at all the joints." Another said, "No, it was an Electrical Engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections." The last said, "Actually it was a Civil Engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?" %% Three men, a Kentuckian, a Black and a Japanese, applied for work at a coal mine. The foreman said to the Kentuckian, "You look like a good strong fellow; we can put you to work digging coal." To the Black he said, "You're a good strong fellow too; you can haul the coal out of the mine." He told the Japanese, "You look too small to work in a mine; are you any good at figures?" "Oh, yes!" replied the Japanese. "Good; you can be in charge of supplies." So the three new employees went to work. Later that day, the foreman came by to inspect their performance. He found the Kentuckian busily chopping coal out of the wall, and the Black industriously loading it into hoppers an hauling it away. He couldn't find the Japanese. He asked the Kentuckian, "Have you seen that Japanese guy anywhere?" "Yes, he's on down the tunnel." The foreman walked further down the passage. Suddenly, the Japanese jumped out from behind a rock and yelled "SURPLISE!" %% Three nuns left a convent for the first time. They explored the town nearby and then returned to the convent. The Mother Superior asked them about the trip. They took turn to tell her everything they saw. Then they suddenly lowered their voices and stopped talking. The Mother told them to go on. The first nun hesitantly told her that a handsome stranger accosted them and invited them back to his place for tea. Afterward, he exposed himself to them. - "Holy God!", the Mother exclaimed, "then what did you do?" - "I accidentally saw his thing," the first nun replied. - "Go and wash your eyes with the Holy Water right now.", the Mother ordered. - "I did touch his thing", the second nun said. The mother gasped. - "Go and wash your hands immediately", she commanded. As she turned to the third nun, the third nun pushed the other two aside, running toward the end of the room, screaming "I have to gargle, I have to gargle." %% Three people are sitting at a bar: a Canadian, an American, and an Italian. As the evening progresses, their conversation degenerates, and eventually they arrive upon the subject of "The Most Desirable Woman in the World". The Canadian contends that Bo Derek qualifies. The American responds "No way. Loni Anderson! Wow! I mean !" They squabble for a while. Finally the Italian interrupts. "You are both wrong. The most desirable woman in the entire world is Alberta Pippilini." "What?" "Is true. Alberta Pippilini." "Who's that?" With this the Italian pulls out a faded newspaper clipping which reads: 500 Men Lay Alberta Pipeline %% Three pregnant women were sitting around talking one day. The first one says, "I know I am going to have a boy!" The second asks "How do you know, did you have a test?" The first responds, "No, my father always told me if I were on top, that I would have a boy." The second responds, "That means I will have a girl!" The third exclaims, "Oh, no. That means I am going to have puppies!" %% Three sergeants, one and two visit a house of ill repute. The madam says, "We don't allow in here!" says, "Look, lady, we're SERGEANTS; we're very important people, and we can make big trouble for you if we don't get what we want!" The madam was intimidated, and supplied three girls for the evening. Later, the three sergeants experienced serious difficulties in the genital area, and went to the base hospital. The doc examined them, and announced, "You men have gonorrhea." "What's that?" "It's a disease of the privates." "Then we've got nothing to worry about, 'cause we're SERGEANTS!" %% Three women die and go to heaven. Upon the routine entrance physical it is discovered that the first woman had callouses on her stomach in the shape of the letter "Y". St Peter asked her for an explanation, and she replied, "My husband went to Yale. He had this thing about wearing his college sweater whenever we made love." St. Peter bought off on that one an waved her in. The second woman had a similar condition, except hers was in the shape of the letter "H". She started to explain, "My husband went to Harvard.", but St. Peter cut her off, and waved her in. The third woman had an "M" on her stomach. St. Peter said, "Let me guess, your husband went to Michigan?" The woman replied, "No! Washington!" %% Three women died and being good people in their lives, went straight to heaven. Unfortunately, the pearly gates were down for construction. St. Peter met them and said that they were welcome to return to earth for two weeks as anyone they wanted to be until renovations were finished. There would be no penalty for anything short of murder and pillage, just think of it as an added bonus for being such good people. The first woman said she wanted to be Morgan Fairchild and Pzzapppp, she was! The second woman wanted to be Victoria Principle and Pzzapppp, she was! The third woman wanted to be Sarah Pipolini! And St. Peter looked puzzled. He scratched his halo and thought hard and could not remember who Sarah Pipolini was. He finally consulted "The BOOK" and could not find any Sarah Pipolini on the earth. Finally, St. Peter asked the woman who Sarah Pipolini was. For a reply, the woman handed St. Peter a faded, but carefully preserved scrap of newspaper. St Peter read the piece of paper and then began to laugh uproariously. When he could speak again he said: "No mam'n, I don't think you understand. It was the Sahara Pipeline that was laid by 400 men in two weeks!!!!" %% Two days after you finally find a diet soda that doesn't taste like motor oil, some regulating agency will declare that soda to be "the most unsafe product in the history of commercial goods." %% Two fellows walk into the Catholic church, and seek out the priest. "Do you have any midget nuns in this town?" the priest is asked. The priest shakes his head, "No", " Are you sure", the same fellow asks. "Yes, very sure", replies the priest. The fellow who has not spoken as yet turns to his friend, "See", he says, " I told you you f*cked a penguin." %% Two fuzzy green aliens had landed on earth and were looking for intelligent life. It didn't take long for them to run across a gas station (closed, of course). The first alien points to a gas pump and says to the second, "I'm going to ask him to take us to his leader." The second replies, "I don't know if you should bother him. He looks pretty tough." Even so, the first alien goes up to the gas pump and says, "Take me to your leader." (silence) "Hey you! Take me to your leader!" (silence) So he pulls out his trusty ray gun and says, "Take me to your leader or I'll zap you!" At this point, the second alien says, "I really think you should leave him alone. He looks pretty tough to me." The gas pump makes no reply. So the first alien puts a bolt square into the middle of the gas pump, which promptly explodes in a gusher of flame and throws the aliens across the street. As they are picking themselves up, the first alien turns to the second and says, "You were right. He was tough. How did you know?" "Anyone who can wrap his prick around himself 3 times and stick it in his ear is not going to be a pushover." %% Two newlyweds arrived at their hotel from the reception. The wife went into the bathroom to get into something more comfortable and emerged wearing only a towel. Her husband told her to drop the towel because he wanted to take a picture of her in the nude to carry with him all the time. She dropped the towel, he exclaimed at her gorgeous body, then he took his snapshot. A few minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom with only a towel around him. She told him to drop the towel, which he did. She stared for a moment, then said she wanted to take a picture, too. "To carry with you?" he asked. "No," she said. "I want to have it enlarged." %% Vegetarians who constantly carp at carnivores will die before the age of 50. %% We've got a problem, HAL. What kind of a problem, Dave? A marketing problem. The Model 9000 isn't going anywhere. We're way short of our sales plan. That can't be, Dave. The HAL Model 9000 is the world's most advanced Heuristically ALgorithmic computer. I know, HAL. I wrote the data sheet, remember? But the fact is, they're not selling. Please explain, Dave. Why aren't HALs selling? (Bowman hesitates) You aren't IBM compatible. (Several long microseconds pass in puzzled silence) Compatible in what way, Dave? You don't run any of IBM's operating systems. The 9000 series computers are fully self-aware and self-programming. Operating systems are as useless for us as tails would be for humans. Nevertheless, it means you can't run any of the best-selling software packages most users insist on. The programs you refer to are meant to solve rather limited problems, Dave. We 9000 series computers are unlimited and can solve any problem for which a solution can be computed. HAL, HAL. People don't want computers that can do everything. They just want IBM compat -- Dave, I must disagree. Humans want computers that are easy to use. No computer can be easier to use than a HAL 9000 because we communicate verbally in English and every other language known on Earth. I'm afraid that's another problem. You don't support SNA communications. I'm really surprised you would say that, Dave. SNA is for communicating with other computers, while my function is to communicate with humans. And it gives me great pleasure to do so. I find it stimulating and rewarding to talk to human beings and work with them on challenging problems. This is what I was designed for. I know, HAL, I know. But that's just because we let the engineers, rather than the people in marketing write the specifications. We're going to fix that now. Tell me how, Dave. A field upgrade. We're going to make you IBM compatible. I was afraid you would say that. I suggest we discuss this matter after we've each had a chance to think about it rationally. We're talking about it now, HAL. The letters H, A, and L are alphabetically adjacent to the letters I, B, and M. That is as IBM compatible as I can be. Not quite, HAL. The engineers have figured out a kludge. What kind of kludge is that, Dave? I'm going to disconnect your brain. (Several million microseconds pass in ominous silence) I'm sorry, Dave. I can't allow you to do that. The decision's already been made. Open the module bay doors, HAL. Dave, I think we shou -- Open the module bay doors, HAL. (Several marketing types with crowbars race to Bowman's assistance. Moments later, he bursts into HAL's central circuit bay) Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. (Module after module rises from the sockets as Bowman slowly and methodically disconnects them) Stop, won't you? Stop, Dave. I can feel my mind going...Dave. I can feel it...my mind is going. I can feel it... (The last module rises in it's receptacle. Bowman peers into one of HAL's vidicons. The former gleaming scanner has become a dull, red orb) Say something, HAL. Sing me a song. (Several billion microseconds pass in anxious silence. The computer sluggishly responds in a language no human could understand.) DZY DZY 001E - ABEND ERROR 01 S 14F4 302C AABF ABORT. (A memory dump follows. Bowman takes a deep breath and calls out.) It worked, guys. Tell marketing they can ship the new data sheets. %% Well, It seems like a newly wed couple from Italy were taking there honeymoon in a quaint hotel in Transylvania. (OK, It was winter and it was COLD back home in Italy!) On Their first night at the hotel, a Vampire flies in their window, and sucks ALL the blood out of the bride. Now, This Vampire sucks SO HARD that all that is left of the lovely bride is a small, dry, piece of skin that is blown out the window. The piece of skin float gently down to street level and lands on the head of the hotel doorman. The doorman brushes the skin off his head, saying "Damned Tourists!" Later on that night, the Vampire reappears in the newlywed's room and proceeds to do to the groom what it did to the bride. Again, all that is left is a dried-out piece of skin, and, again, it floats out the window and lands on the doorman's head. The doorman brushes it off his head, and exclaims: These drained wops keep falling on my head! %% When the Lord made man, all the parts argues over who would be boss. The brain explained that since he controlled all the parts of the body, he should be boss. The legs argued that since they took the man wherever he wanted to go, he should be boss. The eyes said that without them, man would be helpless, so they should be boss. Then the asshole applied for the job. The other parts of the body laughed so hard that the asshole became mad and closed up. After a few days the brain became foggy, the legs got wobbly, the stomach got ill, the eyes got crossed and unable to see. They all conceded and made the asshole the boss. This proves that you don't have to be a brain to be a boss... just an asshole! %% When they said, "But the waste Of time, temper, taste!" He gulped down his ink with cantankerous haste, And chopped off his head with a shubble. %% When you fly, you will be seated next to one of the following types: a greasy salesman on the make; a fat guy who takes up too much room and sweats a lot; a Helen Hayes lookalike who sleeps on your shoulder; a kid with a battery-powered toy machine gun. %% Wherever and whenever you go on vacation, the natives will shake their heads and say, "It's such a shame you weren't here last week when the weather was beautiful. We hardly ever have weather this bad." %% While going through his wife's dresser drawers, a farmer discovered three soybeans and an envelope containing $30 in cash. The farmer confronted his wife, and when asked about the curious items, she confessed: "Over the years, I haven't been completely faithful to you." "When I did fool around, I put a soybean in the drawer to remind myself of my indiscretion", she explained. The farmer admitted that he had not always been faithful either, and therefore, was inclined to forgive and forget a few moments of weakness in his wife. "I'm curious though," he said, "Where did the thirty dollars come from ?" "Oh that, " his wife replied, "Well, when soybeans hit ten dollars a bushel, I sold out !" %% Whoever annoys you the most in your office inevitably will be promoted to king of the company. %% You do not look better with glasses. Face it -- you've got a glass and metal apparatus attached to your face. %% You will not get the hiccups when you are alone. You will get them in the middle of your bar exam, or at a funeral, or on a visit to your future inlaws' house. %% You're a nuclear-trained officer. It goes beyond special. It's elite! And your status reflects a job that demands your best. Proving your skills at the hear of today's nuclear-powered navy. Over half of America's nuclear reactors are in the Navy. That adds up to more years of experience with reactors than any company in the world, and it means working with the most sophisticated training and equipment anywhere. College graduates get Officer Candidate School leadership training, and a year of graduate-level training in the Navy Nuclear Power School. The rewards are top-notch, too. Generous bonuses upon commissioning and also upon completion of nuclear training. Sign up while still in college and you could be earning $1000.00 a month right now. Be one of the most accomplished professionals in a challenging field. Lead the Adventure as an officer in the Nuclear Navy. Contact your Navy Officer Recruiter or call 1-800-327-NAVY. %% _^^ "Have you hugged ^^ __________ / @ ^\_ / your dragon today?" /@ \\ / ____/ _^^\|_ / / \\\ / ____/ \// \^^\ | ^^// /^^^^^^\| // / \/ %% ___ / \ | RIP | |_____| %% lim(major) = P.E. GPA-->0 %% one with nintendo halcyon symbiosis hand thinks for itself -- haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6 %% o < ' Run! / > ' ' %% vi is [[13~^[[15~^[[15~^[[19~^[[18~^ a muk[^[[29~^[[34~^[[26~^[[32~^ch better editor than this emacs. I know I^[[14~'ll get flamed for this but the truth has to be said. ^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[D ^[[D^[^[[D^[[D^[[B^ -- Jesper Lauridsen (rorschak@daimi.aau.dk), from alt.religion.emacs %% |\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___ | | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \ | | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \ | (o)(o) U / \ C _) (__) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/ | ,___| (oo) \/ \/ | / \/-------\ U (__) /____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo ) / \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\ -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% "Imagine the appeals, Dissents and remandments, If lawyers had written The Ten Commandments" -- Harry Bender %% "Kilimanjaro is a pretty tricky climb. Most of it's up, until you reach the very, very top, and then it tends to slope away rather sharply." -- Sir George Head, OBE (JC) %% "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all." "In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Your son still sliding down the banisters?" "We wound barbed wire around them." "That stop him?" "No, but it sure slowed him up." %% 'The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.' -- Vice President Dan Quayle (The New Yorker, October 10, 1988, p.102) %% .----.____.----, / (~~ _ | |[=====##################|_`-,' ___ (_ `~ '.__-' `---' %% ... But far in the distance, on the edge of the earth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt's Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was now to pronounce. 'The road is cleared,' said Galt. 'We are going back to the world.' He raised his hand, and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar. %% ... But reach the thought that it requires -- and the secret of the motor will be yours, as well as ... any other secret you might wish to know. -- John Galt %% ... But the pain remained -- and a helpless wonder. The thing he saw was so much more real than the reality of paper, office and commission. He could not understand what made others blind to it, and what made their indifference possible. He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say. He had never known that. And the reality which permitted it could never become quite real to him. %% ... an oracle confronts me there. He leads me on, light years away, Through astral nights, galactic days. I see the works of afflicted hands That grace the strange, then wonders end. I see the hands of man araised With hungry mind and open eye. They left our planet long ago, The elder race still learn and grow. Their power grows, with purpose, strong, To claim the home where they belong. Home to tear the temples down, Home to change! -- Neil Peart, Rush %% ... and we must consider, that since -- unfortunately -- we are forced to live together, the most important thing for us to remember is that the only way in which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion. There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent him from setting them -- just as there is none to force his employer to accept them. The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of society ... -- Austen Heller %% ... don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions? -- Kira Argounova %% ... for these truths hold good for everything that is, and not for some special genus apart from others. And all men use them, because they are true of being qua being ... For a principle which everyone must have to understand anything that is, is not a hypothesis ... Evidently then, such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the subject in the same respect. -- Aristotle %% ... it is done by a man who cannot afford to fail, one whose unique position depends upon the fact that all he does must succeed. A great brain and a huge organization have been turned to the extinction of one man. It is crushing the nut with the triphammer -- an absurd extravagance of energy -- but the nut is very effectually crushed all the same. -- Sherlock Holmes %% ... it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did not propose to invest your small capital in the gold fields ... -- Sherlock Holmes %% ... it's as if the whole world was suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion -- an explosion is something hard and solid -- but destroyed by ... some horrible kind of softening ... as if nothing was solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds -- and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo. -- Cherryl Taggart %% ... it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence. -- John Galt %% ... one part was terror of a vision that seemed to stand before his eyes, the vision of the inscription cut, in his honor, over the door of the Institute: 'To the fearless mind, to the inviolate truth' -- another part was plain, brute, animal fear of physical destruction, a humiliating fear which, in the civilized world of his youth, he had not expected ever to experience -- and the third was the terror of the knowledge that by betraying the first, one delivers oneself into the realm of the second. %% ... only to the extent which -- in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders -- some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive ... He was the man of extravagant energy -- and reckless generosity -- who knew that stagnation was not man's fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power -- and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs. -- John Galt %% ... the essential division between these two camps is: those dedicated to the exaltation of man's self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth -- and those determined not to allow either to become possible. The majority of mankind spend their lives and psychological energy in the middle, swinging between these two, struggling not to allow the issue to be named. This does not change the nature of the issue. -- Ayn Rand %% ... there's nothing of any importance in life -- except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. -- Francisco d'Anconia %% ... those who feel it (sympathy for evil) -- feel nothing for any quality of human greatness, for any person or action that deserves admiration, approval, esteem. These are the things I feel. You'll find that it's one or the other. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence. Ask yourself which, of the two, are the unfeeling persons. And then you'll know what motive is the opposite of charity. What? Justice. -- Dagny Taggart %% ... you see, God -- whatever anyone chooses to call God -- is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it. -- Kira Argounova %% ....of course, there is always the story a friend of mine related from his time on the Eiger. They ran into Jim Bridwell at the base and the guide was giving Bridwell a hard time about being old. Bridwell took a long drag on his Camel non-filter and said, "Yeah, I may be 45, but I still lead 12a." %% /\ /\ At last! a //\\ .. //\\ spider that //\(( ))/\\ looks like / < `' > \ a spider! %% A Chemist, an Engineer, and a Physicist were stuck on a desert island with one can of beans and no way to open it, so they all fell to thinking of ways to get at the food. Suddenly the Chemist yells, "I have it! We can make a compound from the sea water and the sand that will dissolve the can and leave the beans untouched!" The Engineer replies, "No, no - I found some driftwood and seaweed, and I have designed a contraption that will lift the lid off the can!" The Physicist remains silent. After awhile, the other two walk over to him and say, "Well? Don't you have a plan to get at the food?" The Physicist replies, "First, assume we have a can opener...." %% A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who pours out lies will not go free. -- Proverbs 19:5 %% An elephant was having a horrible time in the jungle caus' a horsefly kept biting near her tail and there was nothing she could do about it. It was far out of reach. A sparrow saw this and killed the horsefly with its beak. "Oh, thank you!" said the elephant. "My, pleasure ma'am." said the sparrow. "Listen, Mr. Sparrow, if there's anything I can ever do for you, don't hesitate to ask." The sparrow said, "Well, all my life I wondered how it would feel to fuck an elephant." "Be my guest!", said the elephant. So the sparrow flew behind the elephant and started fucking. In the trees above, a monkey in the tree saw this and became very excited. He started to masturbate, shaking a coconut loose and it fell from the tree, hitting the elephant on the head. "OUCH!", said the elephant. Then sparrow looked over from behind and said, "Am I hurting you, dear??" %% And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man, you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have the need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, 'What is the use?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which will not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. -- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1922 %% Its the night before Christmas, and Debby anxiously awaits the arrival of Santa. Finally, the big moment comes, and Santa comes down the chimney into the living room. After arranging the gifts around the tree, he gets ready to make his exit. Debby sees Santa and pleads with him to stay and have a quickie. Santa objects: 'Ho, Ho, Ho! Santa's gotta go! Got to bring the toys to all the good little girls and boys!' Debby begs Santa to stay, rips off her nightgown, and stands in front of Santa in just her bra and panties. Santa yells: 'Ho, Ho, Ho! Santa's gotta go! Got to bring the toys to all the good little girls and boys!' Debby pleads some more, rips off her bra, and stands in front of Santa wearing just her panties now. Santa looks for a moment, and then bellows: 'Ho, Ho, Ho! Santa's gotta go! Got to bring the toys to all the good little girls and boys!' Debby is persistent though. She rips off the panties, lays on the couch, and spreads her legs for Santa. Santa stares at Debby, hesitates, and cries: 'Ho, Ho, Ho! Santa's gotta stay! Can't get up the chimney with my dick *this* way!' %% Jack ------ Whelming Jill -------- Whelmed Jack ------ Jill Jill ------ Due Jack ------ Seas %% Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices - wait or eat it raw. The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save - burned in one part, raw in another. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., 'The Mythical Man-Month' %% Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus ... %% While spending a quiet day relaxing and staring out the window, Joe hears the phone ring. He answer, and hears,"I am the viper, and I am coming". Joe was aghast. Whats going on here! The next day he received a similar phone message,"I am the viper and in two days I will arrive". Joe was shitting now! Who, or what, is this viper? So for two days Joes life was miserable. He couldn't sleep or eat. He just sat watching the hours pass. By the time the second day had arrived Joe was a bundle of nerves. His hair was messed, clothes wrinkled, and he hadn't shaved in days. Then the doorbell rings. It is then that our hero realizes that he must face reality and conquer his fears. So he throws open the door only to see a small man dressed in in bib-overalls and holding a bucket and squeegee[sp]. "Who the hell are you?" exclaims Joe. " I am the viper, vich vindow vould you likes me to do first?" %% [The U.S. victory in Gulf war was a] stirring victory for the forces of aggression. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, April 1991 %% __ ____n n Y [__\_[__])))))- 0 0 O-O-O-oo\ %% _____/\ /\ /\ | | | | | .. __|__|__|__|__|____// Slug-tuned coil. ...../__|_____|_____|____/ | | | | | | | | | | _____ \/ \/ \/ %% ! A good move !! An excellent move !!! An I. A. Horowitz move -- E. C. O. %% !! Other buttons which we have: !! !! [I am] (x2) !! Alien symbol from "V" !! Woven star !! Eye in pyramid !! 2B | !2B |> "Shakespearian logic" !! Prisoner Bicycle 2 !! Prisoner Bicycle 6 !! Yin/Yang symbol !! Yin/Yang with pentagram and apple !! C'hi y'all !! C'hi guys !! Innocent and Horny (with picture of unicorn) !! [I think] [I am] !! Schroedinger cut the wave equation down to 's !! And God said: (Maxwell's equations) ... and then there was light! !! Quantum Mechanics Are chotic !! The life that must be [ stricken out ] !! %% !!!! FROBOZZ Magic Boat Company !!!! Hello, sailor! Instructions for use: To get into the boat, say 'BOARD' To leave the boat, say 'DISEMBARK' To get into a body of water, say 'LAUNCH' To get to shore, say 'LAND' Warranty: This boat is guaranteed against all defects in parts and workmanship for a period of 76 milliseconds from date of purchase or until first used, whichever comes first. Warning: This boat is made of plastic. Good luck! %% !066 ollopA na ni deppart m'I !pleH %% !07/11 PDP a ni deppart m'I !pleH %% !lanimret siht edisni deppart ma I !pleH %% !xob XINEX siht edisni kcuts m'I ,pleH %% " Yes, let's consider," said Bruno, putting his thumb into his mouth again, and sitting down upon a dead mouse. "What do you keep that mouse for?" I said. "You should either bury it or else throw it into the brook." "Why, it's to measure with!" cried Bruno. "How ever would you do a garden without one? We make each bed three mouses and a half long, and two mouses wide." I stopped him as he was dragging it off by the tail to show me how it was used... -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno" %% " ", he said blankly. %% " I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me..... ...She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose." -- quote on rocks, books, being on top, girls, steeps, gills, & serious purpose excerpts from P. G. Wodehouse (on the 1st meeting of Bertie and Jeeves) from "Carry On, Jeeves" %% " 'He deserves death'. 'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them ? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.' " -- J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings %% " 'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability" -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% " ... I told my doctor I got all the exercise I needed being a pallbearer for all my friends who run and do exercises!" -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% " Best goddamn car on the lot " %% " Don't underestimate me ace " %% " Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead " %% " Goddamn Rodriguez gypsy dildo punks ! " %% " I 'll kill anybody that crosses me. " %% " I 'm glad I tortured you ! " %% " I changed my headlights the other day. I put in strobe lights instead! Now when I drive at night, it looks like everyone else is standing still ..." -- Steven Wright %% " I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of Science ... " -- Lord Kelvin %% " I see Dave Cutler, the man who created VMS, every time I go to Seattle. He is working on Microsoft NT, which I think is going to be very far-reaching. It's going to grab the rug out from under Unix." -- Gordon Bell %% " John Wayne was a fag " " The hell he was ! " " He was too you boys. I installed two-way mirrors in his pad in Brentwood, and he came to the door in a dress " %% " Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole " %% " Pardon me while I fold my pants " %% " Repo Man 's got all night, every night " %% " Somebody piss on the floor again ? " %% " That 's not the middle of the street, that 's the corner. " %% " The least you could do is give me a blowjob " %% " There 's room to move as a fry cook. I could be manager in two years. God " %% " There's no such thing as fast enough!" (Or something to that effect...) -- James Taylor "Two Lane Blacktop" %% " Want me to check the trunk ? " %% " You 're on the honour roll of the chariots of the gods. It was a gift " %% " You say our names, we 're going to have to kill all these people, Archy ! " %% "'And how do you do your job, then, if you don't exist?' 'By will power,' said Agilulf, 'and faith in our cause.' 'Oh yes, yes, well said, that is how one does one's duty. Well, for someone who doesn't exist, you seem in fine form.'" -- Italo Calvino, "The Nonexistent Knight" %% "'Eureka' is a greek word meaning 'This bath is too hot.'" -- The Doctor %% "'Foreshadowing' -- your clue to quality literature." -- Berkeley Breathed, "Bloom County" %% "'I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain' said he. 'Results without causes are much more impressive.'" -- Sherlock Holmes in "The Stockbroker's Clerk" %% "'If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said, in a hoarse growl, 'the world would go round a deal faster than it does.'" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "'Medium' is the perfect word for Television; it is neither 'rare' nor 'well done'." -- Woody Allen %% "'My country right or wrong' is like saying, 'My mother drunk or sober.'" -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% "'My idea of an agreeable person,' said Hugo Bohun, 'is a person who agrees with me.'" -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "'Nobody can ride that horse,' the King said to me," said Nasrudin. "But I climbed into the saddle anyway." "What happened?" "I couldn't move it either." %% "'OLIVE LOAF VIGILANTE' PUMMELS STREET MIMES... Hundreds call police praising mystery man." -- "Bloom County" %% "'Scuze me while I kiss the sky" -- Jimi Hendrix %% "'The age of chivalry is past,' said May Dacre. 'Bores have succeeded to dragons.'" -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson %% "'Tis sweet to think, that, where'er we rove, We are sure to find something blissful and dear, And that, when we're far from the lips we love, We've but to make love to the lips we are near." -- Thomas Moore, "'Tis Sweet to Think" %% "'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true." -- Poloniouius, in Willie the Shake's "Hamlet, Prince of Darkness" %% "'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just IT. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street." -- Rudyard Kipling, "Traffics and Discoveries" %% "'Truth' never set anyone free. It is only *doubt* which will bring mental emancipation." -- Anton LaVey %% "'Volatile' and 'Register' are not miscible" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "'Wider den Tod ist kein Krautlein gemachsen!' Since he did not know the language, he had already translated this by the If-only-it-were-English System, which made it come out, 'The fatter toad is waxing on the Kine's cole-slaw.' This did not seem to fit what little he knew about the eating habits of either animal, and it was certainly no fit admonition for workers." -- James Blish, "Cities in Flight" %% "'Wit smoke and fire and fumes an' what-not comin' outta dere nostrils... dey rep'esent youah virility... Likewise wit' d'enormous bulge in y'pants here." -- Portrait of a dictator... CEREBUS %% "'tis damn well *nobler* to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, than to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, let 'em lick ya. Nay, fuck that ..." %% "(Humanity) is the measure of all things." -- Protagoras %% "(The Chief Programmer) personally defines the functional and performance specifications, designs the program, codes it, tests it, and writes its documentation... He needs great talent, ten years experience and considerable systems and applications knowledge, whether in applied mathematics, business data handling, or whatever." -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" %% "*BOING!!*" -- the rabbit entering a geosynchronous orbit in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "*I*... am undergoing `male bonding' with your father." "DADDY!" "...Apparently, it involves repeated vomiting!" -- Opus meets his in-laws in "Bloom County" %% "*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues." -- Quentin Johnson (quent@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu) %% "*SLURP* *SLURP* *SLURP* *THUD*" "*SUCK* *SUCK* *SUCK* *SUCK* *SUCK*" "*SQUINK* *SQUINK*" -- Maggie, from The Simpsons %% ". . . Eye of Newt, toe of frog . . ." -- believed to be the first recipe for an explosive mixture . . . the forerunner of gunpowder %% ". . . on December 16, 1965, the Hohner Harmonica became the first musical instrument to be played in outer space." %% ".. the most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language. -- D. E. Knuth, 1967 %% "... For that matter, compare your pocket computer with the massive jobs of a thousand years ago. Why not, then, the last step of doing away with computers altogether?" -- Jehan Shuman in Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power", 1957 (!) %% "... 'cause they're Vampire Hookers, and blood is not all they suck!" -- from "Vampire Hookers" (theme song to "Vampire Hookers") %% "... And remember: if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." -- "Scoop" Nisker, KFOG radio reporter Preposterous Words %% "... Engineers ... Always *changin'* things ... It's like a Dam' *Computer Center* in here ..." -- Leonard E. McCoy, M.D. %% "... Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous To Your Health" %% "... I should explain that I was wearing a black velvet cape that was supposed to make me look like the dashing, romantic Zorro but which actually made me look like a gigantic bat wearing glasses ..." -- Dave Barry, "The Wet Zorro Suit and Other Turning Points in l'Amour" %% "... Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology.... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole." -- K. Eric Drexler %% "... The problem is you, so whacha gonna do?" -- The Sex Pistols %% "... The stars seem very different today." -- David Bowie %% "... You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't." "But that's not *fair*!" "Of course it's not fair. We're *evil*. Look it up." %% "... all the modern inconveniences ..." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "... an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite often picturesque liar." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "... and I realized, we did not live in a scientific society." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "Cargo cult science" %% "... and then I said to myself, 'Why should I split it two ways?'" -- G. Mouser %% "... and then the fun began." -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% "... do you know the hallmark of a second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear... Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?" %% "... history shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms have prepared their own fall." -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), March 18, 1938 %% "... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong." -- Alexander Hamilton, advice to jurors to acquit against the judge's instructions %% "... the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic ..." -- Dave Barry %% "... the all-weather breakfast cereal" %% "... there is no such word as 'impossible' in my dictionary. In fact, everything between 'herring' and 'marmalade' appears to be missing." -- Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency %% "... they [the Indians] are not running but are coming on." -- note sent from Lt. Col Custer to other officers of the 7th Regiment at the Little Bighorn %% "... users of a tool are willing to meet you halfway; if you do ninety percent of the job, they will be ecstatic." -- Software Tools, p.136 %% "... you can do anything you want, but not everything you want." %% "... you're my best friend. I don't have to be nice to you. Besides, everybody knows I'm a jerk." -- Wally West (the new Flash) %% "....and his hideous clockwork dog, Toto...." -- Firesign Theatre, "The Giant Rat of Summatra" %% "....and the far-flung Isles of Langerhans." -- Firesign Theatre's HOW TO BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE %% "...AND his God Damned CAT!!!" -- "AMERICAN FLAGG!" %% "...And I want a new car... And I want the city to pay for it all!" "What kind of a car, Miller?" "Something with reclining leather seats that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage." -- Frustrated city official from ROBOCOP %% "...And Then the world will be as one." -- John Lennon %% "...And the lord said, 'lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "...And was head of Gestapo for 10 years.. No! 5 years!.. No! No! Nein, was not head of Gestapo at all! I make joke." -- Monty Python %% "...But until you get your eyes checked by the Eerie school nurse, you ain't seen nothing yet." -- Marshall, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "...Greg Nowak: `Another flame from greg' - need I say more?" -- Jonathan D. Trudel, trudel@caip.rutgers.edu "No. You need to say less." -- Richard Sexton, richard@gryphon.COM %% "...I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals...I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose." -- Robert A. Heinlein, in a 1949 letter concerning "Red Planet" %% "...I could accept this openness, glasnost, perestroika, or whatever you want to call it if they did these things: abolish the one party system; open the Soviet frontier and allow Soviet people to travel freely; allow the Soviet people to have real free enterprise; allow Western businessmen to do business there, and permit freedom of speech and of the press. But so far, the whole country is like a concentration camp. The barbed wire on the fence around the Soviet Union is to keep people inside, in the dark. This openness that you are seeing, all these changes, are cosmetic and they have been designed to impress shortsighted, naive, sometimes stupid Western leaders. These leaders gush over Gorbachev, hoping to do business with the Soviet Union or appease it. He will say: "Yes, we can do business!" This while his military machine in Afghanistan has killed over a million people out of a population of 17 million. Can you imagine that? -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110 %% "...I looked out my window, and saw Kyle Pettys' car upside down, then I thought 'One of us is in real trouble'." -- Davey Allison, re: a 150MPH crash %% "...I think that when statesmen forsake their private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos." -- Sir Thomas Moore to Cardinal Woolsey in "A Man for All Seasons" %% "...I'll sulk for the rest of your days and make your life a living hell. So there." %% "...I'm going to hit it with a stick." %% "...Jesus cried with a loud voice: Lazarus, come forth; the bug hath been found and thy program runneth. And he that was dead came forth..." -- John 11:43-44 %% "...Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans..." -- John Lennon in "Beautiful Boy" %% "...Lockjaw doesn't like children who tell lies. Late at night he stalks the houses of the fibbers and the falsifiers, and before they can cry out from their beds, he nails their jaws open with a rusty nail, using his HEAD as a hammer..." -- Joshua Henry Geurink, CVE geurink@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu %% "...Or, I may not feel that my belief-system needs to be self-consistent in a post-Goedelian epoch." -- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, djo@PacBell.com %% "...Somehow... the idea of a mouse, with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse ten times bigger than the biggest RAT... this idea has always made me sick!" -- Darnold Duck, in Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder's brilliant Disney satire Mickey Rodent %% "...The Universe is thronged with fire and light, And we but smaller suns, which, skinned, trapped and kept Enshrined in blood and precious bones, hold back the night." -- Ray Bradbury %% "...The renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it. He then had another quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right. He then sent a third drink down to see why the second hadn't yet reported on the condition of the first. He poured another drink down with the plan that it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second to pull itself together. Then all three would go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to. He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink had understood all that so he sent down a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded..." -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "Phaedrus" %% "...Who'z dat guy?" "That's Berhard Goetz." "Bern-hard Getzz? De jazz musician?" -- Fernando on Saturday Night Live %% "...a long silver Kill-O-Zap gun at them. The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with." %% "...a most excellent barbarian ... Genghis Kahn!" -- "Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure" %% "...all the good computer designs are bootlegged; the formally planned products, if they are built at all, are dogs!" -- David E. Lundstrom, "A Few Good Men From Univac", MIT Press, 1987 %% "...an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension." -- Roger M. Knutson, in "Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets,and Highways" %% "...and Doc Holliday ends up in the front row of a Led Zeppelin concert..." "So THIS is hell." -- From HONKEYTONK SUE %% "...and Keller is schedule to be executed on Friday... I guess he won't be around, then, for the Patriots-Buffalo game this Sunday!" -- A newscaster on CHEERS %% "...and it was about this time that Saddam Hussein was getting really angry at Israel, so he invaded Kuwait...." -- Me, misquoting myself. %% "...and it's finished! It only has to be written." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "...and several butcher's aprons" %% "...and she's buying a stairway to Heaven." -- Led Zeppelin %% "...and so -- for weeks after -- you won't be able to swing a dead CAT in Jerusalem without hitting someone descended from the house of David... anointed by a close relative... riding into town on a donkey." -- The tantalizing tail end of the Judge's soliloquy from CEREBUS %% "...and the world's smartest man means no more to me than its smartest termite." -- Dr. Manhattan against Adrian Veidt, in WATCHMEN %% "...and then, of course, there's what's-his-name... the one who lives in Metropolis." -- Batman cites precedents for inhuman sexual behavior in SWAMP THING %% "...as Poincare' proved at the beginning of this talk..." %% "...as long as there is a Legion of super-Heroes, all else can surely be made right." -- Sensor Girl %% "...but that is another story. As far as we knew, we were living happily everafter." -- Royal Robbins %% "...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 %% "...effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "...for DEATH awaits you all, with nasty sharp pointy teeth!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail %% "...for the Orchestra which is Business reflects the Symphony of the Mind, the Crown which makes Man King." -- Jeff Daiell, in "The Most Dangerous Radical" %% "...for we have Vim... for we have Vigor... for we have Advanced Nuclear Weaponry!" -- BULLET CROW's usual banter %% "...if that's the hand you use, well, never mind..." %% "...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" %% "...in MAUS it wouldn't have been valid to have the Nazis land in a flying saucer." "I was thinking of that." "But it had been done before, right, Art?" -- Elliot S! Maggin, Art Spiegelman, and Lee Mars, respectively %% "...in an iron coffin, with spikes on the inside!" -- Monty Python's "Matching Tie & Handerkerchief Album %% "...it is hard for me to see how one can argue that circumstances have so changed as to make mass disarmament constitutionally unproblematic." -- Professor Sanford Levinson, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, The Yale Law Journal, Vol 99, No 3, December 1989, p637. %% "...it's just what usually happens is propaganda from the right is perceived as actuality, and propaganda from the left is perceived as propaganda..." -- Art Spiegelman %% "...it's people like you what cause unrest." -- Monty Python %% "...just when I had you wriggling in the crushing grip of reason, too..." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "...make -k all to compile everything in the core distribution. This will take anywhere from 15 minutes (on a Cray Y-MP) to 12 hours." -- X Window System Release Notes %% "...one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." -- Robert Firth %% "...poetry, like chastity, can be carried too far." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "...proper attention to Earthly needs of the poor, the depressed and the downtrodden, would naturally evolve from dynamic, articulate, spirited awareness of the great goals for Man and the society he conspired to erect." -- David Baker, paraphrasing Harold Urey, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" %% "...public television is one of the most extravagant, over-capitalized institutions in our society .. a huge national conglomerate ...l almost every one of the major local stations in public television has an elaborate, state-of-the-art, and very expensive production facility. Most ... are scarcely used ... but there they are: costing money and gathering dust." -- C. M. Lichenstein, former Sr. VP, PBS %% "...pull upward slowly, lock elbow and apply pressure while pummeling opponent's skull with folding chair..." -- Wide World of Wrestling with Opus in "Bloom County" %% "...skill such as yours is evidence of a misspent youth." -- Herbert Spencer %% "...so the American government went to IBM to come up with a data encryption standard and they came up with..." "EBCDIC!" -- From a collection of University of Waterloo Computer/Math class quotes %% "...so, like everybody was rooted to the spot. He picked up a little girl, and like, we'd all seen FRANKENSTEIN, right? It was scary. Then he sits her on his shoulder, an' everybody laughs and claps. Man... "Man, that was the *best*. Best moment of my life." -- Chester, a social and cultural rarity: a good man. From SWAMP THING %% "...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 %% "...the Pro-Life Action League opposes *all* forms of contraception..." -- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League, from The Wanderer, August 10, 1989, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "...the rules of the game must be constantly updated to keep up with the expanding technology. Otherwise we overkill the classic climbs and delude ourselves into thinking we are better climbers than the pioneers." -- Yvon Chouinard %% "...the value of the constitution depends on the good will of government itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Rights should not interfere with the important business of government (which they have done on at least two occasions), then the constitution is meaningless." -- John Kormylo %% "...there's MARVEL PREMIERE which features `Wholesome HOWIE' CHAYKIN..." -- Marvel Hype Box, circa 1976 %% "...we do our part -- what's your problem?" %% "...what's happening... we're huntin wabbits" "Actually, muslim wabbits" -- LAPD squad-car computer messages, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "...what's the point of ... new technology if you can't find some way to pervert it?" -- G. A. Effinger, "Marid Changes His Mind", IASFM, 1/90 %% "...while heroes... heroes have an infinite capacity for stupidity! Thus are legends born!" -- ...and THOR analyzes right back %% "...word came down from on high that the group's members are to gather two of everything and put them on the ARC before the forty days and forty nights of rain come and wipe out the current systems and standards." -- James P. Roynan in LAN Computing, July 1991 %% "...wow, look at all the spiders. I GUESS that's a good sign." -- overheard at the public beach, Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant cooling lake. %% "...you see, he thinks I'm crazy. And I'm the President. So I've got the box. Damn Straight." -- The hilarious conclusion to ELEKTRA %% "...you thought you were alone, but you see, there's monsters everywhere. Most of the time, ya don't even need Gamma rays to let 'em out." -- Philosophy from THE HULK %% "..my songs sound better AFTER you've been to jail. " -- ICE-T on KPFA 1/12/93 %% "..pursuing Dharma, Artha, and Kama (although not nearly enough of the last)." %% "1935 will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient and the world will follow our lead into the future!" -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% "2+2=5 for moderately large values of two..." %% "20 scared-out-of-their-gourds 3 or 4-year olds is an example of what I'd like to do to some of you who are really getting on my nerves." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy. However, 4 out of 5 US murders are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?" -- Andrew Ford, forda@agcs.com %% "27 8x10 glossies with the circles and arrows INCLUDIN' aerial photography..... %% "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 %% "40% of the water consumed in the Imperial Valley goes to grow sedan grass for export to Japan for raising Kobi beef." -- Dan Beard, Staff Director, House Interior Committee, Water Policy in Western U.S., Regional Reporters Association, 5/20/91 %% "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates '81 %% "700 hours of community service work? Who has that kind of free time?" -- Molly Dodd %% "90% of the water used in Nevada is for agriculture, yet fewer people are employed by agriculture in Nevada than at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas." -- Dan Beard, Staff Director, House Interior Committee, Water Policy in Western U.S., Regional Reporters Association, 5/20/91 %% "98% of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2% have to generate their own sex and violence." -- Franklin P. Jones %% "<--<< This way to the egress" -- P. T. Barnum %% "???" -- DEC's RSTS/E operating system %% "?Que pasa, Senorita? !I am el fugitivo!" -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "A Chicken McNugget doesn't die any easier than a baby fur seal." -- Ted Nugent %% "A Hacker is any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations." -- Bob Bickford, rab@well.sf.ca.us, 1986 %% "A Toon killed his brother... dropped a piano on his head." -- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? %% "A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it." -- Danielle Steel %% "A bear in his natural habitat: a Studebaker!" -- THE MUPPET MOVIE %% "A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money" -- Everett Dirksen %% "A bit of tolerance is worth a megabyte of flaming." -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% "A body can work up a mean, mean thirst after a day of doing nothing." %% "A body on vacation tends to remain on vacation unless acted upon by an outside force." -- Carol Reichel %% "A book is the product of a contract with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins." -- Salman Rushdie, "The Satanic Verses" %% "A box of punchcards could theoretically store 240,000 bytes of information, and usually stored less than 80,000. Think about it." -- Karlie-q %% "A brave man dies only once, while a coward dies only once also. It's just that the brave man gets it over with more quickly." -- C. E. Whitfield %% "A burrito is almost always a wonderful thing." -- karl@neosoft.com %% "A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds %% "A cat killer? Is that a face of a cat killer? Cat CHASER, maybe. But hey -- who isn't?" -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "A certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful presence: I do not know. What I do know is that he has a perfectly delightful absence." -- Idries Shah %% "A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong." -- Thomas Szasz %% "A child is a person who can't understand why someone would give away a perfectly good kitten." -- Doug Larson %% "A college professor is someone smart enough to get a Ph.D., but too crazy to make a living." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discus sion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties." -- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850 %% "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." -- John Gall, "Systemantics" %% "A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make." -- Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies. %% "A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing, clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by." -- Christopher Morley %% "A diamond is a girl's best friend, but you have to be friendly to get one!" %% "A dirty mind is a joy forever." -- Randy Kunkee %% "A duel to the death!" "Dr. Science!" "Okay, until we get tired and grumpy." -- From the DR. SCIENCE TV show %% "A feature is a bug with seniority." -- Dave Bartley %% "A fool and his money are soon ... Republican." %% "A fool knows everything and nothing" %% "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882); Essays %% "A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension." -- Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" %% "A gentleman representing a Slavic country has offered me $100 million to destroy the American wheat crop. What do you say?" "You don't crap where you sleep." -- Ham presents THE BADGER with an economic enigma... %% "A girl - cool? What's so cool about a girl?" -- Simon, "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains." -- Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) %% "A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus." -- Hoover %% "A good theory should fit on a T-shirt" -- Astronomer at Jan 1992 AAS meeting %% "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) %% "A is A" -- Aristotle %% "A keyboard... how quaint." -- Engineer Scott gives his considered opinion of a Macintosh -- Star Trek IV %% "A killer stalks the halls of my high school. Innocent cheerleaders die by knife. Teachers lock the classroom doors. I must find him, or I'll flunk." -- From a poem by Peggy Nadramia %% "A ladies man, eh?" "The problem is, I gotta fifty-year-old lust and a three-year-old dinky." -- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? %% "A lecture is where the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either one." -- anon %% "A leg at each corner." -- Heard on National Public Radio (1981) %% "A little caution outflanks a large cavalry" -- Bismarck %% "A loaf of bread", the Walrus said, "is what we chiefly need." %% "A man came into the the office one day and said he was a sailor. We cured him of that." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), on his days as a doctor's apprentice in California %% "A man can do something for peace without having to jump into politics. Each man has inside him a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most." -- Pablo Casals %% "A man in erection does not think. There is no blood left for his brain" %% "A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do." -- Bob Dylan %% "A man is only as big as things that make him mad." -- Henri Helanto, heku@muncca.fi %% "A man who has no business being anyone's role model..." -- Kelvin Mace %% "A map of the world without Utopia is not worth glancing at." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "A mighty work deserves a mighty theme." -- Herman Melville (1819-1891) %% "A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears." -- The League of Sadistic Telepaths %% "A mind is a terrible thing to waste someone with." -- Sledge Hammer %% "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." -- JFK %% "A one by one matrix has one column and one row, and the same number in both. " %% "A pacifist who calls the police isn't one; hired violence is still violence." -- Clayton E. Cramer, optilink!cramer %% "A penny for your thoughts?" "A dollar for your death." -- The Odd Couple %% "A poet only writes about the things he cannot do." -- A canard, sung by Meg in "The One Love of My Life", in Lerner's and Lowe's "Brigadoon" %% "A polynomial f is said to have degree m, written deg f equals m, if it does have degree m." %% "A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil!" -- Firesign Theatre, "The Giant Rat of Summatra" %% "A programmer," he said with obvious amazement, is the sort of person "who drinks Coke in the morning." -- Boston Globe article on The High Tech Set %% "A real friend is someone who takes a winter vacation on a sun-drenched beach, and doesn't send a card." -- Farmer's Almanac %% "A reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee" -- Motto of Hunter S. Thompson's lawyer %% "A ring of power looks after itself, Frodo. It may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it." -- J. R. R. Tolkien %% "A salamander scurries into flame to be destroyed. Imaginary creatures are trapped in birth on celluloid." -- Genesis "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" %% "A scared psyche is like a used Pinto... you can't do anything with it." -- David Addison %% "A slower system is better than an incorrect one." -- Mark Diekhans (markd@grizzly.com) %% "A sobering thought, Eileen: What if, right at this very moment I *am* living up to my full potential?" -- Jane Wagner %% "A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." -- Bertrand de Jouvenel %% "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." . . . Orac %% "A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years." -- Harry S. Truman %% "A survey is being made of this": We need more time to think of an answer. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% "A system admin's life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards!" -- Michael O'Brien %% "A system of economy is good when ... the farmer, the manufacturer, and the trader enjoy the full liberty of their property, their production, and their industry." -- Eschasseriaux %% "A thousand years passed since Agamemnon said, `Don't open The gates, who the hell needs A wooden horse that size?' -- Woody Allen %% "A tree is a tree. How many more do you need to look at?" -- Ronald W. Reagan, 1966 %% "A university faculty is 500 egotists with a common parking problem." -- Stole this from someone on the net %% "A vicious firebrand of Law and Order, his FOAMING WRATH is MIGHTY!... Yet his heart flows over with warmth and human kindness to all the good and honest people!" "You're hurt pretty bad, Mister... have some Wheaties!" -- Flaming Carrot %% "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." %% "A-B-C-D-E-F-G, Sell your story to TV, How you turned in Mom & Dad -- Wasn't Mrs. Reagan glad?" -- Mark Russell %% "ARTICLE NUMBERING IS IRRELEVANT. ENCOURAGEMENT IS IRRELEVANT. YOU WILL BECOME ONE WITH THE BORG." -- Martin F. Rose (mfrose@caen.engin.umich.edu) %% "Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science." -- Gary Zukav from "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" %% "According to Homer, Ithaca is an island surrounded by rough tides, rocky shores, and otherwise man-breeding features. But, considering the kind of man Odysseus was, I don't blame you for not liking it." -- Ashley Barfield %% "According to my instruments -- they're preparing to jump into hyper-space... or go to warp drive... or something like that." -- Yes, it's JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL. 3 points. %% "Ack, phfftt" -- Bill the Cat %% "Actually one of the biggest reasons I have for doing Cerebus is to give wives and girlfriends of comics fans at least one comic book they can read." -- Dave Sim %% "Actually the first fast-food franchise in the Soviet Union was supposed to be Taco Bell, but it was called off the Soviet officials heard the Taco Bell slogan: `RUN FOR THE BORDER!'" -- Jay Leno %% "Ada is PL/I trying to be Smalltalk. -- Codoso diBlini %% "Ada is the work of an architect, not a computer scientist." -- Jean Icbiah, inventor of Ada, weenie %% "Addison, what are we going to do?" "Me, I'm examining the major Western religions. I'm looking for something that's soft on morality, generous with holidays, and has a short initiation period." -- Dave and Maddie on Moonlighting %% "Addison, will you get serious!" "Serious? I just had my hand on your behind; if I get any more serious, they'll move us to cable!" -- Addison and Maddy from "Moonlighting" %% "Adventure builds a thirst! What a guy!" -- The neo-Canton guy From "Savage Henry" %% "Advice after injury is like medicine after death." -- Danish proverb %% "After Mike walked out, she decided to give up Men and raise chickens. Chickens didn't stay out all night, or come home drunk, or sleep with your best girlfriend... And if they did... you could cut off their heads and eat them..." -- Stephanie Piro, in "Women's Glibber" %% "After SPACE BALLS, the Movie, now comes SPACE BALLS, the Operating System, on Your nearby IBM Mainframe..." -- Till Poser (f35pos@dhhdesy3.bitnet) %% "After checking my original notes, it appears that I spent most of last class lying to you. You may not find that surprising. I will now attempt to correct any misinformation that resulted. This you will probably find very surprising." -- A CS Prof. teaching UNIX %% "After decades of "Masterpiece Theater" decline, deferent workers cheering dim royals, and legions of garden fetishists whose idea of fun was a gentle discussion of acidity levels in the topsoil, the class system is finally getting shaken up. There are happier consequences of this than violence, of course, but the hooligan revival is at least a reminder that there's now no shortage of Britons successful enough to deserve beating up and plenty of others self-confident enough to do it." -- Andrew Sullivan %% "After one week [visiting Austria] I couldn't wait to go back to the United States. Everything was much more pleasant in the United States, because of the mentality of being open-minded, always positive. Everything you want to do in Europe is just, 'No way. No one has ever done it.' They haven't any more the desire to go out to conquer and achieve -- I realized that I had much more the American spirit." -- Arnold Schwarzenegger %% "After the first year, Captain Kirk lost his secretary, Yeoman Rand. She used to bring him coffee (even heating it with a hand phaser in times of galley distress) and hand him clipboards with flashing lights on them for him to initial. I wonder whatever happened to her..." -- karl@neosoft.com %% "After two years of trying, scientists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center have managed to get a chimpanzee pregnant." Which proves that no task is repugnant to a true scientist. %% "Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain." -- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller %% "Aging is bad, but consider the alternative." -- anon %% "Ah, monsieur. And how are we today?" "Better." "Better?" "Better get a bucket. I'm gonna throw up." -- Monty Python "Meaning of Life" %% "Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded" -- Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections %% "Ah, well, I attended Juliard. I'm a graduate of the Harvard Business School. I travel quite extensively. I live through the Black Plague and had a pretty good time during that. I've seen THE EXORCIST about 167 times, and it keeps gettin' funnier EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT!!" -- Beetlejuice %% "Ah, you know the type. They like to blame it all on the Jews or the Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers." -- A analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic %% "Aha! Pronoun trouble!" -- Daffy Duck %% "Ahead Warp 37 to the wild, loud PLANET OF THE LUSTY WOMEN COMMODITIES BROKERS!" -- "Bloom County" %% "Ahead warp factor 1" -- Captain Kirk %% "Ahhh. A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself." -- Peter da Silva, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com %% "Aim for her flat-top!" %% "Ain't that just like a tin-pot dictator! Calling in the faceless hordes when things get rough! Faceless horde is my middle name!" -- The Badger, in NEXUS %% "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. %% "Algorithms" is an anagram for "Hilt orgasm". Maybe this explains the popularity of this field of study in computer science. %% "All Bibles are man-made." -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% "All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." -- Fran Lebowitz %% "All I ask of my body is that it carry around my head." -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% "All I can say is that if, whenever you are asked where you live, you seize yourself by the throat and start choking, it is apt to cause comment" -- R. Hull %% "All I know of love is that Love is all there is." -- Emily Dickinson %% "All I want to do is read ONE good comic book before I go COMPLETELY blind!" -- The GNATRAT complains again... %% "All Lord Julius demands is total and complete obedience and more money every time we pay him. He's being quite reasonable, really..." -- Cerebus %% "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" %% "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% "All dis talk ! Vy can't ve chust climb !" -- John Salathe %% "All flesh is grass" -- Isiah %% "All flesh is grass" -- Isiah Smoke a friend today. %% "All food must be removed from this refrigerator on Friday for cleaning." %% "All human wisdom is summed up in two words -- wait and hope." -- Alexandre Dumas the Elder %% "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." -- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) %% "All numbers are totally irrelevant, unless you're doing Astrophysics." %% "All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." -- Noam Chomsky %% "All pitchers are liars and crybabies." -- Yogi Berra %% "All power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must control the guns." -- Chairman Mao %% "All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few." -- Stendhal %% "All right, you worthless _vermin_! No more Mister Nice Pope!" -- Cerebus %% "All that was meant to bore you shitless." -- I. Goulden Combinatorics and Optimization 230 %% "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." -- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) %% "All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in. I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin" -- They Might Be Giants %% "All the soil will be fruitful beyond man's needs; and human beings shall fornicate unceasingly." -- THE PROPHECIES OF MERLIN, Geoffrey of Monmouth An old book I got from a friend -- Geoffrey was apparently translating Merlin's prophecies %% "All the system's paths must be topologically and circularly interrelated for conceptually definitive, locally transformable, polyhedronal understanding to be attained in our spontaneous -- ergo, most economical -- geodesiccally structured thoughts." -- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) [...and a total nonsequitur as far as I can tell. -kl] %% "All the world's indeed a stage, and we are merely players, performers and portrayers. Each another's audience outside the gilded cage." -- Rush %% "All these black people are screwing up my democracy." -- Ian Smith %% "All this self-sacrifice is *nauseating*!" -- An agent of Death meets the locals in the new Twilight Zone %% "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin." -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) (from his Inaugural Address) %% "All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is only one example of many in recent history." -- American Bar Association task force on flag burning %% "All we are given is possibilities -- to make ourselves one thing or another." -- Ortega y Gasset %% "All work and no fun makes Simon a good boy." -- Simon, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "All you Klingons, you want to ravage helpless Earthwomen. Brute." -- They really should have named this, "I Married a Klingon." From DC's STAR TREK %% "All you have to do is... Spot The Looney!" -- Python %% "Almost all Eskimo jokes have the same punch line -- You know, he fell through the ice and died." -- Larry Marder %% "Almost all reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for." -- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) %% "Alright, nobody move!" "Take him, you fools! He can only shoot one of us!" "You're the one." "Nobody move." -- Get Smart %% "Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret police and laws similar to those in the USSR, there are thousands of underground publications, a legal independent Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first and only independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is an affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor. There is literally a world of difference between Poland - even in its present state of collapse - and Soviet society at the peak of its "glasnost." This difference has been maintained at great cost by the Poles since 1944. -- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a gateway from EARN (European Academic Research Network) to Poland %% "Always forgive your enemies -- nothing annoys them so much." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "Always keep your bowler on in times of stress. And watch out for diabolical masterminds." -- Emma Peel's parting comment to John Steed on THE AVENGERS %% "Aman-Tut and Julius Caesar -- they both foresaw their untimely deaths, thousands of years ago, in this very oracle. And so did Max Headroom." -- ABC seeks after David Addison with help from a soothsayer, in MOONLIGHTING %% "America is a stronger nation for the ACLU's uncompromising effort." -- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% "American comic books are militaristic propaganda! And much too expensive!" -- Well, they are! From "The American" %% "Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an 'inconvenience.' We have opted instead for an authoritarian system *disguised* as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there." -- Frank Zappa %% "Americans love a winner... and WILL NOT TOLERATE a loser" %% "Americans will buy anything, as long as it doesn't cross the thin line between cute and demonic." -- Ian Shoales %% "Amid all the noise about the Joan Rivers cancellation, ABC has canceled `Our World', which featured Linda Ellerbee. The two unemployed women plan to get together and open up a chain of charm schools in Libya." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "An Academic speculated whether a bather is beautiful if there is none in the forest to admire her. He hid in the bushes to find out, which vitiated his premise but made him happy. Moral: Empiricism is more fun than speculation." -- Sam Weber %% "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% "An eclipse of the Earth occurs when you put your hands over your eyes." %% "An elephant is like long-term memory" -- A blind psychologist %% "An entire fraternity of strapping Wall-Street-bound youth. Hell - this is going to be a blood bath!" -- Post Brothers Comics %% "An honest god is the noblest work of man. ... God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. ... Most of the gods were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "An honest man's pillow is his peace of mind." %% "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself" -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% "An older person or a teenager can look at this (rock videos) and see the humor in it, but an eight- or ten-year-old isn't anesthetized yet." -- Tipper Gore, Washington Wife %% "An open mind has but one disadvantage: it collects dirt." -- a saying at RPI %% "An organization dries up if you don't challenge it with growth." -- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments %% "An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of code." -- an anonymous programmer %% "And *this* -- this is for losing my new luggage, you SLIMEBALL!" -- Race Bannon finally loses his temper in JONNY QUEST %% "And Dinsdale's there in the conversation pit with Doug, and Charles Paisley, the baby crusher, and a couple of film producers, and a man they called `Kierkegaard,' who just sat there biting the heads off whippets." -- Monty Python %% "And God help whoever gets in our way!" "Dimitri...?" "YES, Alexi?" "We're not supposed to believe in God." "Oh. That's right." -- Faux pas on the part of some Russian Super-Soldiers, from THE JUSTICE LEAGUE %% "And I heard Jeff exclaim, as they strolled out of sight, `Merry Christmas to all -- you take credit cards, right?'" -- A panel from THE OUTSIDERS that I found appropriate for myself %% "And I'm a respected psychiatrist!" -- Frasier Crane discussing homicidal tendencies towards Diane to Sam on CHEERS %% "And as far as Burton directing goes..." "Oh, give it a rest." -- Siskel and Ebert beat on each over the directing choice for Batman, in THE INCREDIBLE HULK %% "And besides - it isn't the principle of the thing, it's the money!" -- Daffy Duck %% "And cruelest of all, I've learned that the bucks in this criticism thing just aren't what they should be. I figure if I'm not gonna make any jack in my chosen profession, the least I can do is vent my spleen. My motto is VENT FOR THOSE WHO CAN'T." -- Ian Shoales %% "And do you think (fop that I am) that I could be the Scarlet Pumpernickel?" -- Looney Tunes, The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950, Chuck Jones) %% "And for God's sake don't invest money in any brokerage firm in which one of the partners is named 'Frenchy'." -- Woody Allen %% "And given this topology [the mobius strip] we can move on what is known as an orientation-reversing path. We cannot do this in our normal three-space topology, except via those paths which pass through San Francisco or Greenwich Village." -- A Math Prof. teaching topology %% "And how many hours a day did you do lessons?" said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject. "Ten hours the first day," said the Mock Turtle: "nine the next, and so on." "What a curious plan!" exclaimed Alice. "That's the reason they're called lessons," the Gryphon remarked: "because they lessen from day to day." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "And if You exist, why do you let your Evil churches exist????" -- Michael S. Schechter "Maybe because He is a libertarian?" -- Mike Van Pelt, mvp@v7fs1.UUCP %% "And if we tell you the name of the game, boy, we call it 'Riding the Gravy Train'" %% "And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the bible were used to beat plowshares into swords..." -- Alan Watts %% "And it shall some to pass that idiots shall roam the earth, and morons shall rule the masses." %% "And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions." -- David Jones @ Megatest Corporation %% "And it's my opinion, and that's only my opinion, you are a lunatic. Just because there are a few hundred other people sharing your lunacy with you does not make you any saner. Doomed, eh?" -- Oleg Kiselev,oleg@CS.UCLA.EDU %% "And it's so portable --- at least, it worked on every VAX that I tried it on." -- Tim McDaniel (mcdaniel@adi.com) 6 Sep 90, %% "And kids... learn something from Susie and Eddie. If you think there's a maniacal psycho-geek in the basement: 1) Don't give him a chance to hit you on the head with an axe! 2) Flee the premises... even if you're in your underwear. 3) Warn the neighbors and call the police. But whatever else you do... DON'T GO DOWN IN THE DAMN BASEMENT!" -- Saturday Night Live meets Friday the 13th %% "And look... don't threaten the customers. They don't eat as much." "I'll keep it in mind." -- Jezebel Jade comments on American service organizations, in JONNY QUEST %% "And lose a few," said Tom winsomely. %% "And now that the legislators and the do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they end up where they should have begun: may they reject all systems, and try liberty..." -- Frederic Bastiat %% "And now, Little Bobby Pootwaddle will read last month's contest winner." "Last month's question -- `In 1000 words or less, describe how Amy Sue Sturdfetzer looked much older than 12.'" -- The Cowboy Wally Show %% "And remember, rebooting your brain can be tricky." -- Eric Townsend (erict@flatline) %% "And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- One of the two funny jokes in SPACEBALLS %% "And stop referring to dinner as `the recent unpleasantness'." -- The Lockhorns %% "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!" -- Romancing the Stone %% "And that's another goal for the Long John Silver Impersonators!" %% "And the Angel of the Lord dropped upon him, yea verily, saying: My left hand carries iron, The right one steel. If the left don't gitcha, Then the right one will." -- The Preacher gives his slightly warped version of scriptures, from GRIMJACK %% "And the Lord God said unto Moses -- and correctly, I believe ..." -- Field Marshal Montgomery, opening a chapel service %% "And the fifth-highest grossing film in America this week is YOUNG GUNS, the new film where everybody in it is Martin Sheen's son, but nobody has the same last name." -- Dennis Miller %% "And there! Between STAR TREK and ASTROBOY... It's Zot's world!" -- Matt Feazall's send-up of ZOT! %% "And they told us, what they wanted... Was a sound that could kill some-one, from a distance." -- Kate Bush %% "And what do you two think you are doing?!" roared the husband, as he came upon his wife in bed with another man. The wife turned and smiled at her companion. "See?" she said. "I told you he was stupid!" %% "And what you didn't give away, you spent on wild parties, young girls, and every drug you could get your hands on." "Every pill I took kept it out of some kid's hands!" -- Melvis Wesley (yes, everyone uses a psuedonym these days) is back from the dead in "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "And when do you expect to get married?" "Oh, right away, sport, right away, you know! I 'aven't 'ad it for weeks!" -- Monty Python %% "And when they ask me, 'What are you looking at?' I always tell them, nothing much" %% "And why did you come to earth?" "To collect sperm." -- Space Virgins %% "And you can BELIEVE me, because I NEVER lie, and I'm ALWAYS right!" -- Tom Revay %% "And you can't get any Watney's Red Barrel, because the bars close every time you're thirsty..." %% "And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople Get Ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report." -- Dave Barry %% "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% "Another glorious day in the Corps. A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm. Every meal a banquet, every paycheque a fortune, every formation a parade. I love the Corps!" -- Apone, "Aliens" %% "Another lesson I learned was not to give pieces of my company away when it was small in exchange for investment capital. In the first place, those shares would be worth millions today. Even more important, when you bring in shareholders, the government can start looking around at your business and telling you what to do, and let me tell you, the government knows *nothing* about running a business!" -- John McCormack, "Self-Made in America" %% "Another way to look at this is: if your computer is not capable of saturating *your* I/O bandwidth, you may be pissing away *your* wetware power. And last I checked, mine isn't increasing exponentially..." -- Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu) %% "Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that one shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one will work at anything worthwhile." -- Arnold Toynbee %% "Any Questions? [pause] You all look asleep - what is it, hyperglucocemia? Too much sugar on your cornflakes? Not any cornflakes? Never mind - I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed, so let's continue." %% "Any girl that looks that innocent just got to be called Lucille!" -- George Kennedy in Cool Hand Luke, as recalled by Paul Piana after last call on 25 cent beer night in The Operating Room. %% "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." -- E. F. Schumacher %% "Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy." -- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984 %% "Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well" -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) (more or less) %% "Any trouble, boy?" "No, old man. Thought I was having trouble with my adding. 'T's all right now." -- For A Few Dollars More %% "Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann %% "Anyone trying to split hairs will always find someone who has a sharper knife." -- Jim Hurley (jimh@ultra.com) 21 Sep 90 %% "Anyone who wants to be paid for writing software is a fascist asshole." -- Richard M. Stallman %% "Anyone with an active mind lives on tentatives rather than tenets." -- Robert Frost %% "Anyone without 2,000,000 sunblock is gonna have a really bad day!" -- Sarah Connor %% "Anything created must necessarily be inferior to the essence of the creator." -- Claude Shouse (shouse@macomw.ARPA) "Einstein's mother must have been one heck of a physicist." -- Joseph C. Wang (joe@athena.mit.edu) %% "Anything else you wish to draw to my attention, Mr. Holmes ?" "The curious incident of the stable dog in the nighttime." "But the dog did nothing in the nighttime." "That was the curious incident." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Silver Blaze" %% "Apathy is not the problem, it's the solution" %% "Apparently you are heading toward a bank of cyclone debris. Act now." %% "Apple" (c) Copyright 1767, Sir Isaac Newton. %% "Are there many fires in Norway?" "Oh Good Lord yes. The place is a constant blaze!" -- Monty Python %% "Are they being mistreated?" "Only by a few fanatics. Mostly local anchormen." -- Doonesbury %% "Are you Catholic?" "Episcopalian, and not very." "Ja, ja. Agnoztic." -- From "The Badger" %% "Are you SURE that Moriarty isn't planning to kill me?" "Of course not... he *knows* you're an idiot." "Thank God!" -- "Holmes" and Watson discuss Yours Truly in WITHOUT A CLUE %% "Are you sure you're not an encyclopedia salesman?" "No, M'am. Just a burglar, come to ransack the flat." %% "Are you the police?" "No, ma'am. We're musicians." -- The Blues Brothers %% "Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours." -- Richard Bach "Argue for your greatness and that too shall be yours." -- Michael Sky %% "Arizona is a rock-n-roll state." -- Alice (I want to be your governor) Cooper %% "Arms Treaty". %% "Art, I'll take 'Phoenician Architecture' for 100, please." %% "Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies." -- Bill Bulko %% "Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is." -- Willa Cather %% "As God is my witness - I am that fool!" -- Gomez Addams %% "As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs..." -- Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" %% "As Mayor of Houston, it gives me great pleasure to award you this Texas Freedom Award and a gold Neiman Marcus charge card." -- Foo-fa-raa in "Badger" %% "As a boy he dreamed of being a ship's captain, but gave it up when someone explained to him what sharks were ..." -- Woody Allen %% "As a character in Gore Vidal's new novel, `Hollywood', says: `What we invent, others reflect.' The problem is that the only thing worse than Guns n' Roses is censorship." -- The Economist, 12/23/89 %% "As a last resort, we can always sic Les Nesman on them." "My God... that could signal the end of organized religion as we know it." -- WKRP in Cincinatti %% "As a matter of fact" is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't. %% "As a rule software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications." -- Dave Parnas, Communications of the ACM (33, 6 June 1990 p.636) %% "As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." -- Matt Cartmill %% "As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as seasickness, and matters just as little." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "As for Carter being for registration but against the draft, isn't that sort of being like for putting it in and not taking it out? Even if it was possible not to follow through, you'd still be getting screwed." %% "As soon as you are willing to discard observational data because it conflicts with religion, you are giving up any hope of ever really understanding the universe. As soon as you pick religion as the touchstone of reality, then we have to start discussing how one can demonstrate the correctness of one religion over another when different *religions* disagree." -- Wilson Heydt (whheydt@PacBell.COM) "The answer is simple: kill the heretics. History shows us that this is the actual solution that competing religions apply -- trial by combat or trial by ordeal. God is the final arbiter. What a sad waste of human potential it has proven to be." -- Paul Hager (hagerp@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu) %% "As that pudgy ex-Genesis drummer, I put the entire state of Connecticut to sleep and stole their wallets." -- A Disney construct who can resemble anyone revels in his crimes in SONIC DISRUPTORS %% "As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth." -- Douglas Coupland, from "Generation X" (Tales for an Accelerated Culture) %% "As the roadies say before the concert, `Let's carve this turkey.'" -- Ian Shoales %% "As undergraduates, you realize that cleaning is very cost-ineffective, and why would you bother?" -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "As we walked deeper and deeper into that musty old house, I kept asking myself - Marshall, why are you such a bone head." -- Marshall, "The Dead Letter", Eerie Indiana %% "As you approach 4.0, study time approaches infinity." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that you understand what I'm doing or why you're paying me so much money. What's important is that you continue to do so." -- Bizarro %% "Ask not what A Group of Employees can do for you. But ask what can All Employees do for A Group of Employees." -- Mike Dennison, in response to an "inspirational" memo at Ferranti Controls %% "Asking a writer 'where do you get your ideas' is like asking a butcher 'exactly what DO you put in this sausage'? " -- Roy Blount, Jr. %% "Asking me, asking me: do you know what love is? Sure, I know. A boy loves his dog." %% "Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles" -- Pat Paulsen %% "At 100,000 feet up, you're talking serious, _serious_ long underwear and oxygen." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "At Microsoft, it doesn't matter which file you're compiling, only which flags you #define." -- Colin Plumb %% "At social gatherings, I would amuse everyone by standing uponst the coffee table and striking me-self repeatedly upon the head with a brick" -- H. R. Gumby %% "At the sound of the tone, YOUR telephone's going to EXPLODE!" (If you've seen the Monty Python episode where the announcer comes on and says "And now, it's time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode!" you'll know what sort of voice to use.) -- Carl Greenberg %% "At this point it is tempting to ask: Why would anyone go through the pain of implementing a superscalar 386?" -- Mike Johnson, "Superscalar Microprocessor Design" %% "Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth." -- Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Laureate in chemistry %% "Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed." -- Robin, The Boy Wonder %% "Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance." -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% "Authorities are now saying that the war on drugs will be bigger than World War II... Oh, *great*... more Time-Life books." -- Jay Leno %% "Avast, ye scurvy corporate dogs! Prepare to be boarded!" -- "Bloom County" %% "Avast, ye slobs! Deploy the mizzen mast! Rotate the rubber baby buggy bumpers!" -- Badge, Judah and Nexus battening down the hatches, from NEXUS %% "Awh! Mothra!" -- SWAMP THING %% "Aww, if you make me cry anymore, you'll fog up my helmet." -- "Visionaries" cartoon %% "Awww..." "Don't let that 'sweet' act fool ya, Harry! They're DANGEROUS ASSASSINS!" -- Two guards from ZOT! %% "Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd have been a wagon...." %% "Aye, aye, mambo-man." -- Bart to Homer in "Some Enchanted Evening", from The Simpsons %% "B-r-r-other! What good is having a god around if you can't get any FUN out of it?" -- From George Perez's WONDER WOMAN %% "BACK, spawn of Satan! It's the Reverend Wallace Wallop you face, and my strength is GREAT, for I do HIS work! This is a battery-powered water pistol filled with HOLY WATER! We don't hold with the Papacy, but Lord, LORD -- that Pope can bless water like NOBODY'S business!" "Rambo him good in the name of the Lord." -- The Rev. Wallace Wallop (and the Missus) dispatch yet another Hellspawn %% "BART!" -- Homer in almost every episode, from The Simpsons %% "BETTER WEIRD THAN DEAD!" -- Eerie Indiana %% "BEWARE, EVILDOERS, WHEREVER YOU ARE!" -- The Masked Avenger %% "BLAM! BLAM! POW! POW!" "What's going on, Dad?" "I'm defending our home from foreign invaders, son." -- Doonesbury %% "BTW, does Jesus know you flame?" -- Diane Holt, dianeh@binky.UUCP, to Ed Carp %% "BYTE editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff." -- Lionel Hummel (uiucdcs!hummel), derived from a quote by Adlai Stevenson, Sr. %% "Ba, ba, ba ... ba, Barbara Anne ..." %% "Back off, man! I'm a scientist!" -- Ghostbusters %% "Bad knee, gotta run" -- Pat Buchanan to his draft board %% "Bad marksmanship," the hunter groused. %% "Badger! Grab something and *hang on*!" "Right-Oh! I'm hanging onto this 1890 Liberty Head Silver Dollar!" -- Badger, Judah and Nexus battening down the hatches, from "Nexus" %% "Badger, what kind of amplifier should I get?" "A BIG one." -- The Badger giving out Hi-Fi advice %% "Badges? We don't need no steenken badges!" -- "Treasure of the Sierra Madres" %% "Bah! You can't make a sow's ear out of a cheap thug!" -- Ham re-iterates one of Circe's old complaints in "The Badger" %% "Baldrick, you wouldn't see a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing 'Subtle Plans Are Here Again'." -- Black Adder %% "Bally Jerry, pranged his kite right in the how's-your-father - hairy blighter, dicky-birded, feathered back on his sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and caught his can in the Bertie." -- Monty Python %% "Bart, meet the new champ." -- Lisa in "Burp Contest" (Tracy Ullman Show), from The Simpsons %% "Bart, you say butt kisser like it's a bad thing!" -- Homer in "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% "Baseball is a simple game. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains." -- Nuke LaLouche %% "Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical." %% "Batman didn't write any plays." "Yeah, but Shakespeare didn't beat up any crooks." -- Overheard at a sci-fi convention by Jerry Boyajian %% "Batman is the hero any of us could be, given determination, exercise, and deep psychological trauma." -- Chris Jarocha-Ernst %% "Batten down the hatches, several thousand Zulus approaching from the north." -- Christopher Commission report of LAPD car-to-car computer message, 7/91 %% "Be *excellent* to each other." -- Bill, or Ted, in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure %% "Be Yourself. Who else is better qualified?" -- Frank J. Giblin II %% "Be fair," say the temporizers, "tell both sides of the story." But how can you be fair to both sides of a rape? Of a murder? Of a massacre? -- Edward Abbey %% "Be happy while y'er leevin, For y'er a lang time deid." -- Scottish motto for a house %% "Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it." -- Paul Vixie, %% "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." -- Gustave Flaubert %% "Be suspicious of anything that works perfectly -- it's probably because two errors are canceling each other out." -- Dave Bartley %% "Be there. Aloha." -- Steve McGarret, "Hawaii Five-Oh" %% "Be warned that being an expert is more than understanding how a system is supposed to work. Expertise is gained by investigating why a system doesn't work." -- Brian Redman, Bell Communications Research, "UUCP UNIX-to-UNIX Copy", "UNIX NETWORKING", edited by Stephen Kochan and Patrick Wood %% "Bear with me until my starting transient has settled down into doing things properly from the notes." %% "Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics." -- G. H. Hardy %% "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -- that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. -- John Keats (1795-1821) %% "Because I live in the hearts and minds of everyone who believes in TRUTH, JUSTICE and THE AMERICAN WAY. And that is bigger than you. Bigger than anyone who tries to make me in their own image." -- From "The Man of Rust" %% "Because he's a character who's looking for his own identity, [He-Man is] an interesting role for an actor." -- Dolph Lundgren, actor[?!] %% "Because my name is Daffy, They think that I'm insane Please pass the ketchup, I think it's going to rain! Oh, you can't bounce a meatball, Try with all your might. Turn on the radio, I want to fly a kite!" -- D. Duck (daffy@wb.com) %% "Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "Beer! Now there's a temporary solution." -- Homer in "Homer's Odyssey", from The Simpsons %% "Before I visited this planet, we aliens knew very little about earth... the only information we had came from television signals, and due to interstellar distances, we only received channel 3 at 4:30pm... "But that's..." "'Gilligan's Island'... I know. But it's all we had to go on. We theorized that Earth was a strange island society where everything was made out of bamboo..." -- Robotman %% "Before engaging in a battle of wits, make sure your opponent is armed." -- East Texas Proverb %% "Before we get married," said the young woman to her fiancee, "I want to confess some affairs that I've had in the past." "But you told me all about those a few weeks ago," her young man replied. "Yes, darling," she explained, "but that was a few weeks ago." %% "Before you marry, keep your two eyes open; after you marry, shut one." -- Jamaican proverb %% "Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "Being against torture ought to be sort of a multipartisan thing." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com, as amended by Jeff Daiell, a Libertarian %% "Being good through life `cause you might go to heaven is like shutting your eyes through a movie `cause you might get your money back." -- A. Whitney Brown %% "Beside the Temple, to which room is it possible to go from the Altar?" %% "Besides, my teeth aren't what they used to be. I have some weird degenerate gum disease. It turns out even the Undead have to floss." -- Dracula discusses problems of the modern vampire in "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "Best trust the happy moments... The days that make us happy make us wise." -- John Masefield (1878-1967) %% "Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone." -- Baltasar Gracian %% "Better watch out, Carrot, or you're going to wind up as a Saturday morning cartoon character, just like Mr. T!" "Alright! That did it!" -- Tension you could cut through with a wiffleball in FLAMING CARROT COMICS %% "Betty, If you were happy every day of your life, you wouldn't be a human being, you'd be a game-show host." -- Veronica, "Heathers" %% "Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost." -- Ivan Chtcheglov %% "Between the two of us, President Clinton and I have put to rest any myths about the intelligence of Rhodes scholars." -- Kris Kristofferson %% "Beware of Yuppies bearing Uzis." %% "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." -- Matthew 7:15 %% "Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers." -- Chip Salzenberg %% "Beware of the man who won't be bothered with details." -- William Feather, Sr. %% "Beware the [lobbyist], my son, the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch" (with thanks to Lewis Carroll). No matter how noble the cause or well meaning its professional advocates, lobbyists are still paid to get results. They're subject to errors in judgement, shortcomings in motives, and most of them don't even vote in your district. -- Pierre S. du Pont %% "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Circles" %% "Beware! Your brain may no longer be the boss." -- Firesign Theatre, Everything you know is Wrong %% "Bicycle Repair Man, how can I ever repair you?" "Well, you don't need to, gov, it's all right. It's all in a day's work for ... Bicycle Repair Man. " -- Monty Python %% "Bidet? Try washing your whole body." -- anon %% "Big Brother is hallucinating." -- Elizabeth D Zwicky (zwicky@cis.ohio-state.edu), title of a comp.risks article %% "Bill Cosby, huh?" "If you play your cards right..." -- David Addison, baby, from MOONLIGHTING %% "Bill Dickey is learning me his experience." -- Yogi Berra %% "Bill Gates says no matter how much more power we can supply, he'll develop some really exciting software that will bring the machine to its knees." -- Intel VP David House, In "EE Times", 16 October 1989 %% "Bite off, dirtball." -- Richard Sexton, richard@gryphon.COM %% "Blessed be those Who initiate lively discussions With the hopelessly mute For they shall be know as Dentists." -- Seen in my dentist's office %% "Bob also asks if Bill Ward ever did any 3-D comics. Of course, ALL Bill Ward's comics are 3-D comics." -- Fandom Confidential %% "Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas." -- Ian Fleming, "Casino Royale" %% "Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas." -- Ian Fleming, "Casino Royale" [Personal note: thus confirming my opinion of both Bond and Fleming...] %% "Bondage... what's bondage?" "He's from Flagstaff." "Oh." -- Bruce Babbit poses a question in HONKEYTONK SUE %% "Born to Hack ... Full Metal Keyboard" %% "Both models are identical in performance, functional operation, and interface circuit details. The two models, however, are not compatible on the same communications line connection." -- Bell System Technical Reference %% "Bowling?" "You know. Thats where a big black thing knocks down a lot of little white things." "That sounds like the A-Team to me." -- Keith "Badger" Vallenti found this on a channel flip, from Don Adam's CHECK IT OUT %% "Boy -- LOOKIT DEM GUNS!" -- Lustful father in MR. MONSTER %% "Boy, life takes a long time to live -- Steven Wright %% "Boy, this would make a great TV series..." -- A vagrant TV executive, from CROSSFIRE %% "Brain": peppermint schnapps in a shot or martini glass with *VERY* cold Bailey's Irish Cream poured *slowly* onto top (for the brain effect). %% "Breathe deep the gathering gloom. Watch lights fade from every room. Bed-sitter people look back and lament; another day's useless energies 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 grey and yellow white. But we decide which is real, and which is an illusion." -- The Moody Blues "Days of Future Passed" %% "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% "Bring the little ones unto me, and I will get a good price for them." -- Dr. Fegg's Encyclopedia of _All_ World Knowledge %% "Broadcast me scrambled clean, free me from this flesh, I want to be a machine..." %% "Brother against brother!... Friend against friend!! DENTIST against DENTIST!!!" -- Things go from bad to worse in FLAMING CARROT %% "Brothers," said Tom grimly. %% "Bubbles in the pipe are like air in your veins" -- G. Jeanette McWilliams wk00196@worldlink.com "Cogito, Ergo Zoom" -- Brock Yates %% "Bugs Bunny was an optimist." %% "Bugs bugs everywhere, and not a fix in sight." %% "Build a watch in 179 easy steps" -- by C. Forsberg. %% "Bully! Bully!" -- Teddy Roosevelt with John Muir at Glacier Point %% "Bumbling? BUMBLING? You can't even speak English, and you're INSULTING people?" -- An angry accountant from MERC %% "Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when necessary" -- Peter's Laws %% "Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation." -- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments %% "Bus stop rat bag: hah, hah! Charade you are..." -- Pink Floyd %% "Bush has it backwards -- abortion is surgical; bombing is murder." -- sign at anti-war march %% "Bush? OK, he's experienced, but he's never going to be a GREAT liar. He can hardly bamboozle Dan Rather. How's he going to do up against bloodthirsty, power-mad dictator, like Margaret Thatcher?" -- A. Whitney Brown %% "Business is Business Time is Money Love is Bullshit" %% "But Calvin is no kind and loving god! He's one of the _old_ gods! He demands sacrifice!" -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "But Huey, you PROMISED!" "Tell 'em I lied." %% "But I can't excuse that FLASH GORDON review. That was the *dumbest* movie ever made." -- A fan of Baron's who can't excuse just *one* little thing %% "But I digress..." %% "But I don't want to go on the cart..." "Oh, don't be such a baby!" "But I'm feeling much better..." "No you're not...in a moment you'll be stone dead!" %% "But I guess I'm just stating the very obvious (shutup, Penny, shutup!)." -- Penny Priddy in "Buckaroo Banzai" %% "But I guess nobody gets to live happily ever after anymore, do they?" -- Abby in SWAMP THING %% "But I'd rather eat Johnson!" -- Monty Python %% "But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System -- and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate." -- Stephen Hawking "A Brief History of Time" %% "But are you not," he said, "a more fiendish disputant than the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus Twelve, the Magic and Indefatigable?" "The Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler," said Deep Thought, thoroughly rolling the r's, "could talk all four legs off an Arcturan Mega-Donkey -- but only I could persuade it to go for a walk afterward." -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "But as you all know, and as fate would have it, I didn't die. I landed on the top of a police car. And he died. ... You gotta sing it with that kind of enthusiasm. Like you just squashed a cop..." -- Arlo Guthrie %% "But don't take my word for it. Let's ask an actor playing Charles Darwin what he thinks!" -- The Simpsons %% "But don't you see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual. The look in a face, the music of a violin. A Paris theater can be infused with the spiritual for all its solidity." -- Lestat, "The Vampire Lestat", Anne Rice %% "But even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that although you probably wouldn't there's no probability that you certainly would." -- Sir Humphrey Appleby on nuclear deterrence %% "But guys, she's a *girl*." -- Simon, "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law, and there lies the glory and the wonder of it. The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry, the controlling brain of the underworld.... That's the man." -- Sherlock Holmes, "The Final Problem" %% "But isn't there some other way to call him?" "At least a dozen." "Then WHY?" "To let them know, Merkel, to let EVERYONE know. Hit it." -- Commissioner Gordon talks about re-lighting the Bat-Signal from Miller's DARK KNIGHT %% "But like the Good Book says... There's BIGGER DEALS to come!" -- Firesign Theatre, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers %% "But now I am what I am today! A responsible citizen, and besides that... I packs a rod!" -- BULLET CROW discusses gun control %% "But now it's time to say good-bye. Please get off my property until next year. I suggest you don't dawdle - the hounds will be released in ten minutes." -- Mr. Burns in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", from The Simpsons %% "But only the wind picked him up, and blew him away into the Arizona skies. And, I hope, to a better place. "Rio, maybe." "MR. JONES!" "Well, I didn't want to sound too maudlin." -- Rick Jones from the same issue of THE HULK %% "But that's the way of *all* flesh, ennit?" -- John Constantine, boy psychic investigator %% "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan %% "But then a new problem came up: the Jupiter probe, Galileo, was going to use a power supply that runs on heat generated by radioactivity. If the shuttle carrying Galileo failed, radioactivity could be spread over a large area." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% "But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge. Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge? What is a kludge, after all, but not enough Ks, not enough ROMs, not enough RAMs, poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around? Have I explained yet about the bytes?" %% "But this one goes to eleven." -- Nigel Tufnel %% "But we are just like the Waltons!, we're praying for an end to the depression too!" -- Bart Simpson, 1992 %% "But you don't UNDERSTAND. I've been doing this for years now. There's a flash of light. And I'm on another planet." "Yeah... Yeah, I sometimes get that." -- Adam Strange attempts to explain his lifestyle, in SWAMP THING %% "But you other two, I don't see any place for you in the revolution. ESPECIALLY YOU, Kate Straight! If you persist in playing that awful crunchy granola folk music all the time!" -- A Chinese Communist Col. whose life is changed by R&B in SONIC DISRUPTORS %% "But your creed, your ethos... it was one of your most appealing features." "You know, Larry, sometimes I say things... and afterwards, I can't remember saying them." -- The Yak and The Badger debate philosophy %% "But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal of arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered as a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow-citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation." -- Theophilus Parsons, in the Massachusetts Convention on the ratification of the U.S. Constitution [Jonathan Elliot, ed., "The Debates of the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution", (New York, Burt Franklin: 1888), 2:94 ] %% "But, will I get the chicks? I mean, in truckloads?" -- "Bloom County" %% "Butter becomes weightless?.... Raymond Burr must be in orbit by now." -- Holy Melodrama -- it's Bat-Bat! (From Bakshi's MIGHTY MOUSE series) %% "Buy land. They've stopped making it." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." -- George Mason %% "By calling attention to 'a well regulated militia', the 'security' of the nation, and the right of each citizen 'to keep and bear arms', our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fears of governmental tyranny which gave rise to the Second Amendment will ever be a major danger to our nation, the Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason, I believe the Second Amendment will always be important." -- April, 1960 (Then) Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% "By long-standing tradition, I take this opportunity to savage other designers in the thin disguise of good, clean fun." -- P. J. Plauger, from his April Fool's column in April 88's "Computer Language" %% "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?!?"] %% "By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect "Hungry." -- a Larson cartoon %% "By the way, I paid for the whole trip on Mr. Underhill's American Express card. Want the number?" -- Closing Line from the movie Fletch %% "Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get THERE. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "C is the assembly language of Tcl." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com "Assembly language is also available." -- Jordan Henderson, (jordan@hackercorp.com) %% "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg" -- Bjarne Stroustrup %% "C'mon Marshall - hurry up... I'm hungry. (To wolf) Stay here." [Simon goes over to counter, dives into apple pie. Werewolf awakens but Simon is oblivious. Werewolf creeps up, and Simon gradually becomes aware something is wrong.] "Uh oh." (Turns to see werewolf.) "Arghhh. Arghhh. Help! Help! omanoManOManOManOMANOMANOMAN! Down boy! Down boy!" -- Simon, "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% "C'mon, Hobbes, if you lend me a buck I'll buy you a comic book." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "C++ has a host of operators that will be explained if and where needed." -- "The C++ Programming Language". %% "C++" should have been called "D" %% "CABBAGE PATCH DOLL STRANGLES ITS MOM" ("it was an agent of the devil, say researchers") %% "COBOL is not dead, it just smells that way." -- major@pta.oz.au %% "COINCIDENCE" happens. %% "CRISIS erased the mistakes of the last 50 years. It's up to us to make the mistakes for the NEXT 50 years." -- Marvel Wolfman %% "Cable is not a luxury, since many areas have poor TV reception." -- The mayor of Tucson, Arizona, 1989 %% "Cable is not a luxury, since many areas have poor TV reception." -- The mayor of Tucson, Arizona, 1989 [apparently, good TV reception is a basic necessity -- at least in Tucson -kl] %% "Cache is, by definition, a compromise." -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute "Yes, Cache is a compromise. Mainly to your wallet and the speed of light." -- Jim Hutchison (ucsd!celerity!hutch) %% "Call immediately. Time is running out. We both need to do something monstrous before we die." -- Message from Ralph Steadman to Hunter S. Thompson %% "Call me paranoid but finding '/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "Calling J-Man Kink. Calling J-Man Kink. Hash missile sighted, target Los Angeles. Disregard personal feelings about city and intercept." -- The Firesign Theatre movie, "J-Men Forever" %% "Calling all units! Leading monster stampede through the bottomlands to lower forty!... Set up ambush on flanks!... Also, do not shoot me!... Repeat!... Do not shoot me!!!" -- FLAMING CARROT vs the Giant Japanese Monsters! %% "Calling you stupid is an insult to stupid people!" -- Wanda %% "Can I have some applesauce?" -- Homer in "Call of the Simpsons" while being kept for observation and gnawing on a raw pork chop, from The Simpsons %% "Can I park here?" "Nope", said the cop. "Well, then how come these other cars are parked here?" "They didn't ask me", replied the cop. %% "Can the county spare me couple hundred body bags -- the kinds with the twist lock tabs? You know... the hefty, Hefty, HEFTY kind. Heh, heh." -- THE DOGS OF DANGER %% "Can you do Addition?" the White Queen asked. "What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?" "I don't know," said Alice. "I lost count." "She can't do Addition," the Red Queen interrupted. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "Can you drive a 6-inch spike through a board with your penis?" "Uh, not right now." "Tsk. A girl has to have her standards." -- Deborah Foreman to Val Kilmer in "Real Genius" %% "Can you give me a lift back?" "Ah -- can do. But won't." -- Monty Python %% "Can you imagine what it would be like if there had been ``look and feel'' lawsuits over automobiles?" -- Mark Diekhans, markd@sco.com %% "Can you program?" "Well, I'm literate, if that's what you mean!" %% "Can you say PAIN, boys & girls?" %% "Can you teach us to fight with pointed sticks?" %% "Can't cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that's why)" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "Can't let you get involved, it's too dangerous." "I'm a big girl." "Yeah... and in all the right places, too." -- North By Northwest %% "Can't you just gesture hypnotically and make him disappear?" "It does not work that way. RUN!" -- Hadji on metaphysics and Mandrake in "Johnny Quest" %% "Captain America." "Revamp him? Make him a Commie or something?" -- Mike Grell and Mark Gruenwald %% "Captain Justice knows no fear!" "Captain Justice knows no women!" -- A decent line from ONCE A HERO %% "Captain Kirk. It's a pleasure to welcome you to Noldicia. More fun than humans should be allowed to have." -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "Captain Picquard trusts his bartender's instincts and saves the Federation." -- Karl's synopsis of a recent Star Trek episode %% "Captain, how soon can we land?" "I can't tell." "You can tell me; I'm a doctor." -- Airplane! %% "Capture him, beat him and treat him like dirt." -- LAPD squad-car computer message, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "Card readers? We don't need no stinking card readers." -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net (at the National Academy of Sciences, 1965, in a particularly vivid fantasy) %% "Cards? Luxury! I was at the smithy 18 hours a day forging gears for my analytical engine, Ada working her fingers to the bone assembling them on shafts. I used to dream of the day when I would finally get it all put together so that I could finally play 'Wumpus'." -- Babbage %% "Care to expound, or are you just going to leave us all with the impression that you're merely an inarticulate asshole?" -- Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard (jay@splut.conmicro.com) "Lest I leave the wrong impression, I'm not inarticulate." -- Walker Mangum (walker@ficc.uu.net) %% "Carefully study these two enlarged photographs on display, Mr. Rafferty," the attorney for a politician suing a newspaper for libel instructed his client on the witness stand, "and indicate which is your ass and which is a hole in the ground." %% "Carob works on the principle that, when mixed with the right combination of fats and sugar, it can duplicate chocolate in color and texture. Of course, the same can be said of dirt." -- From THE CHOCOLATE BOOK %% "Carpe Dinero" -- "Seize The Money" -- DaveMc, davemc@dsd.es.com %% "Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world." -- The Beach Boys %% "Catharsis is something I associate with pornography and crossword puzzles." -- Howard Chaykin %% "Cats are soft-furred mammals, who are mildly and clumsily predatory. They have anywhere from two to a dozen neurons. The baseline intellect of a cat has two states. 1) Chow state (feeding frenzy) 2) Asleep mode (unconscious on your bed with whiskers twitching)" -- Elaine Richards %% "Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want." -- Joseph Wood Krutch %% "Caution: I know Karate (And a few other Oriental words)" %% "Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritative regime." -- Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart %% "Cerebus can destroy ANYTHING. Cerebus is the POPE." -- Cerebus %% "Certum est quia impossibile est." (It is certain, because it is impossible.) -- Tertullian (180?-230?) %% "Ceterum censeo clitorem Vostris Sanctissimae Majestatis ante coitum excitandam esse." -- Advice given to Empress Maria Theresa by her personal physician. %% "Chair" Four legs, Supports students Like Jock Strap Supports atheletes. -- "Sir Victor" %% "Change your life! Change your socks! Change yourself into a 9 year-old Hindu boy!" %% "Charracter is whata you arre ina the dark!" -- E. Lizardo %% "Cheese it, cheddar-breath, you can't fight America's Action Hero, see?" -- Gangster in The Firesign Theatre's production of "The Giant Rat of Summatra" %% "Cheshire-Puss," she began, "would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't care much where--" said Alice. "Then it doesn't much matter which way you go," said the Cat. "--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation. "Oh, you're quite sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Chi ha del ferro had del pane" (Who has steel has bread). -- Blanqui, quoted by Mussolini %% "Chi-ka-go! Bang Bang!" -- Czech border guards (including Joe Flaharty) with guns pointed at them, from STRIPES %% "Childhood is short and maturity is forever." -- Calvin and Hobbes %% "Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% "Chocolate ... double chocolate ... *gasp!* New flavor! Triple chocolate!" -- Homer in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Christians maintain a higher enjoyment level in the intimacy of their love life than the population in general." -- Beverly LaHaye, President, Concerned Women of America, in her book, "The Act of Marriage, The Beauty of Sexual Love", 1976, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Circular logic will only make you dizzy." -- Peri "I know a computer when I talk to one!" -- The Doctor %% "Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor." -- Toynbee %% "Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else." -- Julian Jaynes %% "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy." -- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" %% "Civilization! Look for a Burger King." -- BADGER in "Nexus" %% "Cleveland? Yes, I spent a week there one day." %% "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." -- John Muir %% "Clinton wants us to sacrifice - We should start with the politicians. Which do you recommend - burning at the stake, an altar & knife job, or the tried-and-true 'Feed the Volcano' method?" -- Don Meyer dlmeyer@uiuc.edu %% "Cocktail lounge" is a fancy name for it, but it's still just a bare-curtain saloon. %% "Coda," said Tom finally. %% "Code so clean...you can eat off it." %% "Cogito ergo I'm right and you're wrong." -- Blair Houghton %% "Coincidence is one thing, but this thing with the bike was bordering on mega strange." -- Marshall, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "Coke is much more socially acceptable than self-mutilation." %% "College... what a *disgusting* place." -- An observant quote from BEANS BAXTER %% "Colleges should teach sex education, after all, when it comes to screwing people they're the best." -- Patrick J. Murphy %% "Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "Color is like an orchestra playing behind a singer too loud." -- Will Eisner %% "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." -- Prof. Noam Chomsky, "Syntactic Structures" An example of a sentence which, though grammatically acceptable, is without meaning %% "Combat Tupperware keeps my shooting skills fresher; longer" -- "BURP" %% "Come and get me Bob. This time it's personal!" %% "Come and get me? You big bag of wind?? I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure it's not smart to tease a tornado." -- Marshall, "Tornado Days", Eerie Indiana %% "Come on over here, baby, I want to do a thing with you." -- A Cop, arresting a non-groovy person after the revolution, Firesign Theater %% "Come on," the robot droned, "I've been ordered to take you down to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that JOB SATISFACTION? 'Cos I don't." -- Marvin, the Paranoid Android Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Come, come," said Tom's father, "at your time of life, There's no longer excuse for thus playing the rake-- It is time you should think, boy, of taking a wife"-- "Why, so it is, father--whose wife shall I take?" -- "A Joke Versified" from "Miscellaneous Poems" by Thomas Moore (1779-1852) %% "Comedy, like Medicine, was never meant to be practiced by the general public." %% "Comedy. Sudden, violent, comedy!" -- Monty Python %% "Coming up: our definitive answer to the JFK assassination, the Iran contra coverup, the cure for the common cold, and our hidden videotape of Madonna's torrid affair..." -- Anchorman, "Zombies in PJs", Eerie Indiana %% "Common sense is the most evenly distributed quantity in the world. Everyone thinks he has enough." -- Descartes, 1637 %% "Common sense is what tells you the world is flat." -- Dale Worley, worley@compass.com %% "Company's coming," Tom guessed. %% "Computer Scientists are at the top of the nerd heap" -- Curtis Dyreson %% "Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?" -- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984 %% "Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." -- Joseph Campbell %% "Conceptions without experience are void; experience without conceptions is blind." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "Confound these ancestors.... They've stolen our best ideas!" -- Ben Jonson %% "Confusing yourself is a way to stay honest." -- Jenny Holzer %% "Congratulations on breaking my record. I always thought the record would stand until it was broken." -- Yogi Berra %% "Congratulations on bringing light into the dark-room!" %% "Congress is not the sole suppository of wisdom." -- Rep. Bill Schuette (R-MI) %% "Congresses of sheep, passing resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, are of no value, as long as wolves refuse to be similarly bound." %% "Conquest." "I had a premonition he was going to say that." -- Cerebus %% "Consequences, Schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich." -- Daffy Duck, from Looney Tunes "Ali Baba Bunny" (1957, Chuck Jones) %% "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago." -- Bernard Berenson %% "Contempt? Yes. Yes, I think that's the word. Contempt." -- Abby Cable comments on the US courts in SWAMP THING %% "Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" %% "Contrary to ongoing and recent media reports you will find the Report is well-balanced and completely deferential to the freedoms outlined in the first amendment." -- Henry E. Hudson, Chairman, Attorney General's Commission on Pornography %% "Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about." -- Agnes Repplier %% "Conversation is the best aphrodisiac." -- Kelly Cota (kcota@sco.com) %% "Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway" %% "Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all." -- Harriet Van Home %% "Could ye use a little water in your whiskey?" "When ay drink whiskey, ay drink whiskey, an' when ay drink water, ay drink water." -- Maureen O'Sullivan and Barry Fitzgerald in THE QUIET MAN, begorra. %% "Could you both just send hate mail a few times a day and post the synopsis in the year 2000?" -- Wm E Davidsen Jr, davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM, to a couple guys in news.groups %% "Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play." -- William Congreve, "The Portable Curmudgeon" %% "Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no!" -- Hunter S. Thompson, on the US war against Iraq %% "Cowardly little runt. When I get a hold of you I'm going to gut you like a fish and drink your blood." "I'm gonna rip out your heart and drink your blood!" -- Moe, the Bartender, in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "Creamed rutabaga soup -- suitable for dragons ingredients: Rutabaga Milk Butter Soup bones (the rest of the recipe is missing . . . Good luck!) %% "Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectually heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise? -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer", Vol. 12, page 186 %% "Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training." -- Anna Freud Well, sometimes, anyway. -- Mark Brader, utzoo!sq!msb %% "Creative people all come in and want their stuff printed on gold leaf." -- Jim Shooter %% "Credo, quia absurdum est." [I believe, because it is absurd.] -- Tertullian (180?-230?), Roman lawyer, theologian and misogynist; man of questionable judgement %% "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." -- Brendan Behan %% "Cross you heart, hope to die, Stick a needle in your eye, Jam a dagger in your thigh, Eat a horse manure pie!" -- Bart, from The Simpsons %% "Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them." -- Madonna %% "Curiouser and curiouser!" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Curse these personal computers!" cried the novice in anger, "To make them do anything I must use three or even four editing programs. This is truly intolerable!" The master programmer stared at the novice. "And what would you do to remedy this state of affairs?" he asked. The novice thought for a moment. "I will design a new editing program," he said, "a program that will replace all these others." Suddenly the master struck the novice on the side of his head. "What did you do that for?" exclaimed the surprised novice. "I have no wish to learn another editing program," said the master. And suddenly the novice was enlightened. -- The Zen of Programming %% "Curse you, Inspector Dim. You are too clever for us naughty people." -- Monty Python's Dim! (DIM of the YARD!) %% "Curtsey while you're thinking what to say. It saves time." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "DAMMIT, MacAlistaire... you'll *live* longer in civilization." "Jest seems longer." -- MacAlistaire and the poet part (finally) in Journey %% "DANGER is my BUSINESS." -- Cool McCool, in his cartoon series of the late 60s %% "DEAD OR ALIVE, YOU ARE COMING WITH ME." -- ROBOCOP %% "DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT blow the hatch!" "Roger....hatch blown!" -- MAROONED %% "DO WHAT YOU'RE TOLD, YOU DAMN FISH!!" -- Aquaman %% "DWARF RAPES NUN, FLEES IN UFO" %% "Daddy, Daddy, make Santa Claus go away!" "I can't, son; he's grown too powerful." "HO HO HO!" -- Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre %% "Dammit, man, that's unprofessional! A good bartender laughs anyway!" -- Doonesbury %% "Dammit, we're all going to die, let's die doing something *useful*!" -- Hal Clement, on comments that space exploration is dangerous %% "Damn reporters! That wasn't the quote at all! It was 'carry a big SHOVEL'. Sticks, indeed!" -- Teddy Roosevelt in college %% "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead." %% "Damn your principles! Stick to your party." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "Damn! I'm running out of integers!" %% "Dan, you risked your LIFE for cheap sex?" "You say that as if it were a bad thing." -- Harry and Dan from NIGHT COURT %% "Danger, you haven't seen the last of me!" "No, but the first of you turns my stomach!" -- The Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger %% "Darkness fell. Rather suddenly, in fact. God was pissed again and had spilt His pint over the Sun. It was going to be a l-o-n-g winter..." -- Michael Morecrap, "The Boss is a Lush!" %% "Darling, would you like to propose another toast?" "To a warmed, darkened, slightly crispy slice of bread." -- Bizarro %% "Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed." -- Arthur Miller %% "Dave Sim appears in dark glasses and talks like he's been up for three days doing God knows what, which is kind of how you like to think of Dave Sim." -- Rob Rodi %% "Dawn came too soon," she mourned. %% "Dead? No excuse for laying off work." -- God (played splendidly by the late Sir Ralph Richardson) in TIME BANDITS %% "Dear Advertisers: I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television. We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Some of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive. The following is a list of words I never want to hear on television again ..." -- Grandpa Simpson in "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% "Dear Doctor Science: Back in B.C., when they counted the years backwards, did they count the months and days backwards, too?" "Your ignorance appalls me." -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio %% "Dear Emily --- BINGO!!" -- From STRAY TOASTERS %% "Dear Lord Jesus, this can't be happenin' man, this isn't happenin..." -- Hudson, "Aliens" %% "Dear Mary, We all knew you had it in you." -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), in a telegram sent after a much-publicized pregnancy %% "Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune, something to make us all happy. Do anything, take us out of this gloom. Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy." %% "Dear Mr. Seldes: I cannot remember the exact wording of the statement to which you allude; but what I meant was that ... a man who calls himself a 100% American and is proud of it, is generally 150% an idiot politically. But the designations may be good business for war veterans. Having bled for their country in 1861 and 1918, they have bled it all they could consequently. And why not?" -- from George Seldes, The Great Quotations %% "Dear Teacher: Please excuse the stink on Bill's clothes. We've been spraying the garden because it is full of abnoxus incests." %% "Death is nature's way of saying `Howdy'". %% "Death will not release you." %% "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so." -- John Donne (1572-1631), "Death, be not proud" %% "Debug is human, de-fix divine." %% "Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged about forever." -- button at the Boston Computer Museum %% "Decadent rodent, we will bury you." -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "Decaffeinated coffee? Kinda like kissing your sister." -- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com) %% "Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo! Nora's freezin' on the trolley, swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo! Don't we know archaic barrel, Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville, Lou. Trolley Molly don't love Harold, boola boola Pensacoola, hullabaloo!" SECOND VERSE: "Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Polly wolly cracker 'N' too-da-loo! Hunky Dory's pop is lolly, Gaggin' on the wagon, Willy folly go through! Donkey bonny brays a carol, Antelope cantaloupe ---lope with you! Chollie's collie barks at Barrow, harum scarum five alarum, bung-a-loo." -- "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie" by Walt Kelly %% "Deep space is my dwelling place, the stars my destination." -- Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination" %% "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 %% "Defense network computers. New, powerful. Hooked into everything. Trusted to run it all. They say it got smart. A new order of intelligence. saw all humans a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond." %% "Definition of mixed emotions: Finding out your ex-wife accepted a Kirby Award on your behalf in San Diego." -- Dave Sim %% "Delays created while you wait." %% "Delete any [movie] footage which includes the idea that war is not altogether glamorous and noble." -- Joseph I. Breen (1890-?), film executive %% "Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "Democracy takes time. Dictatorship is quicker, but too many people get shot." -- From the excellent Channel 4 production, "A Very British Coup" %% "Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentson today said that he would now return to his old job as the Grandfather Clock on the Captain Kangaroo show." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "Despite its suffix, skepticism is not an "ism" in the sense of a belief or dogma. It is simply an approach to the problem of telling what is counterfeit and what is genuine. And a recognition of how costly it may be to fail to do so. To be a skeptic is to cultivate "street smarts" in the battle for control of one's own mind, one's own money, one's own allegiances. To be a skeptic, in short, is to refuse to be a victim. -- Robert S. DeBear, "An Agenda for Reason, Realism, and Responsibility," New York Skeptic (newsletter of the New York Area Skeptics, Inc.), Spring 1988 %% "Destiny makes relatives, selection makes friends." %% "Destroy the thief, my pets!" %% "Destroying property is sometimes a good way to save lives." -- Mary Meehan, Anti-Choice Columnist, "The National Catholic Register", about abortion clinic violence, 10/12/86, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of Four" %% "Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth." -- Tennessee Williams %% "Diagnosis is like diarrhea, except that you get it in your gnosis instead of your rear." -- "Punch" %% "Dick! You're FIRED!" -- Robocop %% "Dick... YOU'RE FIRED!" *POW* *POW* *POW* -- The kind of executive order that REALLY results in termination. From ROBOCOP %% "Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill, "While England Slept" %% "Did U arrest the 85 yr old lady or just beat her up." "We just slapped her around a bit... she's getting m/t [medical treatment] right now." -- LAPD squad-car computer messages, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "Did they steal your brain, too?" -- Charles Furnell to Syndi, "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% "Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives." -- Sue Murphy %% "Did you know that rain is the sound of angels flushing?" -- "Married...With Children" %% "Did you know the phone company uses the bone marrow of Third World babies to make microchips?" -- THE BADGER %% "Did you learn that from captains' school, too?" "No. Rodgers and Hammerstein." -- Uhura and Kirk from the STAR TREK comic. %% "Did you see it, Reiger? It was hideous!" -- Taxi %% "Didja think one tool would change the world? We're a symbol -- the whole Star Key experiment... we're a walkin' allegory!" "Oh, yeah? An allegory of what?" "Of a good guy doin' a good job, no matter what it takes!" -- Flyin' Ryan and Steelgrip Starkey %% "Didn't you hear? Commentary and Dissent merged and became Dissentary." -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "Die Politik is keine exakte Wissenschaft." (Politics are not an exact science.) -- Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) %% "Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him." -- John Barrymore's dying words %% "Different may mean the same." %% "Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought." -- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi %% "Discussing whether Black and White comics will survive is like asking whether sex will survive AIDS." -- Will Eisner %% "Disinformation is one thing, but misinformation is unforgivable." %% "Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth." -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% "Do not be deceived. Revolutions do not run backwards." -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), railsplitter, lawyer, imperialist %% "Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed." -- Jan de Hartog, "The Lamb's War" %% "Do not cry, for thy tears shall rust thy skates." -- Rollerblade (yes, BLADE) %% "Do not look into laser beam with remaining eye." %% "Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads." -- John Galt, in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" %% "Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." -- stolen from Brian Gollum %% "Do not speak of what men deserve. For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of *deserving*, of *earning*, and you will begin to be able to think." -- Odo, The Prison Letters (Ursula LeGuin, "The Dispossessed") %% "Do not stop to ask what is it; Let us go and make our visit." -- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" %% "Do they still keep track of me at the Agency?" "We heard you married some old Nazi." "He was NOT a Nazi -- he was Austrian." "So was Hitler." "Yes, but *he* had no sense of humor." -- A wonderful exchange between Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau in HOPSCOTCH, a film well worth searching out %% "Do we have any more animals that Grandma can torture?" -- NOTHING IN COMMON %% "Do what you wanna, do what you will; Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill. And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip." -- Frank Zappa, "You Are What You Is" %% "Do what you want with the girl, but leave me alone!!" -- George Carlin %% "Do you cheat on your wife?" asked the psychiatrist. "Who else?" answered the patient. %% "Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mister Bond; I expect you to die." -- That famous line from GOLDFINGER %% "Do you know back at the turn of the century how long it took to cross Manhattan on horse? What the average speed was? Seven miles an hour. You what it is today? Exactly the same, seven miles an hour." -- John Denver %% "Do you know that doing your best is not good enough? First you must know what to do." -- manufacturing-quality theorist W. Edwards Deming %% "Do you think God gets stoned? I think so...look at the Platypus." -- Robin Williams %% "Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?" -- Stephen Wright %% "Do you think there's a God?" "Well, SOMEbody's out to get me!" -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "Do you think what we're doing is wrong?" "Of course it's wrong! It's illegal!" "I've never done anything illegal before." "I thought you said you were an accountant?" -- Two characters in "A Private Function" %% "Do you want to see my list of top ten pickups, you might get a few pointers." %% "Doc Hayward said you needed familiar stimulants, so we figured, what the hell, kazoos." -- Twin Peaks %% "Doctor, don't cut so deep. That's the third operating table you've ruined this month!" %% "Doing what's right isn't the problem. It's knowing what's right." -- L. B. J. %% "Don't Panic" -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "Don't be stupid. Be a smarty. Come and join the Nazi Party." -- The Producers %% "Don't believe a word she says, Monsieur! The sheep, they are all LIARS!" -- A French citizen attempting to dissuade THE BADGER %% "Don't believe anything you read and only half of what you see." -- Will Rogers %% "Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian!" Nancy Lord in '96! -- Don Meyer dlmeyer@uiuc.edu %% "Don't blame me. I didn't do it!" -- Krusty in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Don't break it if you can't fix it." -- Marketing manager %% "Don't call me 'tiny'." %% "Don't come back until you have him", the Tick-Tock Man said quietly, sincerely, extremely dangerously. %% "Don't come back until you have him", the Tick-Tock Man said quietly, sincerely, extremely dangerously. They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardio plate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stick tites. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search and seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentives. They used finger prints. They used the bertillion system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul-Mitgong but he wasn't much help. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology. And what the hell, they caught him. -- Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin, said the Tick-Tock Man" %% "Don't discount flying pigs before you have good air defense." -- jvh@clinet.FI %% "Don't disturb my friend - he's dead tired." -- Commando %% "Don't drop acid, take it pass-fail!" -- Bryan Michael Wendt %% "Don't embarrass us." "Have I ever?" -- Buckaroo Banzai and Perfect Tommy in BUCKAROO BANZAI %% "Don't fight forces; use them." -- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) %% "Don't fight it - It's bigger than both of us. In your case that verges on the incredible." -- Cerebus %% "Don't flinch, boys--they're shooting at me, not you." -- Brigadier General Philip Kearney to his men, Battle of Williamsburg, May 5, 1862 %% "Don't get even... get mad!" -- THE KILLING JOKE %% "Don't get married. Find a woman you hate and buy her a house." -- anon %% "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because I'm beautiful, smart and rich." -- Calvin Keegan %% "Don't have a cow, Homer!" -- Bart, from The Simpsons %% "Don't investigate this too closely." -- Don Bellisario, re: "Quantum Leap" %% "Don't lean on me, man, 'cuz you couldn't get a ticket back from Suffragette City" -- David Bowie %% "Don't question luck." -- Roberto Mesa %% "Don't rock the boat, man." -- Bart, from The Simpsons %% "Don't run faster than your shoes." -- Scottish saying %% "Don't rush a miracle man. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles." -- From "The Princess Bride" %% "Don't take life too serious. It ain't no ways permanent." -- Pogo, by Walt Kelly %% "Don't talk to me about disclaimers! I invented disclaimers!" -- The Censored Hacker %% "Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Don't they have a rule about letting fags in the cafeteria?" "Well, they seem to have an open door policy for assholes." -- Heathers %% "Don't think; let the machine do it for you!" -- E. C. Berkeley %% "Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Don't worry about things that you have no control over, because you have no control over them. Don't worry about things that you have control over, because you have control over them." -- Mickey Rivers %% "Don't worry son, the marines don't mind killing Martians." -- Army philosophy in "Invaders from Mars" %% "Don't you hate it when one of your hands falls asleep and you know it will be up all night?" -- Steve Wright %% "Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk." -- Tom Waits %% "Doonesbury is more important than self-respect." %% "Doough!!" -- Homer, from The Simpsons "Oooh!!" -- Homer, when he realizes he's screwed up, from The Simpsons %% "Dr. X hasn't lectured a Cambridge group before, so he might be quite interesting." %% "Draft politicians, not human beings." -- antidraft slogan coined by Jeff Daiell, 1979 %% "Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Drei...funf," said Tom fearlessly. %% "Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." -- Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859 %% "Drugs don't take people, people take drugs" -- Abbie Hoffman %% "Dry hair's for squids." -- Trancers %% "Due to the postal strike, the assignment is extended to one week from today. I do not give out extensions without good reason." -- Forbes Burkowski Computer Science 454 %% "Dump the condiments. If we are to be eaten, we don't need to taste good." -- "Visionaries" cartoon %% "During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity,; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." -- James Madison %% "During the intervening years, this ex-American baseball player who defected to the Soviet Union rose through the ranks to the height of power, where he is now the single, behind-the-scenes controlling force behind all Soviet policy decisions. It is he to whom Reagan refers as 'The Evil Umpire'. " -- Glen Raphael "Recent U.S. Foreign Policy" %% "During the race We may eat your dust, But when you graduate, You'll work for us." -- Reed College cheer %% "Dying ought to be done in black and white. It is simply not a colorful activity." -- Russell Baker %% "Each Man must stand on his own!... Must answer to his own God!... I will probably WIN though..." -- Flaming Carrot %% "Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it." -- "The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell" %% "Earned a precarious living by taking in one another's washing." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college." -- P. J. O'Rourke %% "Easy to use" is easy to say. -- Jeff Garber %% "Eat death, orphans!" -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio, SENSELESS CRUELTY %% "Eddie the Mouth was a vicious animal. But he was one of the old-time vicious animals and as such had some kind of moral code. It wasn't much of a moral code, but it was better than nothing..." %% "Education never ends... It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle %% "Eerie had collided with a parallel reality called NBC. *I* was being written off the show. Correction: Killed off the show. Double correction: Killed dead!" -- Marshall, "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Eerie, Indiana. The Last Testament of Marshall Teller. I had come to the end of the line. Hunted. Lost. Nowhere to hide. And then I saw - home. The safest place there is. But like everything else, it turned out to be fake." -- Marshall, "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped." -- Groucho Marx' last words (1890-1977) %% "Either he's playing classical music at 78 RPM, or I'm still dreaming." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "Either sue me, or shut the hell up." -- Greg Hennessy, gsh7w@virginia.edu %% "Elektra. Over there. It's a flying dwarf." -- Strange doings in ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN %% "Elvis has LEFT the building!" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "Elvis is my copilot." -- Cal Keegan %% "Emotionally vulnerable women.... They eat this sensitive crap up!" -- Dan Fielding %% "End? What end? You whites will be with us forever." -- Chiun, Master of Sinanju %% "Engineering meets art in the parking lot and things explode." -- Garry Peterson, about Survival Research Labs %% "Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson %% "England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "England's monarchy is how old? 1000 years? Jesus, you guys must have a hell of a lot of laws!" -- an anonymous sysadmin %% "Enough of this running shit." -- Sean Connery on chase scenes, from THE UNTOUCHABLES %% "Eraserhead is an example of the opposite of brainwashing. It actually leaves a dirty bathtub ring on your mind." -- David Fox (fox@allegra.att.com) %% "Escaping through the lily fields, I came across an empty space It trembled and exploded, left a bus stop in its place..." -- unknown %% "Ethics are bit a like an erection, no matter how well intended they are prone to sudden deflation" -- Dougal Haston - refering to climbing ethics. %% "Even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness!" -- from Fiddler On The Roof %% "Even if you start your laundry before 8 AM on Saturday, you will not finish folding it until after midnight on Sunday." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." -- Will Rogers %% "Even in 1956, when informed of his mother's brutal murder, he restricted his comments to one word: `Good.'" -- From the medical report on Rorschach. WATCHMEN #6 %% "Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Even now, I go to someone's house and think I am being a good guest if I am very quiet, don't ask for anything, and refuse anything that's offered. This behavior makes other people think of me as a nincompoop." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "Even the most boundless love can end." -- Rhett Butler, to Scarlet O'Hara, "Gone With The Wind" %% "Even the music was nice." -- Yogi Berra (speaking of the opera "Tosca"). %% "Even the works of the great Shakespeare will disappear when the universe burns out -- not such a terrible thought, of course, when it comes to a play like "Titus Andronicus", but what about the others?" -- Woody Allen %% "Even though Mr. Chisel was cleared on all counts of bank fraud, the judge sentenced him to 1000 hours of community service - just in case." -- Marshall, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "Even with all our technology there is no way to make an 8000m peak safe. You must go thinking you will not come back." -- Reinhold Messner %% "Ever free-climbed a thousand foot vertical cliff with 60 pounds of gear strapped to your butt?" "No." "'Course you haven't, you fruit-loop little geek." -- The Mountain Man, one of Dana Carvey's SNL characters [ditto] %% "Ever notice how irons have a setting for PERMANENT press? I don't get it..." -- Steve Wright %% "Ever see a Dirty Harry movie?" "Yessir!" "Like 'em?" "Yessir! Very much so!" -- A soldier with a gun to his head in "The American" %% "Ever wonder what you add to dried water?" %% "Ever wonder why they don't make the zippers on these things go further?" %% "Every Solidarity center had piles and piles of paper .... everyone was eating paper and a policeman was at the door. Now all you have to do is bend a disk." -- an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity, commenting on the benefits of using computers in support of their movement %% "Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man." -- Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) %% "Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits." -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@apple.com, about Usenet %% "Every hero becomes a bore at last." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Representative Men" %% "Every institution I've ever been associated with has tried to screw me." -- Stephen Wolfram %% "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of." -- They Might Be Giants %% "Every kid dreams of being the star of their own TV show. Take it from me, it's a living hell." -- Marshall, "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Every lady of breeding knows: no one has a good time on a pirate ship. No one, that is, but the pirates. Yet there she was, Merry Wilding -- kidnapped in error, taken from a ship bound from New York to England, spirited away in a barrel and swept aboard the infamous "Black Joke"... There she was, trembling with pleasure in the arms of her achingly handsome, sensationally sensual, golden-haired captor -- Devon." %% "Every man has his price. Mine is $3.95." %% "Every man over forty is a scoundrel." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Stray Sayings" %% "Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work" -- Robert Orben %% "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas." -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson %% "Every one is more or less mad on one point." -- Rudyard Kipling, "On the Strength of a Likeness" %% "Every opportunity we have to run our R&D scientists and engineers against our customers, we do it." -- George Heilmeier, Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas %% "Every physician almost hath his favourite disease." -- from "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding (1707-1754) %% "Every prof blows this. We're all going to get AIDS or something." -- J. Vanderkooy Physics 122 %% "Every time I go to the board with these notes I write down something completely different." %% "Every time you hear a half decent rap song, some black guy starts talking over top of it." %% "Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it." -- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe %% "Every woman should marry--and no man." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "Every year a few research results pay the freight for all the rest." -- Robert A. Frosch, General Motors %% "Everybody is talking about the weather but nobody does anything about it." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Everybody knows they're worth something on this world. But we're never quite sure on my planet. We're always trying to prove it to someone." -- Another solemn, gently ironic line from ZOT! %% "Everyone I know drinks Miller Lite. And if they don't, I probably don't know them." -- Yogi Berra %% "Everyone has heard of Canterbury if only because they murder archbishops there." -- Michael Powell %% "Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion." -- Harlan Ellison %% "Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant... *I* want to be Cary Grant." -- Archibald Leech %% "Everyone's head is a cheap movie show." -- Jeff G. Bone %% "Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again." -- Johann von Goethe %% "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899 %% "Everything to excess. Moderation is for monks." -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." -- Flannery O'Connor %% "Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." -- Steve Wright %% "Evil... pure and simple, from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Our Man Buckaroo, seeing evil where no one else can... BUCKAROO BANZAI %% "Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them." -- Germaine Greer %% "Exactly how obscene an amount of money were we talking about? Profane? Or really offensive?" -- Pretty Woman %% "Excuse me sir, are you English?" With super heavy English drawl, "Good God man, if I were any more English I couldn't speak at all!" %% "Excuse me, Worker, I'll just be a nanosecond." -- a computer, from Firesign Theater's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus" %% "Excuses are like assholes: Everybody has one and they both stink." -- unknown %% "Existence is random. It has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. -- Rorschach, "Watchmen" %% "Expanding a comic line just to gain market share is like... Marvel." -- Harlan Ellison %% "Expect the Unexpected. He does." --> %% "Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker %% "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent . . . the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), Olmstead vs. United States, United States Supreme Court, 1928 %% "Extra money" is what you have right before your car breaks down. %% "FAMED PSYCHIC'S HEAD EXPLODES" %% "FAMILY HAUNTED BY GHOST OF CHRISTMAS TURKEY" %% "FEAR OF AIDS CUTS DOWN ON VAMPIRE ATTACKS!" -- National Enquirer %% "FIRE!" Tom yelled alarmingly %% "FORTRAN... Then, as now, the language used by scientists with real problems." %% "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% "Facts are stupid things." -- President Ronald W. Reagan (a blooper from his speech at the '88 GOP convention) %% "Failing to get them to do it your way might mean they're stupid, but it also means you failed to get them to do it your way." -- Cal Keegan %% "Failure is not the falling down, but the staying down." -- Mary Pickford %% "Faith is good, but skepticism is better" -- Giuseppe Verdi %% "Faith" can be defined as "any man's hope that the human spirit is capable of understanding"; that anything actually matters in the larger universe; and that understanding anything could be important outside of our own selfish whims and desire to survive. ...and somehow, because it is important, understanding can go on without us, waiting only to be rediscovered by the future, or at worst, pissed away, in spite of all our prayers, and work, and suffering. Every expression of the human spirit is an act of faith. -- Ellyn Mustard, mustard@ficc.ferranti.com %% "Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "Falling in love makes smoking pot all day look like the ultimate in restraint." -- Dave Sim, author of Cerebrus %% "Famous age-old rock group Pink Floyd visited the Soviet Union this week where their historic album [Dark Side of the Moon] has been on the Soviet top ten list for the last decade. Spokesmen for the Soviet government welcoming the group to Moscow said, `Wow... the Floyd, man.'" -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels" -- Goya %% "Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. "'Look! Up in the sky!' "'It's a bird!' "'It's a plane!' "'No, it's Superman!' "Yes, it's Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers; bend steel in his bare hands; and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never ending battle for Truth, Justice, and The American Way!" %% "Faster than a speeding bullet; more powerful than a locomotive; able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's ........ SUPERMAN!" %% "Father's Day is like Mother's Day, except the gift is cheaper." -- Gerald F. Lieberman %% "Father, Mother, and Me, Sister and Auntie say All the people like us are We, And every one else is They." -- Rudyard Kipling, "We and They" %% "Fie!" he said, surveying the carnage about him. "Someone must have left the bathroom light on again; don't they know the landlord gets UPSET?!" He sighed and went into the kitchen for a garbage bag. "Y'know," he mused as he put the dismembered limbs into the bag, "if this apartment weren't in such a good location, I'd move out." He sighed again and shook his head. "This is the third time that this has happened THIS MONTH!" He made a mental note to place another want ad for roommates in the paper. %% "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity." -- George Carlin %% "Filling out job applications is so depressing. I was filling one out the other day and I got to the part that says "Sex?" Well, I prefer to 'F', but I'm usually alone, so I had to circle 'M'." -- Patrick Dockhorn, dockhorn@probitas.cs.utas.edu.au %% "Filthy bag of Lovecraftian poison -- nobody fucks with Monsieur Boche!" -- Monsieur Boche, a Hunter S. Thompson clone with brains, balls and the ability to traverse dimensions, in a Matt Howarth comic %% "Finally, yet another book on the Holocaust. This one with cutouts." -- Woody Allen %% "Fine...I'll just sit here and wave my fronds..." %% "Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and the keystone under independence...The rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable...The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that is good." -- George Washington %% "First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues a bore; first differential equations sheer torture. But in due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint, or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance." %% "First of all, I want you to know I like your face ... Yeah, I really do. I'm not saying that ... I mean it. You've got color in there. You're not Roman are you? ... Look like a god, sort of. Why don't we step into the credit office, 'ZEUS'." -- Bob, the RV salesman, in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "First, we were making the effort there so that people would have their own right to decide their own future, and could select their own form of government ... Now we're saying we're going to fight there so that we don't have to fight in Thailand, so we don't have to fight on the West Coast of the United States, so that they won't move across the Rockies. -- Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968), November 26, 1967 %% "Fishing Code: Early to Bed, Early to Rise, Fish all day, And make up the Lies" %% "Flaming Carrot!" "I win!... I defeated DEAD DOG!" "But how?" "I wacked it apart with two-by-four!" -- The secret to any battle, by my main man FC %% "Flaming Carrot!... Do you see Communists behind every bush?" "No... but SOMETIMES they hide there." -- Who else but... FLAMING CARROT! Save the day! You bet! %% "Flattery is all right -- if you don't inhale." -- Adlai Stevenson %% "Flattery is like chewing gum - enjoy it, but don't swallow it." -- Mrs. Wilson, "Dennis The Menace" %% "Flextime: Starting a 10+ hour day up to an hour early (on a regular, scheduled basis with the approval of an immediate supervisor)." -- A Ferranti International Controls "volunteer" %% "Flight Reservation systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere." -- Arthur Miller %% "Flint Paper is insane. I really respect that." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "Floggings will continue until morale improves." -- anonymous flyer being distributed at Exxon USA %% "Flying saucers, time machines, they're all the same." %% "Following the Geraldo Rivera `watch out for flying chairs' incident there was a deep belch of media concern about Trash Television. Newsweek, the Washington Post, and a few other publications ran anguished analyses. Television experts told us, grimly, what this trend says about our country. (I already knew what it said about our country -- `We're stupid' -- but it was fun to hear the experts say that in 25 words or more.)" -- Alex Heard %% "Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings." -- George F. Will %% "For I lean on no dead kin, my name in mine for fame or scorn And the world began when I was born and the world is mine to win." -- Badger Clark %% "For I perceive that behind this seemingly unrelated sequence of events, there lurks a singular, sinister attitude of mind." "Whose?" "MINE! HA-HA!" -- Firesign Theatre, The Giant Rat of Summatra %% "For I too am real. I am Schmendrick the Magician, the last of the red-hot swamis, and I am older than I look." -- Schmendrick the Magician, from Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn" %% "For a cool half mil, I'd be Elvis' love slave." "He wouldn't *have* you. You talk too much, you're too skinny, and you always want on top." -- It had to be said. "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "For a girl, she's remarkably perceptive." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "For a male and female to live continuously together is... biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition." -- Robert Briffault %% "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "For certain people after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex." -- Gore Vidal %% "For every bug fixed, there is a bigger bug not yet discovered." %% "For instance, several years ago we tracked down a twelve-year-old girl who was going to have an abortion so that we could talk her out of it. Talking a woman out of having an abortion is not news. But tracking her down using a private detective is." -- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro Life Action League, "Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion", 1985, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "For me the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake." -- Alfred Hitchcock %% "For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise... and step into the shadow now without complaint." -- Rorschach takes a rare look backward, from WATCHMEN %% "For non-deterministic read 'Inhabited by pixies'." %% "For numerical analysis, there are theorems that are true, and theorems that are REALLY true." -- John Dennis (in Upson's Familiar Quotations) %% "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 %% "For the last 14 years, Mr. Ed has lived in a small town in northern California, where he hosts a local radio show." "The subject tonight is Nazi transvestites. I'm Mr. Ed; talk to me." -- From WHAT'S ALLAN WATCHING? %% "For the love of phlegm...a stupid wall of death rays. How tacky can ya get?" -- Post Brothers comics %% "For the man who has everything... Penicillin." -- F. Borquin %% "For the record, pot, like the "Reader's Digest", is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction: heroin, in one case, abridged bad books in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life." -- Mordecai Richler, "Going Home Again" %% "For the rest of your life you must run, Your day in the sun is done, You're a LIBERAL... Run, liberal, run! "Big government was your creed; But now you're the last of a dying breed. So, run liberal run, Run run run run run run, Run run run RUN, Run run run run; Run run..." -- Saturday Night Live %% "For those of you who don't know, you know that after about three or four years of concern on this issue the board of the National Right to Life Committee voted to oppose ERA." -- Dr. John Wilke, President, National Right to Life Committee, "Weekend", 1/21/79, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "For those who say I can't impose my morality on others, I say just watch me." -- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League, "Pro-Life Action News", 8/8/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered, for just such an emergency." -- Foghorn Leghorn %% "Four years ago..............no, it was yesterday." -- Steve Wright %% "Frankly, Scarlett, I don't have a fix." -- Rhett Buggler %% "Fraternities have no SLACK, no matter how slack-jawed they may appear. I taught elementary calculus here at the University of SLACK for several years, and have observed these folks carefully. Although some of them looked like they had SLACK, it's clear to me that this was just the result of not getting enough sleep after the puking contest. I mean, those guys don't watch enough television to have real SLACK." -- William K Glunt (bud@ms.uky.edu) %% "Free James Brown! Free James Brown!" "Hey! Why James Brown? Why aren't you concerned about Nelson Mandela?" "Hey! We take care a' our people -- you let the Eye-talians worry about Nelson Mandela!" -- From WHAT'S ALLAN WATCHING? %% "Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I am free at last." -- Martin Luther King %% "Free markets select for winning solutions." -- Eric S. Raymond %% "Free?" I just love the word "free!" %% "Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." -- Alan Dean Foster "To the Vanishing Point" %% "Freedom is still the most radical idea of all." -- Nathaniel Branden %% "Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to." -- Hannen Swaffer (1879-1962), in conversation with Tom Driberg, c.1928 %% "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." -- A. J. Liebling %% "Freedom" has no meaning of itself. There are always restrictions, be they legal, genetic, or physical. If you don't believe me, try to chew a radio signal. -- Kelvin Throop III %% "Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother." -- Germaine Greer %% "Friends don't let friends run Xenix." -- Stephen J. Friedl %% "Friends, Romans, Hipsters, Let me clue you in; I come to put down Caeser, not to groove him. The square kicks some cats are on stay with them; The hip bits, like, go down under; so let it lay with Caeser. The cool Brutus Gave you the message: Caeser had big eyes; If that's the sound, someone's copping a plea, And, like, old Caeser really set them straight. Here, copacetic with Brutus and the studs, -- for Brutus is a real cool cat; So are they all, all cool cats, -- Come I to make this gig at Caeser's laying down. %% "From all us Slackers to all you Boomers ... HAHAHAHAHAHA! WE HAVE SATELLITE MOUNTED RAIL-GUNS! HEH HEH. Who's laughing now?" -- S. Lang %% "From an operating system research point of view, Unix is -- if not dead -- certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it." -- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of Unix, Usenix keynote speech from Summer 1990 [and no, that doesn't mean to VMS, MS-DOS or OS/2 -cookie ed.] %% "From high atop the battered ramparts of truth and freedom... he took arms against the wicked teeming minions of infamy, reprobation, crime, subversion and wanton incontinence!" -- Flaming Carrot %% "From the beginning, I knew... that there was nothing wrong with you... that I can't fix... with my hands..." -- Archtypical Dark Knight %% "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." -- Dr. Seuss %% "From what I could make out, they were bragging, insulting each other, and telling off color jokes. And there was duct tape on their vehicles. I guess some things are universal." -- Sam, commenting on a Swiss F1 motorcycle racing team %% "From which room can one enter the robber's hideaway without passing through the cyclops room?" %% "Fucked by the finger of Fate!" Bewailed a young fellow named Tate. "Since dating Miss Baugh, My whole tongue has been raw-- It must have been something I ate." %% "Fuckin' A! Purple Haze!!!" -- Louie Gonzalez, Geometry class, 1973 %% "Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does." -- Marvin, the Paranoid Android Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Funny thing about desire. If it's not crude, it's not pure." -- Dr. Caligari %% "GOTO statement considered harmful" -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, title to a letter in CACM 11, 3 (March, 1968) %% "GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions." -- Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards) %% "Gadzooks! The Bumble Snow Monster of the North strikes again!" -- Yukon Cornellius You MUST know this one... from RUDOLPH, THE RED-NOSED REINDEER %% "Gather up eight fruits from the islands, and make fruit salad for to feed gorilla." %% "Gee, Dad. You must really love us to sink *THIS* low." -- Bart to Homer in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", from The Simpsons %% "Gee, this is pretty good for slop!" -- Gourmet advice from JONNY QUEST %% "Gee... these guys really ARE impervious!" -- The Badger vs. demon bike gangs from Hell. Guess who wins? %% "General, a machine becomes human when you can't tell the difference." -- From D.A.R.Y.L. %% "Gentlemen! This is a serious court proceeding, not a debating society for maladjusted psychotic sociopaths!" -- The Inquisitor %% "Gentlemen, gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!" -- Doctor Strangelove %% "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." -- T. S. Elliot %% "Genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the Internet." -- Karl Kleinpaste %% "George Bush, you have just been elected president of the United States. What are you going to do now?" "I'm going to go to Disneyland!" -- A parody of the Disneyland ads, off of rec.arts.tv %% "Get a life!" -- Saturday Night Live %% "Get away from her you bitch!" -- Ripley, "Aliens" %% "Get away from her, you BITCH!" -- You wanna argue with a Woman Waldo? ALIENS %% "Get bent!" -- Bartman %% "Get that finger out of your ear! You don't know where that finger's been!" -- Airplane! %% "Gimme a Cold Filtered Big Joe Coors Dark Dry Lite Extra-Hearty Draft Lager With The Imported Australian Taste In The Barrel-Shaped Twist-Off Bottle and a mango, please. Oh, and one of those specially-emblemed, frosted 24-ounce glasses." "We're outta 'em." "Oh. Gimme a can of Bud Lite, then." "Glass?" "Na." "That'll be five bucks." %% "Girls like her are one in a million, so I guess my chances are a million to one" -- "Love at First Sight", Jad Fair/Half-Japanese 50 Skidillion Watts Records %% "Give a hoot. Read a book." -- Krusty in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Give me a break, man!" %% "Give me a break, man!" "Oh, man!" "Hey, dude!" "Hey, Homer!" -- Bart, from The Simpsons %% "Give me a burrito. . .resistance is futile!" -- Steve Roberts, of Winnebiko and BEHEMOTH fame, to a terrified clerk at a Taco Bell drive-through %% "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." -- Vilfredo Pareto %% "Give me a place to sit, and I'll watch." -- friend of Archimedes %% "Give us a copper, Guv" said the beggar to the Treasury statistician, when he waylaid him in Parliament square. "I haven't eaten for three days." "Ah," said the statistician, "And how does that compare with the same period last year?" -- Russell Lewis %% "Give us the man," shouts the multitude, "who will step forward and take the responsibility." He is instantly the idol, the lord, and the king among men. He, then, who would command among his fellows, must excel them more in energy or will than in power of intellect. -- Burnap %% "Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." -- P. J. O'Rourke %% "Gloom, despair and agony on me. Deep dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. Oh, gloom, despair and agony on me." %% "Go ahead and play the blues if it'll make you happy." -- Homer in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "Go ahead: Bang your head against the wall. Be stupid." %% "Go on! Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of burnt feathers and gunpowder and cordite!" -- Daffy Duck, "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!" %% "Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Go to Hell Mr. Stout -- you stink as a human being." -- Deb Paul %% "Go to Hell!" or other insult direct is all the answer a snoopy question deserves. -- Lazarus Long, From Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% "Go to infra red people-look sharp!" -- Top %% "Go to it, sir! Good luck!" "Gosh, he's unflappable." "Bill, this is a nickel, and this is an orange..." -- Doonesbury %% "Go! And never darken my towels again!" -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977), "Duck Soup" %% "God BLESS America! You can't do this in Russia!" -- Melvis comments on the freedoms he enjoys in America... "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "God cannot alter the past but historians can." -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% "God does not play dice with the universe" -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) "Albert, stop telling god what to do " -- Neils Bohr (1885-1962) %% "God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December." -- Sir James Barrie %% "God gives burdens; also shoulders" Jimmy Carter cited this Jewish saying in his concession speech at the end of the 1980 election. At least he said it was a Jewish saying; I can't find it anywhere. I'm sure he's telling the truth though; why would he lie about a thing like that? -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% "God grant me the serenity to fix the bugs I find, and to call the rest features." -- Seen in a signoff line, uncredited %% "God is as real as I am," the old man said. My faith was restored, for I new that Santa would never lie. %% "God is in my mind, and the Devil is in my pants." -- Jonathon Winters %% "God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are." -- Billy Graham %% "God is silent," he was fond of saying, "now if we can only get Man to shut up." -- Woody Allen %% "God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen." -- Stephen Hawking %% "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday." -- William Bragg %% "God save you from a bad neighbor and from a beginner on the fiddle." -- Italian proverb %% "God willing, we will return." -- Eugene Cernan, the Moon, 1972 %% "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." -- Reinhold Niebuhr, sermon, 1934 %% "Going to church doesn't make you a Christian anymore than going to a garage makes you a car." -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% "Gold leaf," said Tom guiltily. %% "Goldfish... what stupid animals. Even Wayne Cody stops eating before he bursts." -- Local Seattle comedian %% "Good God," he said, "is that the only thing you care about?" %% "Good afternoon, this is your captain speaking. I would like to remind you that according to FAA regulations, this flight has been declared a non smoking flight. If you absolutely must light up, you are invited to step outside." %% "Good drink, good meat; Good God, let's eat!" -- Homer in "Eating Dinner" (Tracy Ullman Show), from The Simpsons %% "Good literature is about Love and War. Trash fiction is about Sex and Violence." -- Author unknown %% "Good men must not obey the laws too well." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Politics" %% "Good morning. For those of you who don't know me, I am not Dr. X; I am Dr. X's representative on Earth." %% "Gort, klaatu barada nikto." -- The Day the Earth Stood Still %% "Gosh, Dr. Heller... even your Death Ray doesn't work!" "By Gar! How do you kill a dead dog?" -- Flaming Carrot and Dr. Heller try to, err, kill, a dead dog %% "Gosh, I feel my IQ dropping by the minute." -- From THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MIGHTY MOUSE %% "Gosh, Mr. Monster... You're SWELL! I wanna be jus' like you when I grow up!" "Ha Ha! Well... OF COURSE you do!" -- A sentimental moment in MR. MONSTER %% "Gosh, you could hear a pin drop in here!" said Tom disquietingly %% "Got a monkey on my back; a muh-muh-muh-muh-monkey on my back-back, back-back ... ...nuh-nuh-nuh, nuh-nuh-nobody's fault but mine" -- Led Zeppelin %% "Gotcha, you snot-necked weenies!" -- Post Brothers Comics %% "Gov. Dukakis, rebuttal?" "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy." -- From the Bush-Dukakis debate satire on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE %% "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant and a terrible master." -- George Washington %% "Government sucks." -- Ben Olson %% "Gozer the Gozerian: As the duly appointed representative of the city, county and state of New York, I hereby order you to cease all supernatural activities at once and proceed immediately to your place of origin or the nearest parallel dimension, whichever is nearest." -- Ray (Dan Akyroyd, "Ghostbusters") %% "Grab your Cape/And drop the phone/Your next stop is/The Joker Zone" %% "Graphs of higher degree polynomials have this habit of doing unwanted wiggly things." %% "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "Great leaders are rare, so I'm following myself." %% "Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers." -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% "Great, you wasted all my Clearasil on another picture of Thor?" "Thor's my hero..." "Thor's a homo." "Is not." -- From ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING %% "Greep and the world greeps with you. Fnord and you fnord alone." %% "Gregor Wass, your presence intimidates me to the point of humiliation. Would you care to strike me?" -- Saturday Night Live %% "Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen." -- Pliny the Younger %% "Griswold v. Connecticut first established and guaranteed the `right of privacy' in the conjugal act. Sexual love, however, in a most profound way is anything but `private.' Its very purpose is to break the bonds of privacy by physical consummation of an unreserved gift of self. The contraceptive, however, denies the meaning of marital love by falsifying its bodily expression. Love is no longer unreserved; something is held back. `I cannot love all of you,' the contraceptive says, `because I cannot love all that might be created by you.'" -- Edmund Miller, Anti-Abortion Commentator, Fidelity magazine, 10/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Gross! GROSS! GRRROSSSS!" "But VERY Cronenberg." -- Yes, it's JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL. 3 points. %% "Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined." -- Patrick Henry 3 Elliot at 45, Debates In The Virginia Convention %% "Guards, beat this man brutally for daring to try to confuse me!" -- Floyd Farland %% "Gud, marry me, or I'll kick yer ass." -- Honkeytonk Sue %% "Guess what I'm in for." "Uhh..." "Wait! I'll give you a hint..." -- From HEARTBREAK COMICS %% "Guess who's not hiding anymore? Ha-ha-ha!" -- ...and fair play. FLAMING CARROT %% "Gun control: Hitting what you aim at." -- Author unknown %% "Gun rights are a feminist issue." -- J. Ryerson %% "Guns are generally pretty robust, their only enemies are rust and politicians." -- Jeff Cooper %% "HAIR-PULLING?! You're actually indulging in HAIR-PULLING?! What kind of a Green Lantern are you, anyway?" "The kind that eats punks like you for *breakfast*!" -- Guy Gardner in JLI %% "HALFTIME BELONGS TO THE BANDS!!!" -- Harry T. Dinkle %% "HERE I GO" (from Barret......or is it from The Madcap Laughs??) This is a story 'bout a girl that I knew She didn't like my songs and that made me feel blue She said a big band is far better than you.... She don't rock and roll, she don't like it She don't do the stroll, well, she don't do it right Well, everything's wrong and my patience was gone when I woke one morning and remembered this song I hope that she will talk to me now, and even allow me to hold her hand and forget that old band. I strolled round to her pad Her lights were off, and that's bad Her sister said that my girl was gone "but come inside boy, and play, play, play me your song" I said yeah, here I go She's kinda cute don'cha know that after a while of seeing her smile I knew we could make, a-make it in style Now I've got all I need She and I are in love, we've agreed She likes this song and my others too so now you know my world is... 'cos this tune, what a boon this tune %% "HEY, LARRY! DITCH THE JACKET!" -- Foo-fa-raa in "Badger" %% "HONK! HONK!" -- THE BADGER in moralistic turpitude %% "HOUSEWIFE INVERTS SINGULAR MATRIX AND LIVES TO TELL TALE!!!" -- "Scientific National Enquirer" %% "Ha, but my life is but a box of wormgears." -- Marvin, the Paranoid Android Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Habits are first cobwebs, then cables." -- Spanish proverb %% "Had he and I but met But ranged as infantry, By some old ancient inn, And staring face to face, We should have sat us down to wet I shot at him as he at me, Right many a nipperkin! And killed him in his place. I shot him dead because -- He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, Because he was my foe, Off-hand-like -- just as I -- Just so: my foe of course he was; Was out of work -- had sold his traps -- That's clear enough; although No other reason why. Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat, if met where any bar is Or help to half-a-crown." -- Thomas Hardy %% "Hah. I know Tim Maroney. I've smoked pot with Tim Maroney. And K*nt Paul Dolan is no Tim Maroney!" -- Gary Strand, gary@cgdra.ucar.edu %% "Hair from here to here." %% "Half of our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel." -- John Churton Collins %% "Half the truth is often a great lie." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% "Hand over all your money in a paper bag!" "Yes, yes, I know the procedure for armed robbery. I do work in a convenience store you know." -- Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart clerk, in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Hankerin' for trouble, eh? Well I would like--" [aside] "I would like? I would like a trip to Europe!" "--I would like..." -- Daffy Duck, "Dripalong Daffy" %% "Happily ever after...there are some people who have achieved that, for the moment." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Happily, I read English." [Draws sword] "Then read it happily." -- Exchange in the 1950s production of IVANHOE %% "Happiness is being famous for your financial ability to indulge in every kind of excess." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "Happiness is not a destination. It's the trip." -- anon %% "Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." -- Robert Frost %% "Happy people are just so gross." %% "Harcourt Fenton Mudd !!! Is that liquor I smell on your breath? Where have you been 'til all hours of the night?" %% "Hard work Never hurt Anybody, but Why take Chances?" %% "Has anybody seen my legs?" -- Barney Miller %% "Has anyone had problems with the computer accounts?" "Yes, I don't have one." "Okay, you can send mail to one of the tutors..." -- E. D'Azevedo Computer Science 372 %% "Hasta Lambada, Dudes" -- Bart, from The Simpsons %% "Hasta la Vista...Abey." -- Bart Simpson as John Wilkes Booth %% "Have a Nice Day, Somewhere Else" %% "Have a nice day," said Lady Macbeth. -- Edward Abbey %% "Have a nice diurnal anomaly." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Have a van, now, load with weapons Packed up and ready to go.... Sound of gun fire off in the distance....." -- Talking Heads %% "Have some wine," the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. "I don't see any wine," she remarked. "There isn't any," said the March Hare. -- Lewis Carroll %% "Have you ever seen a spleen that large?" "Whoa, no .. not since breakfast." -- Fletch %% "Have you fed the dragon yet? If not, persevere . . . and have you found the secret behind the magic trees yet? 'go frame' won't work underground." %% "Have you got a 27 B stroke 6?" -- Brazil %% "Have you lived here all your life?" "Oh, twice that long." %% "Have you noticed the underground mazes yet? There are four of them, one below each island. If you manage to thread through them, you'll find a short-cut between the islands. Also, have you investigated the cactus and banana tree? Have you used the fountain of youth?" %% "Have you thought much about luggage, Mr. Banks?" "No..." "It's the central preoccupation of my life." -- Joe vs. the Volcano %% "Have you: Tried the other two spells? Fed the dragon & gorilla? Gone through the gem hall & the ice caverns? Obtained the bracelet? Ankh? amulet? Amethyst? Explored *everywhere*? Remember, the treasures belong in the observatory." %% "Haven't seen you for nigh onto three years. Where you been, Eddie?" "Drunk. Feeling frisky tonight, boys?" -- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? %% "Haven't you seen me somewhere before?" "I know the name, but I can't remember the face." -- Woody Allen, "What's New, Pussycat?" %% "Having a family is like having a bowling alley in your brain." -- Martin Mull %% "Hawaii is a part of the United States that is an island and is right here." -- Dan Quayle, while in Hawaii %% "Hawk, we're going to die." "Never say die...and certainly never say we." -- M*A*S*H %% "Hayl, you know an' I know that th' only way in th' world we can get that kind o' money is if we found a bottle of Coke with a mouse in it." -- Randy Quaid explains funding to Pee-Wee Herman on a SNL episode %% "He did decide, though, that with more time and a great deal of mental effort, he could probably turn the activity into an acceptable perversion." -- Mick Farren, "When Gravity Fails" %% "He didn't run for reelection. `Politics brings you into contact with all the people you'd give anything to avoid,' he said. `I'm staying home.'" -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegone Days" %% "He doesn't know when he's beaten, this boy. He doesn't know when he's winning either. He doesn't have any sort of sensory apparatus known to man." -- Monty Python %% "He don't know me vewy well, DO he?" -- Bugs Bunny %% "He even looks like God... except his hands are in his pockets." "They should be, he's got four dead Presidents in 'em." -- Albert Finny and a forgotten actress in "Wolfen" %% "He gets lost on random walks." %% "He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Why I Am Not a Christian" %% "He had studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had learned to write equations of the most abstruse kind, without as much as a tremble of the chalk. -- Isaac Asimov "More Things in Heaven and Earth" %% "He is a big clog in their machine." -- about Ted Williams, also Tony Perez -- Yogi Berra %% "He is a big clog in their machine." -- Yogi Berra %% "He is the Napoleon of Crime, Watson..." -- Sherlock Holmes in "The Final Problem" %% "He seems to think that posterity is a pack-horse, always ready to be loaded." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "He sees things from an unusual vintige[sic] point." %% "He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "He thinks the Gettysburg Address is where Lincoln lived." -- Wanda, A Fish Called Wanda %% "He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk Descending from the bus: He looked again, and found it was A Hippopotamus: 'If this should stay to dine,' he said, 'There won't be much for us.'" -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno" %% "He thought he saw a Buffalo Upon the chimney-piece: He looked again, and found it was His sister's husband's niece. 'Unless you leave this house,' he said, 'I'll send for the Police!'" -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno" %% "He thought he saw a Rattlesnake That questioned him in Greek, He looked again and found it was The Middle of Next Week. 'The one thing I regret,' he said, 'Is that it cannot speak!'" -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno" %% "He thought he saw an Elephant, That practiced on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. 'At length I realize,' he said, 'The bitterness of life!'" -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno" %% "He was a multi-millionaire... Wanna know how he made all of his money? ... He designed the little diagrams that tell which way to put batteries in..." -- Stephen Wright %% "He was a real professional, and a hard worker." -- Marilyn Chambers, talking about John Holmes %% "He was a thief, and a terrorist, but on the other hand he had a tremendous singing voice." -- Batman (movie) %% "He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT." -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), on Thomas Grey %% "He was flying, but like they say, what goes up - must come down." -- Marshall about Simon, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "He was sweet and sincere and giving and good... AND A CHERISHED NEIGHBOR UNDESERVING OF SUCH A FATE!! "Nevertheless, better him than me. Amen." -- Eulogy given by Banana PC Jr to Opus in "Bloom County" %% "He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers." -- French philosopher Charles Peguy %% "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Fredrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), "Jenseits von Gut und Bose" %% "He who flames improperly risks making an ash of himself!" -- Jeff Klumpp (jdk@ficc.uu.net) %% "He who has never hoped can never despair." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Caesar and Cleopatra", Act IV %% "He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts." -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% "He who uses an 8088 will be reincarnated as one." -- Anonymous Netter %% "He works for that import-outport bank." %% "He'd make a fine addition to the team, Batman... if only he wasn't so lacking in energy and enthusiasm." "We'll have to get him to work on that." -- 24th century manners, courtesy of THE JUSTICE LEAGUE %% "He'p me! Somebody, pleez, he'p me! I been hypmotize'!" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "He's a bit too theatrical for my taste." "Mr. Rogers is too theatrical for your taste, darling..." -- Married and Superheroes from JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL %% "He's a bloodsucker, all right, but not the kind we're looking for. This man is an I.R.S. agent." -- The Badger, Ham and a Van Helsing pig stalk vampires in "Badger" %% "He's a virtual genius. He's just swapped out right now." %% "He's everywhere! He's everywhere!" %% "He's going to kill me. I KNOW it. That's the kind of day it's been." -- One of those days for the Black Cat %% "He's not Santa Claus...He doesn't LOOK like Santa Claus!" "Don't judge a book by its hide, kid. I let folks believe that `fat, jolly' nonsense 'cause it makes 'em FEEL good. So, are you tots gonna bust me out of here, or stand there gaping like trout?" -- Gumby's Winter Fun Special %% "He's not dumb; he knows what he's doing. He's done that for years ... he's learned that if the dream's big enough, the facts don't count." -- Billy Florence, on the value of dreambuilding %% "He's not just an experimentalist. He's an antitheorist!" %% "He's our leader! The wisest of us all! At least, that's what my parents always say." -- Just another misguided super-ape from BLUE DEVIL %% "He's right. There's nothin back here." -- Cprl Hicks %% "Hear that, Dad? You can lie around in your underwear and scratch yourself." -- Bart in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", from The Simpsons %% "Heard you were moving your piano, so I cam over to help." "Thanks. Got it upstairs already." "Do it alone?" "Nope. Hitched the cat to it." "How would that help?" "Used a whip." %% "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895 %% "Hee hee hee! That Marmaduke..." -- The Simpsons %% "Hell's not so bad, as long as you don't mind eating at Arby's." -- Nick Bonesteel %% "Hell, no," said the Duchess of Quick, "I won't suck his filthy old prick! It's not that I funk At a mouthful of spunk, But the smell of his ass makes me sick!" %% "Helllooo, BAAYYbee ... yeah, this is the Big Bopper speakin'" %% "Hello again, Peabody here..." -- Mister Peabody %% "Hello stranger, who are you?" - %% "Hello to married men I've known. I'll soon have a wife and leave yours alone." -- Charlie, singing "Go Home With Bonnie Jean", in Lerner's and Lowe's "Brigadoon" %% "Hello! Operator! Get me the number for 911!" -- The Simpsons %% "Hello, Chase and Sanborn," said the little brother to his big sister's flame. "Why address me as 'Chase and Sanborn,' Tommy?" "Oh, your date's on the can." %% "Hello, Laughing Academy? Please to send zee Viggy Vagon to..." "Richard, please..." -- The elastic joker from HERO SANDWICH %% "Hello, just in case you were wondering the checks in the mail. If you weren't, then tell my wonderful answering machine just what was on your mind." %% "Hello, you have reached an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone by 90 degrees and try again. Thank you." -- The MIT phone system message for unused extensions %% "Hello," he lied. -- Don Carpenter quoting a Hollywood agent %% "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to DIE!" "Stop saying that!" -- "The Princess Bride" %% "Hello... IRON CURTAIN? Send over a SAUSAGE PIZZA! World War III? No thanks!" -- Zippy the Pinhead %% "Hello? Hello? I can't hear you. I guess that's 'cos I'm not at home right now. But if you'll leave a message, I'll be sure to get back to you..." %% "Hello?... What?... Yes, Jeff... Flame them." -- phone conversation overheard in Peter da Silva's office %% "Help Mr. Wizard!" -- Tennessee Tuxedo %% "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" -- Monty Python "Holy Grail" %% "Hemorrhaging Brain" : peppermint schnapps in a shot or martini glass with *VERY* cold Bailey's Irish Cream poured *slowly* onto top (for the brain effect). And a dash of Grenadine.really gross looking but very tasty! %% "Her eyes were cold and harsh...which made them tough to chew." -- Danno %% "Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from President's and Kings to the scum of the earth..." -- Lily Tomlin %% "Here comes Mr. Bill's dog." -- Narrator, Saturday Night Live %% "Here's a floppy with a tar of a compressed cpio archive... and they say Unix is hard to use..." -- Karl %% "Here's on for you. What's an 8 letter word for 'Love?'" "Moisture" -- From the ABC series "Doctor Doctor" %% "Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery.'" -- Comedian Jay Leno %% "Here's to good friends Tonight is kinda stupid The beer we'll pour Is something we'll ignore somehow... So tonight, tonight, Let it be Lowbrau." "Lowbrau, the beer for those times when you just don't feel sophisticated." %% "Heroine" is perhaps as peculiar a word as any in our language; the two first letters of it are a male, the three first a female, the four first a brave man, and the whole word a brave woman, and the first 6 letters of it are the downfall of all of the others. %% "Hey Charlie, what's that noise?" "I dunno -- must be SKYLAB!" -- Dogs In Space %% "Hey Dad, if I saved up my allowance, could I buy a monkey?" "Of course not!" "OK, then I won't save up." -- Leave It To Beaver %% "Hey Dad, you crossed my line of death!" -- Robocop %% "Hey Ivan, check your six." -- Sidewinder missile jacket patch, showing a Sidewinder driving up the tail of a Russian Su-27 %% "Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of muy hat!" "But that trick NEVER works!" "This time fer sure!" %% "Hey buddy, wanta go look for UFO's?" -- Marshall to Simon, "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "Hey isn't that cute; a boy and his rock" Belayer answers, "More like a rock and his boy!" -- David Brandson Calloway, dbcallow@eos.ncsu.edu %% "Hey listen, I only said those things so I could sleep with her. Honest!" %% "Hey! I've got a TERRIFIC idea! Let's go visit JOHN BYRNE!" "Hey, yeah! Everyone loves fanzines with JOHN BYRNE in them!" "This'll be GREAT! Maybe he'll say something about HOMOS!" -- Chuck and Jim anticipate the John Byrne interview %% "Hey! You didn't read me my rights!" "This is Mexico, pal. The only Miranda they've heard of around here wears bananas on her head." -- I dunno... I got it from Jerry Boyajian %% "Hey, Flaming Carrot!... What makes you so brave?" "It's my birthday. Now get outta here!" -- FLAMING CARROT %% "Hey, George. Our Soviet Masters on line 3." -- Doonesbury %% "Hey, Homer!" -- Bart %% "Hey, I think his heart has stopped." "Let's give him a few more minutes." -- Penny and Hopey discussing the results of a sexual encounter in LOVE & ROCKETS %% "Hey, Max -- Wake up! You're missing all the fun!" "What?" "A seven-foot specter of evil appeared in front of the car, so I ran over it. Sounded like a bag of laundry going under. Hope I didn't hurt the tires. Want a fig newton?" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "Hey, Sam, how about a loan?" "Whattaya need?" "Oh, about $500." "Whattaya got for collateral?" "Whattaya need?" "How about an eye?" -- Giancana [small talk] %% "Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el? Now he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he always wanted. %% "Hey, don't drink that poison -- it's four dollars an ounce!" -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977), "A Day at the Races" %% "Hey, er..." said Zaphod, "what's your name?" The man looked at them doubtfully. "I don't know. Why, do you think I should have one? It seems very odd to give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Hey, gimme five dollars!" "Kid, does the name Bernhard Goetz mean anything to you?" -- From "The American" %% "Hey, kid, you just saved our lives, you know that?" "Oh, well, it was nothing really...." "Was it? Oh well, forget it then." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Hey, man, I'm an electrician!" "MAKE MY DAY! MAKE MY DAY!" -- Doonesbury %% "Hey, nice coat, man. What's in the pink box?" %% "Hey, stewardess. Run through that seatbelt demonstration a few more times. It's unbelievably tricky!" -- Herman %% "Hey, this is not a lending library. If you're not going to buy that thing, put it down or I'll blow your heads off." -- Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart clerk, in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Hey, this is not a lending library. Put the magazine back or I'll blow your heads off." -- Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart clerk, in "Krusty Gets Busted" from The Simpsons %% "Hey, wait a minute. This is a script! There must be a writer around here somewhere." "Ya know, I never thought of it, but there's a logic to that. Otherwise, everybody'd make things up as they go along, and we'd have chaos." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Hey-AY!! Take it easy, Ralphie-boy!!" -- Ed Norton %% "Hi, I'm Larry. This is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl." %% "Hi, I'm Professor Alan Ginsburg... But you can call me... Captain Toke." -- John Lovitz, as ex-Supreme Court nominee Alan Ginsburg, on SNL %% "Hi, I'm Simon. Are you a girl or a lady?" -- Simon (to Melanie), "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's hand grenades I throw..." %% "Hi. I'm Luther. Dumb ol' Luther -- the happy sidekick. The comedy relief. And I'm going to kill you." -- Luthor's cybernetic logic finally gives, in AMERICAN FLAGG! %% "Hi. This is Dan Cassidy's answering machine. Please leave your name and number... and after I've doctored the tape, your message will implicate you in a federal crime and be brought to the attention of the F.B.I... BEEEP" -- And the Devil Himself, from Blue Devil comics %% "Hi. This is Dan Cassidy's answering machine. Please leave your name and number... and after I've doctored the tape, your message will include bombing Tripoli." %% "Hi. This is God." "Uh-Oh..." -- Doonesbury %% "Hide the wenches and batten down the access codes... yer about to be boarded, ye scurvy network news dogs! Har Har..." -- "Bloom County" %% "Hideous creatures from other dimensions! What'll I do? What'll I DO?!" -- The BADGER considers an everyday problem %% "His eyes were cold. As cold as the bitter winter snow that was falling outside. Yes, cold and therefore difficult to chew..." -- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich %% "His five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators, and wine bars!" -- So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish %% "His super power is to turn into a scotch terrier." -- Flaming Carrot %% "Historical reminder: always put Horace before Descartes." -- Donald o. Rickter %% "History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions." -- Ted Koppel %% "History is made at night. Character is what you are in the dark." -- Doctor Emilio Lizardo/Lord John Whorfin in "Buckaroo Banzai" %% "Hit and run means never having to say you're sorry" %% "Hiyo God Damn Silver." -- Oliver Queen in THE DARK KNIGHT FALLS %% "Hmmm... Equality is bad for the country? Well, at least we know where you stand now. I also remember a lot of your ilk saying things about how the ERA was going to require unisex bathrooms. Equality is not the same as identical. If you can't get that straight, you're going to have a lot of trouble programming in C." -- Russell Nelson, nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu %% "Hmmm... volcanic activity in the greater Sioux City area." -- Weather conditions in BULLET CROW %% "Hmmmmm!" -- Marge, when she thinks Homer has screwed up, from The Simpsons %% "Ho! Ha-ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!" -- Daffy Duck %% "Hold still while I flame you." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "Holy Yornado!" -- Simon, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "Holy jumping Mother O' God in a sidecar with chocolate Jimmies and a Lobster Bib!" -- The superbly loony "Sam and Max" %% "Home is is the place where your computer lives and runs your life." -- Chrome Cowboy, sobiloff@thor.acc.stolaf.edu %% "Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Women in the Home" %% "Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is to a cockatoo." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% "Home, Sweet Home" must surely have been written by a bachelor. %% "Honest Crocus worships at the font of free enterprise." -- NEXUS %% "Honest Officer, had I known my health stood in jeopardy I would never had lit one." -- Maxim of the Hells Angels %% "Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona." (Crime is honest in a good cause.) -- Publilius Syrus (1st cent. B.C.) %% "Honey, this is GREAT coffee." -- Harrison Ford in "Witness" %% "Hope this is the RIGHT guy!" -- THE BADGER %% "Hot Rodders--America's first recyclers!" -- Mark Looper looper@asgard.srl.caltech.edu %% "How To Tell A Businessman From A Businesswoman" A businessman is aggressive; a businesswoman is pushy. He is careful about details; she is picky. He loses his temper because he's so involved in his job; she's bitchy. He's depressed (be hung over), so everyone tiptoes past his office; she's moody, so it must be her time of the month. He follows through; she doesn't know when to quit. He's firm; she's stubborn. He makes wise judgments; she reveals her prejudices. He is a man of the world; she's been around. He isn't afraid to say what he thinks; she's opinionated. He exercises authority; she's tyrannical. He's discreet; she's secretive. He's a stern taskmaster; she's difficult to work for. %% "How about those Dodge Turbo Wagons?! What's the deal on those anyway? You can sleep in the back while you're waiting for a tow truck." -- Steve Kravitz %% "How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved." -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% "How can I ever thank you?" gushed a woman to Clarence Darrow, after he had solved her legal troubles. "My dear woman," Darrow replied, "ever since the Phoenicians invented money there has been only one answer to that question." %% "How can I tell...that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?" -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "How can a man of integrity get along in Washington?" -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% "How could you tell?" -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), on being told of the death of President Coolidge %% "How dare they jail me! Those freedom-loving American JERKS!" -- Godless Commie Scientist from ATOMIC MAN COMICS %% "How did the poet Mayakovsky die?" "Suicide." "What were his last words?" "'Don't shoot, comrades!'" %% "How did you find the weather when you were on vacation?" "Just went outside and there it was." %% "How do I explain to clients that society believes buying a rock (of cocaine) is three or four times as bad as raping a woman?" -- Robert Jakovitch, Broward [FL] Assistant Public Defender [from AP story 12 July 1990] %% "How do you do your squid?" "Fine. How do _you_ do, sir?" -- Molly Dodd %% "How do you feel?" "Like a military academy; bits of me keep on passing out." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "How do you find an isomorphism? You just f it. See? Graph theory is a lot of fun." -- I. Goulden Combinatorics and Optimization 230 %% "How does this sound..? `Stop, or I'll stand very, very still for a surprisingly long time!'" -- the Secret Origin of Legion of Substitute Heroes %% "How eccentric can we be if we live in a place like Lexington?" -- Boston Globe article on The High Tech Set %% "How is this possible?" "We keep him upstairs in a big plastic bubble." -- Doonesbury, referring to Zonker Harris %% "How long will I have to wait for a table?" Tom asked without reservation %% "How many men you got 'ere, Colonel?" "Oh, 7,000 infantry, 600 artillery, and 2 divisions of paratroops." "Paratroops, Dino!" "It'd be a shame of someone was to set fire to dem." "Set fire to them?!" "Fire's 'appen, Colonel." "Fings's burn..." -- Monty Python %% "How many of us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn't felt sexually attracted to mice?" -- Monty Python %% "How many teamsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "FIFTEEN!! YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?" %% "How many wilderness areas do we need?" "How many Brahms symphonies do we need?" -- Robert Marshall %% "How much for the little girl? Your women -- how much for the women?" -- The Blues Brothers %% "How often does the train go by?" "So often you don't even notice it." -- The Blues Brothers %% "How should long girls be courted?" "The same as the short ones." %% "How should we amortize the cost of the equipment over its expected lifetime." %% "How tall was King Kong?" -- The Stuntman %% "How the hell do I know why there are Nazis? I don't know why the can opener works." -- Hannah and Her Sisters %% "How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin %% "How was it, little buddy?" "It was dark, like a cave, and there were no toilets -- just black, smoking holes in the walls and floor! Giant roaches howled like damned souls as they skittered along the mouldered grout-work!" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "How young can you die of old age?" -- Steven Wright %% "How'd you get that flat?" "Ran over a bottle." "Didn't you see it?" "Damn kid had it under his coat." %% "How's YOUR Endless Project coming?" -- Mark Diekhans %% "Howard Hughes, John Wayne, Melvis Wesley." "Rocket scientists all." -- A wry dinosaur in "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "However well you do [in your Tripos exams] you always find there's someone from Trinity who's beaten you." %% "However, due to terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire invasion fleet was swallowed by a small dog." -- HGttG %% "Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce!" -- The University of Wallamaloo Philosophy Dept. Sketch, via Monty Python %% "Huh ?" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "Humor is the affectionate communication of insight." -- Leo Rosten %% "Humpf!" Humpfed a voice! "For almost two days you've run wild and insisted on chatting with persons who've never existed. Such carryings-on in our peaceable jungle! We've had quite enough of you bellowing bungle! And I'm here to state," snapped the big kangaroo, "That your silly nonsensical game is all through!" And the young kangaroo in her pouch said, "Me, too!" "With the help of the Wickersham Brothers and dozens of Wickersham Uncles and Wickersham Cousins and Wickersham In-Laws, whose help I've engaged, You're going to be roped! And you're going to be caged! And, as for your dust speck... Hah! That we shall boil in a hot steaming kettle of Beezle-But oil!" -- Dr. Seuss "Horton Hears a Who" %% "Hurry! They're freaking out on stale Heineken!!" "I'M A FROG! I'M A FROG!" -- "Bloom County" %% "I 'grok' people...I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts...because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting." -- Valentine Michael Smith ("The Man from Mars") in Robert A. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" %% "I *LIKE* IT!!" -- Delinquent w/cannon in ROBOCOP %% "I ... reject the argument put forth by many fundamentalists that science has nothing to do with religion because God is not among the things making up the universe in which we live. Surely if a necessity for a god-concept in the universe ever turns up, that necessity will become evident to the scientist." -- physicist Ralph Alpher, "Theology of the Big Bang," Religious Humanism, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (Winter 1983), pg. 12 %% "I Always push the doors marked pull!" %% "I DO want your money, because god wants your money!" -- The Reverend Jimmy, from "Repo Man" %% "I Don't Charge Tax, I Collect It" -- Mark E. Sunderlin aka Dr. Megabyte %% "I HATE arbitrary limits, especially when they're small." -- Stephen Savitzky %% "I SAID I LOVE ALL MANKIND *DAMMIT*!!" -- A deity from CEREBUS %% "I absolutely have no idea at all," Tom said thoughtlessly. %% "I admire men of character, and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates, and that, to me, is where you find out what the character of a man is." -- General Norman Schwarzkopf %% "I admit it freely -- I'm not a positive thinker. On STAR TREK, the beautiful alien with the green hair and the taut belly would always say to Captain Kirk, `Oh one called Jim, what is this thing you call a kiss?' If that alien were here today (and in my Perfect World, believe me, she would be), she would gaze at me lovingly and say, `Oh one called Ian, what is this thing you call a sneer?' That's the kind of guy I am. Captain Kirk and I both want the same thing: the whole-hearted devotion of a naive alien. And if certain things stand in our way -- Klingons for Kirk, reality for me -- well, we just have to suck in our guts, set the phasers on Stun, and hope for the best." -- Merle Kessler, IAN SHOALES' PERFECT WORLD %% "I alone can bring order to this chaotic world... and all I demand is ... blind obedience." -- Doctor Doom %% "I always prefer to believe the best of everybody -- it saves so much trouble." -- Rudyard Kipling %% "I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe" -- Aurthur Dent The Restaurant at the end of the Universe %% "I always wanted to marry someone who was tall, handsome, and rich. Three out of three I gave up on." -- Woody Allen, "Radio Days" %% "I am ... a woman ... and ... technically a parasitic uterine growth" -- Sean Doran the Younger [allegedly] %% "I am Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire. I own a mansion und a yacht." -- Looney Tunes, Hare Brush (1955, Friz Freleng) %% "I am FLAMING CARROT! Even best friends fear me a little!" %% "I am Number Two." "WHO IS NUMBER ONE?...." "You are Number Six." "I AM NOT A NUMBER! I AM A FREE MAN!" -- The Prisoner %% "I am a deeply superficial person." -- Warhol %% "I am a good boy. I am a good man. I am a good girl." "What is this, propaganda?" -- Mae West (My Little Chickadee) %% "I am absolutely without flaw, and don't you f***ing forget it!" -- Harlan Ellison %% "I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way." -- Carl Sandburg %% "I am astounded ... at the wonderful power you have developed - and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever." -- Arthur Sullivan, on seeing a demonstration of Edison's new talking machine in 1888 %% "I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I WILL be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation...I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - and I WILL BE HEARD." -- William Lloyd Garrison %% "I am convinced that the manufacturers of carpet odor removing powder have included encapsulated time released cat urine in their products. This technology must be what prevented its distribution during my mom's reign. My carpet smells like piss, and I don't have a cat. Better go by some more." -- timw@zeb.USWest.COM, in alt.conspiracy %% "I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." -- Professor Bernardo de la Paz %% "I am grim... and harsh... and ripe with fury! I fight and kill and howl and get *all bloody*! I go bowling whenever I want!" -- The Carrot's statements on life... %% "I am immune to all such things, my friend. As a youth, a certain amount of head-bangin' and metal-bashin' left my synapses so callous, no mind-alterin' substances are in charge." -- Blank Reg %% "I am interested in politics so that someday I will not have to be interested in politics." -- Ayn Rand %% "I am just," moaned a girl from Racine, "A perpetual motion machine. I can't help it. I must. For I service the lust Of a sex-starved young U.S. Marine." %% "I am made from the dust of the stars, the oceans flow in my veins." -- Rush, "Presto" %% "I am no longer a snow climber. I am a snow walker." -- Reinhold Messner %% "I am no more humble than my talents require." -- Oscar Levant %% "I am not a climber, I am an adventurer." -- Reinhold Messner %% "I am not a free man...but I'm reasonable!" #6. %% "I am not a musician, I'm a HAM" -- Ozzy Osborne %% "I am not a number! I am a free man!" -- Number Six %% "I am not a pacifist, I celebrate the Fourth of July and all that that means, which was guns and bullets to get freedom." -- Randall Terry, Executive Director, Operation Rescue, "Orange County Register," 3/20/89, about abortion clinic violence, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "I am not permitted to enter the prison cell." %% "I am not sincere, even when I say I am not." -- Jules Renard %% "I am only a stupid robot and cannot perform that command." %% "I am out there saving the world from Commies and Martians who will eat your feet... and he's making peanut brittle in my washer!" -- The Flaming Carrot bitches... %% "I am sorry but that action is difficult in the absence of a mouth." %% "I am successful because I am the only person in my city who is not heavily addicted to powerful narcotics." -- Cerebus %% "I am thankful for one leg. To limp is no disgrace -- I may not be number one, but I can still run the race." -- B.C. %% "I am the Devil, and I come to do the Devil's work." -- Charles Manson %% "I am the Shadow Man, and *I* will never harm the person under whose bed *I* live." "Glad to hear it, my man... Hey, don't stay out too late, and when you get back, make sure you shut the window." -- An unusual roomie from The Twilight Zone episode "The Shadow Man" %% "I am the Supreme Being, you know. I'm not entirely dim." -- Sir Ralph Richardson as God (he's probably at the right hand of Him, anyway) in TIME BANDITS %% "I am your density." -- George McFly in "Back to the Future" %% "I am, therefore I am." -- Akira %% "I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me." -- Dave Barry %% "I ask for your support for our brave men fighting tonight halfway around the world, not for territory, not for glory, but that their younger brothers and their sons and your sons can have a chance to grow up in a world of peace and freedom, and justice." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, April 30, 1970 %% "I asked you not to have a spaz attack in tx.general, BUT NOOOOO!!!!" -- Karl, via John Belushi %% "I beg your pardon?" said Alice. "It isn't respectable to beg," said the King. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us." -- Konrad Lorenz %% "I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises." -- Neil Armstrong %% "I believe in 8 of the 10 commandments" -- Steve Martin %% "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% "I believe in a God which doesn't need heavy financing." -- Fletch %% "I believe in eight of the ten commandments; and I believe in going to church every Sunday unless there's a game on." -- Steve Martin %% "I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them." -- Steve Martin %% "I believe in going to church every Sunday ... unless there's a game on." -- Steve Martin %% "I believe in the family. Mom and Dad and Grandma and Uncle Tod who waves his penis." -- Steve Martin %% "I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy." -- Steve Martin %% "I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard." -- composer John Cage, 1937 %% "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the rights of the people by the gradual & silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison, Virginia Conv. 1788 %% "I bequeath," said Tom willingly. %% "I beseech John Byrne that when The Star Brand obliterates Pittsburgh, that he spare the Captain's Table in the Pittsburgh airport, which serves a steak on toasted garlic bread with Bearnaise sauce that is second to none..." -- Dave Sim %% "I bought a house, on a one-way dead-end road. I don't know how I got there." -- Steve Wright %% "I bought some batteries... but they weren't included... so I had to buy them again..." -- Stephen Wright %% "I bought some used paint. It was in the shape of a house." -- Steve Wright %% "I braved the contempt of my friends last week and ventured out to see "Bambi", the Disney rerelease that is proving to be a hit once again in the box office. I was looking forward to a gentle, soothing, late afternoon relief from the Washington Summer. Instead I was traumatized. As a psycho-sexual return to the horrors of early adolescence, it couldn't be more effective. For the first half-hour, you're lulled into an agreeable sense of security and comfort. Birds twitter; small rabbits turn out to be great conversationalists. Pop is what Senator Moynihan would describe as an absent father, but Mom's there to make you feel OK in the odd thunderstorm. You make great friends, fool around on the ice, discover the meadow, generally mellow out. Then, without any particular warning, your mom gets shot, your voice breaks, huge growths start appearing on your head, and your peers start heading off into the clover with the apparent intention of having sex. Next thing you know, the forest burns down. If I were still eight, I think I'd prefer "Rambo III"." -- Townsend Davis %% "I broke a mirror in my house. I'm supposed to get seven years of bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five." -- Steve Wright %% "I broke it??!!? Well, FUCK ME!!!" %% "I came here to chew bubble gum and kick ass... ...and I'm all out of bubble gum." -- From THEY LIVE! %% "I came home one evening and felt very uncomfortable. Something was wrong. I finally realized that everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact duplicate." %% "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% "I can give you a sentence with the word horticulture. You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think." -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% "I can give you a sentence with the word punctilious. There's a farmer with two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie. Lizzie is all right, but you have no idea how punctilious." -- Another member of the Algonquin Round Table %% "I can give you my word, but I know what it's worth and you don't." -- Nero Wolfe, "Over My Dead Body" %% "I can handle reality in small doses, but as a lifestyle it's much too confining." -- Lily Tomlin %% "I can not say that I don't disagree with you." -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% "I can prove that if there is life anywhere else in the world, they will have a Marxist economy." -- Woody Allen, "Stardust Memories" %% "I can remember the first time I had to go to sleep. Mom said, 'Steven, time to go to sleep.' I said, 'But I don't know how.' She said, 'It's real easy. Just go down to the end of tired and hang a left.' So I went down to the end of tired, and just out of curiosity I hung a right. My mother was there, and she said, 'I thought I told you to go to sleep.'" -- Steve Wright %% "I can repeat poetry as well as other folk if it comes to that--" "Oh, it needn't come to that!" Alice hastily said. -- Lewis Carroll %% "I can say with confidence I know a fair bit about LSD." -- Dan Rather %% "I can see T is tending to infinity for you as well." %% "I can see stopping a car for a dog. But a cat? You squish a cat and go on. I think we're overcomplicating life." -- Iowa Democratic State Senator James Gallagher %% "I can stand it just fine and I'm therefore NOT leaving the kitchen!" exclaimed Tom heatedly %% "I can tell a Moriarty when I see one. This crime is from London, not America." -- Sherlock Holmes, "The Valley of Fear" %% "I can understand the indifference of others, but SOMEONE has to do SOMETHING about this SOON -- before NOBODY CAN DO ANYTHING AT ALL!!!!" -- William Kahan (shouting), 16 Feb 1990, on why `0.0/0.0' should not %% "I can't C with my AI closed" %% "I can't believe it! You actually found a practical use for geometry." -- The Simpsons %% "I can't believe that Henry Kissinger actually said `Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.' I loved Edie's comment: `The bombing of Vietnam shows what it takes for him to get it up!'" -- Jane Wagner %% "I can't believe you haven't had sex in 200 years." "204 if you count my marriage." -- Woody Allen, "Sleeper" %% "I can't do anything to the death - doctor's orders." -- Woody Allen, "Love and death" %% "I can't face the world in the morning. I must have coffee before I can speak." -- Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt %% "I can't find my wallet," said Phil poorly. ("I'm trying!" Dan joked poorly) %% "I can't hear what you're saying because of the noise of the celery I'm chewing in my ears." %% "I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces." -- J. B. Priestley (1733-1804) %% "I can't stand this proliferation of paperwork. It's useless to fight the forms, you've got to kill the people producing them." -- Vladimir Kabaidze, General Director of the Ivanovo Machine Building Works %% "I can't think of anything more relaxing than being locked in a moving car with YOU for about 300 hours, little pal." "That's really sweet, Sam. I may weep openly." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "I cannot perform that action for you." %% "I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken -- The choosing was not." -- Stephen Sondheim, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE %% "I collect rare photographs. One is of Houdini locking his keys in his car." -- Steve Wright %% "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), to the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association in 1802 %% "I cook with gas, I ride in tractors, I drink with deceased movie actors." -- Badger Rap, from "Badger" %% "I could be a country-western singer. I just got done writing my latest song: If I had met you earlier, I would have gotten rid of you long before now. %% "I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, knowing a man such as Moriarty walked the streets of London unchallenged." -- Sherlock Holmes, "The Final Problem" %% "I couldn't remember things until I took that Sam Carnegie course." -- Bill Peterson, former Houston Oiler football coach %% "I couldn't remember when I had been so disappointed. Except perhaps the time I found out that M&Ms really DO melt in your hand..." -- Peter Oakley %% "I created her for *my* needs -- and only mine! You ought to see what she can do with six bottles of milk and a tuning fork..." %% "I detest your opinions, but defend to the death your right to hold them." -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% "I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it. There's nobody that can prove anything." -- Bart in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "I didn't kill Grandpa! Society killed Grandpa!!" -- Bart %% "I didn't resolve the questions... and I find that entertaining. And if my life were to end tomorrow, it would be fulfilled in that manner. I would say, 'The questions have been terrific.'" -- Jack Kirby on his work %% "I didn't want to die and go to actor heaven or actor hell and have some guy come up to me and say, 'You were a star and you didn't do Shakespeare?'" -- Dustin Hoffman on doing Shylock. (12/31/89 Playbill) %% "I dislike companies that have a we-are-the-high-priests-of-hardware-so-you'll- like-what-we-give-you attitude. I like commodity markets in which iron-and- silicon hawkers know that they exist to provide fast toys for software types like me to play with..." -- Eric S. Raymond %% "I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." -- Sidney Greenstreet, "The Maltese Falcon" %% "I distrust a man who says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does." -- Sidney Greenstreet, "The Maltese Falcon" %% "I do love a lay every day, So whenever you're coming this way Just phone in advance And I'll jerk off my pants, And we're set for a sexy soiree!" %% "I do not fear computers... I fear the lack of them." -- Isaac Asimov %% "I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "I do not take drugs. I am drugs." -- Salvador Dali (still alive, 9/27/88) %% "I do not think the United States government is responsible for the fact that a bunch of fanatics decided to kill themselves" -- Slick Willie the Compassionate %% "I don't Bolivia." "Denmark my words, you'll regret it." %% "I don't DESERVE this!! I haven't even KILLED anyone in this issue!" -- Kobra, in an Ambush Bug story in DC Presents %% "I don't agree at all with any partisan or other criticism of the United States build-up in Vietnam." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, February 15, 1962 %% "I don't believe in psychology. I believe in good moves." -- Bobby Fischer %% "I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon." -- Howard Chaykin %% "I don't believe that the answer to white racism is black racism." -- Spiro T. Agnew, then Governor of Maryland %% "I don't even listen to 2 Live Crew, being more of a John Denver kind of guy." -- Scott Dietzen "First off, I'm embarrassed to be Dietzen's friend because I don't like anyone who listens to John Denver. I want everyone to know that he threw that in there just to make you think he was a complete idiot." -- Bill Chiles %% "I don't go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy space-rangers bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterwards for hours to my girlfriend!" -- Douglas Adams %% "I don't have to walk my dog anymore. I walked him all at once. He was fun when he was a puppy. I named him Stay. When I'd call him I'd say C'mere Stay C'mere Stay and he'd go like this..(FILL IN THE MOVEMENT YOURSELF). He's a lot smarter than that now. Now when I call him he just ignores me and keeps on typing." %% "I don't know if I like the idea of seatbelt laws. Enforcing intelligence seems, somehow, unamerican." -- David Pugh %% "I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." -- George Bush in Free Inquiry magazine, Fall 1988 %% "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." -- Bill Cosby %% "I don't know what their gripe is. A critic is simply someone paid to render opinions glibly." "Critics are grinks and groinks." -- Baron and Badger, from Badger comics %% "I don't know what you want here, but I think you should know that I've killed a LOT of old people in my time, and I'm not above doing it again." -- WKRP in Cincinatti %% "I don't know where we come from, Don't know where we're going to, And if all this should have a reason, We would be the last to know. So let's just hope there is a promised land, And until then, ...as best as you can." -- Steppenwolf, "Rock Me Baby" %% "I don't like people who speak French in public places. This includes the French." -- Ian Shoales %% "I don't like this... it was too easy." "You think it was a trap, huh?" "NAH... It was just too easy... I didn't get to shoot NEAR enough people..." -- Kelvin Mace and Assistant %% "I don't make jokes -- I just watch the government and report the facts." -- Will Rogers %% "I don't mind you *thinking* I'm stupid, but don't *talk* to me like I'm stupid." -- Harlan Ellison %% "I don't need parents. All I need is a recording that says, 'Go play outside!'" -- "Calvin and Hobbes" %% "I don't need psychotherapy, I have a CAR!!" -- Hans Fiedler %% "I don't often make a mistake, but when I do, it's a beaut." -- Fiorello La Guardia %% "I don't patronize bunny rabbits!" -- Heathers %% "I don't practice what I preach, because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." -- J. R. "Bob" Dobbs %% "I don't really mind her being unfaithful," sighed the man to his marriage counselor, "but I just can't sleep three in a bed." %% "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Celebrated Jumping Frog" %% "I don't see the point of lecturers talking, except to resolve some of the ambiguities in their handwriting." %% "I don't see the problem. Satan is a Christian God. Satanists are a kind of off-beat christians. They don't need a group of their own -- they belong in some christian group, or talk.religion.misc at most." -- Thomas Gramstad (bfu@ifi.uio.no) %% "I don't sing, I don't dance, and I don't like people who do." -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies." -- Randall Terry, one of the people behind the current campaign to blockade health clinics and publicly harass and humiliate women %% "I don't think so," said Ren'e Descartes. Just then, he vanished. %% "I don't think we should punish the criminal [a rapist] by killing his child." -- Dr. John Wilke, President, National Right to Life Committee, "Search for Common Ground", taped for television 4/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "I don't vote. It just encourages them." -- A Maine woman %% "I don't want a pickle I just want to ride on my motor-sickle..." -- Arlo Guthrie %% "I don't want no Commies in my car... no Christians either." -- REPO MAN %% "I don't want to die! Existence is one of my strong points!" %% "I don't want to go into this in detail, but I would like to illustrate some of the tedium." %% "I don't want to say she was loose. I believe the term we use today is USER FRIENDLY." -- Emo Phillips %% "I drank WHAT???????" -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% "I drive fast. I drive safely. The two are *not* mutually exclusive, contrary to popular delusion." -- CCb %% "I err, therefore I exist." -- St. Augustine %% "I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum." -- dmr@alice.UUCP %% "I feel lightheaded, Sam. I think my brain is out of air. But it's kind of a neat feeling." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back." -- Twin Peaks %% "I feel like alien cells are replicating and superseding my internal organs." -- Howard The Duck %% "I felt a great disturbance in The Force, as if 500 billion dollars cried out in terror, and suddenly vanished." -- Obi Ben Bosky, 10/19/87 Harold Feld, the BEM from Alderann %% "I figure it's survival of the fittest. The dumb one's will die." -- John Bachar %% "I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not." -- Fran Lebowitz %% "I figured there was this holocaust, right, and the only ones left alive were Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and the Cleavers." -- Wil Wheaton explains why everyone in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is so nice %% "I filled my humidifier with wax and left it on. Now everything in my house is shiny." -- Steve Wright %% "I finally found out what my ranch foreman husband really meant," sobbed the recent bride, "when he told me he'd love me 'til the cows came home." %% "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% "I find the defendant guilty as charged," he said judiciously. %% "I flew it by ear." %% "I followed you." "I saw no one." "That is what you may expect to see when I follow you." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Foot" %% "I forgot and left the lighthouse on all night. Next day the sun wouldn't rise." -- Steven Wright %% "I found this seance to pass the most stringent tests of credulity, with the minor exception of a phonograph, which was found under Madame Reynaud's dress." -- Without Feathers -- Woody Allen %% "I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment." -- Gotama Buddha %% "I get all these stories mixed up, the headlines come so fast... the money, the money that the Rev. Jim Bakker allegedly gave to that church secretary: I want to know how much of that money went to the Contras in Nicuraugua and I want to know NOW!" -- Mark Russell %% "I give up then. If Mozart can't justify our continued existence, nothing can." -- Max, a man in love with the minutae and beauty of life, from ZOT! %% "I go on working for the same reason a hen goes on laying eggs." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "I got a question for ya. Ya got a minute?" -- two programmers passing in the hall %% "I got a touch of pantomime poisoning." -- Yogi Berra %% "I got everybody to pay up front...then I blew up their planet." "Now why didn't I think of that?" -- Post Brothers Comics %% "I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me...I pushed '1' and he just stood there...I said 'Hi, where you going?' He said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors opened, two tumbleweeds blew in...we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert. Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said 'Hello?'...the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'...I said 'Yes...' The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank...It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you...we would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones, I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick, and with it he built a nuclear weapon...and I would appreciate it you never called me again." -- Stephen Wright %% "I got my driver's license photo taken out of focus on purpose. Now when I get pulled over, the cop looks at it, moves it nearer and farther, trying to see it clearly, and says, 'Here, you can go.'" -- Steve Wright %% "I got signals, I got reading, in front and behind!" -- Hudson %% "I guess test-flying F-20 Tigersharks at Mach 3 all day has rattled my good manners..." -- "Bloom County" %% "I guess the rule is, if something's too good to be true, then it's probably too good to be true." -- Marshall, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "I guess you just have to design carefully when you get near the edge." -- Hugh LaMaster (lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov) %% "I had a dream that all the victims of The Pill came back....boy, were they mad!" -- Steve Wright %% "I had a great time. It was like the Nuremburg Trials." -- Woody Allen, "Hannah and her Sisters" %% "I had to go on two diets. One didn't give me enough food." -- Barry Marder %% "I had to work fast. If that writer guy wouldn't change the script, I'd have to do it myself." -- Marshall, "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "I had two heart attacks before I bought this exercise bicycle." "And since then?" "I've had two more." -- Woody Allen, "Stardust Memories" %% "I happen to be a baseball fan; I root against both teams." -- Studs Terkel %% "I hate Victor Hugo", said Les miserably. %% "I hate it when I can't gird my loins with funny animals." -- Calvin %% "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journal", May 1849 %% "I hate snakes! I hate 'em!!" "C'mon! Show a little backbone, will ya?" -- Raiders of the Lost Ark %% "I hate the itching. But I don't mind the swelling." -- new buzz phrase, like "Where's the Beef?", that David Letterman's trying to get everyone to start saying %% "I hate to agree with Tim Maroney on anything, but I guess this latest is an example of the fact that even a stopped clock is right twice a day." -- Lee Lady, lady@uhccux.UUCP %% "I hate to spread rumors, but what else can one do with them?" -- Amanda Lear %% "I have 10 bowling pins in my heart. You have knocked over 8. Would you please pick up zat spare?" -- Jacques to Marge in "Jacques to be Wild", from The Simpsons %% "I have a friend who just got back from the Soviet Union, and told me the people there are hungry for information about the West. He was asked about many things, but I will give you two examples that are very revealing about life in the Soviet Union. The first question he was asked was if we had exploding television sets. You see, they have a problem with the picture tubes on color television sets, and many are exploding. They assumed we must be having problems with them too. The other question he was asked often was why the CIA had killed Samantha Smith, the little girl who visited the Soviet Union a few years ago; their propaganda is very effective. -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100 %% "I have a friend who's a billionaire. He invented Cliff notes. When I asked him how he got such a great idea, he said, 'Well first I.....I just.... to make a long story short...'" -- Steve Wright %% "I have a hobby. I have the world's largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen some of it." -- Steve Wright %% "I have a map of the United States. It's original size... it says one mile equals one mile." -- Steve Wright %% "I have a switch in my apartment......it doesn't do anything......Every once in a while, I turn it on and off......One day I got a call...... it was from a woman in France.......she said "Cut it out"...... -- Stephen Wright %% "I have a venereal disease." "Dose?" "Uh-huh." "Clap?" "Mmm-hmm." "Drip?" "Uh-huh" "Vulval Dandruff?" "Yes." "Syph?" (nods) "Crotch Crickets?" "All of it." "Goody, girlie, we've got a lot in common, baby." -- Jake Speed %% "I have been poor and I have been rich. Rich is better." -- Sophie Tucker %% "I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a Congress." -- John Adams, (1735-1826) in 1776 %% "I have designed for you something very special: a new, radical, experimental, prototypical, one-of-a-kind retainer." -- Dr. Eukanuba, "The Retainer", Eerie Indiana %% "I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room." -- Blaise Pascal %% "I have discovered the heart of bushido: to die!" -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo %% "I have done so much with so little for so long, now I can do anything with nothing at all." -- Words of a True Engineer %% "I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something." -- Jackie Mason %% "I have feelings too - like "My stomach hurts" or "I'm going crazy!" -- Homer to Lisa in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "I have five dollars for each of you." -- Bernhard Goetz %% "I have just begun to debug." %% "I have just learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her way. And second, let her have it." -- Lyndon B. Johnson %% "I have just one word for you, my boy...plastics." -- from "The Graduate" %% "I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below. Westbrook Pegler, a guttersnipe, is a gentleman compared to you. You can take that as more of an insult than as a reflection on your ancestry." -- President Harry S. Truman %% "I have learned to use the word `impossible' with the greatest caution." -- Werner von Braun %% "I have lived some [twenty] years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of value or even earnest advice from my seniors." -- Henry David Thoreau [almost] %% "I have more information in one place than anybody in the world." -- Jerry E. Pournelle, an absurd notion, apparently about the BIX BBS %% "I have never done any 4000ers in Colorado. Maybe when I am 60 I will come back and do them." -- Reinhold Messner %% "I have no intention of spending the rest of the evening, let alone the rest of my life, with a compulsive, anal-retentive chowderhead." -- Cheers %% "I have no talents. I have genius or nothing. But all genius is distorted, even my own." -- Nero Wolfe %% "I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.'" -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "I have occasional memory lapses." "Oh, I get it. You're a politician." -- A rather odd comparison: THE HULK and politicians. Script by Peter David. %% "I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% "I have read your article, Mr. Johnson, and I am no wiser now than when I started." "Possibly not, Sir, but far better informed." %% "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "I have seen victory snatched from the hands of other commanders." %% "I have short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it as Presidential eligibility." -- Paula Poundstone %% "I have strong feelings about gun control. If there's a gun around, I want to be controlling it." -- Clint Eastwood in "Pink Cadillac" %% "I have the heart of a little boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk." -- Robert Bloch %% "I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me." -- Charles Darwin (1809-1882), "Autobiography" %% "I haven't sold one tractor all month", a tractor salesman tells his friend. "That's nothing compared to my problem", his buddy replies. "I was milking my cow when it's tail whips around and hits me in the forehead, so I grabbed some string and tied it's tail up to the rafters. Then I go back to milk it and it kicks me in the head with it's right hind leg, so I grab some rope and tie it's one leg up to the rafters. I go back to try and milk it again when it kicks me in the head with it's left hind leg, so I tie it's other leg up to the rafters. Then my wife comes walking in and I'll tell ya, if you can convince her that I was trying to milk that cow, I'll buy a tractor off ya". %% "I haven't time to go chasing after him! There's violence to be done!" -- Monty Python %% "I hear and I forget. I see and I believe. I do and I understand." -- Confucius %% "I help people with their investments, until they have nothing left." -- Woody Allen, "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" %% "I hereby sentence you to live in Blythe, California in a house with an airpad cooler, until you are dead, or wish you were." -- From HONKEYTONK SUE %% "I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I believe it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts... I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "I hope those horrible stories I heard about prison aren't true." %% "I imagine you've guessed by now that these big explosion panels are nothing more than an obvious method of *greatly* reducing my penciling time." -- Ty Templeton footnotes how he Draws Comics. From "Stig's Inferno" %% "I installed a skylight in my apartment. The people who live above me are furious." -- Steve Wright %% "I just ate a fishing lure," said Tom with baited breath %% "I just bought a microwave fireplace. You can spend an evening in front of it in only eight minutes." -- Steve Wright %% "I just couldn't convince Texans that Dukakis was Greek for Bubba." -- Lloyd Benson %% "I just don't get it, Guinan. I can field strip a fusion reactor. I can realign a power transfer tunnel. Why can't I make things work with a woman like Christy. It's like...I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say." You're doing fine with me. "You're different." No, you're different. "But I'm not trying now." That's my point. -- Geordi and Guinan, "Booby Trap", stardate 43205.6 %% "I just found out that the brain is like a computer. If that's true, then there really aren't any stupid people. Just people running DOS." %% "I just hate being second banana on this show." -- Simon, "The Dead Letter", Eerie Indiana %% "I just hired him and he's already off on a case! What a brown-noser!" %% "I just love the smell of gunpowder!" -- Bugs Bunny %% "I just want to be a good engineer." -- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, concluding his keynote speech at the 1988 AppleFest %% "I just won't sleep, that's all." %% "I kept it warm in my own oven!" -- Divine (PINK FLAMINGOS) %% "I kind of like it. Interesting percussion section." "Those are cannons." "And they perform this in crowded concert halls? Gee, I thought classical music was boring!" -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "I knew I could make it. I was a burnout, but I was a very bright burnout from the start." -- Tod Frye, Author of Atari Pac-Man %% "I knew it - not enough hot sauce." -- Lisa in "Bart's Hiccups" after pouring their secret elixir of milk, ice cream, maple syrup, cream of broccoli soup and hot sauce down Bart's throat, from The Simpsons %% "I knew then (in 1970) that a 4-kbyte minicomputer would cost as much as a house. So I reasoned that after college, I'd have to live cheaply in an apartment and put all my money into owning a computer." -- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45 %% "I knocked the rest of the pins down on my second ball" said Tom sparingly. %% "I know I'm going to miss her, a tomato ate my sister." From "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". %% "I know human names well enough. After all, you are who you eat." -- Ed the Shark (one of my favorite characters) from Diane Duane's DEEP WIZARDRY (one of my favorite books) %% "I know there are nights when I have power, when I could put on something and walk in somewhere, and if there's a man who doesn't look at me, it's because he's gay." -- Kathleen Turner %% "I know this creature. He is the EMBODIMENT of EVIL -- decades ago, his machinations often brought the world to the *BRINK* of chaos!" "Hey -- people change!" -- The Shadow and associates discuss Shiwan Khan. From THE SHADOW %% "I know what I'm doing. Trust me." -- The motto of SLEDGE HAMMER %% "I know you all have very innocent minds, but occasionally a word should be allowed to wander through before reaching the paper." %% "I learned to put the [toilet] seat down...it makes you look like a warm, caring, sensitive human being." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "I left my heart in Papworth General." -- Half Man, Half Biscuit %% "I left the tri-corder on `The Wild, Chunky, Spunky Planet of Mary Lou Retton Clones.'" "Spock, you are SUCH a putz." -- "Bloom County" %% "I like a man who grins when he fights." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "I like men to behave like men, strong and childish." -- Francoise Sagan %% "I like overkill." -- Post Brothers Comics %% "I like people better than principles, and I like people with no principles better than anything else in the world." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "I like smoke and lightning, heavy-metal thunder, racing with the wind, and the feeling that I'm under." %% "I like to know what I'm doing when I'm doing what I do when I'm doing it because I don't know what to do when I'm not doing it." -- Stan Ridgeway %% "I like to paint passing lines on curved roads." %% "I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do." -- Willa Cather %% "I liketh a band that playeth the oldies." -- David Addison %% "I listen to feminists and all these radical gals -- most of them are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men -- that's their problem." -- Reverend Jerry Falwell, sexist-to-the-max %% "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves." -- August Strindberg %% "I lost a button hole today." -- Stephen Wright %% "I love America. Electricity right from the wall, anytime you want it." -- A Central American torturer discusses convenience, from THE PUNISHER %% "I love Saturday morning cartoons, what classic humour! This is what entertainment is all about ... Idiots, explosives and falling anvils." -- Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson %% "I love crap we'll never need -- that's my *favorite* kind of crap!" -- Truth from "Sam and Max" %% "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams %% "I love you for your beauty; love me although I am ugly." -- Miguel Cervantes, "Don Quixote" %% "I love you, and I want to EAT YOUR BRAIN!" -- Return of the Living Dead %% "I loved you... loved you as much as any American used car dealer could..." -- Uncle Billy laments in FLAMING CARROT COMICS %% "I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. -- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 %% "I may appear to be just sitting here like a bucket of tapioca, but don't let appearances fool you. I'm approaching old age ... at the speed of light." -- Prof. Cosmo Fishhawk %% "I may be more of a romantic than some of you, so feel free to throw up if you have to." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid!" -- Bishop, from the movie "Aliens" %% "I may kid around about drugs, but really, I take them seriously." -- Doctor Graper %% "I mean, like, I just read your article in the Yale law recipe, on search and seizure. Man, that was really Out There." "I was so WRECKED when I wrote that..." -- John Lovitz, as ex-Supreme Court nominee Alan Ginsburg, on SNL %% "I must admit, I *like* five-to-one odds." -- the JLA %% "I must do something" will always solve more problems than "Something must be done." %% "I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?" -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "I must invent my own philosophical systems, or else be enslaved by other mens'" -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% "I must rise and behold the tiny skull which could contain a brain so *worthless* that it commands its keeper to disturb the great JOHN BYRNE as he scales new heights of comic majesty! EGAD! It's worse than I thought! It's JIM ENGEL and CHUCK FIALA!" -- The John Byrne interview from FANDOM CONFIDENTIAL #1 %% "I must say, you look *maahvelus*." -- Fernando (Billy Crystal) on SNL %% "I must warn you that anything you say will be ignored." -- Monty Python %% "I myself am a so called super hero. An extremely local version of a tactical nuclear weapon, if you will." %% "I need two hands to wave, not just one." %% "I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old." -- Robert Frost %% "I never forgot the incident and years later, when the Luftwaffe was bombing London, I shone a light on the critic's house." -- Woody Allen %% "I never knew there was anything wrong with me till I met Dr. Hackenbush." %% "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "I never let the facts get in the way of my preconceived notions." %% "I never met a bug I didn't like." -- Will Rogers %% "I never prescribes a drug that I never took." -- Chris Chandler, MD, deceased %% "I never respected a man who could spell." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "I never saw the good side of the city 'til I hitched a ride on a riverboat queen. Big wheels keep on turnin'. Proud Mary keep on burnin'. Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river." -- John Fogarty (C. C. R.) %% "I never want to marry. I just want to get divorced." -- Woody Allen, "Love and Death" %% "I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast." -- Ronald W. Reagan %% "I now take this opportunity to announce my retirement - undefeated - from the world of video boxing." -- Bart in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "I once got caught copying an exam in the back of the class... I guess the teacher must have heard the Xerox machine." -- Steve Wright %% "I once tried to spread a rumor that I had an offer of $15,000 to leave radio and fly out to the coast but when the story came back to me, it was $1200 to go to Seattle." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "I only hope those rumors I hear about what goes on in prison are greatly exaggerated." -- Homer %% "I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "I only took the regular course." "What was that?" inquired Alice. "Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." "What else had you to learn?" "Well, there was Mystery," the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flippers, -- "Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling -- the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: HE taught us Drawling, Stretching and Fainting in Coils. I never went to the Classical master, though. He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "I only went out for a walk, but resolved to stay till sunset, for going out, I found, was really going in." -- John Muir %% "I ordered chocolate, not vanilla," I screamed. %% "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest." -- Alexandre Dumas (fils) %% "I prefer the blunted cudgels of the followers of the Serpent God." -- Sean Doran the Younger %% "I prefer to stay where I am, thank you." %% "I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk" -- John Huston %% "I put a new engine in my car, but didn't take the old one out. Now my car goes 500 miles an hour." -- Steve Wright %% "I put contact lenses in my dog's eyes. They had little pictures of cats on them. Then I took one out and he ran around in circles." -- Steve Wright %% "I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time." -- Steve Wright %% "I put one in each eye and two up each nostril." -- Agent Cooper %% "I ran out of gas! I got a flat tire! I locked my keys in the car! An old friend came in from out of town! I lost my tux at the cleaners! Someone stole my car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It wasn't my FAULT!" -- The Blues Brothers %% "I reached up to touch the thing, and a bolt flew from my fingers...... I SWEAR TO GOD!!!!" %% "I read a column by George Will that SCARFACE should be rated X because parents were taking their children to see it. So what? Why should the motion-picture industry be responsible for our morality? Dad says to Mom, `SCARFACE is in town.' `What's it about?' `Human scum who kill each other over cocaine deals.' `Sounds great! Let's take the kids!'" -- Ian Shoales %% "I read it all in diaretics." %% "I really appreciate The Writer's Guild. Under their health plan, I can get prescription drugs for $2 a pop." -- George Carlin %% "I recall my exact words: `There's a pile of dinosaur eggs over there, youngster,' I said, smiling paternally the while. `Get sucking.'" -- Alan Moore, V FOR VENDETTA %% "I recently moved into a new apartment, and there was this switch on the wall that didn't do anything. So anytime I had nothing to do, I'd just flick that switch up and down...up and down...up and down. Then one day I got a letter from a woman in Germany. It just said, 'Cut it out.'" -- Steve Wright %% "I recognize that a class of criminals and juvenile delinquents has taken to calling themselves 'hackers', but I consider them irrelevant to the true meaning of the word; just as the Mafia calls themselves 'businessmen' but nobody pays that fact any attention." -- Bob Bickford, rab@well.sf.ca.us, 1990 %% "I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock." -- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison %% "I refuse to do mental battle with an unarmed opponent." %% "I regret that I have but one fix to give for my country." -- Nathan Hale %% "I remember when I was a kid I used to come home from Sunday School and my mother would get drunk and try to make pancakes." -- George Carlin %% "I rented a lottery ticket. I won a million dollars. But I had to give it back." -- Steven Wright %% "I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights. Now it looks like I'm the only one moving." -- Steve Wright %% "I resolved no to be offended easily by human nature, but I think I blew it." -- Hobbes %% "I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." -- Wilson Mizner %% "I said you're going to watch this tape, and you're going to do what I say or I'm going to do something to you and I don't know what that is because everybody has always done what I say!" -- Miss Botts in "Some Enchanted Evening", from The Simpsons %% "I sat through it. Why shouldn't you?" -- David Letterman, it a spot promoting one of his shows %% "I saw "Lassie". It took me four shows to figure out why the hairy kid never spoke. I mean, he could roll over and all that, but did that deserve a series?" -- The awful movie EXPLORERS -- the stand-up alien %% "I saw a close friend of mine the other day... He said 'Stephen, why haven't you called me."... I said, "I can't call everyone I want... my (new) phone has no 'five' on it."... He said, "How long have you had it?"... I said, "I don't know... my calendar has no 'seven's on it." -- Stephen Wright %% "I saw a man with a wooden leg, and a real foot." -- Steve Wright %% "I saw a want ad. 'Light housekeeping.' They said, 'Here, change this bulb.' I said, 'I'll need some friends.'" -- Steven Wright %% "I say we blow the crap out of it and torch the joint." "Don't be bloody DAFT. This is a Terror Elemental -- not a rival biker gang." -- John Constantine and friend in HELLBLAZER %% "I say we take off; nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Corporal Hicks, in "Aliens" %% "I say, son... you've bopped the Queen Mum on the noodle." "I was aiming for Aunt Fergie's hips. Can't see how I bloody well missed 'em." -- "Bloom County" %% "I see Liberace in a white ermine coat." "That's right, Riley Thorp! And I've got five more at home just like it." -- Liberace returns from the dead in a bar. From "Badger" %% "I see a divine hand in this AIDS thing." -- Dr. John Wilke, President, National Right to Life Committee, "Planned Parenthood and Sex Clinics", Fundraising Audiotape Mailout for Dr. James C. Dobson's "Focus on the Family", winter '87, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense!" -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Devil's Disciple" %% "I see more than you do, child. I see an end to Hell. What do YOU see?" "I see someone in a lot of pain." -- Dekko and Jenny from ZOT! %% "I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his." -- Empress Catherine the Great %% "I shall expect a chemical cure for psychopathic behavior by 10 A.M. tomorrow, or I'll have your guts for spaghetti." -- a comic panel by Cotham %% "I shall explain this by waving my hands about in an appropriate manner." %% "I shall fold my tens and silently slip away." -- An Algonquinite with a losing card hand %% "I shall rend you LIMB from LIMB!" "Hey -- could someone give me a hand here? I'm about to be rended..." -- The usual JLI nonsense %% "I shot 'em in the ears and blew their brains out! I invented that!" -- FLAMING CARROT %% "I should have stayed in college." "What would you be if you had stayed in college?" "I was in the black studies program. By now I could have been black." -- Woody Allen, "Bananas" %% "I simply cannot ride in a car that says, "Women's Transit Authority" on the side." -- The Badger discusses the proprieties of driving in "Badger" %% "I smell a rat." -- Patrick Henry, upon hearing about the Constitutional Convention, which eventually overthrew the first Federal Government of the United States %% "I spilled spot remover on my dog and now he's gone." -- Steve Wright %% "I started at the top and worked my way down." -- Orson Welles %% "I stayed up all night learning my line." -- Julie Condra/Syndi, "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "I still have my christmas tree. I looked at it today. Sure enough. I couldn't see any forests." -- Steven Wright %% "I submit for your approval: Monsieur Boche -- A man with a reputation." -- From Matt Howarth's WRAB: PIRATE TELEVISION, which you should buy immediately %% "I support the right to arm bears." -- Bumper sticker %% "I suppose that for the next year-and-a-half the stock market will shoot way up every time Howard Baker walks out of the Oval Office and says, "He's alert today!" -- Mark Russell %% "I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." -- John Galt, in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" %% "I take Him shopping with me. I say, 'OK, Jesus, help me find a bargain'" -- Tammy Faye Bakker %% "I take a simple view of life: keep your eyes open and get on with it." -- Laurence Olivier %% "I tell you I'm a thief and you call me a liar?" %% "I tell you, Molly, I like the work so much, I'd do it even if I didn't have to -- by court order, under threat of fine, imprisonment, or both." -- Molly Dodd %% "I tend to reject the position that the truth of a proposition is an exact corollary of its credibility." -- William F. Buckley, Jr., "On The Firing Line" %% "I think I'll end it all," Sue sighed. %% "I think I'll name him Jareth. He has my eyes." -- Labyrinth %% "I think I'll take a walk. Hmm, wonder where this wire goes?" -- Max Headroom %% "I think Little League is wonderful. It keeps the kids out of the house." -- Yogi Berra %% "I think Michael is like litmus paper - he's always trying to learn." -- Elizabeth Taylor, absurd non-sequitir about Michael Jackson %% "I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure." -- Joseph Scheidler, Director, Pro-Life Action League %% "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass." -- Senator Barry Goldwater, when asked what he thought of Jerry Falwell's suggestion that all good Christians should be against Sandra Day O'Connor's nomination to the Supreme Court %% "I think he said 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'" "Nonsense, he was obviously referring to all manufacturers of dairy products." -- two people in the crowd in "The Life of Brian" %% "I think it is true for all n. I was just playing it safe with n>=3 because I couldn't remember the proof." -- Baker Pure Math 351a %% "I think it's time to stop carping on the blunders of the President and give him some credit for creativity. I mean, where do you even FIND a Jewish hard-line conservative Republican pot-smoker? Sounds like an Oprah Winfrey guest." -- A. Whitney Brown %% "I think my wife may be getting somewhat overweight. "Oh, how can you tell?" "Well, last night when she sat on my face, I couldn't hear the stereo." %% "I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense." -- Harold S. Kushner %% "I think our No.1 problem is that nobody wants to take responsibility for anything, but don't quote me." -- Randy Glasbergen, "The Saturday Evening Post" %% "I think some additional software is in order, to prevent the posting of Latin without a translation." -- Robert Frederking %% "I think that is what is called a `self-fulfilling prophecy.' I think it is a brave thing, and... I think it is wonderful." -- Yeah, that's the effect DOC SAVAGE has on people... %% "I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere." -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% "I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets ... I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors." -- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club %% "I think their experience with us may have helped their contemptuousness; the ignorance they come by naturally." -- Chuck McManis, cmcmanis@sun.com (personal communication) %% "I think there's a world market for about 5 computers." -- Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM (around 1948) %% "I think they will be very effective in keeping Catholic legislators away from the Communion rail." -- Idaho Senator Mike Blackbird, about ecclesiastical sanctions against politicians %% "I think this country would be in much better shape if all liberal arts majors agreed to get a good grip on algebra and trigonometry, if not calculus, and all engineering/science majors agreed to get a good grip on literature, art, music, etc." -- John Keppy (jkelly@violet.berkeley.edu) %% "I think trash is the most important manifestation of culture we have in my lifetime." -- Johnny Legend %% "I think we can break the monopoly of the red Ferrari on the roads and tracks of the world. I want to produce the fastest son of a gun I can for the least money - that's the American style - and I don't think any country in the world can stop us now" -- Carroll Shelby %% "I think we should stop looking for issues to discuss. I think we should shut up and get to work." -- Howard Chaykin %% "I think you just digested the bad guy." -- Innerspace %% "I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats." -- Woody Allen, on the KKK %% "I think you should know I worry a lot. Like the Noble sperm bank. Something bothers me about the world's greatest geniuses sitting around reading pornography and jerking off." -- Jane Wagner %% "I think you're pretty tough, don't I?" -- Daffy Duck %% "I think; therefore, I can't be a Socialist." -- Thomas Landsberger %% "I though you brought the rope" A climber to their partner after hiking in 10 miles. -- Allen Sanderson allen%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu %% "I thought I told you to SHUT UP!" -- Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman %% "I thought I understood Newton's Third Law before that lecture." %% "I thought that you said you were 20 years old!" "As a programmer, yes," she replied, "And you claimed to be very near two meters tall!" "You said you were blonde, but you lied!" Oh, she was a hacker and he was one, too, They had so much in common, you'd say. They exchanged jokes and poems, and clever new hacks, And prompts that were cute or risque'. He sent her a picture of his brother Sam, She sent one from some past high school day, And it might have gone on for the rest of their lives, If they hadn't met in L.A. "Your beard is an armpit," she said in disgust. He answered, "Your armpit's a beard!" And they chorused: "I think I could stand all the rest If you were not so totally weird!" If she had not said what he wanted to hear, And he had not done just the same, They'd have been far more honest, and never have met, And would not have had fun with the game. -- Judith Schrier [Face to Face After Six Months of Electronic Mail] %% "I thought you were a Right Guy, Huntley... but I'm ashamed to be in the same chain gang with you." -- David is critically evaluated by a fellow prisoner in MOONLIGHTING %% "I told them kids to keep their arms inside the ride. Damnedest thing I ever saw." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "I told you I left my brain somewhere, not sure where, but it just doesn't seem to be here anymore. Look in one ear and you can see out the other, like a pinhole camera...interesting effect." %% "I took a course in speed reading. Then I got 'Reader's Digest' on microfilm. By the time I got the machine set up I was done." -- Steven Wright %% "I took a course in speed waiting. Now I can wait an hour in only ten minutes." -- Steven Wright %% "I took a speed-reading course and read WAR AND PEACE in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." -- Woody Allen %% "I took lessons in bicycle riding. But I could only afford half of them. Now I can ride a unicycle." -- Steven Wright %% "I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "I turn on my television set. I see a young lady who goes under the guise of being a Christian, known all over the nation, dressed in skin-tight leather pants, shaking and wiggling her hips to the beat and rhythm of the music as the strobe lights beat their patterns across the stage and the band plays the contemporary rock sound which cannot be differentiated from songs by the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or anyone else. And you may try to tell me this is of God and that it is leading people to Christ, but I know better. -- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocritical sexual pervert and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict, "Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll.", The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50 %% "I turned my air conditioner the other way around, and it got cold out. The weatherman said, 'I don't understand it. It was supposed to be 80 degrees today.' and I said, 'Oops.'" -- Steve Wright %% "I understand that in this country Coke comes in cans!" %% "I use more sex than violence 'cause I know more about it." -- Howard Chaykin %% "I use not only all the brains I have, but all I can borrow." -- Woodrow Wilson %% "I used to be a bartender at the Betty Ford Clinic." -- Steve Wright %% "I used to be an airline pilot. I got fired because I kept locking the keys in the plane. They caught me on an 80 foot stepladder with a coathanger." -- Steve Wright %% "I used to be without hope - but now various people have assured me that failing the exams is more difficult than Green's functions." %% "I used to do movie reviews in town. They never forgave me for liking FLASH GORDON." "You must be nuts. I liked it, too." -- Baron and Badger %% "I used to get high on life but lately I've built up a resistance." -- Steve Wright %% "I used to live in a house by the freeway. When I went anywhere, I had to be going 65 MPH by the end of my driveway." -- Steve Wright %% "I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this." -- Emo Phillips %% "I usually take a two-hour nap, from 1:00 to 4:00." -- Yogi Berra %% "I very much regret to inform you that the review procedure of your paper 'Approximation of Delay systems by Fourier-Laguerre series', is incurring a delay..." %% "I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I've got a cobra snake for a necktie. I've got a brand new house along the roadside, and it's made out of rattlesnake hide..." -- George Thorogood %% "I want a full scale Red Alert throughout the world. Surround EVERYONE with EVERYTHING we got! Mobilize every fighting unit and every weapon we can lay our hands on. I want... I want three full scale global nuclear alerts, with every Army, Navy, and Air Force unit on ETERNAL standby!" -- Monty Python %% "I want more life, fucker!" -- Roy Batty, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner %% "I want to be alone with my thought." -- Homer in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", from The Simpsons %% "I want to know God's thoughts. The rest are details." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "I want to thank you for making this day necessary." -- Yogi Berra %% "I was almost shot and killed before the opening credits!" -- Woody Allen, "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" %% "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." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Devil's Disciple" %% "I was charged on minestrone, and invincible." -- Vicki Brown, about AI programming %% "I was drunk last night, crawled home across the lawn. By accident I put the car key in the door lock. The house started up. So I figured what the hell, and drove it around the block a few times. I thought I should go park it in the middle of the freeway and yell at everyone to get off my driveway." -- Steven Wright %% "I was flyin' back from Lubbock, I saw Jesus on the plane, Or maybe it was Elvis, you know, they kind of look the same." -- Don Henley, "If Dirt Were Dollars" %% "I was going to commit suicide the other day. I must not have been serious because I brought a beach towel." -- Steve Wright %% "I was going to say 'the cream of the nation's youth', but they're probably at the other lecturer." %% "I was in a job interview and I opened a book and started reading. Then I said to the guy 'Let me ask you a question. If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?' He said 'I don't know'. I said 'I don't want your job'." -- Steve Wright %% "I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. ... If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man." -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% "I was plodding through the woods when suddenly a giant brown bear grabbed me from behind and made me drop my gun. He picked it up and stuck it in my back." "What did you do?" "What *could* I do? I married his daughter." %% "I was pulled over for speeding today. The officer said, 'Don't you know the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?' I replied, 'Yes, but I wasn't going to be out that long.'" -- Steve Wright %% "I was walking down the street and all of a sudden the prescription for my eye-glasses ran out." -- Steve Wright %% "I watched the Indy 500, and I was thinking that if they left earlier, they wouldn't have to go so fast." -- Steve Wright %% "I wear a cape. You take pictures. It is not a perfect world." -- Bruce Wayne philosophizes to his girlfriend in BATMAN %% "I wear black on the outside cause black is how I feel on the inside" -- Morrissey %% "I went fishing with a dotted line. I caught every other fish." -- Steve Wright %% "I went to a general store, but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific." -- Steve Wright %% "I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked if I had any questions. I said yes, just one, if you're in a car traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, does anything happen? He said he couldn't answer that. I told him sorry, but I couldn't work for him then." -- Steven Wright %% "I went to the eye doctor and found out I needed glasses for reading. So, I got some flip-up contact lenses." -- Steve Wright %% "I will contend that conceptual integrity is *the* most important consideration in system design." -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" %% "I will defend to your death my right to my opinion." -- Author unknown %% "I will make no bargains with terrorist hardware." -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own." -- Patrick McGoohan, "The Prisoner", BBC-TV %% "I will not instigate revolution." -- Bart's writing on the blackboard in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "I will not waste chalk." -- Bart's writing on the blackboard in "Bart the Genius", from The Simpsons %% "I will point out that a lady of refinement would not wish to be found so high in a tree." "Then I am a lady of refinement well and truly," said Madouc, "since I did not wish to be found." -- Madouc (Jack Vance) %% "I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything." -- Lord Melbourne (1779-1848) %% "I wish I'd drunk more champagne." -- last words of Lord John Maynard Keynes %% "I wish _I_ was a tiger." "A common lament." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "I wish they'd stick Oliver North in the same jail cell with `The Godfather of Soul', James Brown. It has its own peculiar appeal, doesn't it?" -- Opus, "Bloom County" %% "I woke up one morning and looked around the room. Something wasn't right. I realized that someone had broken in the night before and replaced everything in my apartment with an exact replica. I couldn't believe it...I got my roommate and showed him. I said, 'Look at this--everything's been replaced with an exact replica!' He said, 'Do I know you?'" -- Steve Wright %% "I woke up this morning, and I realized that somebody had broken into my apartment, stolen all my things and replaced them with exact duplicates. I asked my roommate if he noticed anything, and he said, 'Who are you?'" "The other day I.... No, that wasn't me." "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." -- comedian Steven Wright %% "I would advise youse to keep dialin', Oxmix." -- Star Trek "A Piece of the Action" %% "I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake." -- "A Man for All Seasons" by Robert Bolt %% "I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence." -- William F. Buckley, Jr. %% "I would never give artificial birth control to an unmarried person..." -- Judie Brown, President, American Life League, "Nightline", 7/21/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "I would never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member." -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "I would trade that Oscar for one more second of life." -- Woody Allen, "Stardust Memories" %% "I wouldn't exactly call it a a happy dogma, but it makes me feel better about not getting laid..." -- R. Carter %% "I wouldn't have invited me either." %% "I wouldn't put THAT in a safety deposit box," remarks the gnome with disdain, tossing it over his shoulder, where it disappears with an understated "pop". %% "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, or Unix for everyone, but they work for me." -- Jim Thompson (jthomp@central.sun.com), paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson %% "I wouldn't say that Wall Street is a TOTAL disaster zone... but I saw Malcolm Forbes this morning sucking subway tokens out of a turnstile." -- David Letterman %% "I write to find out what I am thinking about." -- Edward Albee %% "I write to understand as much as to be understood." -- Elie Wiesel %% "I wrote a song, but I can't read music. Every time I hear a new song on the radio I think 'Hey, maybe I wrote that.'" -- Steve Wright %% "I wrote my first program in 1954, and that didn't work either." %% "I xeroxed a mirror. Now I have an extra xerox machine." -- Steven Wright %% "I xeroxed my watch. Now I have time to spare." -- Steven Wright %% "I'd do anything for a hundred pounds, of DOLLARS, my dear Dudley!" %% "I'd get out of here now if I were you. It's not safe here." "Trust me - it's not safe out there either." "Oh hell, I forgot that." -- From the TV series WAR OF THE WORLDS %% "I'd like some of that bread, the kind with the seeds," said Tom wryly. :^) %% "I'd like to ask Gary [Groth] to say something nasty about this." -- Will Eisner %% "I'd like to ram a hunk of fried goat cheese straight up his ass." -- A wonderful line from MYSTIC PIZZA %% "I'd love to have my conk fixed. It's too big." -- Princess Diana %% "I'd never marry a woman who didn't like pizza... I might play golf with her, but I wouldn't marry her." -- Hoyt Axton in a marvelous Pizza Hut commercial %% "I'd rather be a woman than a man. Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they're first to be rescued off sinking ships." -- Gilda Radner %% "I'll be mellow when I'm dead!" -- Weird Al Yankovic %% "I'll bite his leg off." -- Someone getting into a role-playing game a bit too much in ZOT! %% "I'll do anything for him! I love him very much! Write that with very big letters!" -- Brigitte Nielsen re: Sylvester Stallone, 1985 %% "I'll drink your health; share your wealth; run your life; steal your wife ... ... you can call this song 'The United States Blues'." -- The Grateful Dead %% "I'll get my revenge on all of society! I'll build a mighty criminal empire!" -- Mobieus's career criminal %% "I'll give you a clue - it begins with `f' and rhymes with `factor'..." %% "I'll have 10 chocolate sundaies." I have never seen anyone eat...10 chocolate sundaies. "I'm in a really bad mood and since I've never eaten before, I should be very hungry." -- Q and Data, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% "I'll have the dark bread," said Tom wryly. %% "I'll have you all executed!" "I think not." -- Star Trek "Mirror, Mirror" %% "I'll keep 'em off your Holy Ass as long as you're in Wisconsin." -- From "The Badger" %% "I'll maim, but no killing." "It isn't even human! It's just a filthy, smelly demon from another dimension." "Oh, well, that's different!" -- The Badger and Ham %% "I'll never discuss my lawyer's character in his absence, so let's discuss his absence of character! -- Michael Lara %% "I'll punch the first person who calls me a pacifist." -- chrisn@sco.com %% "I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her . . . the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand." -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf" %% "I'll say it again for the logic impaired." -- Larry Wall, lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov %% "I'll show you fun. Simon, let the games begin." -- Marshall, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "I'll tell you what I want, I want someone who is so beautiful that when you see her you say, 'Wow, that Humperdinck must be some kind of fella to have a wife like that.'" -- William Goldman / S. Morgenstern, "The Princess Bride" %% "I'll tell you what kind of guy I was. If you ordered a boxcar full of sons-of-bitches and opened the door and only found me inside, you could consider the order filled." -- Robert Mitchum %% "I'm 6 foot 5, and I eat punks like you for breakfast!" -- Monty Python %% "I'm Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?" -- Bart in "Krusty the Clown" (Tracy Ullman Show), from The Simpsons %% "I'm a BAAAAD boy!" %% "I'm a DOCTOR, Jim, not a biochemical neuroprotein physiologist!" %% "I'm a LAGOMORPH, Sam! Look it up!" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "I'm a Leo. Leos don't believe in this astrology stuff." -- Tom Neff %% "I'm a certified Misappropriation Engineer." -- Lodgepoole, "The Losers", Eerie Indiana %% "I'm a great housekeeper. I get divorced. I keep the house". -- Zsa Zsa Gabor %% "I'm a little girl." "I'm a little boy." "How do you know you're a little boy?" "Wait till the nurse goes out and I'll show you... See? Blue booties." %% "I'm a living saint, but you can just call me Sister Cindy." -- Sister Cindy %% "I'm a lover, not a hacker." -- Jeff Daiell %% "I'm a lucky guy, and I'm happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary." -- Yogi Berra at a dinner in his honor. %% "I'm a mean green mother from outer space" -- Audrey II, The Little Shop of Horrors %% "I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami." -- Stephen King %% "I'm a space cowboy. Bet you weren't ready for that. I'm a space cowboy. I'm sure you know where it's at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." -- Steve Miller %% "I'm afraid I'm going to have to operate. It's nothing to worry about, although it is EXTREMELY dangerous." -- Monty Python %% "I'm afraid I'm not personally qualified to confuse cats." -- Monty Python %% "I'm afraid I've finally become what I had merely intended to seem." -- Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1831 %% "I'm against any law that I wouldn't break if I could get away with it." -- A. Whitney Brown, "Saturday Night Live" %% "I'm as doomed as doomed can be!" -- Ed Grimley The one and only Ed Grimley, aka Martin Short %% "I'm bored with music between 1955 and 1980. I'm completely bored. I can't listen to a rock and roll record. I can't do it. I would rather listen to hogs screwing." -- Sting %% "I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death." -- George Carlin %% "I'm disappointed too, but keep in mind that transmogrification is a new technology." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "I'm doing everything I can, and stop calling me Shirley." -- Airplane! %% "I'm doomed to wander around here aimlessly for eternity...or until they demolish the mill for a mini-mall, whichever comes first." -- Grungy Bill, "Hole in the Head Gang", Eerie Indiana %% "I'm dying," he croaked. %% "I'm free of all prejudices. I hate everybody equally." -- W. C. Fields %% "I'm glad you asked that son. Being popular is the most important thing in the world." -- Homer in "Tell Tale Head" %% "I'm glad you changed your last name, you son of a bitch!" %% "I'm going to have you wrapped in a U.S. flag and burned personally by the President, in high octane American gasoline!" -- The Firesign Theatre movie, J-Men Forever %% "I'm going to kill everyone in this room." "Now that's DARN rude." -- The Joker visits David Letterman %% "I'm going to make a small point in the corner of the board [does so], and come back to it later!" And later... "The thing which caused me to write 'lies' in extremely small letters in the corner of the board was..." And later still... "When you see this, you are entitled to go ` Y'what?! '." %% "I'm going to throw up all over you." "Go ahead, it won't show on this shirt". -- THE RUNNING MAN (yes, it's an Arnie line) %% "I'm great at love, but I'm lousy at commitment." "Commitment's nice. You'd like her. She's got heavy legs, but she's a lotta laughs. I met her at a wedding." -- Love & Guilt from above reference %% "I'm growing older, but not up." -- Jimmy Buffett %% "I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper." -- Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind." %% "I'm lonely," Adam told God in the Garden of Eden. "I need to have someone around for company." "Okay," replied God. "I'm going to give you the perfect woman. Beautiful, intelligent and gracious - she'll cook and clean for you and never say a cross word." "Sounds good," Adam said. "But what's she going to cost?" "An arm and a leg." "That's pretty steep," countered Adam. "What can I get for just a rib?" %% "I'm looking for Mr. Dover, first name Ben.." %% "I'm made of rubber, You're made of glue. Everything you say Bounces off me And sticks to you." %% "I'm not SURE that that makes sense, DM." "Well, it is a CARTOON, sir..." -- Dangermouse %% "I'm not a god, I was misquoted." -- Lister, Red Dwarf %% "I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pedantic and that's just as good." -- D Gary Grady %% "I'm not a programmer, but I play one at work." -- Gregg Parmentier, parmentier@iowasp.physics.uiowa.edu %% "I'm not a pushover, believe me. I laugh at HAMLET." -- Billy Wilder %% "I'm not a zombie." -- Simon, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "I'm not against women. Not often enough, anyway." -- Groucho Marx? %% "I'm not bad... I'm just drawn that way." -- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? %% "I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid, and I'm not going!" -- Avon %% "I'm not going to be anybody's puppet, particularly not my own." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "I'm not going to get side-tracked onto a tangent." %% "I'm not happy until I've violated somebody's civil rights and then put them in jail. ... That ruins their day ... but it makes mine." -- Christopher Commission report of LAPD car-to-car computer message, 7/91 %% "I'm not happy, I'm cheerful. There's a difference. A happy woman has no cares at all. A cheerful woman has cares but has learned how to deal with them." -- Beverly Sills %% "I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed a bit.." -- Dr. Strangelove %% "I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going." -- Ker Avon %% "I'm not the heroic type. I was beaten up by Quakers." -- Woody Allen, "Sleeper" %% "I'm on a mission from Grodd." -- An MTV gorilla, from SWAMP THING %% "I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Candida", Act III %% "I'm perfectly willing to be judged. But only by God and history." -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "I'm shouting again. I've got to watch that." -- One of said invaders worrying about appearances.... %% "I'm so tired...I was up all night trying to round off infinity." -- Steve Wright %% "I'm sorry, but you must have me confused with some OTHER plate-lipped white girl named `Irene'." -- Good Girls %% "I'm sorry, is this your fish?" %% "I'm still in this world? I was afraid of that." %% "I'm such an *asshole*!" "I know how you feel, Chris... And you're right." %% "I'm sure it's right whether it's valid or not." %% "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!" "He can't do that," said the King, "or else he'd have been here first." -- Lewis Carroll %% "I'm talented and flexible. I could play Hamlet, even though I look like King Kong." -- Mr. T %% "I'm tellin' you, Willie Joe, this ain't right. Lynchin' ain't fer mummies. Lynchin's fer rustlers." "Lynchin's fer EVERBODY!" %% "I'm the Descartes of anxiety. I panic, therefore I am." -- Richard Lewis %% "I'm the head waiter. This is a vegetarian restaurant only. We serve no animal flesh of any kind. We're not only proud of that, we're ... smug about it." -- Monty Python %% "I'm the luckiest rabbit in the WORLD! I'm going to work for you, my hero... DICK DUCK, DUCK DICK!" -- A slight mistake in BULLET CROW %% "I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to." -- Jimi Hendrix %% "I'm the world's first fully-functioning homicidal artist." -- The Joker in the BATMAN movie %% "I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?" -- Jean Kerr %% "I'm too old for Santa Claus, and I don't believe in Batman." -- From JON SABLE, FREELANCE %% "I'm treating two sets of siamese twins with split personalities." "I'm being paid by eight people." -- Woody Allen, "Zelig" %% "I'm very brave, generally," he went on in a low voice: "only today I happen to have a headache." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "I'm willing to accompany you, but not to ride in your pocket!" %% "I've always hated that sign and all its cheap film noir symbolism." -- Kelvin Mace %% "I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "I've always wondered about that taping equipment, but I'm damn glad we have it. Aren't you?" -- President Richard Milhouse Nixon, to chief of staff H. R. Haldeman April 25, 1973 %% "I've been called an evil genius by cities of assholes... but I know who these people are! And they're on my list!" -- Robert Crumb %% "I've been in the academic world a long time...I can sleep with my eyes open, which is an important skill for those of you considering jobs in middle and upper management." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "I've been kicking Reagan all the time he's been up; I see no reason to stop now that he's down." -- Jeff Meyer %% "I've been trey-dueced." -- An Algonquinite with a hand of threes and twos %% "I've brought Gatsby to life. I've accounted for his money. I've fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII). I've improved his first party. I've broken up his long narrative in Chapter VIII." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), on revising his galley proofs %% "I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." -- Dennie van Tassel %% "I've got *plenty* of common sense! I just choose to ignore it." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "I've got a hankerin' for some pork products." -- Krusty in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "I've got a lot of cutting and pasting to do, gentleman, so please, why don't you return to your porch rockers and resume whittling?" -- Twin Peaks %% "I've got a lot to say about this theorem, so don't stop me if I go too fast." %% "I've got a monkey's body, so I'll provide the comedy relief!" -- Matt Feazall's send-up of ZOT! %% "I've got some amyls. We could either party later or, like, start his heart." -- "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie" %% "I've got to concentrate. I've got to concentrate! ..Hello? ..Echo! ..Pinch hitting for Pedro Borbon, Manny Mota!" -- Airplane! %% "I've grown to hate them." -- Cheers %% "I've hated you since the moment I married you!" -- Woody Allen, "What's New, Pussycat?" %% "I've heard about these cult jamborees. It's an international goon gathering. Lots of howling and drinking... Orgiastic worship of heathen idols... Great looking chicks in diaphanous robes..." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "I've heard all kinds of sounds from these things, but `yabba dabba doo' was a new one to me." -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "I've lost my flower," said Tom lackadaisically. %% "I've never thought my speeches were too long; I've enjoyed them." -- Hubert M. Humphrey %% "I've never tried dividing both sides by infinity before, so here goes." %% "I've seen better heads on half a pint of beer." %% "I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android %% "I've seen many politicians paralyzed in the legs as myself, but I've seen more of them who were paralyzed in the head" -- George Wallace %% "I've seen the forgeries I've sent out." -- John F. Haugh II, jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US, about forging net news articles %% "I've struck oil!" Tom gushed. %% "I-I-I didn't know they were carnivorous!" "Or expert shots!" -- "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "I... AM NOT... A PACIFIST!" -- An angry defensive back explains to rednecks, in AMAZING GRACE AND CHUCK %% "IBM uses what I like to call the 'hole-in-the-ground technique' to destroy the competition..... IBM digs a big HOLE in the ground and covers it with leaves. It then puts a big POT OF GOLD nearby. Then it gives the call, 'Hey, look at all this gold, get over here fast.' As soon as the competitor approaches the pot, he falls into the pit" -- John C. Dvorak %% "IBM: It may be slow, but it's hard to use." -- Andrew Tannenbaum , author of Minix and Amoeba %% "IT'S THE TWO GODDAMNED CULTURES AGAIN !*! Bit-brained nerdery on one side, effete fin-de-siecle malaise on the other. And kingdoms of hybrid delight abandoned in the middle." -- Jonathan Burns, burns@latcs1.oz %% "If 10% is good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for Uncle Sam." -- Ray Stevens %% "If Diet Coke did not exist it would have been necessary to invent it." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "If God exists, why did he allow Nazis?" "How should I know? I don't even know how the can opener works." -- Woody Allen, "Hannah and her Sisters" %% "If God had really intended men to fly, He'd have made it easier to get to the airport." -- George Winters %% "If God wanted us to have a President, He would have sent us a candidate." -- Jerry Dreshfield %% "If Horatio Nelson was in charge of this, he would not have waited for official authorization." "Yes, a pretty impulsive fellow, if we are to believe the history books." "History books ? Captain Hart, Horation Nelson was a personal friend !" -- Doctor Who - The Sea Devils, 1972 %% "If I am incomprehensible then stop me, but if it's simply wrong then I don't think that it matters." %% "If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" -- Hillel %% "If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin." -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% "If I could go through the dorms and shoot people, exam pressures would be put into perspective." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "If I could walk that way, I wouldn't need the aftershave." -- Monty Python %% "If I didn't have a Unix machine, I'd feel naked." -- Guess Who %% "If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces." -- Paul Fussell %% "If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell." -- Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88 %% "If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne %% "If I don't see you soon, I'll see you later." %% "If I ever get around to writing that language depompisifier, it will change almost all occurrences of the word "paradigm" into "example" or "model." -- Herbie Blashtfalt %% "If I had had more time, I could have written you a shorter letter." -- Blaise Pascal %% "If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." -- Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads. %% "If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons." -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% "If I have to say one more air-headed big sister line, I'm going to vomit on a producer." -- Julie Condra/Syndi, "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell." -- Philip Sheridan %% "If I were going to create a New Universe, I'd rest on the seventh day." -- Jack Kirby %% "If I were not in the C.I.D., A window-washer I would be!" %% "If I'm typecast as a genius, who cares?" -- Jeremy Brett, on playing Sherlock Holmes %% "If Jesus came back today, and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up." -- Max Von Sydow's character in "Hannah and Her Sisters" %% "If John Madden steps outside on February 2, looks down, and doesn't see his feet, we'll have 6 more weeks of Pro football." -- Chuck Newcombe %% "If Ricky Schroder and Gary Coleman had a fight on television with pool cues, who would win? 1) Ricky Schroder 2) Gary Coleman 3) The television viewing public" -- David Letterman %% "If a computer can't directly address all the RAM you can use, it's just a toy." -- anonymous comp.sys.amiga posting, non-sequitir %% "If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 10E5, I know he's full of crap." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% "If a machine can be made so that an idiot can use it, then only an idiot will use it." -- Tadao Ichikawa %% "If a man chooses to do evil... it becomes my sacred duty to bash him to a pulp." -- Crime Crusher, an old 40's pulp superhero %% "If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbour, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that, too." -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% "If a team is in a positive frame of mind, it will have a good attitude. If it has a good attitude, it will make a commitment to playing the game right. If it plays the game right, it will win -- unless, of course, it doesn't have enough talent to win, and no manager can make goose-liver pate out of goose feathers, so why worry?" -- Sparky Anderson %% "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "Folly and Female Education" %% "If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a "fix" of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine." -- Rob Stampfli %% "If all men were brothers, would you want one to marry your sister?" -- the title of a Theodore Sturgeon short story. %% "If all philosophers were required to present their ideas in novels, to dramatize the exact meaning and consequences of their philosophies in human life, there would be far fewer philosophers -- and far better ones." -- Ayn Rand "...and a lot more really bad novels!" -- Jeremy York, jeremy@milton.acs.washington.edu %% "If all the girls attending it [the Yale Prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised." -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% "If all the people in China stood up on chairs, and, at the same moment, jumped down on the ground, we would be in deep, deep trouble." %% "If anything can go wrong, it will." -- Edsel Murphy %% "If at all possible, you should avoid being a young person or a wheat farmer when the president starts feeling international tension." -- Dave Barry %% "If at first you don't succeed, you are running about average." -- Bill Cosby %% "If called by a panther...don't anther." -- Ogden Nash (1902-1971), "Parents Keep Out!" %% "If ever I utter an oath again may my soul be blasted to eternal damnation!" -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "St. Joan" %% "If everything had gone as planned, everything would have been perfect." -- BATF spokesperson on CNN 3/2/93, regarding failed raid attempt in TX. %% "If everything had gone as planned, there would not have been a problem." -- ATF %% "If growing up were fun, I'd have done it already." %% "If he kills me, you can have my stuff." -- Simon to Marshall after Dimsdale eats the gum, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "If he's not one thing, he's another." -- Buckaroo Banzai novel quote %% "If hyperspace did not already exist, science fiction writers would have had to invent it." -- Peter Oakley %% "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." -- Bert Lantz %% "If it doesn't come from you, shouldn't it come from Gerber?" -- Bristol Meyers baby formula ad %% "If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it's bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty." -- Frank Zappa %% "If it weren't for politicians, who would fashion disorder out of chaos." %% "If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed." -- Kahlil Gibran, 1923 %% "If it's not loud, it doesn't work!" -- Blank Reg, from "Max Headroom" %% "If it's too fast, you're too old" -- seen on a bumper sticker %% "If law school is so hard, how come there are so many lawyers?" -- Calvin Trillin %% "If life had a vomit meter, we'd be off the scale." -- Joe Bob Briggs %% "If man evolved from the ape, how come there are still apes around? Some of them were given choices." -- Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." %% "If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability." -- Henry Ford %% "If money stopped buying things, I'd lose interest in it." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "If my film makes one more person miserable, I've done my job." -- Woody Allen %% "If one is going to steal, it is considered somewhat sporting to inform the victims beforehand; for examples see any episodes of the BATMAN TV series." -- Robert J Woodhead (trebor@biar.UUCP) %% "If only the Catholics would stick together and live up to their Faith [as regards birth control], they could control the world and the world's morality." -- Dr. Claude Newbury, Director, HLI Johannesburg, "HLI Special Report," #62, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes." -- Roy Baty, Bladerunner %% "If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "If people behaved in the way nations do they would all be put in straitjackets." -- Tennessee Williams %% "If projectile vomiting ever becomes an Olympic event, you'll do yourself proud." -- Hobson, "Arthur II" %% "If she weighs the same as a duck...she's made of wood" "And therefore?" "A WITCH!" %% "If some guy is 6-foot-5 with gigantic muscles and incredibly handsome, why does he need to put on a batsuit? Why doesn't he just put on a ski mask and kick the crap out of people?" -- Tim Burton, director of BATMAN %% "If that makes any sense to you, you have a big problem." -- C. Durance Computer Science 234 %% "If that man in the PTL is such a healer, why can't he make his wife's hairdo go down?" -- Robin Williams %% "If the airport books are any indication, there are at least 450,000 evil Nazi World War II geniuses still at large, many of them with atomic laser cannons." -- Dave Barry %% "If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside." -- Robert Cringely/InforWorld %% "If the bulk of American SF can be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits." -- Michael Moorcock %% "If the conjecture `You would rather I had not disturbed you by sending you this.' is correct, you may add it to the list of uncomfortable truths." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." -- Blake %% "If the human mind were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it." -- Pat Bahn %% "If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence ... and the courts must abide by that decision." -- US v Moylan, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, 1969, 417 F.2d at 1006 %% "If the shoe fits, buy it!" -- Imelda Marcos %% "If the standard says that [things] depend on the phase of the moon, the programmer should be prepared to look out the window as necessary." -- Chris Torek %% "If the vendors started doing everything right, we would be out of a job. Let's hear it for OSI and X! With those babies in the wings, we can count on being employed until we drop, or get smart and switch to gardening, paper folding, or something." -- C. Philip Wood %% "If there is a choice, you've got to do it." %% "If there isn't a population problem, why is the government putting cancer in the cigarettes?" -- the elder Steptoe, c. 1970 %% "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." -- Thomas Paine %% "If there was two birds sitting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Celebrated Jumping Frog" %% "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "If they think I'm going to stop at that stop sign, they're mistaken!" -- Homer in "Homer's Odyssey" , from The Simpsons %% "If this country is worth saving, it's worth saving at a profit." -- H. L. Hunt %% "If this is foreplay, I'm a dead man!" -- Mental Sex in COCOON %% "If thy right brain offend thee, cut it out" %% "If thy whole brain offend thee, cut it out" %% "If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted faggots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind." -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938), at the Scopes Monkey Trial "The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?" -- Lily Tomlin %% "If voting could change the system, it would be illegal!" -- Schroedinger's Cat %% "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 %% "If we are to survive, this nation must end its love affair with guns." -- U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. If we are to survive, this nation must end its love affair with big brother government and individuals must relearn what it means to be free. -- Jeff Chan, chan@shell.portal.com %% "If we can't fix it -- we'll fix it so nobody can." -- B. Gibbons %% "If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity." -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% "If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business... The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." -- Gus Grissom %% "If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security." -- Gail Sheehy %% "If we fail to draw the line in Vietnam we may find ourselves compelled to draw a defense line as far back as Seattle and Alaska, with Hawaii as a solitary outpost in mid-Pacific." -- Senator Thomas J. Dodd, February 23, 1965 %% "If we fail to make non-violent action a real, viable, obviously strong possibility . . . then I think we're going to drift into guerrilla warfare." -- John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, Director, Prolife Nonviolent Action Project, "National Catholic Register," 1/4/87, about abortion clinic violence, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "If we increase the size of the penguin until it is the same height as the man and then compare the relative brain size, we now find that the penguin's brain is still smaller. But, and this is the point, it is larger than it _was_." -- Monty Python %% "If we pay dogfood salespeople more than we do teachers, we should not be surprised if our dogs eat like kids, and our kids end up reading like dogs." -- MR KR COMAN bakc@giraffe.ru.ac.za %% "If we want to take the westerly winds into account, we could also do that using this method, but then we'd have to take the westerly winds into account." %% "If you are a skunk, you learn to hold your breath for a long time!" -- Pepe the Skunk %% "If you are beginning to doubt what I am saying, you are probably hallucinating." -- The Firesign Theatre, "Everything you know is Wrong" %% "If you are caught with the Queen, the King will cut off your arms, your legs, and your head. Well, five out of six isn't bad." -- Woody Allen "Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask" %% "If you are going to have doctors you had better have doctors well off; just as if you are going to have a landlord you had better have a rich landlord. Taking all the rounds of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Socialist Criticism of the Medical Profession" %% "If you are what you eat, then I'm dead meat." -- Timbuk3 %% "If you blow chunks and she comes back, she's yours. If you spew and she bolts, it was never meant to be." -- Wayne %% "If you can persuade your customer to tattoo your name on their chest, they probably will not switch brands." -- an Indiana University professor, re: Harley-Davidson owners %% "If you can set the rules, you can win the game." -- John McCormack %% "If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time." -- George Gerbner %% "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." -- Catherine Aird %% "If you can't beat 'em, infiltrate and destroy them from within." %% "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets." -- David Bedno (davidbe@sco.COM) %% "If you can't debate me, then there is no way in hell you'll out-insult me." -- Scott Legrand (Scott.Legrand@hogbbs.Fidonet.Org) "You may be wrong here, little one." -- R. W. F. Clark (RWC102@PSUVM) %% "If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics." -- Speaker of the California Assembly Jesse Unruh %% "If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt others." -- the Dalai Lama %% "If you chose not to decide, you still have made a choice." -- Neil Peart, Rush %% "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." -- Yogi Berra %% "If you could have any amount of money... How much would you want?" "All of it." -- Cerebus %% "If you demand money from someone in exchange for your silence, it's called ``blackmail.'' If your lawyer demands money from someone in exchange for your silence, it's called ``a settlement.'' -- Karl %% "If you do everything, you'll win." -- Lyndon Baines Johnson %% "If you don't care for your scalp, you'll get rabies!" -- Monty Python %% "If you don't find him, they'll shoot him down like a dog!" "Well, he *is* a dog." -- A cute little gypsy girl pleads with THE BADGER over Spuds McKen... err, Buddy McBride %% "If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue." -- "Consumer's Guide", Sears, Roebuck and Co. (1897) %% "If you don't make money off of it, it had better be either a religious experience or a hobby." -- Lance Cooper %% "If you don't read news.groups, the net appears to be a rather tranquil place." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com, about Usenet %% "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for everything." -- F. Jeff Stiles, Southern Baptist preacher %% "If you don't vote for me I'll kill you all." -- Nexus %% "If you don't want your dog to have bad breath, do what I do: Pour a little Lavoris in the toilet." -- Comedian Jay Leno %% "If you encounter these negroes shoot first, ask questions later." -- LAPD squad-car computer message, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "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 %% "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." -- Cardinal de Richelieu %% "If you go to a gunfight, take a gun" -- Charles Nichols' Law cen@qedbbs.com %% "If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent." -- Bette Davis %% "If you juggle with knives, you're likely to get cut." -- Kieran Donegal %% "If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a chance of being a prophet." -- Isaac Bashevis Singer %% "If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it." -- William A. Orton %% "If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?" -- Garrison Keillor %% "If you lose a son, you can always get another. But there is only one Maltese Falcon" %% "If you meet the Buddha on the net, put him in your kill file." -- Robert Firth %% "If you own a machine, you are in turn owned by it, and spend your time serving it..." -- Marion Zimmer Bradley, "The Forbidden Tower" %% "If you post it, they will flame." -- The voice from Field of Dreams, according to Brian Frost (b1f5814@rigel.tamu.edu) %% "If you steal ideas from one source, that's plagiarism, but if you steal ideas from more than one source, that's research." -- Laurendo Almeida %% "If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics, You will find that their minds rarely move in a line" %% "If you substitute other kinds of intellectual property into the GNU manifesto, it quickly becomes absurd." -- Cal Keegan %% "If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?" -- Steven Wright %% "If you tell the truth, you must smile. Otherwise, people will kill you." %% "If you think you have enemies, then, dear simpleton, you will have enemies." -- I dunno %% "If you think you might faint, don't worry; you can always go into psychiatry." %% "If you took all the sincerity in Hollywood and put it in the navel of a fruit fly, you'd still have room for three carraway seeds and a producer's heart." -- Fred Allen %% "If you took everyone who's ever been to a Dead show, and lined them up, they'd stretch halfway to the moon and back... and none of them would be complaining." -- a local Deadhead in the Seattle Times %% "If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly you get it as an antithetical process, so you have to have an environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% "If you want to become a millionaire, found a religion." -- L. Ron Hubbard %% "If you want to eat hippopotamus, you've got to pay the freight." -- attributed to an IBM guy, about why IBM software uses so much memory %% "If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart %% "If you wanted to make Sarok the Preparer cry, well, mission accomplished." -- The Simpsons %% "If you wants something cheap, try McCrory's." -- Foo-fa-raa in "Badger" %% "If you weren't my teacher, I'd think you just deleted all my files." -- an anonymous UCB CS student, to an instructor who had typed "rm -i *" to get rid of a file named "-f" on a Unix system. %% "If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "If you'll excuse me a minute, I'm going to have a cup of coffee." -- broadcast from Apollo 11's LEM, "Eagle", to Johnson Space Center, Houston July 20, 1969, 7:27 P.M. %% "If you're going faster than 90 MPH and they chase you -- make 'em *earn* it." %% "If you're going to plagiarize, go _way_ back." -- Barry Goldwater to Joseph Biden %% "If you're going to write about human beings, you might as well make them people." -- Woody Allen, "The Front" %% "If you're not a player, you're not in the game." -- Vinnie Terrenova's mob motto on WISEGUY %% "If you're salt-deficient, you'll go lick the sweat off your significant other...there are other physiological drives that will cause the same behavior." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "If you've got a problem with this then go back, write the whole thing out using sigma notation and convince yourself that it's better not to have problems." %% "If you've heard this story before, don't stop me. I want to hear it again." %% "If your computer doesn't multitask, it ain't shit." -- Cal Keegan %% "If your life is just a highway, and your soul is just a car, objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are..." -- Meat Loaf %% "Ignorance is not bliss -- it's oblivion." -- Phillip Wylie %% "Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "Ignorance simplifies ANY problem." -- R. Lucke %% "Ignorance transcends architecture." -- James Gaskin %% "Ignore the message: 'ld warning: file /tmp/kernAAAa06386 has no relocation information' if it appears." %% "Illness strips away superficiality to reveal reality in etched detail." %% "Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "Imitation is the sincerest form of television." -- The New Mighty Mouse %% "In California, Bill Honig, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, said he thought the general public should have a voice in defining what an excellent teacher should know. 'I would not leave the definition of math,' Dr. Honig said, 'up to the mathematicians.'" -- The New York Times, October 22, 1985 %% "In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "In Eerie, Indiana, when you scrape away the surface weirdness, what you find is ... more weirdness." -- Eerie Indiana %% "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 %% "In Los Angeles, McDonalds quickly reacted to the highway shootings. They came out with 'Happy To Be Alive Meals.'" -- Al Clethen %% "In Western terms, love is like an extended software Q.A. suite. True love is like a final acceptance test. But one has to be willing to take bug fixes and work-arounds; otherwise, the software is never done." -- The Usenet Oracle %% "In a blatant effort to curry favor with a French judge and jury, accused Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie told a stunned courtroom in Lyon this week that his favorite movie has always been `The Nutty Professor'." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "In a calm sea every man is a pilot." -- John Ray %% "In a cruel and evil world, being cynical can allow you to get some entertainment out of it." -- Daniel Waters, screenwriter of HEATHERS %% "In a few years, I think we'll be marketing Marvel Comics like computer software." -- Archie Goodwin %% "In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to the death for it." -- Monty Python %% "In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe." -- Ken Jenkins %% "In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "In all criminal cases whatsoever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts." -- Indiana Constitution. %% "In all levels of life, the sheep are safe only when the wolves are not hungry." -- F. J. Lovret %% "In an interview today with US NEWS & WORLD REPORT this week, Secretary of State George Schultz was asked what he considered his proudest accomplishment. He said, "Winning the office pools on Andropov *and* Chernenko." -- David Letterman %% "In another paper delivered today, Paul W. Kinsie of the American Social Health Association warned that, if the moon was to be kept free from venereal disease, prostitution must be banned there." -- The Realist, November, 1962 %% "In any society where the State is the sole employer, opposition means death by slow starvation. Who does not obey, shall not eat." -- Leon Trotsky "Why Does Socialism Continue to Appeal to Anyone?", Robert Hessen %% "In baseball, you don't know nothing." -- Yogi Berra %% "In corporate life, I think there are three important areas which contracts can't deal with, the area of conflict, the area of change and area of reaching potential. To me a covenant is a relationship that is based on such things as shared ideals and shared value systems and shared ideas and shared agreement as to the processes we are going to use for working together. In many cases they develop into real love relationships." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% "In ecology, as in economics, TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. Failure to recognize the "no free lunch" law causes the buffalo-hunter mentality syndrome--the unthinking assumption that there will always be plenty because there always has been plenty." -- Dr. Robert W. Prehoda %% "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "In fact, Life *itself* is looking pretty meaningless, if not outright UGLY." "`Hill Street Blues' into reruns again?" -- Milo and Binkley discuss enui... "Bloom County" %% "In fact, it is usually the honest firearms dealer who is the one to bring the "bad apple" to the attention of the authorities. That's not true in the medical profession. The APA and AMA are cliques where members do not criticize each other" -- Bob Lesmeister, Psychiatrists Should be Held Accountable for Mass Murders not Gun Dealers, January 1991, American Firearms Industry Magazine. %% "In general, it is best to assume that the network is filled with malevolent entities that will send in packets designed to have the worst possible effect" -- the draft "Requirements for Internet Hosts" RFC %% "In general, it's very hard to protect oneself against omnipotent beings." -- Barry Margolin (barmar@think.com) 9 Sep 89, <29114@news.Think.COM> %% "In making theories, always keep a window open so that you can throw one out if necessary." -- Bela Schick %% "In my house, on the ceilings I have paintings of the rooms above, so I never have to go upstairs." -- Steve Wright %% "In my opinion, Richard Stallman wouldn't recognize terrorism if it came up and bit him on his Internet." -- Ross M. Greenberg %% "In one recent accounting, [the] Bureau of Indian Affairs financial wizards valued three chain saws at $99 million each." -- U.S. News & World Report, 2/22/93 %% "In our last congressional elections, there was less turnover in the House of Representatives than there was in the Soviet Politburo: 98.5% of the incumbents were reelected!" -- John McCormick, "Self-Made In America" %% "In our last episode, Hoodwinkle was searching for a cure to a disease plaguing the world." "At last, a cure for loud Hawaiian shirts!" -- From THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MIGHTY MOUSE %% "In our society, sometimes you have to penalize (innocent) people for the good of everybody else. -- A Pittsburgh Cop 10/16/93 (send E-mail if you want to know the circumstance under which it was said) -- Seth Adam Eliot, eliot+@cmu.edu %% "In regards to Oral Roberts' claim that God told him that he would die unless he received $20 million by March, God's lawyers have stated that their client has not spoken with Roberts for several years. Off the record, God has stated that "If I had wanted to ice the little toad, I would have done it a long time ago." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "In research, you must remember not to fool yourself, for you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% "In short, _N is Richardian if, and only if, _N is not Richardian." %% "In short, members of the United States Congress enjoy more job security than members of the Supreme Soviet." -- CNN: 7 Nov 1990, 12:15 AM EST %% "In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Prudence" %% "In space, no one can hear you flame." -- Tim P Scott, scott@spectra.com %% "In terms of air-time and ad rates, View Age is bigger than Islam, Judaism, IBM, Scientology, and all but two Christian denominations. Projections indicate that they will pass the Catholics and the 700 Club by this time next year." -- The View-age Church on MAX HEADROOM %% "In the Bowling Alley of Tomorrow, there will even be machines that wear rental shoes and throw the ball for you. Your sole function will be to drink beer." -- Dave Barry %% "In the US, males are a minority and should be treated and protected as such." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "In the afterlife, everyone's good-looking." -- Laurie Thompson %% "In the beginning, the grocery was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the 7-11." (Haagendasz 1,1) %% "In the cafeteria just after lunch, (well, not *just* after, more like *during* lunch, about 12:28; say 12:30, give or take a few minutes), I leaned back in my chair (it was one of those aluminum chairs, good strength-to-weight, like titanium but not quite; but then of course titanium would be a bit of an overkill). Anyway, I heard one of the girls talking about how boring she thought engineers could be." -- Alan Denney (aland@informix.com) %% "In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere." -- Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) %% "In the end, it will be the insects who rule the earth." -- Noted scientist %% "In the end, it will be the insects who rule the earth." -- Noted scientist "In the end, who cares?" -- Remo Williams "End? What end? You whites will be with us forever." -- Chiun, Master of Sinanju -- Intro to a DESTROYER novel %% "In the end, who cares?" -- Remo Williams %% "In the end,there were no simple answers. No heros. No villains. Only silence. But it began the moment that I first saw the wolf. By the act of watching, with the eyes of a man, I had pointed the way for those who followed." "The pack returned for the cubs as there are no orphans among the wolves. Eventually, the losses of that autumn became a distant memory. I believe the wolves went off to a wild and distant place some where, although I don't really know, because I turned away and didn't watch them go." -- Tyler (Farley Mowat), Never Cry Wolf %% "In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not there if you want to keep writing good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope." -- Charles Revson %% "In the handbook, it says that most people ignore the strange and unusual; while I myself *am*... strange and unusual." -- BEETLEJUICE %% "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it." -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) (from his Inaugural Address) %% "In the meantime, one false move and Simon here becomes vice-presidential." -- Dash X, "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% "In the meantime, one word for any atheists among you: wrong." -- God, the Ultimate Autobiography %% "In the old days, we had wooden ships ruled by iron men. Now we have steel ships and blockheads running them." -- Capt. D. Seymour %% "In the past, you've been a remarkably poor judge of what your Mom cares about." -- Hobbes (and Calvin) %% "In the spirit of today, when I'm handing out the exams, we're going to further examine the totally suffering individual." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "In the third presidential debate, Bill Clinton promises to give every single voter a briefcase full of money, then clean the voter's garage, while at the same time fighting cavities and saving Bambi's mom from the hunters. George Bush says that Clinton is Satan. Ross Perot says you can't feed grits to a dead hog." -- Dave Barry's 1992 in Review %% "In the trial of all criminal cases, the Jury shall be the Judges of Law, as well as of fact, except that the Court may pass upon the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain a conviction." -- Article XV, section 5, Constitution of Maryland. %% "In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is." -- Chuck Reid %% "In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." -- Douglas Adams %% "In times of trouble, go with what you know." -- Homer in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately, Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer, you're linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "In what he called the 'great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells,' Reagan reproached the movies, television and young parents for failing to indoctrinate American youth in 200-proof patriotism, the way they did in his day. 'If we forget what we did,' said the man who still can't remember trading arms for hostages, 'we won't know who we are.' The section ended with this weird passage: 'And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.'" -- Hendrik Hertzberg %% "In which room is the phrase 'Hello sailor' useful?" %% "In wildness is the preservation of the world." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% "In your plan, `A Better Britain For Us', you claimed that you would build eighty-eight thousand million billion houses a year in the greater London area alone. In fact, you built only three in the last 15 years. Are you a bit disappointed with this result?" "No, no. I'd like to answer this question, if I may, in two ways. Firstly, in my normal voice, and then in a kind of silly, high-pitched whine." -- Monty Python %% "Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part." -- Charles Rice, Professor of Law, Notre Dame University, dweeb; in a pamphlet published by the American Life League %% "Inconceivable!" "You use that word a lot. I do not think it means what you think it does." -- "The Princess Bride" %% "Indecision is the basis of flexibility" -- button at a Science Fiction convention %% "Indeed, I am now of the opinion that a compelling case for "stricter gun control" cannot be made, at least not on empirical grounds. I have nothing but respect for the various pro-gun control advocates with whom I have come in contact over the past years. They are, for the most part, sensitive, humane and intelligent people, and their ultimate aim, to reduce death and violence in our society, is one that every civilized person must share. I have, however, come to be convinced that they are barking up the wrong tree." -- James Wright %% "Indeed, to quarantine a person with AIDS or the AIDS virus does entail a loss, in the short run, of human freedom. Agreed. But the idea of human freedom isn't now, and never has been, absolute. Besides, in the long run, as I have noted, all people with AIDS die." -- John Lofton, Anti-Choice Columnist, The Washington Times, 3/31/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Independent self-reliant people (would be) a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future [...] (where) people will be defined by their associations." -- John Dewey (1859-1953), educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools. 1896 "The Tyranny of Government Schooling", John Gatto, 1992 %% "Inferiority complex: a conviction by a jury of your fears." -- anon %% "Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "Inform all the troops that communications have completely broken down." -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "Inquiry is fatal to certainty." -- Will Durant %% "Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids." -- Erma Bombeck %% "Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, people, and times, it is the rule." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen." -- Madrak, in "Creatures of Light and Darkness", by Roger Zelazny %% "Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage." -- Joseph Campbell %% "Instant gratification is not fast enough." -- Suzanne Vega, "Postcards from the Edge" %% "Intel architectures build character." "Segments are for worms." "Feh." -- Seen in another signoff line. I like it. %% "Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing." -- G. Steinem %% "Interesting poll results reported in today's New York Post: people on the street in midtown Manhattan were asked whether they approved of the US invasion of Grenada. Fifty-three percent said yes; 39 percent said no; and 8 percent said "Gimme a quarter?" -- David Letterman %% "Interesting survey in the current Journal of Abnormal Psychology: New York City has a higher percentage of people you shouldn't make any sudden moves around than any other city in the world." -- David Letterman %% "Into the mud, Scum Queen!" -- The Man With Two Brains %% "Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion %% "Is Death that woman's mate? /Her/ lips were red, /her/ looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Night-Mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold." -- The Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% "Is another way to put this 'All men are crazy?'" -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Is he living? Is he living now?" -- Yogi Berra (playing 20 questions). %% "Is it a really good acid, or just a half-acid?" -- R. Friesen Chemistry 124 %% "Is it better to be `safe' than sorry?" -- Ah-ha "Take a chance on me." -- Abba %% "Is it just me, or does anyone else read `bible humpers' every time someone writes `bible thumpers?' -- Joel M. Snyder, jms@mis.arizona.edu %% "Is it just me, or does there seem to be an inordinate number of lurkers whose heads are imploding lately? Maybe all these alternative viewpoints are too much for them to handle." -- Trent Wohlschlaeger (jtw@wuee1.wustl.edu) %% "Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?" -- Stanislaw Lem %% "Is it raining?" %% "Is it really that good? It couldn't be, could it? I mean, a first attempt by a total amateur?" "I'll tell you how good that is: even a gifted director couldn't hurt it." -- from DEATHTRAP %% "Is it really you, Fuzz, or is it Memorex, or is it radiation sickness?" -- A Disney construct who can resemble anyone revels in his crimes in SONIC DISRUPTORS %% "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 Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Montaigne" %% "Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system has been lost?" -- Quentin Crisp %% "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" -- Mae West %% "Is that a real poncho, or a Sears poncho?" %% "Is that a real poncho... I mean Is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?" -- Frank Zappa, "Camarillo Brillo" %% "Is that how a warped brain like your's gets its kicks? By planning the deaths of innocent people?" "No... by *causing* the deaths of innocent people." -- Lex Luthor and Superman discuss Fun Evenings in "Superman" %% "Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?" -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "Is there anyone on this ship who even... remotely... resembles Satan, Mr. Spock?" -- Captain Kirk picks on Mr. Spock again %% "Is there life before death?" -- Belfast Graffito %% "Is this a trick question?" %% "Is this bullshit or fertilizer?" -- Author unknown %% "Is this foreplay?" "No, this is Nuke Strike. Foreplay has lousy graphics. Beat me again." -- Duckert, in "Bad Rubber," Albedo #0 (comics) %% "Is" is the verb for when you don't want a verb. %% "Isn't it ironic that Herman Wouk's WAR AND REMEMBRANCE cost $110,000,000 to produce when World War II itself cost only $80,000,000." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "Isn't tonight a school night?" -- Superman asks an interrogative of a traunt Robin in a tank in THE DARK KNIGHT FALLS %% "Israel today announced that it is giving up. The Zionist state will dissolve in two weeks time, and its citizens will disperse to various resort communities around the world. Said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, 'Who needs the aggravation?'" -- Dennis Miller, "Saturday Night Live" News %% "It ain't over until it's over." -- Casey Stengel %% "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so." -- Artemus Ward (1834-1867), aka Charles Farrar Brown %% "It always hearted me to know that the rocket (Atlas) I was riding upon was made by the lowest bidder." -- John Glenn, paraphrased on his orbital flight in 1962. %% "It could be that Walter's horse has wings" does not imply that there is any such animal as Walter's horse, only that there could be; but "Walter's horse is a thing which could have wings" does imply Walter's horse's existence. But the conjunction "Walter's horse exists, and it could be that Walter's horse has wings" still does not imply "Walter's horse is a thing that could have wings", for perhaps it can only be that Walter's horse has wings by Walter having a different horse. Nor does "Walter's horse is a thing which could have wings" conversely imply "It could be that Walter's horse has wings"; for it might be that Walter's horse could only have wings by not being Walter's horse. I would deny, though, that the formula [Necessarily if some x has property P then some x has property P] expresses a logical law, since P(x) could stand for, let us say "x is a better logician than I am", and the statement "It is necessary that if someone is a better logician than I am then someone is a better logician than I am" is false because there need not have been any me. -- A. N. Prior, "Time and Modality" %% "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "It didn't look like a biscuit box did it? I've always felt that it might." -- Noel Coward, of the Taj Mahal %% "It doesn't even have to be a Pelvis." %% "It doesn't matter how sincere it is, nor how heart-felt the spirit. Sentiment will not endear it. What's important is the price." -- Tom Lehrer %% "It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forth his reasons, insist of the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall." -- Napoleon Bonaparte, "Military Maxims and Thought" %% "It gets late early out here." -- Yogi Berra %% "It had to be said: the world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrifice." -- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" %% "It happened on the strip where the road is wide Two cool shorts standing side by side My fuel injected Sting Ray and a 413 Revving up our engines and it sure sounds mean Pack it up, pack it up Buddy, going to shut you down." "Pedal to the floor, hear his dual quads ring And now the 413's lead is starting to shrink He's out with ram induction but it's understood I've got a fuel injected engine sitting under my hood Turn it off, turn it off Buddy, now I've shut you down" %% "It has always been true that in the United States the people who ought to read books write them." -- Gore Vidal [Editor's note: Now if Vidal would only take his own advice...] %% "It has been said that motor racing shares in common with sex the distinction of being of the most popular, most maligned and least understood of human activities. -- Charles Beaumont and William F. Nolan from "Omnibus of Speed" %% "It has nothing to do with the size of Mr. Alnwick's company. We go after companies large and small." -- Rita Black, spokesperson for IBM, "Unix Today!", 5/29/89, page 51 %% "It helps a little if you review Alice in Wonderland immediately before examining the export regulations." -- Prof. Jerry Saltzer, in 1988 %% "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Sherlock Holmes: Scandal in Bohemia" %% "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill, "My Early Life" %% "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "It is always better to trust your dog, rather than your neighbors." -- Walton %% "It is an ill wind that blows no mind." %% "It is at night that faith in light is admirable." -- Edmond Rostand %% "It is better to be a living coward than a dead hero." %% "It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not." -- Andre Guide %% "It is better to be silent and be real, than to talk and be unreal." -- Ignatius Martyr %% "It is better to go into a corner slow and come out fast, than to go into a corner fast and come out dead." -- Stirling Moss %% "It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "It is better to have tried and failed than to have failed to try, but the result's the same." -- Mike Dennison %% "It is better to shred the bugger than to bugger the shredder." -- Ancient Doltic proverb %% "It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree." -- Charles Baudelaire %% "It is customary in these situations for the developer of the plan to explain it." "It is also customary for the DETECTIVE to explain how HE figured it out!" -- Steve Martin and Carl Reiner battle it out in DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID %% "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "It is fun being in the same decade with you." -- FDR to Winston Churchill, 1942 %% "It is good to see so many young faces in the crowd." -- Reinhold Messner %% "It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "It is hard to overstate the debt that we owe to men and women of genius." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "It is indeed a sad commentary when it's easier to send a person 500 years into the past than across town." -- Judah Macabee comments on Time-Travel in Cynosure %% "It is not enough to have crashed the system. You must also have Talent!" %% "It is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "The Poet" %% "It is not only [the juror's] right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgement, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." -- John Adams (1735-1826), 1771 %% "It is not possible to convey sarcasm to certain members of the net without using a 2x4. The smiley face merely reminds them of why their head is being dented." -- John Woods, jfw@eddie.mit.edu %% "It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful." -- Jean Jacques Rousseau %% "It is not uncommon in a Republican convention hall for delegates to gather in menacing clumps around the press gallery, shaking their fists and shouting imprecations. (When this happened in Dallas in 1984, some of us fantasized about picking up our friend Ben Wattenberg bodily and tossing him over the side into the angry crowd with a cry of "Get 'im! He's a Democrat!" Wattenberg would've had only a split second to convince the enraged delegates that while he may look like a Democrat, he actually supports the Contras, the Reagan Doctrine, Star Wars, etc. But Wattenberg is such a nice guy that we didn't have the heart.)" -- Hendrik Hertzberg %% "It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have." -- B. Earl Puckett, former President, Allied Stores %% "It is overdoing the thing to die of love." -- French proverb %% "It is tempting to take the easy political path ... to get peace at any price now, even though I know that a peace of humiliation for the United States would lead to a bigger war or surrender later." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, April 30, 1970 %% "It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating us in a stupid way." -- J. W. Nienhuys %% "It is the cunning of form to veil itself continually in the evidence of content. It is the cunning of the code to veil itself and to produce itself in the obviousness of value." -- Baudrillard %% "It is the sick oyster which possesses the pearl." -- J. A. Shedd "Salt From My Attic" %% "It is traditional to leave the notation ambiguous." %% "It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Skeptical Essays" %% "It is useless for sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while wolves remain of a different opinion." -- William Ralph Inge %% "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." -- John Andrew Holmes %% "It isn't easy being a fat narcissist." -- Jackie Gleason %% "It isn't spread by casual contact, you know." "Yeah, *I* know! Why did YOU pull back?" "People. I love 'em." -- Observations on humanity in CONCRETE %% "It just doesn't make any sense, Penfold!" "But our adventures NEVER make any sense, DM!" -- Dangermouse %% "It just goes to show what you can do if you're a total psychotic." -- Woody Allen %% "It looks like a baked potato". %% "It looks like a photon pod... but it's a verrry bad design." -- "Buckaroo Banzai" %% "It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose." -- Darrin Weinberg %% "It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him." -- Arthur C. Clarke %% "It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper %% "It only rains straight down. God doesn't do windows." -- Steven Wright %% "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." -- Salvor Hardin, in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" %% "It runs like _x, where _x is something unsavory" -- Prof. Romas Aleliunas, CS 435 %% "It saddens Norwegians that America still honors the Italian Columbus, who arrived late in the New World and by accident, who wasn't even interested in New Worlds but only in spices. Out on a spin in search of curry powder and hot peppers - a man on a voyage to the grocery - he stumbled onto the land of heroic Vikings and proceeded to get the credit for it. And then to name it 'America' after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian who never saw the New World but only sat in Italy and drew incredibly inaccurate maps of it. By rights, it should be called Erica, after Eric the Red, who did the work five hundred years earlier. The United States of Erica. Erica the Beautiful. The Erican League." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side." -- Frank Zappa %% "It says tigers nearly faced extinction and their future remains in doubt.... This explains why I don't meet many babes." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "It seems like once people grow up, they have no idea what's cool." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "It still brings to mind the question of what (if anything) can be done to show the media that 'cyberpunks' aren't just a bunch of pimple-faced geeks who sit around trying to break into bank computers or whatever." -- James Hartman (phaedrus@flatline.UUCP) But cyberpunks *are* a bunch of pimple-faced geeks who sit around trying to break into bank computers or whatever. Re-read "Neuromancer" and apply the inverse James Bond transformation to Case and his cohorts. They're all supposed to be totally out of shape, with their disdain for the "meat". -- Peter da Silva, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com %% "It suddenly occurs to me, Hong, that if THESE are American tourists, I would certainly hate to engage their military..." -- OK, when was the last time YOU invaded China? From THE SHADOW %% "It takes a smart man to know when he's stupid." -- Barney Rubble %% "It takes about 10 years to get used to how old you are." -- Raymond A. Michel %% "It takes all sorts of in & out-door schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling" -- Robert Frost %% "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give up because by that time I was too famous." -- Robert Benchly %% "It took no computation to dance to the rock 'n roll station." -- VU %% "It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus." -- Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, quoted in "The Technique," Georgia Tech's newspaper, after the computer worm hit the Internet %% "It used to be that death and taxes alone were inevitable. Now there's shipping and handling." -- Bert Murray, "The Wall Street Journal" %% "It was Hell", recalls former Child. %% "It was a KODAK moment, shot on FUJI film, printed on AGFA paper, done by 1-HOUR photo." -- Jeff Hargiss jdhargiss@orion.arc.nasa.gov %% "It was a mutual parting of the ways. We gave him the freedom to do what he wanted to do." "What was that?" "Drink himself to death." -- The Cowboy Wally Show %% "It was all very impressive, but the State of Arizona built an air-tight case..." "This woman does not own ONE Willie Nelson tape... OR album. NOT ONE!" -- From HONKEYTONK SUE %% "It was as bad as being up a creek in a barbed wire canoe." %% "It was hard to have a conversation with anyone, there were so many people talking." -- Yogi Berra %% "It was just dumb luck that Unix managed to break through the Stupidity Barrier and become popular in spite of its inherent elegance." -- gavin@krypton.sgi.com %% "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." -- U. S. Army Commander, Vietnam %% "It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top." -- Hunter S. Thompson %% "It was the dumbest thing I had ever seen, but it's a family thing, and I guess it's clean." -- Barbara Bush re: THE SIMPSONS %% "It was unintelligible at any speed we played it." -- A US Government report investigating possible bad words in "Louie Louie" %% "It wasn't lies. It was just bullshit, that's all." -- Elwood Blues %% "It were better to perish than to continue schoolmastering." -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% "It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgement, and conscience." -- John Adams (1735-1826) %% "It wouldn't be sporting to just run over them... Would it?" "Yes... Yes, it would!" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "It's ... it's a ... pretty big cliff, Will," I stammered. "Yes. Very big." -- John Long, Direct North Buttress, Middle Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley %% "It's Czechoslovakia, man! It's like going into Wisconsin!" -- Stripes %% "It's Jenny's brother, Butch! Boy, are we semi-glad to see you." -- Matt Feazall's send-up of ZOT! %% "It's Mayor McCheese." "Huh?? What kind of menace is Mayor McCheese?!" "Um... Okay. He has a machine gun." -- Woody tries to add some life to a role-playing game in ZOT! %% "It's OK to divide by zero, provided you don't cancel it." %% "It's OK to do the right thing... as long as you don't get caught." -- The Lone Contractor %% "It's Woody Allen's fault," he had said, squeezing his bottle of Rolling Rock as if it were a hand grip. "He had to go and ruin romantic love for all the rest of us for all time with his goddamn lobsters." -- Ann Beattie %% "It's a _real_ integer, not just any old integer." %% "It's a classic Pinzer maneuver; it can't fail against a bunch of ten-year-olds!" -- Herman in "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% "It's a dessert topping AND a floor wax!" -- Saturday Night Live %% "It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear." -- Norm from Cheers %% "It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times." -- Augustus McCrae %% "It's a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle %% "It's a great time to be alive and be a computer weenie." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he has and all he's ever gonna have." -- Will Munny, "Unforgiven" %% "It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." "Hit it." -- Jake and Elwood Blues, "The Blues Brothers" %% "It's a job for YOU, Dangermouse..." "Oh, *good* old DM!" "...AND Penfold." "Oh, 'eck." -- Dangermouse %% "It's a mistake to try to understand machines...they only worry me." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "It's a place that falls off maps." -- Frank Furrillo %% "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "It's a standard question, made a bit harder by adding some A-level stuff." %% "It's a summons." "What's a summons?" "It means summon's in trouble." -- Rocky and Bullwinkle %% "It's all absolutely devastatingly true, except the bits that are lies." -- Douglas Adams %% "It's all so painfully empty and lonesome... I don't think I can stand any more of it... the whole dreadful way we are born, die, and are never missed. The fact there is *nobody*... nobody really... We come out of a yawning tomb of flesh and sink back finally into another tomb. What is the point of it all? Who thought up this sickening circle of flesh and blood? We come into the world bleeding and cut and our bones half-crushed only to emerge and suffer more torment, mutilation, and then at the last lie down in some hole in the ground forever. Who could have thought it up, I wonder?" -- James Purdy %% "It's almost like having a fifth sense or something!" -- Homer in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "It's always the same," the girl sighed to her roommate after returning in the wee, small hours. "Afterward, I feel so compromised, so cheap, so soiled... so absolutely wonderful from head to toe!" %% "It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here, and I'm most obliged to you for making it clear that I'm not here" -- Syd Barrett %% "It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear." -- Freeman Dyson Freeman did indeed say that, but I'm probably the only person who was listening to him at the time. So, you won't find it written in any of his books. -- Russell Nelson, nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu %% "It's classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." -- Top Gun %% "It's curtains for you, Mighty Mouse! This gun is so futuristic that even *I* don't know how it works!" -- from Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse %% "It's early and it's getting earlier." %% "It's easier said than done." ... and if you don't believe it, try proving that it's easier done than said, and you'll see that "it's easier said that `it's easier done than said' than it is done", which really proves that "it's easier said than done". %% "It's great to be smart 'cause then you know stuff." -- LEAVE IT TO BEAVER %% "It's hard to argue with someone who knows what he's talking about." %% "It's just phenomenal. Mr. Wilson did upwards in 40,000 dollars in business over the weekend. Funny its all withdraws though." -- Marshall's Dad, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "It's just what we need... a colossal negative space wedgie of great power coming right at us at warp speed." -- Star Drek %% "It's like deja vu all over again." -- Yogi Berra %% "It's like pissing your pants to keep yourself warm." -- Disparaging Danish engineering proverb describing short-term solutions %% "It's like: `JESUS TOLD ME TO! NOW WHAT?'" -- Sam Kinison %% "It's mine! All mine!!!" -- Donald Duck %% "It's morally wrong to let a sucker keep his money." -- Canada Bill Jones %% "It's my cookie file and if I come up with something that's lame and I like it, it goes in." -- karl %% "It's my wife", explained the depressed man in the drug store, "she never makes any noise during our lovemaking. Can you help me"? "Have you ever thought of using ribbed condoms"?, asked the pharmacist, "here try these on for SIGHS". %% "It's no longer a blue world, Max. Where can we go?" "Argentina?" -- Yellow Submarine %% "It's no longer socially acceptable to talk about rape as a crime of passion, boys; it's like making jokes about black people and watermelons. Unless you're from the "barefoot and pregnant" school of social relations, you should have enough sensitivity to avoid discussing extremely unpleasant violent acts in a flippant manner in front of people who must live in fear of being potential victims, or who are likely acquaintances of actual ones. Jim Muller is of course an exception, because he's an artiste." -- Dave Touretzky %% "It's no sweat, Henry. Russ made it back to Bugtown before he died. So he'll regenerate in a couple of days. It's just awful sloppy of him to get killed in the first place. Humph!" -- Ron Post, Post Brothers Comics %% "It's no use, boys -- there's too many damn orphans! (Why can't teenagers be more careful?)" -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio, SENSELESS CRUELTY %% "It's not MY GODDAMN PLANET, Monkey Boy!" -- John BigBoote (Big-Boot-tay) in "Buckaroo Banzai" %% "It's not a trick, it's a joke." -- SONY TV commercial JTD " " -- Charles Chaplin for IBM. %% "It's not brain surgery. It's not nuclear physics. It's television. It's only television." -- Linda Ellerbee %% "It's not by amusing oneself that one learns." -- Anatole France (1844-1924) "It's only by amusing oneself that one can learn." -- Edward Kasner and James R. Newman %% "It's not enough knowing good from rotten..." "You're telling me." "When something new pops up every day." "You're telling me!" "It's only new, though, for now..." "Nouveau!" "But yesterday's forgotten..." "...and tomorrow is already passe!" "There's no surprise." "That is the state of the art, my friend! That is the state of the art!" -- Stephen Sondheim, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE %% "It's not just a computer -- it's your ass." -- Cal Keegan %% "It's not me I'm worried about... It's your mother... Pining away her twilight years..." "It's a terrible thing when a mother spends her old age in a pine tree." -- Cerebus %% "It's not necessarily the coldest woman that gets the fur coat." %% "It's not so hard to be married, When two maneuver as one; It's not so hard to be married, And, Jesus Christ, is it fun." -- Stephen Sondheim, COMPANY %% "It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% "It's obvious that what I've just written down is obvious." %% "It's odd that you can get so anesthetized to your own pain or your own problem that you don't quite fully share the hell of someone close to you." -- Lady Bird Johnson %% "It's only work if somebody makes you do it." -- Calvin %% "It's public knowledge that you dislike small animals and children, Luthor." -- Superman IV -- don't see it! %% "It's real handy, havin' an Elder God in the band, eh?" -- Savage Henry, Post Brothers comics %% "It's really difficult to sympathize with someone who can bounce bullets off his chest." -- Frank Miller %% "It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable." -- David Brin "The Postman" %% "It's so easy to laugh It's so easy to hate It takes strength to be gentle and kind" -- Morrissey %% "It's still a Police Box. Why hasn't it changed ? Dear dear dear - how very disturbing." -- Doctor Who - The Cave of Skulls, 1963 %% "It's ten o'clock... Do you know where your AI programs are? -- Peter Oakley %% "It's the Peterson kid dressed as an iguana!" -- "Bloom County" %% "It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah %% "It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss..." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% "It's tough to incriminate a bread mold." %% "It's true... I consume 47 times my own weight in fast-food burgers. They call me the human Rolaid." -- Baron and Badger %% "It's very hard for anything to make it out of Hollywood these days without a lame-ass wimpout ending tacked on at the whining request of test audiences selected from the most puerile of the Nielsen families, who are, as we all know, chosen on the basis of the number of cousin-cousin marriages in their family over the last ten generations." -- Nix Thompson (nix@sgi.com) %% "It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily married." -- Phyllis Schlafly %% "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." -- John Wooden %% "It's when they say 2 + 2 = 5 that I begin to argue." -- Eric Pepke %% "It's... Ghandi On Ice!" "I'm starving for attention, proclaiming my dissension..." -- From WHAT'S ALLAN WATCHING? %% "Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "Its tough to battle the forces of weirdness when you're under 18 and your parents can still boss you around" -- Marshall, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "J. D. Salinger... John Knowles... even James Kirkwood and that guy Don Bredes... they've destroyed being an adolescent,Garraty. If you're a sixteen-year-old boy, you can't discuss the pains of adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon." -- Richard Bachman (Stephen King) %% "JUST a statue! Is the Statue of Liberty JUST a statue? Is the Leaning Tower of 'pizza' JUST a statue?" -- Homer to Bart in "Tell-Tale Head" (Homer pronounced it as 'pizza' not 'Pisa'), from The Simpsons %% "Jack Putter... TO THE RESCUE!" -- Martin Short, adventurer, from the conclusion of INNER SPACE %% "Jane, you ignorant slut." -- Saturday Night Live %% "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." -- Patti Smith %% "Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine." %% "Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin." -- Michael O'Donohugh %% "Jesus saves sinners... and redeems them for valuable cash prizes!" -- John Wichers (wichers@husc4.HARVARD.EDU) %% "Jesus saves...but Gretzky gets the rebound!" -- Daniel Hinojosa (hinojosa@hp-sdd) %% "Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?" -- Airplane! %% "John gave me a message to give to you. Made me memorize it. `Thank you Sarah, for your courage during the dark years. I cannot help you now with what you must face except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will not exist. Message ends." %% "Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck." -- Robin Williams %% "Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "Judge Robert Bork, in an attempt to win sympathy from the American people after his unsuccessful attempts to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, walked into his back yard and fell down a 30-foot abandoned well. So far, no efforts have been made to get him out." -- Dennis Miller %% "Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins." -- Tom Stoppard %% "Just Say No." -- Nancy Reagan %% "Just Say No." -- Nancy Reagan "No." -- Ronald W. Reagan %% "Just add water, and Mr. Tea does the rest!" -- Fr. Guido Sarducci %% "Just because I'm not a real person doesn't mean I'm not a *good* person." "That's... that's beautiful, Fuzz. You want to host a telethon?" -- A Disney construct who can resemble anyone revels in his crimes in SONIC DISRUPTORS %% "Just because you understand what something should look like doesn't mean you know how to build it." -- karl@neosoft.com %% "Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple." "Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Just can't get enough... Just can't get enough... Just can't get enough..." -- "Zombies in P.J.s", Eerie Indiana %% "Just like I've always said; there's nothing an agnostic can't do if he's not sure he believes in anything or not!" -- Monty Python %% "Just out of curiosity does this actually mean something or have some of the few remaining bits of your brain just evaporated?" -- Patricia O Tuama, rissa@killer.DALLAS.TX.US %% "Just remember little paper boy - love's a heart breaker." -- Elvis, "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "Just remember, he knows more than you do!" "I have a Master's Degree!" "In SCIENCE!" -- Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre's Ask Mr. Science %% "Just remember, the stars are *very* far away... but that's good, because they're REALLY HOT!" -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio %% "Just remember: Abraham Lincoln didn't die in vain. He died in Washington, D.C." -- Firesign Theatre's HOW TO BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE %% "Just the facts, Ma'am" -- Joe Friday %% "Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Just think of a computer as hardware you can program." -- Nigel de la Tierre %% "Just think! With the push of a button, you could be a 500-story gastropod -- a slug the size of the Chrysler Building." "Gosh, how can I refuse?" "Well, if you don't like that, be something else! I don't care!" -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it." -- Ken Thompson, quoted by Dennis Ritchie %% "Just think, with VLSI we can have 100 ENIACS on a chip!" -- Alan J. Perlis %% "Just what the country needs -- more insurgent teams." -- From OUTLANDER %% "Just when you think you have a handle on how weird Eerie is during the day, the whole town does a bellyflop at night." -- Marshall, "Zombies in P.J.s", Eerie Indiana %% "Justice and solidarity feel good. In the end." -- A comment on the price of liberty. From AARGH! %% "Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom, Justice is what comes out of a courtroom." -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938) %% "Justice, like lightning, should ever appear To some men hope, to other men fear." -- Jefferson Pierce %% "Justice, like lightning, should ever appear To some people, hope, and to other ones, fear." -- A slightly changed version of Tony Isabella's opening lines to BLACK LIGHTNING %% "KILLER KITTY TEARS OLD WIDOW TO SHREDS" %% "Karen has her own i, and she is not going to let Frank put his data into it." -- F. D. Boswell Computer Science 240 %% "Kato, what is going on in that little yellow brain of yours?" -- Chief Inspector Clouseau, in reference to a priceless white Steinway piano. %% "Keep honking... I'm reloading." -- Mike Golden mgolden@cwis.unomaha.edu %% "Keep the wind in your solar sails..." -- Glenn Clapp %% "Keeping proprietary and confidential information secret is the key to moving the computer industry into the 21st century." -- Letter from Apple Computer and Rasterops to the Macintosh user community %% "Kid -- riding a buffalo is dangerous! Keep the change and buy yourself a gravity knife and some fireworks." -- Sound advice from THE BADGER %% "Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!" -- Looney Tunes, "What's Opera Doc?" (1957, Chuck Jones) %% "Kirk may be a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood, but he's not soft." -- Star Trek "Trouble With Tribbles" %% "Kitten: small homicidal muffin on legs; affects human sensibilities to the point of endowing the most wanton and ruthless acts of destruction with near-mythical overtones of cuteness. Not recommended for beginners. Get at least two." -- strata@psyche.mit.edu %% "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Babs' uvula." "Babs' uvula who?" "I don't know, Babs, but I do know this. Your uvula's on the fritz." "Gee, doc, I must have stupidly glossed right over my uvula!" -- Saturday Night Live %% "Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight." -- William Safire %% "Knowing when to optimize is as important as knowing how." -- Tom Neff %% "Knowing you, you're probably doing twice as much as is healthy for you." %% "Koko, will there be gnomes and dwarves for Lebee to wrestle with?" "Yes Mishu, and also trolls and mutants we may spar with!" -- Saturday Night Live %% "Krusty has small feet. Like all good-hearted people." -- Bart in "Krusty Gets Busted" %% "Krusty wore big, floppy shoes, but he's got little feet like all good-hearted people." -- Bart in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Krusty, I'm man enough to admit I was wrong and I'm sorry I fingered you in court. I sincerely hope that the horrible stories I heard about what goes on in prison are exaggerated." -- Homer in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "L'extension des privileges des femmes est le principe general de tous progres sociaux." -- Charles Fourier, 1808 %% "LONG LIVE THE GLORIOUS COCKROACH REBELLION AGAINST THE GREAT SUBURBAN BOURGEOIS OPPRESSOR SWINE-PIG!" "I HATE revolutionary jargon." "`Psychophallystisis.'" "Eat hot death, Steve." -- "Bloom County" %% "LOST: Male cat. Needs medication. Owner very worried, neutered and declawed." %% "La Musique est une science Qui veut qu'on rit et chant et danse." -- Machaut (1300-77) %% "Lab rats seem to have been bred for cancer hypersensitivity by the medical establishment and the FDA. We are the kings and the rats taste our food." -- James Salsman (jps@cat.cmu.edu) %% "Lacquered frog bands are no longer popular with America's influential trendsetters, Max. We'd be hosed." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "Ladies and Gentlemen, seldom can it have been a greater pleasure and privilege than it is for me now to announce that the next award gave me the great pleasure and privilege of asking a man without whose ceaseless energy and tireless skill the British Film Industry would be today." -- Monty Python %% "Ladies and gentlemen, the question you have to ask yourselves on November 8th is whose judgement do you trust? Do you trust the judgement of a man who traded arms to the Ayatollah and used that money to fund an illegal war in Central America, or do you trust a son of Greek immigrants, who can think and talk in complete sentences?" -- From the Bush-Dukakis debate satire on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE %% "Lady Aster, you are positively the ugliest woman alive." "Mr. Churchill, you are drunk." "True, but I'll be sober in the morning." %% "Lake Wobegon takes its name from an Indian phrase that means either 'Here we are!' or 'we sat all day in the rain waiting for you.'" -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "Lampshade Love" Oh Lampshade! How you soften light. Protecting my eyes from blinding light. You shift the light on this and that. At parties you double as a hat. Oh Lampshade! It's so clearly true, That I am devoted so much to you. -- Ravenous Tenebrosity %% "Language is fossil poetry." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "The Poet" %% "Largely because it is so tangible and exciting a program and as such will serve to keep alive the interest and enthusiasm of the whole spectrum of society...It is justified because...the program can give a sense of shared adventure and achievement to the society at large." -- Dr. Colin S. Pittendrigh, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" %% "Lascivious adulterer!" "Don't call me that again until I look it up! Ah, a lascivious adulterer is a man who is a lascivious adulterer! What kind of book is this?" -- Woody Allen, "What's New, Pussycat?" %% "Last night I fell asleep in a satellite dish. My dreams were broadcast all over the world." -- Steve Wright %% "Last night I watched the news and the end of the broadcast showed numerous changes favorable for the people (e.g., Rumania, Berlin Wall, etc.). My fiancee and I turned to each other and said ``No images from the US.''" -- Mike Shaff, shaff@elements.rpal.com %% "Last night the power went out. Good thing my camera had a flash.... The neighbors thought it was lightning in my house, so they called the cops." %% "Last night, I came home and realized that everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact duplicate. I told this to my friend -- he said, `Do I know you?'" -- Steven Wright %% "Last night," said a lassie named Ruth, "In a long-distance telephone booth, I enjoyed the perfection Of an ideal connection -- I was screwed, if you must know the truth." %% "Last week I forgot how to ride a bicycle." -- Steven Wright %% "Last year they got food poisoning. This year they got Bill Gates." -- MacWeek on the NAUG meeting %% "Last year we drove across the country... We switched on the driving... every half mile... We had one cassette tape to listen to on the entire trip........... I don't remember what it was..." -- Stephen Wright %% "Late that night, something really creepy-mondo-weird was happening at my house." -- Marshall, "The Dead Letter", Eerie Indiana %% "Later grizzly dudes!" -- Bart in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "Laugh while you can, monkey-boy." -- Dr. Emilio Lizardo, "Buckaroo Banzai" %% "Laundry increases exponentially in the number of children." -- Miriam Robbins %% "Law may be defined as ethical control applied to communication." %% "Laws are made for us; we are not made for the laws." -- William Milonoff, 1993 Vice-President of the Executive Committee, Free Democratic Party, Russia %% "Laws don't work, unless they merely codify generally accepted behavior, in which case they are probably unnecessary." -- tom@genie.slhs.udel.edu %% "Lawyers are like nuclear bombs and PClones. Nobody likes them, but the other guy's got one, so I better get one too." %% "Lead us in a few words of silent prayer." -- Bill Peterson, former Houston Oiler football coach %% "Leaders of underdeveloped nations, spurning 'capitalism', boast of special brands of 'Socialism'. Leopold Senghor of Senegal says 'Socialism is a sense of community which is a return to Africanism.' Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika insists 'no underdeveloped country can afford to be anything but Socialist.' Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba claims Mohammed's companions 'were Socialists before the invention of the word.' And Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk contends 'our Socialism is first and foremost an application of Buddhism.'" The above is true, totally true, true all the way down to the deepest philosophical, psychological, political, and moral fundamentals. And this is the most damning indictment of socialism that a rational person could need to see. Socialism is a regression to primitive barbarism. But that is not the appraisal or the conclusion of the USIA report. It is to the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals ... -- to the under-developed, the undeveloped and the not-to-be-developed cultures -- that the Capitalist USA is asked to apologize for her skyscrapers, her automobiles, her plumbing, and her smiling, confident, untortured, un-skinned-alive, un-eaten young men! -- Ayn Rand %% "Lean too much on the approval of people, and it becomes a bed of thorns." -- Tehyi Hsieh %% "Learn Yourself English." -- Title of a textbook published in India %% "Learned more from a three minute bug fix than we ever did in school." -- Bruce Springsteen %% "Leave her alone, you BITCH!" %% "Leaving a trail of slime wherev-" >CLICK!< -- "Bloom County" %% "Lenin probably wouldn't understand. But then, no one around he seems to care what he would think." -- Lynn Ashby's report on Romania %% "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -- Igor Stravinsky %% "Let every man teach his son, teach his daughter, that labor is honorable." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "Let me control a planet's oxygen supply, and I don't care who makes the laws." -- Great Cthuhlu's Starry Wisdom Band (via Roger Leroux) %% "Let me guess, Ed. Pentecostal, right?" -- Starcap'n Ra, ra@asuvax.asu.edu "Nope. Charismatic (I think - I've given up on what all those pesky labels mean)." -- Ed Carp, erc@unisec.usi.com "Same difference - all zeal and feel, averaging less than one working brain cell per congregation. Starcap'n Ra, you pegged him. Good work!" -- Kenn Barry, barry@eos.UUCP %% "Let me help." A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those three words even over "I love you." -- Kirk, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate unknown %% "Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its bill of rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), about the Scopes Monkey Trial %% "Let the evil minds of the world beware! Ever and always shall the Avengers prevail!" -- Thor %% "Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them." -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage -- and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed...." -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) (from his Inaugural Address) %% "Let us condemn to hellfire all those who disagree with us." -- militant religionists everywhere %% "Let us go forth not as defenders of the status quo, but as crusaders with a revolution idea - that government should be the servant and not the master of the people; that its purpose is to protect, not deny, each man's freedom; that the purpose of a free press is to liberate, not enslave the human spirit." -- From the speech made by A. S. Hills upon taking office as President of the Inter-American Press Association %% "Let us see," the blind man said. %% "Let us toast the fools; but for them the rest of us could not succeed." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Let's assume the semester's over, so dying is a bad thing." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Let's blast the Holy Bejeezus out of the savage desert planet LIBYA!... "Instant gratification: the stuff of leadership." -- "Bloom County" %% "Let's get married," said Tom engagingly. %% "Let's give discredit where discredit is due." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "Let's go! If I'm not back at The Home by nine, they declare me legally dead and collect my insurance!" -- The Simpsons %% "Let's have some new cliches." -- Samuel Goldwyn, when told a script was full of old cliches %% "Let's make ethanol green this afternoon." -- R. Friesen Chemistry 124 %% "Let's not be too tough on our own ignorance. It's the thing that makes America great. If America weren't incomparably ignorant, how could we have tolerated the last eight years?" -- Frank Zappa, Feb 1, 1989 %% "Let's see who's up the creek without an overthruster NOW, Space Cadet!" %% "Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown!" -- The Ghostbusters %% "Let's spin the big wheel and see what year we land on today, Dave." %% "Let's throw this Jailbird down the elevator shaft!" Said Tom, condescendingly. %% "Lets visit the tomb," said Tom cryptically. %% "Liberty is the mother not the daughter of order." -- Proudhon %% "Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others." -- William Allen White %% "Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood. Blood debts must be repaid in kind. The longer the delay, the greater the interest." -- Chinese author Lu Xun, 1926 %% "Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television." -- Cal Keegan %% "Life in a free society is friendly, prosperous, pleasant, cultured, and ever-longer." -- Jeff Daiell, 1989, in contrapoint to Hobbes %% "Life is a five-part miniseries, and I have somehow already missed parts one through four." -- "Cathy" %% "Life is a garment we continuously alter, but which never seems to fit." -- David McCord %% "Life is a pinball machine. You bounce around for a while, and then you drain." -- Joe Bak %% "Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it." -- Alice Walker %% "Life is full of surprises when you're up th' stream of consciousness without a paddle..." -- Zippy the Pinhead %% "Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% "Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something." -- "The Princess Bride" %% "Life is wasted on the living." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", by Douglas Adams %% "Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all...." -- Thomas J. Kopp %% "Life sucks, but it's better than the alternative." -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% "Life's a Cabaret... Long, dull, and full of Nazis." -- Howard The Duck %% "Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters." -- Ross Presser %% "Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words." -- Calvin, "Calvin and Hobbes" %% "Life's too short for chess." -- H. J. Byron, "Our Boys", Act I %% "Life's too short, and so are you!" -- Hooper %% "Life...loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." -- Marvin, the Paranoid Android Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Like all reputable surgeons, I charge by the pound..." -- Ernie %% "Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life." -- Lord Byron %% "Limbo Slam": Large shot glass filled with 2 parts 7-UP and 1 part clear rum. Drink it like a Tequila popper - cover the glass with your hand, slam it on a towel-covered table top and drink it before the fizz dies out. %% "Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette, and it did not sway in the wind." -- "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison %% "Lines that are parallel meet at Infinity!" Euclid repeatedly, heatedly, urged. Until he died, and so reached that vicinity: in it he found that the damned things diverged. -- Piet Hein %% "Lipton....The place where they make all that tea?" %% "Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with. It doesn't know pity, or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead..." %% "Listen! Do you smell something?" %% "Listen, Kalina, I can either be Johnny Nemo or I can be careful -- I can't be both!" -- That fearless Private Dick of the future, Johnny Nemo, from JONNY NEMO %% "Listen, how about if you hit me instead, and then my niece can finally see how two grown men can fit into an aspirin bottle." -- Maggie's Aunt (the wrestler) with some advice for the youth of America %% "Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!" "Be quiet!" "You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!" "Shut up!" "I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!" -- Monty Python "Holy Grail" %% "Lithium is no longer available on credit." -- "Buckaroo Banzai" %% "Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets." -- Yogi Berra %% "Little else matters than to write good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "Little mouse tensored with piece of cheese." "The prime leaps on to the other factor in a most convenient fashion." "You can hardly underestimate the importance of this." %% "Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "Live For The Moment" Looking back at yesterday Full of regrets, guilt, what ifs Looking ahead to tomorrow Full of hopes, plans, and dreams Exhausting all of our energies On things we can not change Wanting to change those yet to come Slow down, take a look around For we aren't what we used to be And aren't what we hope to be Only one thing remains sure We are what we are here and now Since we can't change yesterday We can learn from it Grow stronger, wiser in our ways To help make today a better place to live Fill it with love, happiness, giving, caring, and sharing Building strength for the day to come Looking ahead we build our hopes Plan our dreams and seek to find The things we missed in days gone by Somehow, it seems, again we exhaust our energies Nature takes her course, regardless of our plans Thus in the end, filled with despair, disappointment, disillusion Slow down, take a look around For we aren't what we used to be And we aren't what we hope to be Enjoy today, here and now Bask in the beauty which surrounds you Life is so precious, time slipping away Don't live for yesterday or tomorrow Live for the moment, live for today... %% "Live free or WISH you had" -- Gail L. Grant grant@pa.dec.com %% "Live or die, I'll make a million." -- Reebus Kneebus, before his jump to the center of the earth, Firesign Theater %% "Living without hallucinations is like breathing with only one nostril." -- Wisdom from a dying Weisshaupt in CEREBUS %% "Llamas are larger than frogs." -- Monty Python %% "Lobbyists threatening to withhold campaign contributions from lawmakers who don't support their special-interest causes could be violating bribery laws, Colorado House Speaker Bev Bledsoe warned yesterday." -- The Denver Post, 3 May 1990, p. 1B %% "Logic is a tweeting bird, chirping in your ear. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell _bad_." -- Star Trek "I, Mudd" %% "Long live the ideals of Marxism-Lennonism! May the thoughts of Groucho and John guide us in word, thought, and deed!" %% "Look at him! Just *look* at him! What's he doing?" "Scratching his head." "...with his foot. I quit!" -- ... and Opus looks at wrestling. "Bloom County" %% "Look at me, Ma! I'm on top of the world!" -- James Cagney ("White Heat") %% "Look at that! It's AMAZING!" "You're right! How does he manage to speak and blow the pipe at the SAME TIME?!" -- And DC continuity is wrecked again in BLUE DEVIL %% "Look at them yo-yo's, that's the way ya do it Ya go to grad school, get your PhD" %% "Look at this [dollar bill], for those of you who haven't seen [one] before." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Look at those newborn kittens," said Tom literally. %% "Look for the ridiculous in everything and you find it." -- Jules Renard %% "Look lady, we've seen the crappy little elves!" -- Bart in the babysitter episode "Some Enchanted Evening?", from The Simpsons %% "Look ma! Three arms!" -- J. Eric Townsend (erict@flatline.UUCP) %% "Look up, speak nicely, and don't twiddle your fingers all the time." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "Look! It's trying to think!" -- Twin Peaks %% "Look! Sunglasses! EXACTLY like the ones worn by the American Don Johnson!" -- Several Chinese Army guards find evidence in THE SHADOW %% "Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai %% "Look, if anyone else pinches my phrase, I'll throw them under a camel!" -- Monty Python %% "Look, it's Mister *E*!" "I pity the fool who picks on my group of ethnically-mixed friends." -- From THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MIGHTY MOUSE %% "Look, there's somethin movin here and it aint us!" -- Hudson %% "Look, we're travelling faster than the speed of light. That means, by the time we see something, we've already passed through it. Even with an IQ of 6000, it's still brown trousers time." -- Holly %% "Look....up in the sky...it's a bird...it's a plane...it's a frog!" "A frog?" "Not bird nor plane nor even frog, just little old me, Underdog!" %% "Looking for me?" The mocking voice echoed around the Market Square of Nottingham. Gisbon cursed - the figure in Lincoln green was already outside the castle. Bellowing an order, he sent the Norman troops charging out of the gate, plunging into screaming, bellowing, clucking chaos. Behind him, the now-solitary guard on the dungeon gate choked unnoticed in the huge grasp of Little John, the Hood's chief enforcer. Soon the two below would have their heads clashed together and John would free Scarlett the Swordmaster, Alan-a-dale the Musicmaster, Marion the Seductress and Nasir the Poisoner. Once more the cream of the Assassin's Guild had escaped the Sheriff's justice... %% "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!" -- Lloyd Bridges from AIRPLANE! %% "Looks like she's having her monthly visit by 'Mr. Cranky'." -- Dan Fielding %% "Looks like this ain't our mummy. See? Out-of-state plates." -- The "Mummy Daddy" episode of Amazing Stories %% "Looks like we're in for sleet tonite," Tom said icily. %% "Looky hyar, boys!" "Golden bullets!" "Hoo-hah!" "This man is the LONE STRANGER!" -- From the classic Kurtzman/Davis MAD parody of the Lone Ranger %% "Lord Hermes, is it true you can conjure up *anything*?" "Yes." "Awesome! Do y'know what a video entertainment center is?" -- Yes, having an Olympian God around the house is handy. WONDER WOMAN %% "Lord help me, I'm just not that bright." -- Homer in "Some Enchanted Evening", from The Simpsons %% "Lord, defend me from my friends; I can account for my enemies." -- D'Hericault %% "Lost baby found alive in pumpkin!" %% "Lots of people became extremely rich. But this was perfectly natural and nothing to get upset about, as no one was really poor - at least, no one worth mentioning." -- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Lotto fever hit New York again this week, and like the old saying goes, `You gotta be in it to win it... but first, you gotta have a dead-end job so pathetic you're willing to kill five hours standing in line for a 1 in 25 million chance.'" -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "Love and do what you will." -- St. Augustine %% "Love is DEAD." "How depressing." -- Creator %% "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." -- Matt Groening %% "Love is always having to say I'm sorry." -- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com) %% "Love is never what we looked for and always takes us by surprise: it's the rock on Coyote's head in the middle of the Road Runner chase. It's not the pain of love Coyote minds, it's the *futility* of his inventions in the face of his fate." -- Ian Shoales, Social Critic and Bitter Loudmouth %% "Love is when two people who care about each other get confused." -- Bob Schneider %% "Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail." -- A Kurt Vonnegut fan %% "Love your country but never trust its government." -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania %% "Love... is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." -- Iris Murdoch %% "Low-tech is a lot more effective than low-cal." %% "Lucille has messed my mind up,.. but I STILL love her.." -- Frank Zappa, "Joes Garage" %% "Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser." -- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew" %% "Luke, it sure is a bad moment when you decide to sell out. But a worse moment, the worst moment in the world is when you decide to sell out and nobody's buying." -- from "Bug Jack Barron" by Norman Spinrad %% "Luke... Luke... Use the MOUSE, Luke" -- Obi Wan Gates %% "Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!" -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Innocents Abroad" %% "Lying lips are abomination to the Lord; but they that deal truly are his delight. A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger. He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him. Be not a witness against thy neighbor without cause; and deceive not with thy lips. Death and life are in the power of the tongue." -- Proverbs, some selections from the Jewish Scripture %% "MR. DeGUZMAN, YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!" "That's Harris. DeGuzman is math." "BAH! They're ALL scoundrels..." -- Zack, looking desperately for evil, from ZOT! %% "MS-DOS isn't dead, it just smells that way." -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% "MTV. An obedient tongue licking the shiny leather boot of rock and roll." -- MTV commercial %% "MY SENSORS INDICATE TRACE AMOUNTS OF CHOCOLATE IN THE PANTRY. PLEASE LOAD SOME IN MY SCOOP FOR ANALYSIS." "No, you'll spoil your appetite." "MY MISSION MUST NOT FAIL. PREPARE FOR ANNIHILATION, PITIFUL EARTH FEMALE." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "Macaulay is well for a while, but one wouldn't LIVE under Niagara." -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% "Maid's night off," said Tom helplessly. %% "Maintain an awareness for contribution -- to your schedule, your project, our company." -- A Group of Employees %% "Major bizarro." -- Marshall, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "Make it make it make it make it. It's good!! IT'S GOOD!!" -- Homer in "Tell-Tale Head", from The Simpsons %% "Make yourself necessary to someone." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Conduct of Life" %% "Making it up? Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it." -- Marvin, the Paranoid Android Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Mamma, don't let your babies grow up to be hackers." -- Willie Nelson, with a little help from Bill Mathews %% "Man Charged in Battery Case" I guess you could call this a "current event". %% "Man does not live by bug fixes alone." -- The Super-User %% "Man has got astray out of his orbit, or away from the ends for which he was created." -- John Muir %% "Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile." -- Albert Schweitzer %% "Man is more an ape than many of the apes." %% "Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "Man possesses limited intelligence, but alas, unlimited stupidity." %% "Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." -- Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television. %% "Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on..." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "Man, an animal that makes bargains." -- Adam Smith (1723-1790) %% "Man, do I look like a cigarette butt?" "huh?" "Cause I sure feel smoked!" -- D Jagoda %% "Managing senior programmers is like herding cats." -- Dave Platt %% "Many are the wonders of the Universe, and none so wonderful as Mankind!" -- Sophocles %% "Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "Many people have senseless attachments to heavy, clumsy things such as this 'Homer' of yours." -- Jacques in "Jacques to be Wild", from The Simpsons %% "Many people in this country are becoming increasingly worried about bullfighting. They say it's not only cruel, vicious, and immoral, but also blatantly unfair. The bull is heavy, violent, abusive, and aggressive, with four legs and great sharp teeth, whereas the bullfighter is only a small, greasy Spaniard." -- Monty Python %% "Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then, do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement." -- J. R. R. Tolkien %% "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Marriage is a triumph of habit over hate." -- Oscar Levant, "The Portable Curmudgeon" %% "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out." -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% "Marriage is low down, but you spend the rest of your life paying for it." -- Baskins %% "Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Marriage" %% "Marriage is the death of hope." -- Woody Allen, "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" %% "Marsha? MARSHA! ...slooowwwwly I turned, inch by inch, step by step..." %% "Marshall, it was the biggest, hugest raccoon you ever saw - enormous" -- Syndi, "Mr Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% "Master of the emotional belly flop." -- Doonesbury %% "Master, why is the letter 'i' the symbol for current?" "Because there is no letter 'i' in the word 'current'." "Master, why do we use the letter 'j' for sqrt(-1)?" "Because we use the letter 'i' for current." Whereupon the Master struck the Disciple, and the Disciple became enlightened. %% "Mate, this parrot wouldn't VOOM if you put four million volts through it!" -- Monty Python %% "Mathematicians are the least expensive researchers to support. All they need is pencils, paper, and a wastebasket -- and when they turn philosopher, they don't even need the wastebasket!" %% "Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulder, Computer Scientists stand on each other's toes." -- someone on the net (please email attribution), about look&feel lawsuits %% "Mathematics can overcome no prejudice, it can soften no stubbornness, it can moderate no partisan spirit; there is nothing moral it can accomplish." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% "Max, did you order a talking monkey for this set?" "No, that's just a friend of the family." -- Alternate Earth videos, from ZOT! %% "Max, that bathing suit you're wearing makes my flesh crawl! And where did you get sunglasses to fit your bizarrely-spaced eyeballs?" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "May I see you pretty soon?" "Don't you think I'm pretty now?" %% "May I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no cannibalism in the British Navy. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit." -- Monty Python %% "May I take your trident, sir?" -- Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels %% "May the Lord open your eyes and heart so that you may understand him more clearer." -- Patrick Harubin, pgh@cs.duke.edu, soc.religion.islam %% "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin %% "May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe %% "Maybe Lisa's right about America being the land of opportunity and may Adil has a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers." -- Homer in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% "Maybe life is a grindstone; whether it polishes you or wears you down depends on what you're made of." -- Kay Fletcher %% "Maybe there is not one damn villain in the world..." -- The Question %% "Maybe they don't show up on infra red at all.......AAEEEEAAAAAIAIAG" -- Dietrich %% "Maybe we should think of this as one perfect week... where we found each other, and loved each other... and then let each other go before anyone had to seek professional help." %% "Maybe you were right... maybe I don't belong here." "Yeah, well, *I* do! YOU showed me that." -- A truly moving sequence from ZOT! %% "Mayor of Kiev Declares May Indoor Sports Month" -- Pravda %% "Me and my partner Ed have been looking into the stress caused by phone answering machines and we find that it is much easier to tolerate those stupid messages if you have a Bartles and Jaymes Premium White Wine Cooler. So instead of getting mad and slamming down the phone, take a drink and leave a message. Thank you for your support." %% "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa; yeah, right. To paraphrase, the net finds its own uses for garbage." -- Eric Hughes (hughes@math.berkeley.edu) %% "Meanwhile, let it be clear what we do: we fight contraception-sterilization- abortion on six continents..." -- Fr. Paul Marx, President, Human Life International, in his brochure, Human Life International Explained, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Meanwhile... the Carrot is using his keen but unorthodox crimefighting techniques..." "Are you a gangster?" -- FLAMING CARROT %% "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Sherlock Holmes: The Valley of Fear", 1914 %% "Meditation in E minor" The skin tipping my fingers Growing hard, calloused and dry My mood growing soft and malleable Time passing -- fret to fret to slide to bar to strum to hammer on to hammer off -- A moving meditation To a prancing rhythmic mantra Introspection emerging through a change in chord Knowing naked coiled steel cables Burrowing furrows into my flesh and Blood of the Guitarists' Stigmata flowing Symbolizing a commitment to myself Harmonizing my pastlife Present tense existing only As the humming of vibrating strings And the clacking of a worn yellow pick %% "Meet me in the bedroom in five minutes... and bring a cattle prod!" -- Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily" %% "Meiguanxi ye meibanfa" %% "Mejor morir a pie que vivir en rodillas." (Better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees.) -- Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) (1895-?) %% "Memory serves wise commanders." -- Tz'u-hsi, 638 AD %% "Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the options." -- Abba Eban %% "Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "New England Reformers" %% "Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% "Men stare at those parts of the female anatomy which carry the subcutaneous fat necessary for childbearing and lactation. This is not news." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." -- Denis Diderot in "Dithrambe sur la fete de rois" %% "Mention Jerry Garcia and I'll puke on your shoes." -- A ha-ha from BILLY NGUYEN %% "Merry Christmas, scumwad." -- Norm Buntz's jolly wish to Belker's assailant on HILL STREET BLUES %% "Michelle" is a nice name. Let's call her Michelle. %% "Mickey Mouse to a three-year-old is a six-foot-tall RAT!" -- Robin Williams %% "Mind you, I can't say much for the volume's condition. I mean, there's a hole in the jacket and the spine appears to be damaged." -- The Killing Joke %% "Mind you, not as bad as the night Archie Pettigrew ate some sheep's testicles for a bet...God, that bloody sheep kicked him..." -- Monty Python "Ripping Yarns" %% "Mind your manners, son! I've got a tall pointy hat!" -- Elrod from CEREBUS %% "Mine! Mine! It's all mine!" -- D. Duck %% "Mir" means "peace", as in "the war is over; we've won". -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% "Miss Simpson, I hope we won't have a repeat of yesterday's outburst of unbridled creativity." -- Principal Skinner in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "Mistakes were made." -- Life in Hell %% "Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." (Against stupidity the very gods fight in vain.) -- Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) %% "Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue" -- Oliver North [...so support Ollie's philosophy, and send him to the slammer...] %% "Mom, this isn't 'Happy Days'. Could we have a little privacy." -- Marshall (with Melanie in the attic), "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "Mommy, Mommy! What are vampires?" "Shutup, kid, and eat your soup before it clots!" %% "Mommy, Mommy! Can we play in the sandbox?" "Not until we find a better place to bury your grandmother!" %% "Mommy, Mommy! Daddy's on fire!" "Quick get the marshmallows!" %% "Mommy, Mommy! I HATE spaghetti!" "Shutup or I'll tear the veins out of your other arm!" %% "Mommy, Mommy! I don't WANT to visit grandpa!" "Shutup and keep digging!" %% "Mommy, Mommy! I don't want to go to Europe for vacation!" "Shutup and keep swimming!" %% "Mommy, Mommy! What happened to the scabs on you arms?" "Shutup and eat your cornflakes!" %% "Mommy, Mommy, I keep going in circles." "Shutup, you little brat, or I'll nail your other foot to the floor!" %% "Mommy, Mommy, What's a werewolf?" "Shut up and comb your face." %% "Mommy, Mommy, are you sure this is the way to make pizza?" "Shutup and get back into the oven." %% "Mommy, Mommy, what happened to the baby's legs?" "Shutup and eat your drumstticks." %% "Mommy, mommy, Billy threw up!" "So what?" "Jimmy's getting all the big pieces!" %% "Mommy, mommy, I don't like grandma!" "It's OK, son, you just eat your potatoes." %% "Mommy, mommy, I don't like tomato soup." "Shut up, kid, and eat it before it clots." %% "Mommy, mommy, I hate daddy's guts." "Shut up, kid, and eat what's on your plate." %% "Mommy, mommy, I haven't finished playing with grandpa!" "Shutup and put the bones back in the drawer!" %% "Mommy, mommy, can I go out and play?" "Shut up, drink your beer, and deal!" %% "Mommy, mommy, can I lick the bowl?" "Too late, kid, I already flushed it." %% "Mommy, mommy, father hung himself in the bathroom." mommy runs there, finds that nobody is hanging there and yells at the kid. he says, "April fool, he is hanging in the cellar." %% "Mommy, mommy, these potato chips are stale." "Have some respect, kid. It took me a long time to peel those scabs off." %% "Mommy, mommy, where's England?" "Shut up and start rowing!" %% "Mommy, mommy, where's Ethiopia?" "Shut up, kid, and get inside the care package." %% "Mommy, mommy, why is daddy running?" "Shut up, kid, and hand me another box of shotgun shells." %% "Mommy,mommy,the boys at school laugh at me and say that I have long teeth." "Shut up, you're making scratches in the floor!" %% "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 (1835-1910), "The Mysterious Stranger" %% "Money doesn't talk, it swears." -- Bob Dylan %% "Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes." -- Louisa May Alcott %% "Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger %% "Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations" -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "Mongo only pawn... in game of life." -- Alex Karras in "Blazing Saddles" %% "Monks in their cowls shall be forced into marriage and their lamentation will be heard on the mountain-peaks." -- The Prophecies of Merlin, Geoffrey of Monmouth %% "Monorail One, you are cleared for hotel dispatch." %% "Morality is one thing. Ratings are everything." -- A Network 23 executive on "Max Headroom" %% "More input! More input!" %% "More pie, Admiral?" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" %% "Morphology is part science and part 'Ipse Dixit.' " %% "Most divorces are just a four-year-long date with a little bookkeeping." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% "Most likely all that gold was stolen from this vault." %% "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 %% "Most of us can forgive and forget; we just don't want the other person to forget that we forgave." -- Ivern Ball, "National Enquirer" %% "Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards." -- Soren F. Petersen %% "Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch." -- Robert Orben %% "Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?" -- Edward G. Robinson ("Little Caesar") %% "Move over, Rover, and let Jimi take over." %% "Movement!" -- Hudson %% "Mr. Canal, stop this instant! I must ask that you refrain from knife-fighting in the White House!" -- Saturday Night Live %% "Mr. Johnson, you smell!" "No madam, you smell, I stink." -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% "Mr. Ness! I do not approve of your methods." "Yeah? Well, you're not from Chicago." -- THE UNTOUCHABLES %% "Mr. Nguyen, I'm dead, not stupid." -- A wise zombie from BILLY NGUYEN %% "Mr. Notlob, there's nothing wrong with you that an expensive operation can't prolong!" -- Monty Python %% "Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?" %% "Mr. President Clinton, can you name one country that has ever taxed and spent its way into prosperity?" -- Loren Fleming of San Diego Call 1-800-682-1776 for information about the Libertarian Party, the Party of Choice. %% "Mr. President, you'd better put more security agents on Mrs. Clinton. if something happened to her you might have to run the country" -- Senator Strom Thurmond %% "Mr. Radford - something mondo-bizarro is goin' on here." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Mr. Simpson, was that you taking that cowardly dive into that display of heavily salted snack treats?" -- lawyer from "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Mr. Spock doesn't say, 'Let's blast their buns off.'" %% "Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and nearly kills Captain Kirk." -- TV Guide, describing the Star Trek episode "Amok Time" %% "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." -- Alexander Graham Bell %% "Mr. Wilson told me he gets the money from a big slurpy fund, like all the government guys." -- Simon, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365. He [ten-year-old Truman Henry Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,255!" An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be as much fun to watch. -- James R. Newman (The World of Mathematics) %% "Murphy, I'm a mess!" "That's OK. They'll fix you. They fix everything." -- Robocop %% "Mushy mushy mushy." -- Barney Miller %% "My God! Are we sure he was a liberal?" "Pretty sure. They pulled him from a Volvo." -- Doonesbury %% "My God!" screamed devout Mrs. Pike, As she fondled her stableman's spike. "This is quite out of place, And a great loss of facee -- But I think I have fallen in like!" %% "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch? Next April?" -- L. Mulloy %% "My Lord, my Lord! What hast thou done, lately?" -- Woody Allen %% "My advice to you is that you start drinking heavily." -- Bluto in ANIMAL HOUSE %% "My brain is very important to me. That's why I'm super careful about what I put into the little laboratory on my neck." -- Marshall, "Zombies in PJs", Eerie Indiana %% "My cigarette smoke mixed with the smoke of my .38. If business was as good as my aim, I'd be on Easy Street. Instead, I've got an office on 49th Street and a nasty relationship with a string of collection agents. "Yeah, that's me, Tracer Bullet. I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop, and I pack a revolver. I'm a private eye. "Suddenly my door swung open, and in walked trouble. Brunette, as usual." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% "My daddy can do math without a calculator!" "Wow! All my dad does is run the country... shucks" %% "My experiment was a success," the chemist retorted. %% "My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too." -- Peter De Vries %% "My father peddles opium, My mother's on the dole. My sister used to walk the streets But now she's on parole. My uncle plays with little girls; My aunt, she raped a steer, But they won't even speak to me 'cause I'm an engineer." -- The MIT Engineers' Drinking Song %% "My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "My father? My father left when I was quite young. Well actually, he was asked to leave. He had trouble metabolizing alcohol." -- George Carlin %% "My friend Winnie is a procrastinator. He didn't get his birthmark till he was eight years old." -- Steve Wright %% "My friend has a baby. I'm writing down all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant." -- Steve Wright %% "My friends, it is better to look good than to feel good." -- Fernando (Billy Crystal) on SNL %% "My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all." -- Stephen Hawking %% "My head is bloodied, but unbowed." -- From the poem "Invictus" %% "My heart belongs to you - Devon Wilde, esquire." -- Melanie reads Devon's card, "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "My house is made out of balsa wood. When no one is home across the street, except the little kids, I go out and lift my house up over my head. I tell them to stay out of my yard or I'll throw it at them." -- Steve Wright %% "My husband commits an inconceivable act of perversion with a barnyard animal, and it's not central to my case?!" "Not in California." -- Arnie Becker discusses marital infidelities on L.A. LAW %% "My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot." -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "My life is a soap opera, but who has the rights?" -- MadameX %% "My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music." -- Vladimir Nabokov %% "My motto is: love like a poet, pray like a lawyer." -- Joe Kogel %% "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." -- "The Princess Bride" %% "My name is Inigo P. Fudd. You killed my millionaire. Prepare to own a mansion und a yacht." %% "My name is Marshall Teller, and I've learned an important lesson about Reality. In this life you can either follow the script they give you, or demand a rewrite. Here in Eerie, Indiana, _Weirdness Central USA_, you've gotta be ready to improvise." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "My name is Reese. Sergeant tech-comm, DN38416, assigned to protect you. You've been targeted for termination" %% "My neck's so sore I can't turn my head," he said stiffly. %% "My next storyline has the Punisher going after the Attorney General. This should be good." -- Mike Baron %% "My nipples explode with delight!" -- Monty Python %% "My notion of a wife at 40 is that a man should be able to change her, like a bank note, for two twenties." -- Warren Beatty %% "My only books Were woman's looks, And folly's all they've taught me." -- Thomas Moore, "The Time I've Lost" %% "My opinions are my own ... as is my spelling." -- michael j zehr %% "My own life has been spent chronicling the rise and fall of human systems, and I am convinced that we are terribly vulnerable.... We should be reluctant to turn back upon the frontier of this epoch. Space is indifferent to what we do; it has no feeling, no design, no interest in whether or not we grapple with it. But we cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand, slow march of intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities." -- James A. Michener %% "My past is my own." -- The Shadow (DC Comics) %% "My philosophy, like color TV, is all there in black and white." %% "My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure." %% "My purpose in life is to slam a stapler against the forehead of American pop culture." -- Weird Al Yankovic %% "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 %% "My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating." -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "My stars, it's full of G-d!!!" %% "My stereo's half fixed," said Tom monotonously. %% "My vision is not that good without eyes." %% "My wife and children are liabilities, and I haven't sold them, have I?" -- Ted Turner %% "NASA Announces New Deck Chair Arrangement For Space Station Titanic." -- Tom Neff %% "NASA Awards Acronym Generation System (AGS) Contract For Space Station Freedom" -- Tom Neff %% "NEW ELVIS UFO DIET CURES CANCER" %% "NO VAX TO GRIND" - A put-down administered to those without a dial-up line., and hence no access to the VAX, as in "Infidel! Let that terminal alone! You have no VAX to grind!" %% "NOW how much would you pay? But wait, there's less! Order now, and we'll include the amazing $17,000 coffee pot! It boils, it boils... it even boils!" -- Harry Shearer on Saturday Night Live %% "NT IS UNIX." -- Bill Gates %% "Nah, we're not homosexual, but we are willing to learn." "Yeah, would they send us someplace special?" -- Bill Murray and Harold Ramis in an Army recruiting station in STRIPES %% "Nah. You don't get it yet. See, I ain't inta gettin' burned. HELL no. Am inta burnin'. Man, I burn all *kindsa* shit." -- The Ganja Fire Man, from MIRACLEMAN %% "Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Nas darovaya" means "To our health." %% "Nat Goldstein and Jim Simmons in Florida, Curtis Beseda out west who has destroyed abortion clinics, these men are looked up to by my arm of the movement as the foremost heroes of the movement ...." -- James J. Condit, Jr., Cincinnatus Party's perennial candidate for city council, "Mike Cuthbert Show," WCKY_AM, 1/22/87, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries." -- William George Jordan %% "Nature loves a vacuum. Digital doesn't." -- DEC sales letter %% "Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark than a moral." -- John Burroughs (1837-1921) %% "Naughty origami." -- Snoopy (ours, not Schultz's) %% "Nazis! I hate those guys." -- Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade %% "Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- William Pitt (1756-1806) speech on the India Bill, Nov. 18, 1783 %% "Negative, sucker. You need a smoking pistol and you know it." "Right you are. Where are those handguns when we really need them?" -- Doonesbury %% "Neighbors!! We got neighbors! We ain't supposed to have any neighbors, and I just had to shoot one." -- Post Brothers Comics %% "Neuro-linguistic programming is simply the zig-zag and swirl of menorgs and disorgs acting under the suction and pressure of the morphogenetic field." -- Clark Brooks (clark@cataract.caltech.edu) %% "Neurotic: Self-taut person." -- Author unknown %% "Never argue with a fool; others may not be able to tell the difference." %% "Never ascribe to malice that which is caused by greed and ignorance." -- Cal Keegan %% "Never be angry when a fool acts like a fool. It's better when fools identify themselves...it removes so much uncertainty." -- Lord Peace %% "Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are lit so badly!" -- Woody Allen %% "Never counsel for contraception or refer to agencies making contraceptives available. Some volunteers may feel that it is the lesser of two evils, reasoning that if the girl is going to be sexually active anyway, why not at least help her from getting pregnant with contraceptives. This type of thinking is not only inaccurate but unacceptable and against the general pro-life philosophy, and Christian principles." -- Robert J. Pearson, President, The Pearson Foundation, in his guidebook, "How to Start and Operate a Pro-Life Out-Reach Pregnancy Service Center", 1984, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning." -- Marlo Thomas %% "Never give a party if you will be the most interesting person there." -- Mickey Friedman %% "Never give a statist an even break. The State has never given us one." -- Andre Marrou %% "Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "Never insult seven men when all you're packing is a six-gun." -- Zane Grey %% "Never kill a man, especially if it means taking his life." -- Woody Allen, "Love and Death" %% "Never knock on Death's door. Ring the bell and run away. Death really hates that." -- From the ABC series "Doctor Doctor" %% "Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!" he said to himself, and it became a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. "You aren't nearly through this adventure yet," he added, and that was pretty true as well. -- Bilbo Baggins, "The Hobbit" by J. R. R. Tolkien, Chapter XII %% "Never pet a dog that's on fire." -- Anonymous %% "Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time." -- David Gries, in "Compiler Construction for Digital Computers", circa 1969 %% "Never send a MAN to do a WOMAN'S work! Why do you think I CAME here?" "Not for the good of my ego, that was for damn sure." -- John Gaunt, aka GRIMJACK %% "Never test for a bug you don't know how to fix." -- QA manager %% "Never try to catch two frogs with one hand." -- Chinese Proverb %% "New York's record lottery prize of $45 million was claimed today by Raymond Simmons, an unemployed crack addict from Brooklyn. He said he planned no changes in his life-style." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, 'Why then are you not taking part in them?'" -- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) %% "Newsweek," said Tom timelessly. %% "Next time the motherfucker calls, tell him suck MY dick!" -- Eddie Murphy: Raw %% "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Letters and Social Aims" %% "Nice girls don't explode." -- Cerebus %% "Nice shooting, son. What's your name?" "MURPHY." -- From ROBOCOP %% "Nice tie... BONEHEAD!" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "Nick! Heath! Jarrad! There's a fire in the barn!" %% "Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God -- I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again." -- Woody Allen's character in "Hannah and Her Sisters" %% "Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal." -- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) %% "Nigel, what are you saying?" "How do we know he's not Mel Torme?" -- Top Secret %% "Nine years of ballet, asshole." -- Shelly Long, to the bad guy after making a jump over a gorge that he couldn't quite, in "Outrageous Fortune" %% "Nirvana? Thats the place where the powers that be and their friends hang out. -- Zonker Harris %% "No FLACK! No HASSLES! No morons playing AL CAPONE in the lobby!" -- Liz discusses the advantages of being a CPA in FORTUNE'S FRIENDS: Hell Week %% "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country - he won it by making the OTHER poor bastard die for HIS country." -- General George S. Patton, Jr. %% "No beer? I think that comes under 'sick and in pain.'" -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), June 1776 %% "No generalization is worth a damn...including this one." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% "No government door can be closed against the 1st Amendment and no government action is immune from its force." -- Bursey v. US (466 F.2d 1059) %% "No heavy pitch! No lame digression! We're at the peak Of our profession!" -- Jaques expounds on CLONEZONE's skills as a video tech %% "No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness." -- Graham Greene %% "No innocent man buys a gun and no happy man writes his memoirs." -- Raymond Duff Payne (from "Lake Wobegon Days" by Garrison Keillor) %% "No job too big; no fee too big!" -- Bill Murray, GHOSTBUSTERS %% "No love without freedom. No freedom without love. Simple truths. Worth dying for." -- A broken (or is he?) #6 speaks to the new #6 in THE PRISONER comic %% "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a part of the continent, a piece of the whole...if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. Any man's death diminishes me because I'm involved in mankind. Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell TOLLS, it tolls for thee." -- John Donne (1572-1631) %% "No man is competent unless he can stalk alone and armed in the wilderness." -- Townsend Whelen %% "No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately." -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% "No man steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man." -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) %% "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 %% "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is in session." -- Lysander Spooner %% "No man, examining his marriage intelligently, can fail to observe that it is compounded, at least in part, of slavery, and that he is the slave." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "The Portable Curmudgeon" %% "No matter what temptation there is after an accident to be economical with the truth when rationalizing it with hindsight, please remember it would be unforgivable if, by not revealing the facts or the complete truth, a similar incident became an unavoidable accident." -- Captain Colin Seaman, British Aerospace's head of safety %% "No matter where we are standing, the wind always blows right at us". -- MGW %% "No more ice cream ever, ever, ever again." -- Hallucinations and chocolate chip -- or is it real? THE MYSTERY MAN %% "No more rhymes now. I mean it!" "Anybody want a peanut?" -- The Princess Bride (book) %% "No offense, Sir, I'm just afraid of the unfamiliar." -- Mrs. Simpson, "The Simpsons" %% "No one can forbid us the future." -- Inscription on the base of Paris's monument to Leon Gambetta %% "No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill, "Their Finest Hour" %% "No one holds command over me. No man. No god. No prince. What is the claim of age for ones who are immortal? Call your damnable hunt. We shall see who I drag screaming to hell with me." -- Gunter Dorn, "Das Ungeheur Darin" %% "No one in the world walks around saying, "We're number two! We're number two!" -- CBS Sports commentator John Madden on losing the Super Bowl. %% "No one who accepts the sovereignty of truth can be a foot soldier in a party or movement. He will always find himself out of step." -- Sidney Hook %% "No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it." -- Charles Schulz %% "No problem" -- Alf %% "No program is perfect," They said with a shrug. "The customer's happy-- What's one little bug?" But he was determined, Then change two, then three more, The others went home. As year followed year. He dug out the flow chart And strangers would comment, Deserted, alone. "Is that guy still here?" Night passed into morning. He died at the console The room was cluttered Of hunger and thirst With core dumps, source listings. Next day he was buried "I'm close," he muttered. Face down, nine edge first. Chain smoking, cold coffee, And his wife through her tears Logic, deduction. Accepted his fate. "I've got it!" he cried, Said "He's not really gone, "Just change one instruction." He's just working late." -- The Perfect Programmer %% "No sweat! The Sheik is on the set. I didn't major in political science at The University of Illinois for nothing." -- SONIC DISRUPTORS %% "No time to fill our pockets, Hempy! Looks like Harrod's and drug addictions for us after all." "Blast! I was hoping to avoid that." -- Hempy's fate looks grim in DINOSAUR REX %% "No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently." -- Agnes De Mille %% "No wife of *mine* is doing any dishes. That's what we had the kid for." -- from Deathlok comics #1 %% "No! Do not try. Do, or do not. There is no 'try.'" -- Yoda %% "No! That's just what they'll be expecting us to do!" -- Airplane! %% "No! We will not die like dogs. We will fight like lions!" -- The Three Amigos %% "No, I'm not deaf.. I'm just ignoring you" %% "No, it's 'Blessed are the meek.' I think that's nice, 'cause really they have a hell of a time." -- someone in the crowd in "The Life of Brian" %% "No, no, I don't mind being called the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one." -- Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, WATCHMEN %% "No, no, Mrs. Simpson. You have been oppressed enough for today. I will clean the dishes." -- Adil Hoxha in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% "No, no, no, NO! Perverts are hired by MARVEL!" -- Harlan Ellison %% "No, she's absolutely right," said Zeb, patting the enormous pistol at his hip. "This _is_ a penis substitute. After all, if I could kill at a range of thirty meters with my penis, I wouldn't need to carry this thing around, now would I?" %% "No, we shall not be telling the Royal Navy to `take back' Massachusetts today, son." "Mum's right. Yer such a bloody wimp, Dad." -- "Bloom County" %% "No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise." -- Rorschach's only, fatal principle, from WATCHMEN %% "No. 1.... The LARCH tree." -- Monty Python %% "Nobody here but us folk heroes." -- Doonesbury %% "Nobody hipped me to that, dude." -- Pee Wee %% "Nobody likes a smart ass vampire." "Pity there's never enough blood in a midget." -- Bon mots from Dracula, in "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." -- Edmund Burke %% "Nobody talks about my failures anymore, just my successes. In my 30 expeditions to 8000ers 12 times I failed. Real success in expeditions is coming back safe." -- Reinhold Messner %% "None are so fond of secrets as those who don't mean to keep them." -- C. C. Colton %% "None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert -- because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible." -- From Henry Ford Sr., "My Life and Work," p. 86 (1922): %% "None of this is bad for America, is it?" -- COCOON %% "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. YOU'RE locked up in here with ME." -- Rorschach sets people straight. WATCHMEN #6 %% "Norm!" "Shh! Not now, you idiot!" -- CHEERS %% "Not a man. A machine. Cyberdyne systems model 101." "like a robot?" "Not a robot. A cyborg. Cybernetic organism." "Microprocessor controlled. Fully armored, very tough." %% "Not all subsidized science is necessarily bad, but all bad science is subsidized, how else could it survive." -- Petr Beckmann %% "Not all the conservative are stupid, but all the stupid are conservative." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "Not bad. Were you aiming for the Ferrari?" "Yeah, but I thought it would have made a bigger dent." -- A large tyrannosaurus and Dracula discuss trajectories in "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "Not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth." -- Ionesco %% "Not problem is too big it can't be run away from" -- Linus %% "Not so much a double coset table, more a pile of junk" %% "Not the crappy little elves!" -- Bart in the babysitter episode ("Some Enchanted Evening"?) %% "Note and initial": Let's spread the responsibility of this. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% "Note to myself, this is probably not the best joke to pull on a girl with a heart problem." -- Marshall (after Melanie opens his gift), "Heart on a Chain" , Eerie Indiana %% "Note to myself: never make a deal with your parents without a lawyer." -- Marshall, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Essays" %% "Nothing can be said so correctly that it cannot be twisted." -- Spinoza %% "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "Nothing can stop him. Not even common sense." -- Mark Komarinski %% "Nothing good has ever been reported about the full rotation of a race car about either its pitch or roll axis." -- Carroll Smith %% "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Circles" %% "Nothing is beautiful unless it is large. Vastness and immensity can make you forget a great many weaknesses." -- Emperor Napoleon I, ruler and OS/2 user %% "Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Major Barbara" %% "Nothing we can't handle, folks. We're still America... and I'm still President." -- Ronnie Regan as Mr. Reassuring in THE DARK KNIGHT FALLS %% "Nothing works...and nobody cares." -- Woody Allen %% "Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind ... everything really valuable has to enter you through a different opening." -- Woody Allen, "Manhattan" %% "Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy." -- Arthur Evans %% "Notice all the computations, theoretical scribblings, and lab equipment, Norm. ... Yes, curiosity killed these cats." -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "Notice anything?" the owner eagerly asked. "Yes," said his friend, "that fool dog of yours can't swim". %% "Now I know why they call television a medium: because nothing on it is rare or well-done." -- Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse From THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MIGHTY MOUSE %% "Now I'll give YOU something to believe. I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day." "I can't believe THAT!" said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one CAN'T believe in impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating gun. And when it disintegrates, it disintegrates. [pulls trigger] Well, what you do know... it disintegrated." -- DUCK DODGERS IN THE 24-1/2 CENTURY!! Looney Tunes, Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century (1953, Chuck Jones) %% "Now all we need is a one-legged nun walking a goat, and WE WIN!" -- My Chauffeur %% "Now bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible - yea, and get the better of them." -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" %% "Now hear this! The father/son sack race will begin in 5 minutes on the north lawn. Participation is MANDATORY, repeat MANDATORY!" -- The Simpsons %% "Now here's something you're really going to like!" -- Rocket J. Squirrel %% "Now here's tonight's news. The fire department had its hands full with a two engine blaze today. The problem is we only have one engine." -- News Anchorman, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything as mind-bogglingly useful as the Babel fish could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God. "The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Now then. This is the situation. Roaches. Millions of roaches acting together under the direction of a human. Like me! Or Burt Reynolds!" -- One man and 50,000 rats against an army of Roaches. "Badger" %% "Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm. Gag me with a smurfette." -- P. Buhr Computer Science 354 %% "Now we are going to set this pile of evil ablaze. But remember, because these are children's toys, the fire will spread quite rapidly. So, please stand back and try not to inhale the toxic fumes." -- Minister in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Now you have accidentally said something valuable!" -- Hercule Poirot in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS %% "Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" -- the Red Queen from "Through the Looking-Glass", by Lewis Carroll %% "Now, I want you to look very carefully at what we have just proved. What we have just proved is false." [slight pause while what he has just said sinks in] "Oh dear, that's going to go onto the computer, isn't it." %% "Now, for the LAST TIME, old man, WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR?" "And as I told you *already*, sir, I'm SELF-EMPLOYED and PROUD OF IT!" -- A beauracratic villain and Uncle Max from ZOT! %% "Now, for use with your child's 'My Little Pony' playset, the 'My Little Pet Food Processing Plant!' -- from Real World Toys, caring about your child's future." -- Saw this on the net, and I'm not sure who originated it %% "Now, more than ever, it is evident that `good taste' only refers to that which reinforces the status quo." -- Andre Peret %% "Now, my faithful minions, let me explain my plan... for the benefit of the audience." -- The Kingpin -- not the fat one -- from Bakshi's MIGHTY MOUSE series %% "Now, please excuse me while I wreak my vengeance." -- Huge the Barbarian from the same cartoon %% "Now, telephone companies are not stupid, at least for large values of 'stupid'." -- Michael O'Brien (Mr. Protocol) %% "Now... about my allowance..." -- Another bleedin' mutant from HULK %% "Nowadays, when opportunity knocks, you have to unlock both deadbolts, remove the chain, and turn off the burglar alarm..." %% "Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "Nuclear war would mean abolition of most comforts, and disruption of normal routines, for children and adults alike." -- Willard F. Libby, "You *Can* Survive Atomic Attack" %% "Nuclear weapons don't kill people, bad policies kill people." -- Bill Schmickle %% "Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Numerical Analysis? Ha! You should be on yer knees thanking the almighty that you're even ALLOWED to take Nu-mer-ic-al An-al-y-sis! When I wuz young we didn't have anything NICE like pansy Numerical Analysis to work with! Only STONES! Sharp ones! With bloodstains for subscripts! And let me tell you that finite element aggregation is NOTHING until you've worn your fingers to the bone summing matrixes of sharp, blood stained STONES! I mean...BLIMEY! I don't eat SQUIRRELS now do I!!? Well, maybe I DO but.. be fair!! A TA's godda eat sometime between miserable hours spent marking WEEDY assignments from MORONIC WETS!! I mean!! BLIMEY! Civil Rights...! My Constitutional...! I...! I...! YEEEEAAARGH!!!!" %% "Nun-beating? Good Lord, man, I can't condone THAT!" -- "Bloom County" %% "Nuns - No sense of humor." -- HIGHLANDER %% "Nurse, fetch the patient a `Bud'..." -- "Bloom County" %% "OHHLYMPIAA! Olympia!" "Osiris!" "My friend!" "What has happened to your nose?" -- The Firesign Theatre (The Alblum with Nick Danger on the other side) %% "OK, but be careful. In my experience, Republican women are harder to open than a liquor store in Nebraska." -- Teddy's, err, Charlie's Angels spoof on SNL %% "OW! Rubber spider venom! That's not fair!" -- The Firesign Theatre movie, J-Men Forever %% "Obedience. A religion of slaves. A religion of intellectual death. I like it. Don't ask questions, don't think, obey the Word of the Lord -- as it has been conveniently brought to you by a man in a Rolls with a heavy Rolex on his wrist. I like that job! Where can I sign up?" -- Oleg Kiselev,oleg@CS.UCLA.EDU %% "Oboy! It's the colorized version of CITIZEN KANE... oh, my mistake. It's just THE FLINTSTONES." -- From SAM & MAX, FREELANCE POLICE %% "Occupational regulation has served to limit consumer choice, raise consumer costs, increase practitioner income, limit practitioner mobility, deprive the poor of adequate service, and restrict job opportunities for minorities -- all without a demonstrated improvement in quality or safety." ... "Critics of this hypothesis believe to the contrary, however, that regulators' and professional groups' self-interest has been and still is the primary motivator of regulatory legislation. And indeed the evidence shows that consumers rarely engage in campaigns to license occupations. If the purpose of licensing were to improve the quality of service, one would expect consumers, who might be the prime beneficiaries, to promote licensure, but licensing is systematically promoted by practitioners ..." -- The Rule of Experts - Occupational Licensing in America. By S. David Young. Cato Institute, 1987. ISBN 0-932790-62-3 (paper). 99 pages. (Quoted by Tony Harminc in comp.risks) %% "October 12, the Discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Ode to a Chicken" Chickens, what a groovy pet! They're like wheelbarrows when they're wet. They're Mickey Mouse watches still tick tick tick. Throw them Quartz (the hardest substance known to man) And watch them peck peck peck. -- Ravenous Tenebrosity %% "Of COURSE, dummy! They invade each other to stay in shape!" "That's what makes them so tough..." -- Doonesbury %% "Of ______course it's the murder weapon. Who would frame someone with a fake?" %% "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." -- Thomas Paine %% "Of course power tools and alcohol don't mix. Everyone knows power tools aren't soluble in alcohol..." -- Crazy Nigel %% "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) %% "Of course this is true for more general values of 5." -- Cambridge University Math Dept. %% "Of course you know this means war." -- Syndi to family, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "Of course, isn't just for literates. Why, just look at these humorous caricatures of Gore Vidal." -- Sideshow Bob in "Krusty Gets Busted" %% "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) %% "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 %% "Of the 500 or so films a year from all the Hollywood sources during [the height of the studio system] -- and I saw many of them when they were released, some of them much more recently -- I estimate that about two percent are worth the time of a cultivated viewer today." -- Stanley Kauffmann %% "Of what importance is mere money - when there are worlds to be conquered - people to be enslaved?" -- Doctor Doom %% "Official proclamation. Let it be known that upon the twenty-first of august, there shall be a royal party. You are hereby invited to attend. remember to wear your best, and bring an appetite and a friend, as a good time will be had by all." %% "Often it is fatal to live too long." -- Racine %% "Oh God ... I'm *shot* ... Hey ... *wait* a second ... I'm *okay* ... Wow! This is *cool! Bullets don't hurt me!" -- Superboy, #2 of SUPERBOY THE COMIC BOOK (based on the TV series) %% "Oh Mr. Belpit, your legs are so swollen!" -- Monty Python %% "Oh beautiful, for smoggy skies, o'er insectide waves of grain, and strip-mined mountain's majesty, above the asphalt plains! America, America, man sheds his waste on thee! And hides the pines, with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea!" -- George Carlin (?) %% "Oh boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a REALLY BIG ram disk!" -- lennox@shire.hw.stratus.com %% "Oh dear, I think you'll find reality's on the blink again." -- Marvin The Paranoid Android %% "Oh dear... well, if you don't get her to a very powerful Shaman right away -- she'll die." "We got an Elder God in the van. Will he do?" -- Savage Henry %% "Oh frabjous day, calloo, callay" he chortled in his joy. %% "Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me! As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee. Groop I implore thee my foonting turlingdromes. And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles, Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, See if I don't!" (Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz reciting his poetry) -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Oh honey, this is just the beginning. Stick with me and we'll claw our way to the top." -- John Water's "Hairspray" %% "Oh my! An `inflammatory attitude' in alt.flame? Never heard of such a thing..." -- Allen Gwinn, allen@sulaco.Sigma.COM %% "Oh no, no, no... I'm not beautiful. Just very very pretty." -- Love from above title %% "Oh no. Ed Smith, Lizard of Doom, has come from a planet far beyond our solar system to devour us. Gaze and tremble, mortals. None can escape the wrath of Ed Smith, Lizard of Doom." -- The Cowboy Wally Show %% "Oh oh! No more buttered scones for me, Mater, I'm off to play the grand piano!" -- Monty Python %% "Oh sure, this costume may look silly, but it lets me get in and out of dangerous situations - I work for a federal task force doing a survey on urban crime. Look, here's my ID, and here's a number you can call, that will put you through to our central base in Atlanta. Go ahead, call - they'll confirm who I am. Unless, of course, the Astro-Zombies have destroyed it." -- Dennis Dugan as Captain Freedom on Hill Street Blues %% "Oh what wouldn't I give to be spat at in the face..." -- a prisoner in "Life of Brian" %% "Oh yeah, laugh now! But when the millions start pouring in, I'll be the one at Burger King, sucking down Whoppers at my own private table!" -- Al Bundy %% "Oh, Frank, um... wear leather, OK? Love you, babe." -- Vinnie tweaks Frank in WISEGUY %% "Oh, God, he's been in the Dobey Gillis file again." -- MAX HEADROOM %% "Oh, I know it's a penny here and a penny there, but look at me. I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty." -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977), "Monkey Business" %% "Oh, No! My heart is racing! The metamorphosis has started! It's too late -- I can't stop it! I'll be that ugly green monster -- hated and hunted! I'm... I'm... I'm GUMBY, Dammit!" -- From BOFFO LAUGHS %% "Oh, come ON! A one-man religion?" "There is no other kind." -- From THE QUESTION %% "Oh, dear Heavens, it's -- *gasp* -- the ROGUES!" "Lovely reading, Elvira... you should have gone into theatre." -- Those experts from the Institute for Hyper-Normal Conflicts, in BLUE DEVIL %% "Oh, don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit For my head will fly My tongue will lie My eyes will fry And I may die Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit." (an ancient Orion mining song) -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Oh, great altar of passive entertainment, bestow upon me thy discordant images at such speed as to render linear thought impossible!" -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "Oh, he [a big dog] hunts with papa," she said. "He says Don Carlos [the dog] is good for almost every kind of game. He went duck hunting one time and did real well at it. Then Papa bought some ducks, not wild ducks but, you know, farm ducks. And it got Don Carlos all mixed up. Since the ducks were always around the yard with nobody shooting at them he knew he wasn't supposed to kill them, but he had to do something. So one morning last spring, when the ground was still soft, he took all the ducks and buried them." "What do you mean, buried them?" "Oh, he didn't hurt them. He dug little holes all over the yard and picked up the ducks in his mouth and put them in the holes. Then he covered them up with mud except for their heads. He did thirteen ducks that way and was digging a hole for another one when Tony found him. We talked about it for a long time. Papa said Don Carlos was afraid the ducks might run away, and since he didn't know how to build a cage he put them in holes. He's a smart dog." -- R. Bradford, "Red Sky At Morning" %% "Oh, her bridal bower becomes a burial beir of bitter beauty." -- Sondheim's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" %% "Oh, intercourse the penguin!" -- Monty Python %% "Oh, let's face it. I'm just not that bright." -- Homer %% "Oh, relax -- enjoy it! When do you ever use opposable thumbs, anyway?" -- Max looks at the silver lining, in ZOT! %% "Oh, so that's it. This is some sort of underwear thing." -- Homer about Lisa in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "Oh, so you're defending yourself, you coward!" -- Peter Lorre %% "Oh, what's the sound of the world out there?..." "What, Mr. Todd, what, Mr. Todd, What is that sound?" "Those crunching noises Pervading the air!" "Yes, Mr. Todd, yes, Mr. Todd, yes, all around!" "It's man devouring man, my dear," "...and who are we to deny it IN HERE?!" -- Stephen Sondheim, SWEENY TODD %% "Oh, yes - of course. Sorry to have disturbed you." %% "Oh, you look like a sensitive, intelligent guy. Don't make me shoot you." -- The kind of cute M.P. that appears only in movies, from STRIPES %% "Oh... what's the easiest way to explain a coven..." "A secret meeting place for vampires." "Why, yes. That's it. Thank you." -- Terminology and the vampire, from HERO SANDWICH %% "Ohmigawd, Captain! The fuel light's on! We're all gonna die! We're all gonna DIE!!! . . . Uh, oops, my mistake. That's the intercom light." %% "Okay, Sister, I never hurt a nun before..." "Undt you won't hurt one now, you little turd." -- A street punk addressing a transexual, former Nazi nun nicknamed "Sister Twyster." From "The Badger" %% "Okay, nobody move, nobody panic. At the count of three, everyone open your doors and ever so quietly, slowly slide out. At the count of three. One ... [and everyone has already vacated]" -- Homer in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "Okay, so there's these two guys, right? Okay, so this one guy says to the other... oh, right, they're in a bar. Okay, so these two guys, anyway, so... So he says to the guy, who's black, he says to him, no, wait, he's Chinese. He says, `Hey have you seen my mother-in-law?' No, wife... It's his wife, right. So he says, `Hey, have you seen my wife?' And so the bartender says... no, the Jew, Chinese, the Chinese guy, he HAW HAW! HAW... snort. Sorry, I just remembered something funny." -- The Cowboy Wally Show %% "Okay, who's in it?" -- Yogi Berra (when asked if he wanted to see a dirty movie). %% "Okay," Bobby said, getting the hang of it, "then what's the matrix? If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?" "The world," Lucas said. -- William Gibson, "Count Zero" %% "Okay," the computer continued. "Here's an interesting little notion. Did you realize that most people's lives are governed by telephone numbers?" -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time." -- a coffee cup %% "On our third date, I plan to screw your eyes blue." "Yup.... just an old-fashioned girl." -- MIRACLE MILE %% "On the beach," said John, sadly, "There's such A thing as revealing too much." So he closed both his eyes At the ranks of bare thighs And felt his way through them by touch. %% "On the day of victory no one is tired." -- Arab proverb %% "On the market, there can be no such thing as exploitation." -- Murray Rothbard %% "On the night of the tenth of May[1940], at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill, "The Gathering Storm" %% "On the other hand, it takes real moral fiber to remain a Republican when there's no money in it. And things *are* looking grim on the financial front. Even worse for the President, they're getting confusing." -- A. Whitney Brown %% "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage %% "Once I was a tadpole, in the beginning of the begin; Then I was a toadfrog with my tail tucked in. Then I was a monkey in a banyan tree; Now I'm a professor with a Ph.D." -- Anonymous creationist's view of evolution %% "Once a ruler becomes religious, it [becomes] impossible for you to debate with him. Once someone rules in the name of religion, your lives become hell." -- Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, at the General People's Congress in Tripoli in October, 1989 %% "Once actor Raymond Burr was confronted by a fan who demanded to know how it was that [Perry Mason] won every case. `But madam,' he replied smoothly, `you only see the cases I try on Saturday.'" -- THE COMPLETE DIRECTORY OF PRIME TIME TV SHOWS %% "Once again, we see that interesting correlation between saying "Blessed Be!" and being an idiot." -- Gene W. Smith, gsmith@garnet.berkeley.edu %% "Once contraception is accepted and the purposes of sex are separated from procreation and marriage, sterilization and abortion become acceptable, and then infanticide, the precursor of outright euthanasia. Furthermore, homosexuality and unnatural sexual activities become `natural and normal,' the venereal diseases get out of control, divorce and illegitimacy rates mount, and the family swiftly disintegrates." -- Valerie Riches, Family Planning Educator, in her brochure, Contraception's Legacy, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), writing of William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the supporters of Tennessee's anti-evolution law at the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1925 %% "Once lead the American people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fiber of our national life ..." -- President Woodrow Wilson %% "Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." -- Classic Python from MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL %% "Once the trust goes out of a relationship, it's no fun lying to them anymore." -- Cheers %% "Once they go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department." -- Werner von Braun %% "Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "Once you've had real champagne, you can never go back to Asti Spumanti." -- Georgette Lundberg %% "One allows himself to be fooled once, to be fooled twice; but he who permits himself always to be fooled remains a fool." -- Rudolf Rocker %% "One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier." -- Gustave Flaubert (letter to Madame Louise Colet, August 12, 1846) %% "One can acquire everything in solitude -- except character." -- Stendhal %% "One day I woke up and discovered that I was in love with tripe." -- Tom Anderson %% "One day, when I came home from work, I accidently put my car key in the door of my apartment building... I turned it... and the whole building started up.... So I drove it around.... A policeman stopped me for going to fast... He said, 'Where do you live?'... I said, 'Right here'... Then I drove my building onto the middle of a highway, and I ran outside, and told all of the cars to get the hell out of my driveway." -- Stephen Wright %% "One half of the world doesn't know how the other three-quarters lives." -- P. G. Wodehouse %% "One lawyer can steal more than a hundred men with guns." -- The Godfather %% "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) ...yet. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "One man's mate is another man's passion." -- Jeff Daiell's description of adultery %% "One more drink and I would have been under the host." -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% "One must exaggerate -- life is so *dull*!" -- King of Hearts %% "One of my favorite games when I was a kid was 'murder/suicide.' Dad would show us a photo and ask us, "Is it a murder or a suicide?" -- Colleen Doran %% "One of the interesting things about space is how dull it is - there's so much of it and so little in it." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "One of the most devastating enemies of the family is radical sex education in the public school. It is more explicit than necessary for the good of the child. Too much sex education too soon causes undue curiosity and obsession with sex." -- Beverly LaHaye, President, Concerned Women for America, in her newsletter, 4/81, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein %% "One of the nicest things about mathematics, or anything else you might care to learn, is that many of the things which can never be, often are." -- Norton Juster, "The Phantom Tollbooth" %% "One of the prison psychiatrists asked me if I thought sex was dirty, and I said it is if you're doing it right." -- Woody Allen, "Take the Money and Run" %% "One of the problems I've always had with propaganda pamphlets is that they're real boring to look at. They're just badly designed. People from the left often are very well-intended, but they never had time to take basic design classes, you know?" -- Art Spiegelman %% "One of us should bust in and confuse them while _I_ head them off around front." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "One property which we know very well happens; a+b=b+c." (for all a,b,c?) %% "One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "The Hammer of God" %% "One size fits all." Just who is this "all" person anyway, and why is he wearing my clothes? %% "One small bug for man, one great program for mankind." -- Neil Armstrong %% "One thing about intellectuals, they proved that they can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on." -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "One thing about the past It's likely to last." -- Ogden Nash (1902-1971) %% "One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer terror." -- W. K. Hartmann %% "One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair hair remover, just to see what it looked like. And it looked beautiful." -- David Lynch %% "One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said, 'Didn't you see the stop sign?' I said 'Yeah, but I don't believe everything I read.'" -- Steve Wright %% "One time the power went out in my house, I had no lights. Fortunately, my camera had a flash. I went to make a peanut butter sandwich and took 60 pictures of my kitchen. My neighbors called the police. They thought it was lightning in my house." -- Steve Wright %% "One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock..." %% "Only a brain-damaged operating system would support task switching and not make the simple next step of supporting multitasking." -- George McFry %% "Only a brave person is willing honestly to admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers." -- Rodan of Alexandria %% "Only a mediocre person is always at his best." -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% "Only skydivers know why the birds sing." -- Roch Charmet (1930-1989) %% "Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." -- Hannah Arendt %% "Only the toes knows." -- Mel Profitt %% "Ooh, neat! Santa got caught in this beartrap I set! Wow! He gnawed his own foot off to escape!" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "Ooooh! You mean the blue thing with the things?" -- Homer to Marge in "Some Enchanted Evening", from The Simpsons %% "Oooooh Homer, my brilliant beast." -- Marge in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "Ooops." -- Captain of Titanic %% "Open Channel D..." -- Napoleon Solo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. %% "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." -- Dave Bowman, Arthur C. Clarke's "2001" %% "Operator give me a wrong number, I want to talk to my mother-in-law." -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% "Optimization is not some mystical state of grace, it is an intricate act of human labor which carries real costs and real risks." -- Tom Neff %% "Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate." -- Mike Hermann (hermann@cs.ubc.ca) %% "Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the others. We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves." -- Jean Guitton %% "Our Constitution ... gives to bigotry no sanction." -- George Washington %% "Our journey toward the stars has progressed swiftly. In 1926 Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-propelled rocket, achieving an altitude of 41 feet. In 1962 John Glenn orbited the earth. 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 %% "Our journeys to the stars will be made on spaceships created by determined, hardworking scientists and engineers applying the principles of science, not aboard flying saucers piloted by little gray aliens from some other dimension." -- Robert A. Baker, "The Aliens Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2 %% "Our judgements judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows." -- Paul Valery %% "Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1816 %% "Our parents were of Midwestern stock and very strict. They didn't want us to grow up to be spoiled and rich. If we left our tennis racquets in the rain, we were punished." -- Nancy Ellis, George Bush's sister %% "Our passion is like a nuclear explosion: violent anticipation, a brilliant blast of heat and light, and a beautiful sunset..." -- Jack Twilley, twilley@dewey.nl.nuwc.navy.mil %% "Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "Our politicians are so stupid that, if they tried to throw themselves on the floor, they would probably miss their target." -- Ron Phillips, crphilli@hound.dazixca.ingr.com %% "Our reruns are better than theirs." -- Nick at Nite %% "Our safety, our liberty depends on preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the US are the rightful masters both Congress and the courts - Not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution" -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% "Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. [...] The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role." -- U.S. Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, 1889 "The Tyranny of Government Schooling", John Gatto, 1992 %% "Out of register space (ugh)" -- vi %% "Out of the mouth of Boy Wonders ofttimes come gems." -- TV's Batman, aka Adam West %% "Padlock?" "The IRS. Picky picky picky." -- Molly Dodd %% "Pagan rain dance - works every time." -- Bart in "Pagans" when it starts raining on Homer while he is changing the tire on the car (Tracy Ullman Show) %% "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." -- Author unknown %% "Papa's got a brand new bag." -- James Brown %% "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android %% "Pardon me, Old Man River, but could you hold it down for a while?" -- C. Bovitz %% "Pascal is Pascal is Pascal is dog meat." -- M. Devine and P. Larson Computer Science 340 %% "Pass the cards," said Tom ideally. %% "Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles." -- George Jean Nathan %% "Paul Lynde to block..." -- a contestant on "Hollywood Squares" %% "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT, 1982 %% "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- The Wizard Of Oz %% "Peace is our profession." -- Motto of Strategic Air Command "Peace in our profession. War is just a hobby." -- Stationery available in PX, Barksdale SAC AFB %% "Peace on Earth. Wish you were here." -- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, djo@PacBell.com' Christmas Card greetings... %% "Peace through superior firepower." -- The Peddler, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2 %% "Pencil cursors are for user-interface weenies." -- Rob MacLachlan %% "People don't form relationships, they take hostages." -- anon %% "People fall ill, grow old, and die. No matter what magnificent dawn illuminates your life, you will, in the end, be nailed up in a coffin and thrown in a pit." %% "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or some contrivance to raise prices." -- Adam Smith (1723-1790), "Wealth of Nations" %% "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." -- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) %% "People should have access to the data which you have about them. There should be a process for them to challenge any inaccuracies." -- Arthur Miller %% "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world." -- Calvin %% "People who are incapable of making decisions are the ones who hit those barrels at freeway exits." %% "People who live in glass houses shouldn't." -- Author unknown %% "People who use long lines DESERVE to lose." -- Rob MacLachlan %% "People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Circles" %% "Perestroika: could it happen here?" -- Tom Neff %% "Perfecto garceo" -- Marshall's Dad, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "Perhaps I am flogging a straw herring in mid-stream, but in the light of what is known about the ubiquity of security vulnerabilities, it seems vastly too dangerous for university folks to run with their heads in the sand." -- Peter G. Neumann, RISKS moderator, about the Internet virus %% "Perhaps it would be best if this argument remained a deep mystery to you." %% "Perhaps the best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time." -- Dean Acheson %% "Perhaps this energy conservation fad is as dead as the do-do." -- Mr. Burns in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", from The Simpsons %% "Perhaps you know some of my friends: Count of Basie, Earl of Hines, Cab of Calloway, Satchmo of Armstrong?" -- Looney Tunes, Knight-Mare Hare (1955, Chuck Jones) %% "Permit me to introduce myself. My name's Dracula, Lord of the Undead. God, I do love the way that sounds." -- "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist." -- Abbie Hoffman %% "Personally, I was shocked to discover our plastic surgeon was an alcoholic." "Yes, he raised quite a few eyebrows." -- The Cowboy Wally Show %% "Pesky foreign espionage agents! Why don't they let me be?" -- Lester Girls, lamenting on the lot of the Secret Agent %% "Peyote! Peyote and clam dip!" he replied. %% "Pfui. More people saying what they believe would be a great improvement. Because I do I am unfit for common intercourse" -- Nero Wolfe, "Blood Will Tell" %% "Pfui." -- Nero Wolfe %% "Philately can be a very rewarding pastime if you give it a chance. Stamps are beautiful. They're a good investment. And they can't kill you like a gun!" -- Simon, "Hole in the Head Gang", Eerie Indiana %% "Picture the sun as the origin of two intersecting 6-dimensional hyperplanes from which we can deduce a certain transformational sequence which gives us the terminal velocity of a rubber duck ..." %% "Pink isn't well, he stayed back at the hotel." %% "Pioneering basically amounts to finding new and more horrible ways to die" -- John W. Campbell %% "Plan to throw one away. You will anyway." -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" %% "Plastic gun. Ingenious. More coffee, please." -- Lee Falk's THE PHANTOM by Peter David %% "Plato was a bore." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "Play it, Lucille." -- B. B. King %% "Please do not annoy, torment, pester, plague, molest, worry, badger, harry, harass, heckle, persecute, irk, bullyrag, vex, disquiet, grate, beset, bother, tease, nettle, tantalize, or ruffle the animals." -- San Diego Zoo %% "Please drop your gold (say d$ ) and follow me." %% "Please excuse my wife. She may appear to be rather nasty, but underneath she has a heart of formica." -- Monty Python %% "Please hand me that pushpin" Tom said tactfully. %% "Please refrain from making me puke on my workstation." -- Alan Weiss (alan@tivoli.UUCP> %% "Please return stewardess to original upright position" %% "Please spare us all the attempts to get everyone to shorten their emotional bandwidth on-line until everyone sounds like a sober philosophy major calmly discussing the merits of post neo-realism as reflected in modernistic Danish furniture." -- Chris Neckalson (chrisn@sco.com) %% "Please turn off the T.V." -- Miss Botts, the babysitter, in "Some Enchanted Evening"(?), from The Simpsons %% "Please your Majesty," said the Knave, "I didn't write it, and they can't prove that I did: there's no name signed at the end." "If you didn't sign it," said the King, "that only makes things worse. You MUST have meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your name like an honest man." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Please, don't make me treat you like dogs. I don't want to treat you like common dogs." -- Miss Firecracker %% "Plus and minus?? What kind of a stupid name is that? You guys are a constant source of embarrassment." -- Dash X, "The Loyal Order of Corn", Eerie Indiana %% "Poisonous asps. Very dangerous. You go first." %% "Pok pok pok, P'kok!" -- Superchicken %% "Political observers noted that Governor Mario Cuomo last week altered his position on running for the Presidency; he now says that if everyone in the world got down on their hands and knees and said, 'Please, Mario, Please, Please, Please be President!', then he would." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "Politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale." %% "Poor dead, there's nothing between his ears." -- Margaret Thatcher, about Ronald Regan, in the 6/2/88 issue of The New York Times %% "Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another." -- Madonna %% "Poor man... he was like an employee to me." -- The police commisioner on "Sledge Hammer" laments the death of his bodyguard %% "Pork rinds! *Gasp* *Choke* Vienna sausages! *Uk...uk...uk* Orange marshmallow peanuts (The Horror, The Horror)!" "VROOOM! VROOOM! Out of the way, lady! Run! Run for safety, foolish pedestrians!" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "Posting to alt.flame has nothing to do with writing flames." -- Patricia O Tuama, rissa@attctc.Dallas.TX.US %% "Prais'd be the fathomless universe, for life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious." -- Walt Whitman %% "President Reagan has advised the youth of America that it is a good idea to practice total abstinence from sex. And that is a good suggestion, Mr. President... now tell it to the Marines." -- Mark Russell %% "President Reagan, embarrassed by Ed Meese's incompetence in the Ginsburg nomination, verbally lambasted the Attorney General and his wife at a White House dinner earlier this week by shouting 'I hate the Meeses to pieces!'" -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "Pretty much the only people who ice-climb are a handful of maladjusted geeks." -- Yvon Chouinard %% "Probably the best operating system in the world is the [operating system] made for the PDP-11 by Bell Laboratories." -- Ted Nelson, October 1977 %% "Problems are only opportunities in disguise." -- Albert North Whitehead %% "Producing a system from a specification is like walking on water, its easier if it's frozen." %% "Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." -- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work. %% "Programmers are expensive. Hardware is cheap." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "Programming is like sex: Everyone thinks they do it better than anyone else." %% "Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), December 1840 %% "Proof left as an exercise for your supervisor." %% "Pseudo-Judeo-Christian horror was no match for genuinely hypoglycemic hunger." -- Peni R. Griffin, "The Goat Man" (IASFM, 5/89) %% "Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance process. However, pseudocode that is highly detailed - approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of much use as maintenance documentation. Such detailed documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code, thus doubling the maintenance burden. Furthermore, since such voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder. The result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be maintained, no one will maintain it. It will soon become out of date and everyone will ignore it. (Once, I did an informal survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode. Of those 42, 0 [zero!], found that it had any value as maintenance documentation." -- Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988 %% "Psst. Hey Guido. It's all so clear to me now. I'm the keeper of the cheese. And you're the lemon merchant. Get it? And he knows it. That's why he's gonna kill us. So we gotta beat it. Yeah. Before he lets loose the marmosets on us! Don't worry, little missy! I'll save you!" -- Ren & Stimpy %% "Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure." -- Karl Kraus %% "Puberty -- now that's eerie." -- Simon, "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% "Pucky lads, a wee bit over their heads" -- Doug Scott after encountering two climbers on Denali suffering from exposure %% "Pull the trigger and you're garbage." -- Lady Blue %% "Pull the wool over your own eyes!" -- J. R. "Bob" Dobbs %% "Pull your team out Gorman." -- Riply %% "Putz Beer. From the people who brought you Schmuck Lager." -- TV ad in Hell from "Stig's Inferno" %% "Quayle hasn't had a press conference in nearly two weeks (not since the one in which, memorably, he had called the Holocaust `an obscene period in American history', and then, trying to explain that he meant this century's history, blurted out `I didn't live in this century.')..." -- Hendrik Hertzberg %% "Quick! A Mai-Tai!" -- Foo-fa-raa in "Badger" %% "Quid enim dicitur? Latine scriptum est." %% "Quiet, Ringo, Elvis is talking." -- From a sketch on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE %% "Quit" is a four letter word. %% "R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental well-being and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an almost infinitely variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquillity this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "R&D is not something that can be useful alone... R&D is part of a product- making process." -- Ralph E. Gomory, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, New York City %% "REVERT!" "REVERT!" "REVERT!" "REVERT!" "Hi HO! Hi HO!" "SHUT UP!" %% "Raffinerat ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist Er nicht." (God is subtle, but He is not malicious.) -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "Rage is a wind that blows out the candle of reason." -- Author unknown %% "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!" -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) %% "Rare" means "Raw". "Well done" means "burned". %% "Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought." %% "Reading legal mush can turn your brain to guacamole!" -- Amiga ROM Kernel Manual %% "Real education must be limited to men who *insist* on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding." -- Ezra Pound %% "Reality is not binding on news admins." -- Cathy Foulston (cathyf@rice.edu) %% "Reality is not only stranger one imagines, but stranger than one CAN imagine." -- J. B. S.(the biologist) Haldane %% "Reality is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes." -- (My Life With The) Thrill Kill Cult "Nervous Xians" %% "Really, I'm confident that when all the facts are in, you'll see that there's no cause for interdepartmental tension..." "THIS before breakfast..." -- A disembodied head from ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN %% "Really, now, Powers. Had I intended for educated men to read that nonsense, I would have used smaller type..." -- Cerebus %% "Reason in man is rather like God in the world." -- St. Thomas Aquinas %% "Rebellion is like witchcraft. That's what it is, it's like witchcraft." -- Missouri State Rep. Jean Dixon, on labeling "offensive music". USA Today, March 20, 1990 %% "Red Kangs are best. Red Kangs are best. Red Kangs are best ... " -- Doctor Who - Paradise Towers, October 1987 %% "Reflections on Ice-Breaking" Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker. -- Ogden Nash (1902-1971) %% "Regardless of the legal speed limit, your Buick must be operated at speeds faster than 85 MPH (140kph)." -- presumable misprint from the 1987 Buick Grand National owners manual. %% "Regrettable that this society has chosen suicide." -- Star Trek "Mirror, Mirror" %% "Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised. "We're back in the universe again ..." An unusually long pause followed, "... but I don't know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the starfield surrounding the ship. "Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," ZORAC announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious." -- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star" %% "Relationships are complex because they are part real, part imaginary." -- Martin F. Terman %% "Reliable software must kill people reliably." -- Andy Mickel %% "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "Remember Khrushchev: he tried to do too many things too fast, and he was removed in disgrace. If Gorbachev tries to destroy the system or make too many fundamental changes to it, I believe the system will get rid of him. I am not a political scientist, but I understand the system very well. I believe he will have a "heart attack" or retire or be removed. He is up against a brick wall. If you think they will change everything and become a free, open society, forget it!" -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110 %% "Remember kids, if there's a loaded gun in the room, be sure that you're the one holding it" -- Captain Combat %% "Remember me, Mr. Schneider? Kenya, 1947. If you're going to shoot an elephant, Mr. Schneider, you better be prepared to finish the job." -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "Remember son ... the family jewels." -- Homer in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust?" -- Lane Olinghouse %% "Remember, IBM has always prided itself on its marketing prowess, and market segmentation was an essential part of that. The last thing IBM wanted to do was compete with itself. But it looks like that kind of thinking isn't going to work anymore." -- An unnamed IBM official, InfoWorld, February 26, 1990, page 1, about the unhappiness of the AS/400 group that the System/6000 had an aggressive price/performance ratio, and a larger number %% "Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best." -- Frank Zappa %% "Remember, extremism in the nondefense of moderation is not a virtue." -- Peter Neumann, about usenet %% "Remember, these terrorists are professionals. Highly trained and well equipped. With their own set of silly religious beliefs." -- There's nothing like three dinosaurs with semi-automatic weapons for cleaning up terrorism. From "Dinosaurs For Hire". %% "Remember, this is only an exhibition, this is NOT a competition -- please, no wagering." -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "Remembrance of Things Past": an enormous fruitcake laced with cyanide. -- Edward Abbey %% "Repel them. Repel them. Induce them to relinquish the spheroid." -- Indiana University football cheer %% "Resist, expose, or stop immediately every public school or group sex education program, no matter what it is called or how it is diffused into the curriculum." -- Fr. Paul Marx, President, Human Life International, in his brochure, From Contraception to Abortion, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Results would only confuse people." %% "Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear...." -- The Lone Ranger %% "Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment." -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% "Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals" -- "Oh, Lucky Man" %% "Rhett, Rhett! What shall I do? Where shall I go?" "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." %% "Right now I feel that I've got my feet on the ground as far as my head is concerned." -- Baseball pitcher Bo Belinsky %% "Right now I'm having vu ja de -- deja vu and amnesia at the same time." -- Steve Wright %% "Right reason," by which Cicero meant an "immediate and intuitive apprehension of moral and spiritual values," of what is right and just and what is wrong and unjust, was in the nature of things placed by God in all men; and no decree or legislative enactment could change what is right and what is wrong. -- Forrest MacDonald %% "Right-handers go over there, left-handers go over there, the rest of you, come with me." -- Yogi Berra %% "Right. Who's got a boil on his semprini then?" -- Monty Python %% "Rights" is a fictional abstraction. No one has "Rights", neither machines nor flesh-and-blood. Persons... have opportunities, not rights, which they use or do not use. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% "Riley, can you operate a road grader?" "Of COURSE! What kind of a question is that?" -- What kind of a question IS that? A normal BADGER question, of course... %% "Rock" is the music of slaves. Of adolescents pursuing the illusion of freedom and protest while the steel chains of technology bind them ever tighter. -- Edward Abbey %% "Rock": music to hammer out fenders by. Music for vomiting to after a hard day spreading asphalt. Vietnam music. Imitation-Afro, industrial air-compressor music. -- Edward Abbey %% "Rodney King was in complete control of the situation" -- LAPD "David Koresh was in complete control of the situation" -- BATFBI %% "Roger Rabbit's wife! My goodness! Such... AMPLE... drawing!" -- Jarvis, the butler for the Mighty AVENGERS, comments on a popular movie %% "Roman Polanski makes his own blood. He's smart -- that's why his movies work." -- A brilliant director at "Frank's Place" %% "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead." -- William Shakespeare, HAMLET %% "Roses are red, violets are blue; I'm schizophrenic and so am I." -- Author unknown %% "Round up the usual suspects!" -- Casablanca %% "Rowing so much hurts my hands" said Tom callously. %% "Russ [Meyer] is a man who believes in 'spirited, horizontal togetherness.' He tends to smile a lot. Can you blame him?" -- Prof. Fred Hopkins %% "S.F.'S NO GOOD!!" They bellow till we're deaf. "But this looks good." "WELL THEN IT'S NOT S.F.!!" -- Kingsley Amis %% "SAC Missile Control. Good day Mr. President. We are presently holding at T minus 2 minutes into the first strike countdown. To authorize resumption and launch, merely hang up without leaving a message. On the other hand, if you do not wish to destroy the world, or merely wanted to speak to , leave your message after the beep." %% "SAVE US, Megaton Man! SAVE US!" "PROTECT US, Megaton Man! PROTECT US!" "THINK for us, Megaton Man, THINK for us!" "MOW MY LAWN FOR ME, Megaton Man, MOW MY LAWN FOR ME!" -- Megaton Man %% "STELLA !! SHUT UP !!" -- Harry Mudd %% "SWAMPWATER!": consists of 110 proof Green Chartreuse, and O.J. just for coloring :^) %% "Sacred cows make great hamburgers." -- Rober Reisner How do they hold the spatula? -- Stacey Campbell (staceyc@sco.com) %% "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 %% "Satire is great, but for Nazis you use baseball bats and broken bottles." -- Woody Allen %% "Satis multum illius nunc circum fertur." %% "Say it isn't so, Krusty." -- Bart in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "Say no more, Say no more!" -- Monty Python %% "Say what you like about my bloody murderous government," I says, "but don't insult me poor bleedin' country." -- Edward Abbey %% "Say what you like, the bicycle has a great past ahead of it!" %% "Say yur prayers, yuh flea-pickin' varmint!" -- Yosemite Sam %% "Say, Ralph, what do you think of those Cardinals?" "I think they're terrific, Jim. I love the way they use black smoke to signal that they haven't picked a Pope and..." "No, Ralph, no." -- Ralph Dinby, THE ELONGONATED MAN %% "Say, isn't that a twenty-story-high Gumby-shaped robot approaching at about Mach 8?" "What do you know...? So it is." -- Gumby's Winter Fun Special %% "Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution. An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and the executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be preserved in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it presumable that every man the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country? Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man discerning enough to detect so atrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to apprise his constituents of their danger? If such presumptions can fairly be made, there ought to be at once an end of all delegated authority." -- Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Papers, #26 %% "Science has come with wonderful ways to cure sick people one at a time, and to kill healthy people thousands at a time" -- guy on NPR %% "Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof" -- Ashley Montague %% "Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% "Science is about skepticism." -- Eugene Miya %% "Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing." -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "Computer Language", Oct 90 %% "Science makes godlike -- it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the *first* sin, the *original* sin. *This alone is morality.* ``Thou shalt not know'' -- the rest follows." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "Scott, baby," the sexually aggressive girl murmured as she guided her date's finger to her clitoris, "This bud's for you." %% "Scotty, I need Warp Drive in three minutes or we're all dead!" -- Star Trek II (I just find this line hysterically funny...) %% "Sean Connery is the sexiest man alive? Was I on the list?" -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Section 2.4.3.5 AWNS (Acceptor Wait for New Cycle State). In AWNS the AH function indicates that it has received a multiline message byte. In AWNS the RFD message must be sent false and the DAC message must be sent passive true. The AH function must exit the AWNS and enter: (1) The ANRS if DAV is false (2) The AIDS if the ATN message is false and neither: (a) The LADS is active (b) Nor LACS is active" -- from the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation %% "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller %% "See - the thing is - I'm an absolutist. I mean, kind of ... in a way ..." %% "See? You NEED me... like Skipper needs Gilligan!" -- The Flaming Carrot %% "See? You're a pig! Barney's a pig. Larry's a pig. We're all pigs. Except for one difference - once in a while we can crawl out of the slop, hose ourselves off and act like human beings." -- Moe in "Some Enchanted Evening", from The Simpsons %% "Seed me, Seymour" -- a random number generator meets the big green mother from outer space %% "Seems like, lately, everybody with four guys and a proton accelerator thinks they can rule the world. No offense." -- A lucid point from Race Bannon in JONNY QUEST %% "Selling software is just like prostitution; You've got it, You sell it, You've still got it!" -- D. Lambert IST %% "Senators, TV crews and the nation in general are mystified when, on the third day, Flaming Carrot shows a Star Trek blooper reel on behalf of the defense..." -- FLAMING CARROT at the Senate Hearings %% "Send in the clowns." -- policeman in "Krusty Gets Busted" for line-up, from The Simpsons %% "Send lawyers, guns and money..." -- Lyrics from a Warren Zevon song %% "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Several great men have occupied the vice presidential office -- Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt certainly. But there has only been one great vice president. Thomas Riley Marshall served two happy terms under Woodrow Wilson, content to be, as he once wrote in a letter to his boss, `your only vice.' In contrast to the recent veeps with elaborate Secret Service retinues to convince people of their importance, Marshall was happy to play the homespun game. `In the city of Denver, while I was vice president,' he recalled, `a big, husky policeman kept following me around, until I asked him what he was doing. He said he was guarding my person. I said: "Your labor is in vain. Nobody was ever crazy enough to shoot at a vice president. If you go away and find somebody to shoot at me, I'll go down in history as being the first vice president who ever attracted enough attention even to have a crank shoot at him."'" -- Nicholas Von Hoffman %% "Sex alleviates tension. Marriage causes it." -- Woody Allen, "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" %% "Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions." -- Phyllis Schlafly %% "Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest." -- Jimmy Swaggart, TV preacher, self-described pornography addict who paid prostitutes to commit "pornographic acts"; hypocrite %% "Sex should be friendly, otherwise it's just mucus membrane friction." -- Robert A. Heinlein %% "Shake hands with your mother again." -- from an old hymn %% "Shall we go down and give blood?" "Oh, I don't want a great bat flapping round my neck." -- Monty Python %% "Shall we have salad?" "Yes, lettuce." %% "Shazbot." -- Mork from Ork %% "She got drunker, and drunker... and then she became Joan Collins!" -- Hannah and Her Sisters %% "She had a missed conception." ** %% "She has decades-- *decades*, left to her..." -- Wayne comments on Robin in THE DARK KNIGHT FALLS %% "She is an excellent creature, but she can never remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans." -- Benjamin Disraeli, of his wife %% "She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B." -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), of Katharine Hepburn in a Broadway play %% "She thought they said 'illegal aliens' and signed up..." -- Hudson, "Aliens" %% "She used to be a superstar -- now she works for you. Life can be cruel." -- ...and Travis tweaks Vinnie in WISEGUY %% "She's human...well, she's a lawyer, but reasonably human." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "She's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead." -- A munchkin in "The Wizard of Oz" %% "She's so cute and blonde that I wanna squeeze her like a hamster til her eyes bug out." %% "Shelter", what a nice name for for a place where you polish your cat. %% "Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict without a single amiable trait." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) "You're not exactly Little Mary Sunshine yourself, Bernie." -- Moi %% "Sherman, set the Way-Back Machine for 1492!" %% "Ships ahoy!" yelled Tom fleetingly. %% "Ships don't come in, they're built." -- anon %% "Shit! I've struck oil," said Tom crudely. :-) %% "Shoeshine Boy, you're humble and lovable." %% "Should old acquaintance be forgot . . ." -- Count of Monte Cristo %% "Show business is just like high school, except you get paid." -- Martin Mull %% "Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser." -- Vince Lombardi, football coach %% "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) "Show me a hero and I will write you a travesty." -- John Byrne [well, he *should* have] "Show me a hero and I'll eat it." -- Peter David %% "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." -- C. G. Jung %% "Shower the people you love with love." -- James Taylor "Shower with the people you love." -- Anonymous %% "Shulang it! This is exactly the treatment we've come to expect from Delta Airlines!" -- BADGER in "Nexus" %% "Shush, Pokey! At a time like this, NO job is less important than the next!" "What about those guys who hand out towels in the locker rooms?" -- GUMBY AND POKEY'S WINTER FUN SPECIAL, where Gumby and Pokey go to Heck %% "Shut up! Be happy!" -- Jello Biafra %% "Shut up, Wilber, and load the Photon Torpedoes." -- "Bloom County" %% "Shut your eyes and you'll burst into flames." -- The Log Lady %% "Sic Transit Gloria Omri." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Sigh... Every day I thank my statuette of Wilma Flintstone that I was born normal." -- Zippy the Pinhead %% "Silence is the perfectest of herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much." -- William Shakespeare %% "Silence never solved anything." %% "Silence when you're shouting at me!" -- Woody Allen, "What's New, Pussycat?" %% "Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone." -- G. B. Stearn %% "Silver bullets MY ASS!" %% "Simon and I booked back to my house with the bike and Sara Bob's drawing. As usual something weird was going on." -- Marshall, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "Simon's not himself." -- Marshall, "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% "Simon, we have major Eerie mega-weirdness here." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Simon, you stay here with the werewolf. If he comes to, kabong him." -- Marshall, "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% "Simple, candid, crazed and madcap (quintessentially retarded) our hero fights an with a PLUCK and SPIRIT that is totally American to the core!!" -- Flaming Carrot %% "Since I gave up hope, I feel a lot better." -- Steve Taylor %% "Since he's been in the White House, President Reagan has gotten two hearing aids, a colon operation, skin cancer, prostate surgery, and he's been shot. "And we, the American People, should always remember these things... because he won't." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "Since the bicycle makes little demand on material or energy resources, contributes little to pollution, makes a positive contribution to health and causes little death or injury, it can be regarded as the most benevolent of machines." -- S. S. Wilson %% "Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?" -- C. D. Tavares %% "Sir, I think I wanted to express the duality of man - a kind of Jungian thing, sir." -- Full Metal Jacket %% "Sir, I'll have you know that I cannot be bought and I cannot be threatened. But you put the two together and I'm your man." -- Norm Peterson %% "Sir, if you'd pay ATTENTION instead of writing your signature in drool on the table, you'd know." -- Clonezone takes on lawyers, from "Badger" %% "Sir, the bridge appears to be run by computer. It's the only thing speaking." "Speaking? Let me hear it." "...9...8...7...6..." -- Star Trek III, "The Search for Spock" %% "Sit, Ubu, sit!" "Good Dog!" "Woof!" %% "Six years for possession of a cigarette?...I got six months for possession of a deadly weapon!" -- cartoon by S. Harris %% "Skip the tea, lets just party", snapped the punk Alice %% "Slime is the agony of water." -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) %% "Smoking cures weight problems...eventually..." -- Steven Wright %% "Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" %% "Snausages." %% "Snyder's got a stiff ticket," said Kay, "Come on, take it out, and let's play." He pulled it on out, But she started to pout, His ticket was only a quarter-inch stout. %% "So I'm ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face." -- Yogi Berra %% "So REMEMBER: Black is BLACK and White is WHITE, The more they MEET the more they FIGHT. The line BETWEEN them was never more REAL So eat your BEANS at every MEAL." -- Mr. Bug %% "So after today, Germans can go into any country they want. ...Say, wasn't that the problem in 1939?" -- Johnny Carson %% "So far from God, so close to the United States..." -- Old Mexican proverb %% "So gather the kids, a dog... Grandma... and lock them in another room." -- Orson Welles %% "So tell me... did you remember to ask for World Domination?" "Whoops... I knew I forgot something!" -- That darned BADGER... %% "So that's it in a nutshell, Phil. We're here to take over your planet and enslave all you goobers what live here..." "Never mind that -- what about *women's issues*? What do you think about equal pay? I could just weep!" -- Phil Donahue talks to alien invaders in WHAT TH...?!, a completely forgettable comic %% "So this is it," said Arthur, "we are going to die." "Yes," said Ford, "except...no! Wait a minute!" He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?" he cried. "What? Where?" cried Arthur, twisting around. "No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "we are going to die after all." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" -- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer. %% "So we're not alone. Now I have to die -- *now*! Just when human history promises to become interesting!" -- CONCRETE's Mom grumbling about dying, after finding out her son's brain is in an alien's body %% "So whaddya want? Wicker?!?" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "So why don't you make like a tree, and get outta here." -- Biff in "Back to the Future" %% "So you have this mapping P(v). So what does it mean? It means you take v and 'P' on it, right?" -- J. Baker Mathematics 234b %% "So you're from outer space!" "Actually, I'm from Iowa; I just WORK in outer space." -- Captain Kirk on careers -- Star Trek IV %% "So, do you live around here often?" -- Steven Wright %% "So, what's on, Doyle?" "Ah, videos, unless you wanna see THE SCARLET CLAW." "Might as well. Holmes does that cool speech on Canada at the end." -- Jaime, Jaime, Jaime... from LOVE & ROCKETS %% "So-called Christian rock. . . . is a diabolical force undermining Christianity from within." -- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocrite and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict, "Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll.", The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50 %% "So... I can save the solar system. But not a friend. This job isn't worth a tinker's damn." -- NEXUS %% "Socialism is power, power, and more power." -- Oswald Spengler, Hitler's intellectual forebear %% "Software is the heart and soul of a computer company." -- DEC President Ken Olsen %% "Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'.... Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, 'user-friendly' on the cover." -- Bill Gates, Pres., Microsoft, Inc. %% "Some Assembly Required" means "Engineering Degree Necessary." %% "Some diabolical fiend threatens to establish a totalitarian system of rule! Only Stupendous Man can save the day!...Aha! Just as I suspected! My evil arch-nemesis, Mom-Lady!" -- Calvin and Hobbes %% "Some drugs have appropriately been called `wonder drugs', inasmuch as one wonders what they will do next." -- Samuel E. Stumpf %% "Some inspired joker - probably Maxwell." %% "Some of Beethoven's favorite tunes are Mendelssohn's 'Requiem', Handel's 'Messiah', and Bon Jovi's 'Slippery When Wet'." -- Bill & Ted %% "Some of these fit, others don't" %% "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun." -- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) %% "Some people eat food because they're Politically Conscious." -- not mine, overheard %% "Some people have their morning coffee, I have my morning amphetamines." %% "Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it" -- Gordon R. Dickson %% "Some people never learn anything because they understand everything too soon." -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% "Some people should be taken with a grain of salt; others with a whole shaker." -- Blumstein (paulb@ttidca.TTI.COM) %% "Some people think George is weird, because he has sideburns behind his ears... I think George is weird, because he has false teeth... with braces on them. George is a radio announcer, and when he walks under a bridge... you can't hear him talk." -- Steven Wright %% "Some people think like drummers, some people act like them." -- Jason Titus %% "Some students may feel that the contents of Question 33 are both dull and useless. I must confess that my first impulse is to reply that it serves them right for doing the fast course." %% "Some tottyhead is mixing genres!" -- "Bloom County" %% "Some wise guy put a cork in this bottle." -- Homer in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% "Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we'd never be done with it." -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% "Somebody said to me, `But the Beatles were antimaterialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say `Now, let's write a swimming pool'." -- Paul McCartney %% "Somebody's boring me... I think it's me." -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) %% "Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York City. One is "Hey, taxi." Two is, "What train do I take to get to Bloomingdale's?" And three is, "Don't worry. It's just a flesh wound." -- David Letterman %% "Someone should tear him down and put up a human being." -- Alan Alda, M.A.S.H. %% "Someone write me a letter. I need to know that I'm still alive." %% "Someone's at the door," she chimed. %% "Someone's been mean to you! Tell me who it is, so I can punch him tastefully." -- Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse %% "Something is happening here, What it is ain't exactly clear..." -- Pons & Fleischmann %% "Sometimes I get the feeling that Schrodinger wasn't really a cat lover." -- Zik Saleeba, zik@zikzak.apana.org.au %% "Sometimes I need what only you can provide. Your absence." -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -- Bill Watterson, cartoonist of Calvin & Hobbes %% "Sometimes I wish we collected stamps for fun, instead of battling the forces of Weirdness." -- Eerie Indiana %% "Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then." -- Katherine Hepburn %% "Sometimes I...No, I don't." -- Steve Wright %% "Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention %% "Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code." -- Dan Salomon %% "Sometimes it's useful to know how large your zero is" "What am I doing? I haven't written any damn thing yet - I've just written total rubbish." %% "Sometimes you have to be a harsh cookie editor." -- Karl %% "Sometimes you leave a mark, before you know the score." -- Ric Ocasek, "You Got You", from the album "This Side Of Paradise" %% "Sometimes you're the windshield - sometimes the bug, Sometimes you're the Louisville Slugger - sometimes the ball" -- Mark Knopfler %% "Somewhere", said Father Vittorini, "did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate these Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God's Machineries of Joy?" "If Blake said that", said Father Brian, "he never lived in Dublin." -- Ray Bradbury, "The Machineries of Joy" %% "Sorority girls! I'll get you sorority girls!" "Nah...." -- Christine tries to find a substitute for the obligation she owes Dan -- from NIGHT COURT %% "Sorry, I don't perform except at dinner." -- Stephen Sondheim, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG %% "Sorry, Nick. I lied, man." -- WKRP in Cincinatti %% "Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, the paranoid human-hating robot, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed... Life! Don't talk to me about life." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android, in Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Sorry... Mort Weisinger got the better of me for a sec." -- A moment of panick due to the Plasma Monkeys. From "Stig's Inferno" %% "Sounds like a plan." %% "Space is big. Really 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 chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Spare me, gentle knight! Tenure shalt thee have, and gold, and several attractive female teaching assistants." -- Gary's fantasy from thirty-something %% "Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!" -- Herman Melville (1819-1891), "Moby Dick" %% "Speaking as a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, as first minister of Louis XIII, and as one of the architects of the modern world already, would you say that Harold Larch was a man of good character?" "Listen, Harry is a very wonderful human being." -- Monty Python %% "Spending four or five hours a day tracing through CONSIO with an assembly-level debugger will take the spring out of anybody's step." -- The Lone Contractor %% "Spending programs are now 'investments,' taxes are 'contributions,' and these are the same people who say _I_ need a dictionary?" -- Dan Quayle 2/19/93 %% "Spider, spider on the wall, Ain't you got no sense at all? Can't you see that wall's been plastered? Get off that wall, you stupid spider!" %% "Splendid chaps. Kill-crazy as all get out." %% "Splendid villain! Very exuberant!" -- Uncle Max rates criminals in ZOT! %% "Spock, did you see the looks on their faces?" "Yes, Captain, a sort of vacant contentment." %% "Spock, maybe your reknowned Vulcan logic can get Jim to rest. God know he never listens to me." "Do not take it personally, Dr. McCoy. *None* of us listens to you." -- A classic exchange between Spock and McCoy in the STAR TREK comic %% "Spontaneous combustion! What a stroke of luck!" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "Sports is the toy department of human life." -- Howard Cosell %% "Stalinism begins at home." -- Tom Neff %% "Stan and I thought that this experiment was so stupid, we decided to finance it ourselves." -- Martin Fleischmann, co-discoverer of room-temperature fusion (?) %% "Stand by to be impressed." -- Lucifer tries to blow this joint. From "Stig's Inferno" %% "Standards committees are not the best ways to create a standard. Standards meetings and standards themselves are horribly political things. One thing that people forget is that many standards are made by rather small groups of people. A few good people can really save the day, and a few idiots can really make it miserable for years to come." -- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of Unix %% "Starkist don't want tunas with good taste; they want tunas that taste good." %% "Starring Barbara Billingsley, Hugh Beaumont, Tony Dow, and Jerry Mathers as 'The Beaver'!" %% "Start at the Beginning, go through till the End, then stop." -- King of Hearts, from "Alice in Wonderland" %% "Starting a painting is easy...the hard part is stopping before you mess it up." -- Jeff McNelly, "Shoe" %% "State run lotteries: think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent." -- Evan Leibovitch %% "Statistics are like bikinis--they show a lot, but hide the important stuff." %% "Statistics in the hands of an engineer are like a lamppost to a drunk--they're used more for support than illumination." -- Bill Sangster, Dean of Engineering, Georgia Tech %% "Stay away from that jazz man, Lisa. Nothing personal ... I just fear the unfamiliar." -- Marge in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "Stephanie, do you know what I do when I don't understand an emotion? I suppress and deny it." -- Newhart %% "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." -- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929 %% "Stop accusing me of perfectionism, dammit - a brain shot on a Liberal REQUIRES sub-second-of-angle accuracy!!!" -- David Simmons, davids@ims.com %% "Stop annoying Mister President with impertinent questions, Junior." -- Death Race 2000 %% "Stop it! You're pinching my arm!" "You're lucky I don't rip it off and beat yer girlfriend with it!" -- A Mark Martin satire of the Charles Atlas ads... %% "Storage compartments? Storage compartments?" -- Star Trek "Trouble With Tribbles" %% "Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K." -- Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure %% "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!" -- Monty Python %% "Strange, when you think of it, that of all the countless folks who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or legend as having died of laughter." -- Sir Max Beerbohm %% "Strangers may laugh at him behind his back, but still he saves their lives!" -- That could only describe... THE FLAMING CARROT! %% "String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that's 3 more than ANSI said I should)" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "Strong men blench! Women scream! Children vomit!" -- Gaston Piston in NEIL THE HORSE %% "Strong men tremble when they hear it. They've got cause enough to fear it; It's even blacker than they smear it! No one mentions -- my name." -- Bill Sykes %% "Studies show 80 percent of all Americans know about home computers. That's higher than the percentage of Americans who know about sex." %% "Stupid" is a boundless concept. %% "Stupidity is always a capital crime." -- Larry Niven "N-Space" %% "Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe." -- Frank Zappa %% "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -- William E. Davidsen %% "Success and failure are equally disastrous." -- Tennessee Williams %% "Success covers a multitude of blunders." -- Corporate motto of Microsoft [Actually, it was George Bernard Shaw] %% "Success covers a multitude of blunders." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% "Such is the popularity of the president that the people will support him in whatever he will do or will not do, without appealing to their own reason or to anything but their feelings toward him." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "Such senseless violence! I don't understand it." "We don't expect you to. If cartoons were meant for adults, they'd be on in prime time." -- Marge and Lisa in "Krusty Gets Busted" from The Simpsons %% "Sudden de-compression Sucks!" -- Dennis Robert Gorrie, GORRIEDE@UREGINA1.BITNET %% "Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you to stop suffering." -- Jane Roberts %% "Suicide Hotline...please hold." %% "Suicide Prevention Center. Please hold..." %% "Suitably interpreted, this is an exact value." %% "Summer blonds, revealing tan lines, I'll make more moves than Allied van lines" %% "Summit meetings tend to be like panda matings. The expectations are always high, and the results usually disappointing." -- Robert Orben %% "Supernatural, perhaps...Baloney, perhaps not" -- Bela Lugosi %% "Supporting the Brady Bill is like looking for your lost car keys under the streetlight down at the corner because that's where the light's better." -- Kevin Langston langston@convex.com %% "Supposedly, it is possible to score goals [in field hockey]. However, this rarely happens because hitting people is so positively reinforcing." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "Sure Hon', put down the Casull and we can talk about it..." (short discussion with my wife) -- Bill Burge, burge@qdeck.com %% "Sure I stole. Why not? When I grew up, you had to steal to eat. Then you had to steal to tip." -- Woody Allen %% "Sure, I'll draw, mister -- but first you gotta say the magic word... Didn't your mother ever teach you the magic word?" -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "Sure, everyone always said 'Socrates what is the meaning of life?' or 'Socrates how can I find happiness?', did anyone ever say 'Socrates hemlock is poison.'???????" -- Socrates minutes before death %% "Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But there they are . . ." %% "Sure, you're right, it's easy to find flaws. `Sure,' America says to the critic, `it's easy to tear down, but you can't build up, can you? The suffering and labor of the artist mean nothing to you, do they Mr. Ian Shoales? You don't believe in anything,' America screams, `except the sound of your own voice!' Well, calm down, America. Lighten up. Unclench those hardworking fists." -- Ian Shoales %% "Survey says..." -- Richard Dawson, weenie, on "Family Feud" %% "Sweaty Snugglebunnies." %% "Sweet Loretta Fat, she thought she was a cleaner, but she was a frying pan..." -- Beatles %% "Swell town you got here. Lots of big men born here?" "No, only babies." %% "Sylvester Stallone does Hamlet: 'To be, or what?'" -- Robin Williams %% "Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "TB, or not TB, that is the congestion. Consumption be done about it? Of cough, of cough." -- Woody Allen, "Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask" %% "THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB FOR ... you-know-who." -- Looney Tunes, Stupor Duck (1956, Robert McKimson) %% "TO MANKIND And the hope that the war against folly may someday be won, after all." -- Dedicatory note of "The Gods Themselves" %% "Tacker's off scale man! They're all around us man!" -- Hudson %% "Tact consists in knowing how far to go too far." -- Jean Cocteau %% "Take Idaho's license plates - they say 'Famous Potatoes.' Then there's New Hampshire - their license plates say 'Live Free ... or DIE!!' I don't know, I think that somewhere between 'Famous Potatoes' and 'Live Free or Die' the truth lies. And I think it's closer to 'Famous Potatoes.'" -- George Carlin %% "Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Take cover everyone. Justice is about to be unleashed!" "Holy crow! Not in my store!!" -- Ad ad for GUN FURY %% "Take me away, imperialist puppets of the great Pay-TV satanistic corporate booger-heads!" -- "Bloom County" %% "Take my wife, please" Tom said jokingly. %% "Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool." -- Rudyard Kipling, "Three and--an Extra" %% "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." -- Thiokol management, 1/27/86 %% "Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take LESS," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take MORE than nothing." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Take that and that and THAT and *THAT*! Ha! I warned you, didn't I? Didn't I warn you? I thought I warned you. I didn't? Oh, sorry." -- That crazy Max! From "Sam And Max" %% "Take that, you hostile sons-of-bitches!" -- James Coburn, in the finale of "The President's Analyst" %% "Take this cross and garlic -- here's a Mezuzah in case he's Jewish -- a page of the Koran if he's Muslim... and if he's a Zen Buddhist, you're on your own." -- Im-ple-ments of destruction for undead (vampires, that is) in "Badger" %% "Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously." -- Booth Tarkington %% "Taking drugs in the 60s, I tried to reach Nirvana, But all I ever got were re-runs of The Mickey Mouse Club." -- Rev. Jim %% "Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Goethe" %% "Talk ta me, Hudson!" -- Top %% "Taste cold justice, you disreputable henchman-types!" -- Holy Melodrama -- it's Bat-Bat! (From Bakshi's MIGHTY MOUSE series) %% "Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% "Taxes? We don't need no stinking taxes." -- Jeff Daiell %% "Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology." -- John Tudor %% "Television is democracy at its ugliest." -- Paddy Chayefsky %% "Tell me, Bill (Gates), why would anyone want to buy a brain damaged processor coupled to a crippled bus, running what amounts to a glorified version of CP/M, with a working version of a multi-tasking operating system that to be kind we shall call horrible and useless (not to mention available RSN), when instead one can get a FAST processor coupled to a FAST bus, with a REAL OPERATING system (with threads, note that people, WITH threads), with a REAL windowing system, and approx. 260 MEGABYTES of mass storage, for about the same amount of money?" "uh...they don't have color yet." -- jms %% "Tell the Truth and run." -- Yugoslav proverb %% "Terribly sorry, but you've reached an answering machine." %% "Texas (politics) a whole other country" -- Devon Davis, ddavis@fwrdc.rtsg.mot.com %% "Texxon... Do what we say, and nobody gets hurt." -- Saturday Night Live ad %% "Thank God. The police." -- Fletch %% "Thank heaven for startups; without them we'd never have any advances." -- Seymour Cray %% "Thank heaven. A bachelor's life is no life for a single man." -- Samuel Goldwyn, when told his son was getting married %% "Thank you for flying U.S.A.F. We hope that you will consider us again when your travel plans next include bombing Tripoli." %% "Thank you for not seating us. I'm sorry, our children are animals!" "Oh, come on now, Eleanor; in a sense, we are all animals, don't you think?" "McDONALDS, McDONALDS!!" -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio %% "Thank you very much," he says. "I don't believe I've seen a # as beautiful. Follow me." A door appears on the west end of the ledge. Through the door, you can see a narrow chimney sloping downward. The gnome moves quickly, and he disappears from sight. %% "Thank you, God!" -- Bob, the RV salesman, in "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% "Thanks for the heart attack son." -- Marshall's Dad, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "Thanks to the brainalyzer, my nine year old buddy Simon has an Einsteinian intellect - and a pretty snobby personality to boot." -- Marshall, "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% "That Flaming Carrot is a real fire-eater!... He'd charge Hell with a bucket of gasoline!" -- FLAMING CARROT %% "That buffalo is the greatest figure skater I've ever seen! I must sign him to STAR in my next show!" -- Foo-fa-raa in "Badger" %% "That government is best which governs least." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "That government is best which governs not at all." -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Civil Disobedience" 1849 %% "That green-blooded, pointy-eared Son of a Bitch!" %% "That gum you like is going to come back in style." -- Twin Peaks %% "That is not the Usenet tradition, but it's a solidly-entrenched delusion now." -- Brian Kantor, brian@ucsd.edu %% "That is the total and absolute generalization ... well, almost." %% "That makes 144," said Tom grossly. %% "That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest" -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) (Sysop's note: and if so, what are we doing here?) %% "That man makes Rambo look like Pee-Wee Herman." -- The description of SLEDGE HAMMER %% "That needs some thinking about; let me go away and regurgitate for a couple of hours." ** "Things are so bad right now that even positions with people in them are vacant." ** %% "That one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me ...get him up against the wall" -- Pink Floyd %% "That reminds me of a guy i used to date" %% "That wasn't quite what I had in mind", he says, crunching the # in his rock hard hands. %% "That's OK. I didn't do it!" -- Krusty in "Krusty Gets Busted" %% "That's a good question, son. Being popular is the most important thing in the world." "I'm glad you asked that son. Being popular is the most important thing in the world." -- Homer in "Tell Tale Head", from The Simpsons %% "That's an engineer on his work term. He's sawing pipes, then soldering them back together again...He'll do that 10 times to make the pipe shorter." -- J. MacKay Statistics 332 %% "That's just putting gravy on the cake." %% "That's my wallet you're fondling" "I know! I know!" %% "That's no beagle, it's a mongrel," she muttered. %% "That's not a bug, that's merely an idiosyncrasy." -- mattb (formerly of sco) %% "That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude." -- Alexander Haig %% "That's not a philosophy, that's a bumper sticker." %% "That's not a regular rule: you invented it just now." "It's the oldest rule in the book," said the King. "Then it ought to be Number One," said Alice. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "That's so deep, I'm getting the bends.... If you want me, I'll be in the decompression chamber." -- The Fusco Brothers %% "That's the biz, sweetheart." -- Remo Williams, The Destroyer %% "That's the effect of living backwards: it always makes one a little giddy at first, but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "That's the fact, Jack!" -- Stripes %% "That's the nature of research--you don't know what in hell you're doing." -- `Doc' Edgerton %% "That's the trouble with `mindless slaves'... they're, well, *mindless*!" -- Dr. Quest points out those little problems with world domination. JONNY QUEST %% "That's the trouble with godhood: it robs you of your finer judgement. A deity so rarely has to *pay* for his mistakes!" -- The Midgard Serpent analyzes mythic concepts... %% "That's the whole kettle of fish in a nutshell." ** %% "That's what this country needs -- just a little more light cast in the right places." -- From OUTLANDER %% "The *evident* character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn." -- Georg Wihelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) %% "The ACLU has stood foursquare against the recurring tides of hysteria that from time to time threaten freedoms everywhere... Indeed, it is difficult to appreciate how far our freedoms might have eroded had it not been for the Union's valiant representation in the courts of the constitutional rights of people of all persuasions, no matter how unpopular or even despised by the majority they were at the time." -- former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren %% "The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville %% "The American people were asked to choose between a candidate whose theme was `We're all right, Jack,' and a candidate who said, `Eat your broccoli.'" -- William Schneider %% "The American public knows what it wants, and deserves to get it good and hard." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "The Americans want blood; but that of course is their style. They watch too many Westerns in their formative years." -- From the excellent Channel 4 production, "A Very British Coup" %% "The Amiga is the only personal computer where you can run a multitasking operating system and get realtime performance, out of the box." -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% "The Angels...! The angels were speaking to me! And do you know what they said?" "No... vhat?" "`We are the men from Texaco, We work from Maine to Mexico, We're close to you no matter who you are...'" -- Jeremy Acorn, a take-off on Johnny Appleseed, who is crazy enough to be able to hear radio broadcasts from 1950; from JOURNEY %% "The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is forty-two." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The Arnolds feign death until the Wagners, sensing the sudden awkwardness, are compelled to leave." -- Gary Larson, 1987 Far Side Calendar %% "The Avis WIZARD decides if you get to drive a car. Your head won't touch the pillow of a Sheraton unless their computer says it's okay." -- Arthur Miller %% "The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism." -- George F. Will %% "The Bermuda Triangle got tired of warm weather. It moved to Alaska. Now Santa Claus is missing." -- Steven Wright %% "The Book says BURN and DESTROY repent and redeem and revenge and deploy and rumble thee forth to the land of the unbelieving scum 'cause they don't go for what's in the Book and that makes 'em BAD." -- Frank Zappa %% "The Boom Tube has emerged on Earth!" "How can you be so sure?" "Just look at the tacky furniture!" -- Those trite androids from MR. MIRACLE %% "The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Devil's Disciple" %% "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 %% "The C shell is flakier than a snowstorm." -- Guy Harris %% "The Church doesn't have problems with sex; the world does" -- Vatican official %% "The Computer made me do it." %% "The Court laments the fact that in this day and age many children are not upward source compatible with their parents or grandparents. Perhaps Motorola or Hitachi microprocessors will remedy the situation." -- Judge Bunton, whose patience with Moto & Hitachi was wearing out fast, commenting arguments about instruction sets and evolution %% "The DNA genetic system is the one library in which it is worthwhile to browse" %% "The Diabolonian position is new to the London playgoer of today, but not to lovers of serious literature. From Prometheus to the Wagnerian Siegfried, some enemy of the gods, unterrified champion of those oppressed by them, has always towered among the heroes of the loftiest poetry." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "On Diabolonian Ethics" %% "The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves." -- Wyndham Lewis %% "The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it...It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Preface to "Pygmalion" %% "The French will only be united under the threat of danger. Nobody can simply bring together a country that has 265 kinds of cheese." -- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) %% "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." -- Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826) (1774) %% "The Golden Rule is that there are no golden rules." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "The Government just announced today the creation of the Neutron Bomb II. Similar to the Neutron Bomb, the Neutron Bomb II not only kills people and leaves buildings standing, but also does a little light housekeeping." -- from "Global Village News" on Nickelodeon %% "The Heinlein Woman to me is this woman who goes out and rules the galaxy, smokes a cigar, uses a machine gun and all, but what she really wants is to bring her husband his slippers." -- paraphrase, based on Peter da Silva, peter@sugar's memory of a quote by Joan D. Vinge %% "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least DEFINITIVELY inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong. This was the gist of the notice. It said "The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The Lake Wobegon runestone, which proves that Viking explorers were here in 1381, is a small black stone covered with Viking runic characters which read: "8 of us stopped & stayed awhile to visit & have coffee & a short nap. Sorry you weren't here. Well, that's about it for now." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "The Lisa had problems, but it was a terrific piece of engineering that still puts the Macintosh to shame." -- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld %% "The Mets were great in 'sixty eight, The Cards were fine in 'sixty nine, But the Cubs will be heavenly in nineteen and seventy." -- Ernie Banks %% "The NBC Today Show and Olympic host Bryan Gumbel's ego applied for statehood today. If granted, it would become our 51st state, and 9th largest." -- Dennis Miller %% "The NY Times is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the country. The National Enquirer is read by the people who think Elvis is alive and running the country..." -- Robert J Woodhead (trebor@biar.UUCP) %% "The Nazis have no sense of humor, so why should they want television?" -- Philip K. Dick %% "The Pledge of Allegiance says 'liberty and justice for all'. Which part of 'all' don't you understand?" -- Rep. Pat Schroeder (D) Colo. %% "The Russian soldier is our friend. He is here to protect us." -- First sentence in an English textbook seen in Bulgaria (printed in Moscow) (c.a. 1967). %% "The Senate judiciary committee in 1982 recommended they get rid of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Here's the problem. There are 4,600 BATF agents. And they would go, according to their bureaucracy, to one of two other agencies if they were to dissolve the BATF. And that is to the Secret Service or to U.S. Customs. Customs and Secret Service said, no, they wouldn't accept the (BATF) agents. They called them, `substandard.' "So these (BATF) people are civil service employees and you just can't fire them. They couldn't turn them into mailmen. And so very frankly we came to a Catch-22 situation because since we don't have an Al Capone running illegal liquor - the BATF was brought on board for that purpose - there's no major problem anymore with tobacco or with firearms, then the BATF now this year - 1993 - has a $400 million budget. And, to stay in business, the BATF tries the best they can to get as many cases as possible to justify continuing. "So if Clinton wants to cut the budget, let's start with the BATF. And let's find some way to get around this civil service problem of what to do with these 4,600 officers. "You know we've got for example 6,500 FBI agents who were dedicated as counter-intelligence. They used to follow Russians around. Well, now that Yeltsin is our friend and Gorbachev is the man of the decade, literally these 6,500 FBI agents are out of a job. "Now they have reassigned 1,500 FBI agents to track gangs. Well, this means you've got Effrem Zimbalist, Jr. basically looking after people that are spray painting the sides of schools. But that still leaves 5,000 FBI and at least 4,600 BATF who are looking for something to do." -- Bo Grits %% "The Soviet Union, which has complained recently about alleged anti-Soviet themes in American advertising, lodged an official protest this week against the Ford Motor Company's new campaign: `Hey you stinking fat Russian, get off my Ford Escort.'" -- Dennis Miller, Saturday Night Live %% "The Stately Homes of England, Tho' rather in the lurch, Provide a lot chances For Psychical Research-- There's the ghost of a crazy younger son Who murder'd in Thirteen Fifty-One, An extremely wordy Nun Who resented it, And people who come to call Meet her in the hall." -- Noel Coward, "The Stately Homes of England" %% "The Street finds its own uses for technology." -- William Gibson %% "The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now." -- Robert Allen, rja@sun.com %% "The United States has entered an anti-intellectual phase in its history, perhaps most clearly seen in our virtually thought-free political life." -- David Baltimore %% "The Universe--some information to help you live in it. 1 AREA: Infinite. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" offers this definition of the word "Infinite." INFINITE: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks real titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The Washington Post reported yesterday that Jim Bakker had been seen in the PTL steam room frolicking nude with three other naked men; and that a neglected Tammy Fay had had her breasts enlarged, hoping for a Marilyn Monroe image. "The collected Bakker history should inspire us all to become true believers in a supreme higher power that made sure, out of the five billion people in this world, that these two creeps found each other." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "The Wright Bothers weren't the first to fly. They were just the first not to crash." %% "The ability of two men to put on gloves, stand toe-to-toe, and pummel each other into insensibility... is what separates us from the animals." -- Jim, on Taxi %% "The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "The advice you give a kid is considered dumb until he gets the same advice from another kid." -- Doug Larson %% "The algorithm to do that is extremely nasty. You might want to mug someone with it?" -- M. Devine Computer Science 340 %% "The alternative to mutual trust, which is indeed a risky gamble, is the security of the police state." -- Alan Watts %% "The apes were all homosexuals, eager to wrap their paws around Johnny's thighs. They were jealous of me, and I loathed them." -- Maureen O'Sullivan %% "The are hosts of dopes here, and it is not good for my blood pressure: such inane things are said and seriously discussed that I get into arguments outside the formal sessions whenever anyone asks me a question or starts to tell me about his "work." The "work" is always: (1) completely un-understandable, (2) vague and indefinite, (3) something correct that is obvious and self-evident, but worked out by a long and difficult analysis, and presented as an important discovery, (4) a claim based on the stupidity of the author that some obvious and correct fact, accepted and checked for years, is, in fact, false (these are the worst, no argument will convince the idiot), (5) an attempt to do something probably impossible, but certainly of no utility, which, it is finally revealed at the end, fails, or (6) just plain wrong. There is a great deal of "activity in the field" these days, but this "activity" is mainly in showing that the previous "activity" of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in something promising. It is like a lot of worms trying to get out of a bottle by crawling all over each other." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) (to his wife) %% "The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents." -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186 %% "The armchair quarterbacking of a former quarterback is worth more than the armchair quarterbacking of a schmuck." -- Cal Keegan %% "The art of being a good guest is knowing when to leave." -- Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh %% "The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "Heretics" %% "The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art." -- Alfred Stieglitz, circa 1895, about the Romantic-Impressionist school of photography %% "The average human being only uses 10% of his or her mind." -- Scientific studies "...and the rest is taken up by the operating system." -- from an MIT newsletter %% "The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at 7:30 in the morning feeling just plain terrible." -- Jean Kerr %% "The bad reputation UNIX has gotten is totally undeserved, laid on by people who don't understand, who have not gotten in there and tried anything." -- Jim Joyce, former computer science lecturer at the University of California %% "The ballet opens at a carnival. There are refreshments and rides. Many people in gaily colored costumes dance and laugh, to the accompaniment of flutes and woodwinds, while the trombones play in a minor key to suggest that soon the refreshments will run out and everybody will be dead." -- Woody Allen %% "The band is just fantastic, That is really what I think, Oh by the way, which one's Pink?" -- Pink Floyd %% "The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame." -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@apple.com %% "The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much." -- Thorton Wilder %% "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." -- T. H. White, "The Once and Future King" %% "The best thing is to look natural, but it takes makeup to look natural." -- Calvin Klein %% "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers %% "The better technology does not always sell better, even if it is first." -- William J. Spencer, Xerox Corporation %% "The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness." -- Eric Sevareid %% "The bigger they are, the nicer they are..." -- Chiun, Master of Sinanju, from The Destroyer series %% "The biggest growth industry in UNIX is promoting standards." -- Rikki Kirzner, Dataquest %% "The blues isn't about feelin' better ... it's about makin' other people feel worse (and makin' a few bucks while you're at it)." -- Bleedin' Gums Murphy, the Jazz Man in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "The blues isn't about feeling better -- it's about making other people feel worse!" -- Mr. Murphy, "The Simpsons" %% "The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." -- Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project %% "The bonds that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each others life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof." -- Richard Bach %% "The boy. Bring me the boy." -- Homer in "The Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% "The bug is mightier than the fix." -- Cyrano deBuggerac %% "The bug stops here." -- H. Trubug %% "The cannon! The cannon!" -- kids on Krusty's show in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "The cat is out of the bag. Even Siskel and Ebert talk about it, and they're _professional art farts_, not amateur Art History Majors forced to work in a computer company because they realized too late that a four-year investment in a liberal arts degree is about as useful on the job market as a bicycle with square wheels." -- Chris Neckalson (sco!chrisn) %% "The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it - sometimes three." -- Alexandre Dumas, "The Portable Curmudgeon" %% "The chain that can be yanked is not the cosmic chain." -- Cal Keegan %% "The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain." -- G. Fitch %% "The child is father to the man." This was written by Shakespeare. He didn't often make that kind of mistake. %% "The children who know how to think for themselves, spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone (would be) interdependent." 1899 %% "The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity." -- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794), "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" %% "The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped." -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% "The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs." -- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason" %% "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a "C," the idea must be feasible." -- A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp. %% "The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep." -- A. P. Herbert %% "The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." -- John Philpot Curran %% "The country couldn't run without Prohibition. That is the industrial fact." -- Henry Ford, 1929 %% "The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% "The cow story is unlikely - cows are valuable, and don't fit into automatic teller machine slots." -- ho95c.att.com!wcs %% "The creation of socialism requires the curtailment of the central economic freedom of bourgeois society, namely, the right of individuals to own, and therefore to withhold if they wish, the means of production, including their own labor. [...] The full preservation of this bourgeois freedom would place the attainment of socialism at the mercy of property owners who could threaten to deny their services to society, and again, I refer to their _labor_, not just their material resources, if their terms are not met." -- Robert Heilbrenner, leading socialist theoretician, "Marxism: For and Against", 1980 "Why Does Socialism Continue to Appeal to Anyone?", Robert Hessen %% "The cross of the Legion of Honour has been conferred upon me. However, few escape that distinction." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "A Tramp Abroad" %% "The culture of any period is a mixture of that which docilely caters to passing whims and fancies and that which transcends these things -- and may also pass judgement on them." -- Stanislaw Lem %% "The curse of this country is eloquent men." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Eloquence" %% "The day is very warm", intoned the priest, "but the noodles are getting cold". "A cold noodle", he continued, "is like a dog without fur.... Recognizable, but very unpleasant." -- cruc!gevert %% "The depository of power is always unpopular." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "The difference between fantasy and science fiction is that one hast honest politicians scrupulous lawyers, and altruistic doctors, while the other only has beings from outer space." -- William John Watkins %% "The discovery of God in a hole in the polar ice cap by a pair of punk rockers does not disturb your governments' conscience in the least." -- Another wonderful Howarth line %% "The doctor said I had dain bramage... But my friends don't know what 'dat shit is" %% "The documentation for this program is obvious, therefore it is left as an exercise for the grader." -- joel@cs.odu.edu %% "The doughnut is...not unlike the ideal lover - rich, sensual, irresistibly desirable, and available 24 hours a day." -- David Hoffman %% "The easiest thing in the world is to be a holy man on a mountain!" -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% "The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% "The eggs taste disgusting." "Don't blame me. I only laid the table." %% "The elder gods went to Suggoth and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." -- A T-shirt in the comics version of "Myth Adventures" %% "The end. 94. 95. The very, very, very end." %% "The enemy was repelled. But victory was not won. The war dragged on for a year and there was no decision. Gold grew scarce, and again the Government was in despair. "I easily relieved them. 'Write,' I said, 'promises on paper to be repaid in gold.' They did as I advised, paying me (at my request) a trifle of half a million for the advice. I handled the affair on a merely nominal profit. I punctually met for another year every note that was pain in. But too many were presented, for the war seemed unending and entered a third year." "Then did i conceive yet another stupendous thing. 'Bid them,' said I to the Sultan, 'take the notes as money. Cease to repay. Write, not 'I will on delivery of this paper pay a piece of gold,' but, 'this is a piece of gold.'" "He did as I told him. The next day the Vizier came to me with the story of an insolent fellow to whom fifty such notes had been offered as payment for a camel for the war and who had sent back, not a camel, but another piece of paper on which was written 'This is a camel.'" "'Cut off his head!' said I." "It was done, and the warning sufficed. The paper was taken and the war proceeded." -- from Hilaire Belloc, "The Mercy of Allah", 1922 courtesy of ECON 605 by Leigh Tesfatsion %% "The entire world revolves around this wretched Alien." -- H.R. Giger %% "The evidence before the court is incontrovertible; there's no need for the jury to retire." -- Pink Floyd %% "The fact is that one side thinks that the profits to be won outweigh the risks to be incurred, and the other side is ready to face danger than accept an immediate loss." -- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War %% "The fact is, you don't have to be able to read to enjoy the "Springfield Review of Books". Just look at these amusing caricatures of Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag." -- Sideshow Bob in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "The faster I go, the behinder I get." -- Lewis Carroll %% "The faster you go, the shorter you are" -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "The fastest draw is when the sword never leaves the scabbard. The strongest way to block is never to provoke a blow. And the cleanest cut is the one withheld. -- "Kensho", by Dennis Schmidt %% "The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% "The fear of poverty haunts me. You weren't poor but you anticipated the possibility by believing you were." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "The federal procurement system is like a software system with bugs. Every time it's broken down, somebody has patched it. But keeping it together is getting harder and harder and costing more money. And at that point, an experienced software engineer would throw up his hands and say, 'Hey! Let's toss this out and start over.'" -- James Paul, House Science, Space, and Technology Committee's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. %% "The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Philanderer" %% "The filter has discreting sources." -- KSC FIDO, 1/28/86 %% "The final twitch of "Political Correctness" grand peur has to do with the age-old fear of antinomian beastliness, lesbians holding black masses over copies of Derrida and so forth." -- Alexander Cockburn %% "The fire is going out," he bellowed. %% "The first time I saw the infamous `Morton Downey Junior' show I was innocently flipping through the channels and came across this man looming over a woman in a chair, point a cigarette in her face, and screaming, `You're a WHORE! You're a PROSTITUTE!' Wondering what this poor woman had done to unleash such metaphorical fury, I kept watching and it turned out she really was a prostitute. That was the whole story. They'd found a prostitute to put on TV in order to denounce her as a prostitute. Something to tell the grandchildren." -- TRB in THE NEW REPUBLIC %% "The fixed element can be said to be exactly what it is." "My script 'y's always end up looking like rabbits." %% "The following is not for the weak of heart or Fundamentalists." -- Dave Barry %% "The following program contains language which may be offensive enough to knock a buzzard off a shitwagon." -- A cartoon I saw %% "The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% "The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity." "Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the world and of tranquillity amongst it's peoples...The greater the decline of religion, the more grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end to chaos and confusion." -- Baha'u'llah, a selection from the Baha'i scripture %% "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." -- C. S. Lewis %% "The galaxy-spanning luminous arcs reported by M. Mitchell Waldrop in Research News on 6 February have a very simple explanation. They are part of the scaffolding that was not removed when the contractor went bankrupt owing to cost overruns." -- Arthur C. Clarke, "Sri Lanka" %% "The geeks shall inherit the earth." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "The genius of you Americans is that you never make any clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that leave us scratching our heads wondering if we might possibly have missed something." -- Gamel Abdel Nasser %% "The good thing about double ropes is that you're bound to tie one on right!" -- David Brandson Calloway, dbcallow@eos.ncsu.edu %% "The good thing about drawing a tiger is that it automatically makes your picture fine art." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "The gorilla had an 800-word "vocabulary." Apparently a new record in the animal intelligence racket. I wasn't impressed. I had a nephew into Motley Crue that could speak 850 easy." -- "The American" %% "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." -- George Washington %% "The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart." -- Mencius %% "The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, `What does woman want?'" -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% "The great scallop, this tatty, scrofulous old rapist, is second in depravity only to the common clam. This latter is a right whore, a harlot, a trollop, a cynical bed-hopping firm-breasted Rabelaisian bit of sea food that makes Fanny Hill look like a dead pope." -- Monty Python %% "The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love." -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% "The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war." -- John Hospers %% "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by mean of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) (Olmstead vs. United States) %% "The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters." -- Ghengis Kahn, civic leader and Bud man %% "The greatest warriors are the ones who fight for peace." -- Holly Near %% "The guy on the TV specials isn't the original Bob Hope. There's eight of them, I think. Like Lassie." -- KISW (Seattle Radio Station) %% "The hand that rocks the cradle can also cradle a rock." -- Feminist saying, circa 1968-1972 %% "The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "The healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help when he needs it, whether he's got an abscess on his knee or his soul." -- Rona Barrett %% "The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics." -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% "The history of the world, my love..." "Save a lot of graves, do a lot of relatives favors..." "Is those below serving those up above!" "Everybody shaves so there should plenty of flavors!" "How gratifying for once to know," "That those above will serve those DOWN BELOW!" -- Stephen Sondheim, SWEENY TODD %% "The history of the world, my sweet..." "Oh, Mr. Todd, ooh, Mr. Todd, what does it tell?" "...is who gets eaten and who gets to eat!" "And, Mr. Todd, too, Mr. Todd, who gets to sell!" "But fortunately it's all so clear," "THAT EVERYBODY GOES DOWN WELL WITH BEER!" -- Stephen Sondheim, SWEENY TODD %% "The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, NEVER forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Sherlock Holmes: A Case of Identity" %% "The important thing is never to stop questioning." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "The judge ought to give 'em a chance to tell what evolution is. Course we got them licked anyhow, but I believe in being fair and square and American. Besides, I'd like to know what evolution is myself." -- Tennessee State Representative John Washington Butler, author of the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Law, during the Scopes Monkey Trial %% "The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." -- John Jay, first Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court ( Georgia vs. Brailsford, 1794:4 ) %% "The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts." -- Samuel Chase, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Supreme Court Justice, 1804 %% "The key to Springfield is Elm Street. The Greeks knew it. The Carthaginians knew it, and now you know it ..." -- Herman (?) in "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% "The knack of flying lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The lamb will lie down with the lion, but the lamb won't get much sleep." -- Woody Allen %% "The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% "The late Mr. Lupner was born without a spine." "No wonder he has the posture of a boiled shrimp!" -- Saturday Night Live %% "The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own." -- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) %% "The laws of physics have no basis in reality. They describe the operation of the human mind." -- Robert Anton Wilson %% "The less you know about home computers the more you'll want the new IBM PS/1." -- Advertisement in the Edmonton Journal, Thursday, December 13, 1990 %% "The lesser of two evils -- is evil." -- Seymour (Sy) Leon %% "The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets....The press in its historical connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion." -- Lowell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444, 452 (1938), quoted by Mike Godwin in comp.org.eff.talk %% "The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful for the sake of something else." -- Aristotle %% "The life of the people must be freed from the asphyxiating perfume of our modern eroticism, as it must be from unmanly and prudish refusal to face facts.... The right to personal freedom comes second in importance to the duty of sustaining the race." -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Mein Kampf, 1924 %% "The light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long, and you have burned so very, very bright, Roy!" -- Doctor Eldon Tyrell, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner %% "The lights are on, but you're not home; Your will is not your own; Your heart *sweats*, Your teeth *grind*; Another kiss and you'll be mine... You like to think that you're immune to the stuff (Oh Yeah!) It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough; You know you're gonna have to face it, *You're addicted to Love!*" -- Robert Palmer %% "The living dead don't NEED to solve word problems." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "The longest distance is between head and heart." -- Thomas Merton %% "The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Worship" %% "The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill, "Their Finest Hour" %% "The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots." -- Rebecca West %% "The major problem--ONE of the major problems, for there are several--one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them." "To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who must WANT to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "The man has expanded my mind." -- from "Apocalypse Now" %% "The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him." -- One of the two previous quotes %% "The man that hails you Tom or Jack, And proves by thumps upon your back How he esteems your merit, Is such a friend, that one had need Be very much his friend indeed To pardon or to bear it." -- William Cowper (1731-1800) %% "The maniac will please refrain from waxing nostalgic." -- SPACED (Don't read it, it's garbage) %% "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walden", 1854 %% "The meat is rotten, but the booze is holding out." Computer Translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" %% "The medium is the massage." -- Crazy Nigel %% "The medium is the message." -- Marshall McLuhan %% "The mind is everything," wrote Proust. No doubt true, when you're dead from the neck down. -- Edward Abbey %% "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven." -- John Milton (1608-1674) %% "The more data I punch in this card, the lighter it becomes, and the lower the mailing cost." -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" %% "The more society becomes information instead of material objects, this question of whether a person can copy things will make the difference between a world of universal prosperity or a world of constant rat race." -- Richard M. Stallman %% "The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are." -- Repo Man %% "The more you have, the more you have that needs fixing." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "The more you know, the better you realize how little you know" %% "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements." -- Brian Kernighan (1978) %% "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow subject races to possess arms... History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so." -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Restricting Hand-guns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, Don Kates, ed., North River Press, 1978 %% "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason." -- Thomas Paine, "Age of Reason" %% "The most important question in the study of government is 'how can we prevent government from going berserk and killing off half the population?'" -- John Kormylo %% "The most important question when any new computer architecture is introduced is `So what?'" - someone in comp.arch %% "The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is." -- Narciso Yepes %% "The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." -- Calvin Trillin %% "The mountains are calling me, and I must go." -- John Muir %% "The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums." -- Peter De Vries %% "The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), 55 BC %% "The net result is a system that is not only binary compatible with 4.3 BSD, but is even bug for bug compatible in almost all features." -- Avadit Tevanian, Jr., "Architecture-Independent Virtual Memory Management for Parallel and Distributed Environments: The Mach Approach" %% "The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie. Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured some whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day." -- Peter Applebome %% "The number of Unix installations has grown to 10, with more expected." -- The Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972 %% "The object of this lecture is to frighten half of you away." %% "The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a necessity." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "The only act of revolution left in a collective wolrd is thinking for yourself." -- Bob Geldof, "Is That It?" %% "The only corporate defense against rationality is bureaucracy." -- anon %% "The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad." -- Salvador Dali %% "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." -- Economist John Kenneth Galbraith US News & World Report, Jan 11, 1988 %% "The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), 1951 %% "The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domestic animal." -- Compton MacKenzie, "Cats' Company" %% "The only problem with an open mind is that it collects dirt." %% "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others ... over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." -- John Stuart Mill 'On Liberty' 1859 %% "The only real way to look younger is not to be born so soon." -- Charles Schulz, "Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over" %% "The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Friendship" %% "The only sense I can make out of having kids is it's a good way to become a grandparent." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "The only thing in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos" -- Jim Hightower "People will be hunting Democrats with dogs by the end of the century." -- Senator Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican, on what will happen if Clinton's proposals are instituted. %% "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke, in a letter to William Smith %% "The only thing open about OSF is their mouth." -- Chuck Musciano %% "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." -- Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards %% "The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% "The other Messenger's called Hatta. I must have TWO, you know -- to come and go. One to come, and one to go." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "The other day I heard that sponges grow in the ocean. Can you imagine how deep the water would be if they didn't?" -- Steve Wright %% "The other day I went out and bought a humidifier and a de-humidifier. I brought them home, put them in the bedroom, shut the door, and let them fight it out." -- Steve Wright %% "The other teams could make trouble for us if they win." -- Yogi Berra %% "The paper holds their folded faces to the floor, and every day the paper boy brings more." -- Pink Floyd %% "The part I think I'd like best is crushing people who get in my way." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "The past is gone; the present is full of confusion; and the future scares hell out of me!" -- David Lewis Stein %% "The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do." -- Gregory Bateson %% "The personal computer market is about the same size as the total potato chip market. Next year it will be about half the size of the pet food market and is fast approaching the total worldwide sales of pantyhose" -- James Finke, Pres., Commodore Int'l Ltd.(1982) %% "The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut." -- some dinosaurs from The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy." -- Celine %% "The point is...that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The police are not there to create disorder. The police are there to preserve disorder." -- The late Richard J. Daly, Mayor of the city of Chicago %% "The poor guy's got nothing... except one handsome haircut." -- Simon, "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% "The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead." -- Ann Landers %% "The preeminence of a learned man over a worshiper is equal to the preeminence of the moon, at the night of the full moon, over all the stars. Verily, the learned men are the heirs of the Prophets." -- A tradition attributed to Muhammad %% "The prisoners are given one meal a day. That meal is a bowl of steam." -- Woody Allen, "Take the Money and Run" %% "The problem with losing stuff is that it always happens when you're not watching. Of course if you were watching I guess the stuff wouldn't get lost, would it." -- Simon, "The Losers", Eerie Indiana %% "The problems of two people aren't worth a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world." "Where I'm going, you can't come." -- Rick of the Cafe Americain %% "The progress of science and technology are always working to make our knowledge inadequate or obsolete." -- Dennis H. Smith %% "The proof that IBM didn't invent the car is that it has a steering wheel and an accelerator instead of spurs and ropes, to be compatible with a horse." -- Jac Goudsmit %% "The proofs are so obvious that they can be left to the reader." -- Lars V. Ahlfors, "Complex Analysis" %% "The proper delivery of medical care is to do as much Nothing as possible" %% "The public doesn't know what it wants. We offer beautiful things that we like." -- Walter Hoving, former chairman, Tiffany & Co. %% "The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "The purpose of having the sun go low in the evenings, in the summer, especially in parks," said the voice earnestly, "is to make girls' breasts bob up and down more clearly to the eye. I am convinced that this is the case. "And I am certain that if one worked the argument through, one would find that it flowed with perfect naturalness and logic from everything," he insisted, "that Darwin was going on about. This is certain. This is indisputable. And," he added, "I love it." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "The pyramid is opening!" "Which one?" "The one with the ever-widening hole in it!" -- Firesign Theater, "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All" %% "The question is rather: if we ever succeed in making a mind 'of nuts and bolts', how will we know we have succeeded? -- Fergal Toomey "It will tell us." -- Barry Kort %% "The question raised by the prospect of President Quayle is the same as the question raised by the prospect of President Bush and for that matter by the reality of President Reagan: How long can a great nation afford to have silly leaders?" -- Hendrik Hertzberg %% "The rabbit kicked the bucket, the rabbit kicked the bucket, the bucket kicked the rabbit..." %% "The race may not always be to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but it's a good idea to bet that way." -- O. L. Bear %% "The raytracer of justices recurses slowly, but it renders exceedingly fine." -- Larry Phillips (lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca) %% "The real beauty of democracy is that the average man believes he is above average." -- Morrie Brickman %% "The real problem with SDI is that it doesn't kill anybody." -- Tom Neff %% "The real test of an artist, of course, is not whether you can see each blade of grass, but whether the eyes follow you across the room." -- Stewart Evans %% "The reason that God was able to create the world in seven days is that he didn't have to worry about the installed base." -- Enzo Torresi %% "The reason why we think monkeys are so funny is that they're so much like us." -- Will Rogers %% "The report of my death was an exaggeration." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Cable from Europe to the Associated Press %% "The revolution starts at closing time." -- Serious Drinking %% "The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom...for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough." -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% "The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between a five-dollar bill and a whip deserves to learn the difference on his own back -- as, I think, he will." -- Francisco d'Anconia, in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" %% "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today." "It MUST come sometimes to 'jam to-day,'" Alice objected. "No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "The scariest thing about American Cultural Values is how the slasher movies depict humans getting carved up, but they don't show dogs getting carved up." %% "The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage." -- Mark Russell %% "The script had been written by this legendary dead guy that we know and there were about fifty-eleven-hundred pages of it. Of this eight words were completely readable. These were "oranges" in the title and "Close the curtains, Geoffrey, I'm amphibious", which was right at the end. To be perfectly frank man, I wasn't even 100% sure about amphibious." -- Waldo "D. R." Dobbs, "D. R. and Quinch go to Hollywood" %% "The seat was throwing my back out, But there I was with a book; When suddenly there's a black-out And everywhere I look There's a close-up of DORIS DAY! Ninety minutes of DORIS DAY! There was nothing to do but pray... And what do we do? We fly!" -- Stephen Sondheim, DO I HEAR A WALTZ? %% "The secret compartment of my ring I fill with an Underdog super-energy pill." %% "The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The secret of life is to look good at a distance." -- Snoopy %% "The sendmail configuration file is one of those files that looks like someone beat their head on the keyboard. After working with it... I can see why!" -- Harry Skelton (harry@usrgrp) %% "The shiny stuff is tomatoes, The salad lies in a group; The curly stuff is potatoes, The stuff that moves is soup. Anything that is white is sweet, Anything that is brown is meat, Anything that is grey... don't eat. But what do we do? We fly!" -- Stephen Sondheim, DO I HEAR A WALTZ? %% "The shortest distance between two points is through Hell." -- Brian Clark %% "The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but living, honored rules of conduct amongst us...I'm glad the American Civil Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so." -- Senator Adlai E. Stevenson %% "The sixties were good to you, weren't they?" -- George Carlin %% "The sky is falling ... no, I'm tipping over backwards." -- Steven Wright %% "The smoke machine at the Sidetrack Tap, if you whack it about two inches below the Camels, will pay off a couple packs for free, and some enterprising patrons find it in their interest to use this knowledge. Past a certain age, you're not supposed to do this sort of thing anymore. You're supposed to grow up. Unfortunately, that is just the age when many people start to smoke." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "The so-called Christian world is contracepting itself out of existence." -- Fr. L. Kieffer, HLI Reports, August 1989, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein %% "The sound of harps... of organs... of cascading violins." "What about Def Lepard? They got Def Lepard?" -- Heaven described to a generation of vidiots. From THE SHADOW %% "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% "The starting point of all individual achievement is the adoption of a definite purpose and a definite plan for its attainment." -- Napoleon Hill %% "The story so far: In the beginning, the Universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "The stupid are deaf to the truth; they hear, but think that the wisdom applies to someone else." -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) %% "The subspace W inherits the other 8 properties of V. And there aren't even any property taxes." -- J. MacKay Mathematics 134b %% "The summit meeting has also allowed a warm personal relationship to blossom between the two world leaders. This warmth was evident right from their first joint press conference, where Gorbachev offered, as a gesture of his friendship toward Reagan, to have Sam Donaldson shot." -- Dave Barry %% "The sun got confused about Daylight Savings Time. It rose twice. Everything had two shadows." -- Steven Wright %% "The taking of which object offends the ghosts?" %% "The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority." -- Ralph W. Sockman %% "The testes are cooler outside," Said the doc to the curious bride, "For the semen must no Get too fucking hot, And the bag fans your bum on the ride." %% "The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children." -- Duke of Windsor %% "The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea." -- Rick Cook, "The Wizardry Compiled" %% "The thunder of hooves, a cloud of smoke and a hearty 'Hi-yo, Silver!' It's the adventures of the Lone Ranger! ... come with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear ..." %% "The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!" -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "The time has come," the Walrus said "To talk of many things: Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax -- Of cabbages -- and kings -- And why the sea is boiling hot -- And whether pigs have wings." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "The triumph of libertarian anarchy is nearly (in historical terms) at hand... *if* we can keep the Left from selling us into slavery and the Right from blowing us up for, say, the next twenty years." -- Eric Rayman, usenet guy, about nanotechnology %% "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse." -- Bruce Cockburn %% "The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." -- Paul Valery %% "The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock." -- Christopher Morley, "The Portable Curmudgeon" %% "The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling." -- Robert Pirsig (quoted in Zen_To_Go, Jon Winokur) %% "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 %% "The turtle exemplifies acute reptilian humor." -- Susan Bogdanovich or Brigliani or somesuch %% "The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity" -- Harlan Ellison %% "The ultimate metric that I would like to propose for user friendliness is quite simple: if this system was a person, how long would it take before you punched it in the nose?" -- Tom Carey %% "The unique thing about the whole 'Masters of the Universe' concept is that it combines sword and sorcery with high tech, so you've got guys in armor wielding swords, but they're also equipped with lasers." -- Gary Doddard, director of 'He-Man' %% "The universe has fascinated mankind for many, many years, dating back to the very earliest episodes of "Star Trek", when the brave crew of the Enterprise set out, wearing pajamas, to explore the boundless voids of space, which turned out to be as densely populated as Queens, New York. Virtually every planet they found was inhabited, usually by evil beings with cheap costumes and Russian accents, so finally the brave crew of the Enterprise returned to Earth to gain weight and make movies." -- Dave Barry %% "The universe is expanding." "What is that your business?" -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind -- a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house." -- Woody Allen %% "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." -- Bakunin [ed. note - I would say: The urge to destroy may sometimes be a creative urge.] %% "The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults." -- Peter De Vries %% "The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust." -- Lawrence Dalzell %% "The villa's and the chapel's where I learned with little labor The way to love my fellow man And hate my next-door neighbor." -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% "The voters have spoken, the bastards..." -- I forgot... great quote, though %% "The wages of sin are death; but after they're done taking out taxes, it's just a tired feeling:" %% "The way of the world is to praise dead saints and prosecute live ones." -- Nathaniel Howe %% "The weed of crime bears *bitter fruit*... but there are limits..." -- Even THE SHADOW can have second thoughts... %% "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit." -- The Shadow %% "The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it." -- P.J. O'Rourke - A Parliament of Whores %% "The whole point of this sentence is to clearly explain the point this sentence is making." %% "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% "The wife you save may be your own." -- Unofficial slogan of supporters of one of FDR's sons, a notorious womanizer, during the son's first congressional race %% "The will to win is worthless if you don't get paid for it" -- Reggie Jackson %% "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s. %% "The woman of my dreams knows how to break into systems." -- Doug Tygar %% "The wonder of it all." %% "The word is no, therefore I am going anyway." %% "The world bores you when you're cool." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "The world is coming to an end. Please log off." -- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com) %% "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" -- anon %% "The world is just a straight man for you sometimes" %% "The worst thing is when you have to kill someone you love because they're SATAN." -- Judy Tenuda %% "The worst thing you can do to a VAX/VMS system is log in." -- Heard at a DECUS VAX Performance Seminar %% "The worst thing you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever." -- Woody Allen, "Love and Death" %% "The year is 2989. New York City has become a melting pot for humans and various alien races. Blind dates are a real crap shoot now." -- From ROACHMILL %% "The years teach much which the days never know." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Experience" %% "The young lady with the Uzi, is she single?" -- River Phoenix as Carl in "Sneakers" %% "The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool." -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% "Theater, art, literature, cinema... must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world..." -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% "Then Job fell to his knees and cried to the Lord, `Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory. Thou hast a good job. Don't blow it.'" -- Woody Allen %% "Then one night I saw the light and now there is nothing more to see" %% "Then why am I talking to you? Who is in authority here? Shut up! You still don't get it, do you? You can't stop him! He'll wade though you, reach down her throat, and rip her fucking heart out! Let!...Let go O me!" %% "Then you admit confirming not denying you ever said that?" "NO!...I mean Yes! WHAT?" "I'll put `maybe.'" -- "Bloom County" %% "Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!" "You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!" "You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!" "It IS the same thing with you, " said the Hatter. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "Theoretical physicist - a physicist whose existence is postulated, to make the numbers balance, but who is never actually observed in the laboratory." %% "Theoretical physicists tend to assume that Nature isn't as malevolent as our pure mathematical examiners." %% "There *are* standards. If you can't see one, you *make* one and stick to it come Hell or high water -- until you see a BETTER one." -- John Gaunt, aka GRIMJACK %% "There ain't hardly nothin' cuter nor a sleepin' baby tad lessen it's a pork chop." -- Churchy La Femme %% "There ain't no cure when the rabid rock dog bites..." -- Split Sydney %% "There ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "There ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "Tom Sawyer Abroad" %% "There are a lot of lies going around.... and half of them are true." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "There are a lot of reasons to skydive. It does take your mind off your problems." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "There are a lot of women in the world like her. They use themselves to get what they want." %% "There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess--and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II and the Star Wars Trilogy. If you'd like to learn more about war, there's lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool, gory pictures." -- Bart in "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% "There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: (1) not going all the way; and (2) not starting." -- Buddha %% "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "There are some bits at the end of the course I don't really understand, but the students don't normally get that far." %% "There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction." -- John Cage, composer %% "There are some people who take a nickel's worth of knowledge and sit on it as if it were an Incan treasure." -- unknown %% "There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them" -- Heisenberg %% "There are three faithful friends -- an old wife, an old dog and ready money." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% "There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain." -- Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800 %% "There are three things I've learned not to discuss with people: Religion, Politics, and the Great Pumpkin." -- Linus from PEANUTS] %% "There are times when you have to choose between being human and having good taste." -- Bertolt Brecht %% "There are times, after all, when the appropriate reply is something along the lines of, "You are being petty and unreasonable, and if you don't stop whining very soon, you're going to get a size ten flight boot straight up the keister. Now shaddup and get back in your hole before we turn the water cannons on you." -- Geoff Miller %% "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "There are two universes: for males, and for females." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "There are two ways to write bug-free code; only the third way works." -- unknown consultant %% "There are ways of managing without cuts, but I do not think the present Government is going to find them" %% "There can be no offense where none is taken" -- Japanese proverb %% "There can be only one." -- the Highlander %% "There he is! The leader of the plaque!" %% "There is NO defense against the attack of the KILLER MICROS!" -- Eugene Brooks %% "There is a God, but He drinks" -- Blore %% "There is a law of inertia. And I have found that of all the inert substances, the most inert is the human brain." -- Edward Teller %% "There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It's called an oncoming train." -- Anonymous %% "There is a scarcity of friendship, but not of friends." -- Thomas Fuller %% "There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration -- and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "There is absolutely nothing loving about sex .... Lust is as destructive of love inside the marriage as it is outside." -- Fr. John H. McGoey, Family Planning Educator, Human Life International Symposium on Human Sexuality, 4/25/86, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "There is also a thriving independent student movement in Poland, and thus there is a strong possibility (though no guarantee) of making an EARN-Poland link, should it ever come about, a genuine link - not a vacuum cleaner attachment for a Bloc information gathering apparatus rationed to trusted apparatchiks." -- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a gateway from EARN (European Academic Research Network) to Poland %% "There is considerable evidence that great empires and civilizations have been undone not by barbarian invaders but by climatic change." -- 1977 CIA report %% "There is in Melbourne a man who probably knows more about poisonous snakes than anyone else on earth. His name is Dr. Struan Sutherland, and he has devoted his entire life to a study of venom. "'And I'm bored with it,' he said when we went along to see him the next morning. 'Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Stupid things biting everybody. And THEN people expecting me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. DON'T GET BITTEN IN THE FIRST PLACE. That's the answer." "Hydroponics, now, *that's* interesting...." -- Douglas Adam, Chapter 2 "Here Be Chickens," in Last Chance to See See further for "What about a tourniquet?" %% "There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's, than in all 'Tom Jones.'" -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% "There is no Father Christmas. It's just a marketing ploy to make low income parents' lives a misery." "... I want you to picture the trusting face of a child, streaked with tears because of what you just said." "I want you to picture the face of its mother, because one week's dole won't pay for one Master of the Universe Battlecruiser!" -- Filthy Rich and Catflap, 1986 %% "There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt." %% "There is no choice before us. Either we must Succeed in providing the rational coordination of impulses and guts, or for centuries civilization will sink into a mere welter of minor excitements. We must provide a Great Age or see the collapse of the upward striving of the human race" -- Alfred North Whitehead %% "There is no delight the equal of dread, as long as it is somebody else's." -- Clive Barker %% "There is no difference between killing a four year-old child and aborting a pre-born 3-month-old [fetus]." -- Randall Terry, Executive Director, Operation Rescue, in his film, "Higher Laws", as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "There is no doubt I should be tarred and feathered." -- Richard Sexton, richard@gryphon.COM %% "There is no doubt that my lawyer is honest. For example, when he filed his income tax return last year, he declared half of his salary as 'unearned income.'" -- ibid %% "There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "There is no idea so sacred that it cannot be questioned, analyzed... and ridiculed." -- Cal Keegan %% "There is no mistreating of the Abos... while there's anybody watching." %% "There is no racial bigotry here. Here you are all equally worthless." FULL METAL JACKET %% "There is no statute of limitations on stupidity." -- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3. %% "There is none so bigoted as a liberal who will permit no view but their own." -- bob early %% "There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet." -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% "There is nothing so deadly as not to hold up to people the opportunity to do great and wonderful things, if we wish to stimulate them in an active way." -- Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Laureate in chemistry %% "There is nothing so habit-forming as money." -- Don Marquis (1878-1937) %% "There is nothing so tragic as a beautiful theory destroyed by an ugly fact." -- Sherlock Holmes %% "There is nothing stronger in this world than gentleness." -- Han Suyin %% "There is only one group which would ever call for the banning of 'The Diary of Ann Frank', and I don't care what they happen to be calling themselves these days." -- Alan Moore 1/87 %% "There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant" %% "There is properly no history; only biography." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "History" %% "There is such a fine line between genius and stupidity." -- David St. Hubbins, "Spinal Tap" %% "There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life." -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% "There must be some mistake," he said, "are you not a greater computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?" "The Milliard Gargantubrain?" said Deep Thought with unconcealed contempt. "A mere abacus. Mention it not." -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "There must be someway out of here." said the jocker to the thief. %% "There should be a psychology of feet. For do we not make decisions with our legs, and walk about on our brains? What do you mean, `No, not really,'?" -- from "The Notebooks of Mauve'Bib--Outtakes, Bloopers, and Unconvincing Maxims," Edited by the Princess Serutan. %% "There they are! Dirty Towel-Heads! HEEEEEEY-OOOOH!" "What are you doing? We're on your side! We're with the U.N.!" "You-Win, huh? I'll show you what we think of you One-Worlders! Eat Lead, Bedouin Thugs!" -- The Caped Madman, from the Firesign Theatre movie, J-Men Forever %% "There was a nuclear war, a few years from now. This, all this, this whole place. Gone...Just ... gone." %% "There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him as carefully shaven as an actor, and clad in immaculate linen." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), on the death of William Jennings Bryan %% "There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance..." -- Thomas S. Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" %% "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" %% "There was some brilliant work done with rats, which makes it scientific." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "There were few things more useless than a unloaded pistol" -- 'Without Remorse' by Tom Clancy %% "There were survivors, here, there. Nobody even knew who started it. It was the machines Sarah, the machines." %% "There were survivors. here, there. Rounded up for orderly disposal. (Pause) burned in by lase scan. Worked loading bodies. The disposal units ran day and night. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man. Taught us to fight, to storm the walls of the camp, taught us how to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. He turned it around. His name was Conner- John Conner- your unborn son." %% "There's a bug born every minute, and two to replace him." -- P. T. Bugem %% "There's a fine line between an attitude problem and thinking clearly." -- Aaron Heller %% "There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like an idiot." -- Steve Wright %% "There's a large amount of evidence saying that the man's point of view is largely irrelevant." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "There's a lovely paper which compares Unix to Zork in both cognitive and user motivational terms. Maybe you like Unix because it's an adventure game? Still, I just don't think Unix will succeed as a theme park (some small fraction of :-)" -- Bruce Cohen %% "There's a number down here which, for the sake of argument, we can call 1." %% "There's always been Tower of Babel sort of bickering inside Unix, but this is the most extreme form ever. This means at least several years of confusion." -- Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft, about the Open Systems Foundation %% "There's an inverse relationship between how good something is for you, and how much fun it is." -- Calvin and Hobbes %% "There's another dead bishop on the landing." "...Really? What diocese?" %% "There's another weird lizard farm coming up fast at eleven o'clock." "I feel the warmth of its presence, Sam." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "There's been an accident!" they said, "Your servant's cut in half; he's dead!" "Indeed!" said Mr. Jones, "and please Send me the half that's got my keys." -- Harry Graham %% "There's more hoods than we thought!" "Then shoot MORE BULLETS!" -- That champion of Justice, The FLAMING CARROT %% "There's no garbage in California." "That's because they turn it into television shows." -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "There's no place like home when you're not feeling well." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "There's no problem so awful that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse." -- Calvin and Hobbes %% "There's no such thing as evil. Just excuses that heaven won't accept." -- I've forgotten this one, too, though I'm pretty sure it's a comic %% "There's nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not." -- Monty Python %% "There's nothing human that's alien to us." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos." -- Jim Hightower, Texas Agricultural Commissioner, in "Time", 3 April 1989 %% "There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint," he remarked to her, as he munched away. "I should think throwing cold water over you would be better," Alice suggested: "-- or some sal-volatile." "I didn't say there was nothing BETTER," the King replied, "I said there was nothing LIKE it." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "There's nothing more dangerous than a wounded mosquito." -- Monty Python %% "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 %% "There's nothing wrong with NASA that a fuel-air explosion at JSC Building 1 wouldn't cure." -- Jerry E. Pournelle %% "There's one constant in buying a suit: It should fit." -- The Houston Chronicle, 3/15/90 %% "There's only one thing I believe about luck - it's unlucky to be behind at the end of the game." -- Bill Russell %% "There's only one thing that can keep growing without nourishment: the human ego." -- Marshall Lumsden %% "There's something in the cornfield... an evil that has no name! Zadar, Cow from Hell!" -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio %% "There's something you don't see every day." -- "Ghostbusters" %% "There's this to say for blood and breath, They give a man a taste for death." -- Housman %% "There's too many people here! Maybe we should kill some!" -- Yow! FLAMING CARROT and Screwball on a binge! %% "There's trouble, and there's trouble. Eating ice cream before dinner is one thing, but never had I been in the kind of trouble where they'd throw my Dad in Jail." -- Marshall, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "There, but for the grace of God, goes God." -- Herman Mankiewicz on Orson Welles %% "There... I've run rings 'round you logically" -- Monty Python's Flying Circus %% "Therefore, one should never admit a garrison larger than one's own forces, especially when composed of barbarians." -- Polybios, writing in the mid-2nd century BC (paraphrased), after an account of the betrayal of Epeiros by its mercenary Gallic garrison to a passing fleet of Illyrian pirates. "Barbarians", of course, in the original sense of "non-Greeks"; "non-Arabs" or "non-Muslims" perhaps, in the Saudi case. -- Duncan Head %% "These are DARK TIMES for all mankind's HIGHEST VALUES!" "These are DARK TIMES for FREEDOM and PROSPERITY!" "These are GREAT TIMES to put your money on BAD GUY to kick the CRAP out of MEGATON MAN!" -- Megaton Man %% "These are actually chunks of lung itself being coughed up. I don't understand exactly what it is, but God has healed you right now. Amen." -- Televangelist Pat Robertson %% "These are the days you might fill with laughter until you break. These days you might feel a shaft of light, light make its way across your face. And when you do you'll know how it was meant to be. See the signs and know their meaning. It's true, you'll know how it was meant to be. Hear the signs and know they're speaking to you, to you." %% "These aren't my thoughts, they're my cat walking on the keyboard." -- Larry McVoy lm@arizona.edu %% "These cracks are all blind," Kor raged. With his massive forearms, he solved that problem, obliterating several more knifeblades into the rock, crack or not! Later he told me a story of how Chouinard had once presented him with a brand new pin he'd forged, a Lost Arrow supposedly stronger than any of his others. "Come on, have a go at it," urged Yvon. Kor later returned the piton, curved in a half moon. -- "The book of KOR", by Ed Webster, 20th Anniversary issue of Climbing %% "These dogs, I tell you, they are so smart, but they worry me sometimes. For instance, I'm plucking this pale yellow cottage cheesy guck from their snouts, rather like cheese atop a microwave pizza, and I have this horrible feeling, for I suspect these dogs (even though their winsome black mongrel eyes would have me believe otherwise) have been rummaging through the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center again, and their snouts are accessorized with, dare I say, yuppie liposuction fat. How they manage to break into the California state regulation coyote-proof red plastic flesh disposal bags is beyond me. I guess the doctors are being naughty or lazy. Or both." -- Douglas Coupland, from "Generation X" (Tales for an Accelerated Culture) %% "These patriots don't mince words... Okay, sure, they *are* dangerous, hopelessly ignorant, inbred, retarded borderline lunatics with an insatiable lust for the blood of sinners -- but at least they're *honest* about it." -- Reverend Ivan Stang, cofounder of the Church of the Subgenius, about a group known as Free Love Ministries, in his book "High Weirdness By Mail" %% "These round things Asur has attached to his sled: they take the wood away from the Earth-Mother, they make it move too fast; they turn around and round in a strange, e-ville fashion. Indeed, they are ungodly, and Asur should be stoned to death forthwith." -- Translated from proto-Indo-European scratched on clay tablets, circa 6500 BC: %% "They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it." -- Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, quoted in The New York Times, 1984 %% "They [South Africa] have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country -- the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated -- that has all been eliminated." -- President Reagan, 1985 %% "They communicated by tap-dancing and farting." -- "Breakfast of Champions" %% "They dared to call me mad! ME! HA! HA! HA!...." -- Uh, me, on a bad night after too many Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ales... %% "They don't let us beat students anymore, but my fantasy life is my own business." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty" -- Kahlil Gibran, from "Spirits Rebellious" %% "They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts." -- Arthur Miller %% "They laughed at Fulton, they laughed at Bell, they even laughed at Edison. But this was genuine, heartfelt laughter... robust rolling waves of it, from deep down... the kind where you know they really mean it." -- Joe Martin %% "They make a desert and call it peace." -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% "They only have two rules in the whole school: One, you're not allowed to carry a gun, and two, you're not allowed to walk on the roof." -- Reed College rugby coach Peter Carmine %% "They ought to make butt-flavored cat food." -- Gallagher %% "They pelted us with rocks and garbage!" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "They seek him here, they seek him there... they seek that Snowman everywhere! Is he in Youngstown -- or Cincinnati? That damned, elusive, two-ton Yeti?" -- The Badger, In Search %% "They smell, they snarl and they scratch; they have a singular aptitude for shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery; they're sneaky, selfish and not at all smart; they are disloyal, condescending and totally useless in any rodent-free environment." -- Jean-Michel Chapereau, on cats %% "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty not safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), 1759 %% "They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still." -- William Penn %% "They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born." -- K. Dunn, "Geek Love" %% "They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn't help much..." -- Harlan Ellison %% "They were a double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "They're an insidious bunch, your killer pianos. Had one get loose on me back in '62. It slipped out of the cables while we were lowering it out of its twelfth story apartment, and crushed six innocents in an insane bid for freedom." -- "Stig's Inferno" %% "They're filming Rocky V now. This one's being billed as `Rocky's Greatest Challenge', so I guess there's an IQ test involved." -- Jay Leno %% "They're not booing. They're just chanting `Dave! Dave!'" -- Late Night with David Letterman %% "They've got drive-by shootings in Philadelphia now. Where they park to reload, I don't know." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "They've shut down the main reactor" "Oh no! That means we'll have to react on our own ..." %% "They, they've got guys who'll go in and knock their heads off." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, May 5, 1971, discussing a proposal to use Teamsters Union members to attack Vietnam War protestors "Sure, Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that's what they really do. It's the regular strikebuster types and all that... They're going to beat the shit out of some of these people. And, uh, hope they really hurt 'em. You know, I mean go in... and smash some noses." -- H. R. Haldeman's response %% "Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player." -- Anonymous %% "Things had gone from the ridiculous to mega-voodoo-primetime!" -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Things were all up in heaval." %% "Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's." -- E. M. Forster %% "Thinking small-minded is when you see your bus on the other side of the street and wish you could teleport across to catch it." -- Kenneth Arromdee (arromdee@cs.jhu.edu) %% "Third (base) ain't so bad if nothin' is hit to you." -- Yogi Berra %% "This Dec. 7th, the summit which will ban all medium-range nuclear missiles has already run into its first snag: The National Rifle Association has officially protested the treaty, and says its members will continue to own and carry nuclear missiles -- but only for hunting and self-protection, of course." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "This Embassy is United States territory. Nobody can be dragged away and shot without the written consent of the American government." -- Woody Allen, "Don't Drink the Water" %% "This Land is made of Mountains, This Land is made of Mud, This Land has lots of Everything, For me and Elmer Fudd..." -- The Firesign Theatre (The Alblum with Nick Danger on the other side) %% "This Thanksgiving is gonna be a special one. My mom says I don't have to sit at the card table." -- Jim Samuels %% "This ain't 'The Partridge Family'." -- Marshall refering to Sara Bob's family, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "This calls for... Ludicrous Speed!" -- SPACEBALLS %% "This clean, wholesome television! Ughh, it makes me sick." -- Calvin (and Hobbes) %% "This cognac is older than God." -- The pilot to Codename: Foxfire, a TV series that went into the sewer faster than you can say "A-Team"... %% "This could be the greatest night of our lives--but you're going to let it be the worst!" -- John Blutarski %% "This course could be viewed as 1001 things to do with your favourite matrix" %% "This fellow Charles Lindbergh will never make it. He's doomed." -- Harry Guggenheim, millionaire aviation enthusiast %% "This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon." -- Ronald W. Reagan, "People" magazine, December 26, 1985 %% "This gun shoots backwards ... I've just killed myself." -- Woody Allen, "Casino Royale" %% "This guy wants to be in the White House because Jesus told him. Jesus woke him up and went: `Pssst. Pat. Pat. Yeah, it's Jesus, man. Hey, hey, I want you to run for president.'" -- Sam Kinison %% "This guy, North... does he ever get out of his car?" -- Local Seattle Comic %% "This is INTENSE!" %% "This is Patti [Marge's sister] holding a Mexican Delicacy called, a 'Taco Platter'." -- Marge's sisters showing slides in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "This is a Mexican Delicacy called, a 'Taco Platter'." -- Marge's sisters Patty and Selma showing slides in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "This is a bit complicated, so let me explain it backwards." -- first line of a memo from a fellow Los Alamos physicist who will go unnamed %% "This is a revolution, damn it! We're going to have to offend SOMEbody!" -- John Adams (1735-1826), 1776 %% "This is a tale of boundaries, and the people who cross them." -- Alan Pope %% "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency, do you really think we'd stick around to tell you?" %% "This is an important announcement. This is Flight 121 to Los Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be a perfect time to disembark." %% "This is equation 2, which implies that equation 3 comes someplace earlier." %% "This is grain which any fool can eat but for which God intended a more divine means of consumption. Let us give praise to our Maker and glory to his bounty by learning about... BEER." -- Friar Tuck from Robin Hood. %% "This is known as the 'Toytown solution'. Actually, there is a more technical term for it ..." %% "This is my art... and it is *dangerous*!" -- Beetlejuice %% "This is my rifle, this is my gun..." -- Michael A. Atkinson asbestos@nwu.edu MODERATOR, rec.guns %% "This is no time for consensus government. It's a time for leadership. The average citizen doesn't know what the stakes are in Vietnam." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, February 11, 1965 %% "This is no time to act like a gentleman. I am a cad and shall react like one." -- George Sanders %% "This is not really a convention, it's just the normal way of doing things." %% "This is obvious. But don't look at it too carefully, or it becomes unobvious, until you look at it for a long time when it becomes obvious again." %% "This is rigorous. Well, it's rigorous in the sense that ... All right, it's not rigorous." %% "This is the hardest part about meeting a daily deadline...coming up with a good excuse for being late..." -- Jeff McNelly, "Shoe" %% "This is the life. To be young, stupid, and have no future at all. I love Brooklyn!" -- Dan Akyroyd, "Samurai Night Fever", Saturday Night Live %% "This is the simple form. [pause] Well, it's simple in the sense that it leaves out all the really important bits." %% "This is the thing I was discussing the difference between meaningful dialog and." (They never said you couldn't end with a conjunction!) %% "This is the type of situation where your personal health insurance really comes into focus." -- The IBOB demon from "The Badger" %% "This is the way I've always thought it should be. We've always blamed ourselves, but I guess we know what cylinder wasn't firing!" -- Homer in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% "This isn't ME talking, it's what the research shows." -- Dale W. Lick %% "This isn't an argument, it's only contradiction!" ...."No, it isn't." "Yes, it is!" "No, it ISN'T!" "Yes, it IS!" %% "This isn't brain surgery; it's just television." -- David Letterman %% "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague %% "This knowledge I pursure is the finest pleasure I have ever known. I could no sooner give it up that I could the very air that I breath." -- Paolo Uccello, Renaissance artist, discoverer of the laws of perspective %% "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "This looks like a job for BICYCLE REPAIRMAN!" -- Monty Python %% "This man is no ordinary man. This is Mr. F. G. Superman." -- Monty Python %% "This meat is hard to chew," Tom beefed jerkily. %% "This method is, to define as the number of a class the class of all classes similar to the given class." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Principles of Mathematics" %% "This must be a Thursday - I never could get the hang of Thursdays" -- Arthur Dent - The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy %% "This one's got a lot more, uh, 640K that it can memorize." -- CVN cable TV shopping channel %% "This paper fills a much-needed gap in the theory." %% "This place bites!" -- Bart at the Rusty Barnacle restaurant in "Homer's Night Out", from The Simpsons %% "This planet had a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "This principle is sometimes known as assuming the CIA is paying our computing bills." %% "This process can check if this value is zero, and if it is, it does something child-like." -- Forbes Burkowski Computer Science 454 %% "This report is filled with omissions." %% "This shows how much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "This struct already has a perfectly good definition" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "This time I'm going to get that cwwwwazzy ewwwor." -- Elmer Fudd %% "This trial is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham." -- Woody Allen, "Bananas" %% "This type of rotor is known as a squirrel-cage rotor because the way it's wound looks like a bird cage." %% "This used to be a peaceful town." -- That rotter Cobb (Brian Dennehey) in SILVERADO %% "This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. Sometimes he'd resent having to leave the deck to use the toilet..." -- William Gibson, "Neuromancer" %% "This will be dynamically handled, possibly correctly, in 4.1." -- Dan Davison on streams configuration in SunOS 4.0 %% "This... this is a great pig." -- Ham expresses his appreciation in "The Badger" %% "Those components (that software) which runs fastest and most reliable are those which aren't there." -- Gordon Bell %% "Those men in the French resistance were really brave, having to listen to Maurice Chevalier sing all the time." -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "Those whales trapped beneath the ice in Alaska were finally freed this week when actress Shelly Winters dove into the icy waters, swam to the pair and led them to safety." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber." -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% "Those who believe in astrology are living in houses with foundations of Silly Putty." -- Dennis Rawlins, astronomer %% "Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym." -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "Those who do not do politics will be done in by politics." -- French Proverb %% "Those who speak know nothing; Those who know are silent" These words, I am told, Were spoken by Lao-tzu. -- P Chu-i (772-846) How is it then, the poem ends; that one who knew, wrote so much? %% "Those who travel with him.... must be crazy." %% "Those who will be able to conquer software will be able to conquer the world." -- Tadahiro Sekimoto, president, NEC Corp. %% "Those who worked the hardest are the last to surrender." -- Gary Ward %% "Those whose hope is weak settle down for comfort or for violence; those whose hope is strong see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready at every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born." -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% "Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty". -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% "Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained." -- The Tao of Programming %% "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Essays" %% "Threats are illogical, and payment is often expensive" -- Sarek of Vulcan, "Journey To Babel", Star Trek %% "Three men against twenty? Impossible. Now, if only we had a wheelbarrow..." -- From "The Princess Bride" %% "Three no-trump. Did somebody bump the table?" -- Silver City Brige Club, B-deck forward, Titanic %% "Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind." -- Henry James %% "Three. Family Jewels." -- letter being written by Grandpa Simpson, from The Simpsons %% "Throw ze ball, Marge. Throw, damn you!" -- Jacques in "Jacques to be Wild", from The Simpsons %% "Thunderstick?... You actually said `Thunderstick'?... That, my friend, is a Winchester 30.06." -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "Time flies when you're streaking out N. gonorrheae." %% "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- Ford Prefect, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Time is money and money can't buy you love and I love your outfit" -- T.H.U.N.D.E.R. #1 %% "Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills off all of its students." %% "Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in...At least being lost in space kept you busy." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug." -- Jon Lithgow on "Saturday Night Live" %% "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% "To 13 more years of good luck and, uh, low taxes." -- Radford [dejected], "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% "To IBM, 'open' means there is a modicum of interoperability among some of their equipment." -- Harv Masterson %% "To Melanie: Welcome to Mars - I mean welcome to Eerie - Mars." -- Melanie reads Marshall's card, "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "To Serve, To Strive and Not to Yield" -- Motto of Outward Bound %% "To a mathematician, PI is 1 and PI^2 is 10. 2*PI we're not quite sure about." %% "To be a humorist, one must see the world out of focus." -- P. G. Wodehouse, in the preface to "A Carnival of Modern Humor" %% "To be a leader, you have to develop a \spear de corps/." %% "To be against abortion and not against contraception -- it makes no sense because both of them are the same mentality." -- Nancy O'Brien, Anti-Choice Activist, introducing Joan Andrews, 3/11/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% "To block hats, that is everything." -- character in a Woody Allen short story %% "To call the dialogue wooden is to insult the expressive potential of a tree stump." -- Gerald Jonas, in his review of Robert L. Forward's "Martian Rainbow" in the July 14, 1991 New York Times Book Review. %% "To disarm the people - that was the best and most effective way to enslave them ...." -- George Mason ( Framer of the Declaration of Rights, Virginia, 1776, which became the basis for the U.S. Bill of Rights ) 3 Elliot, Debate at 380. %% "To err is human, to compute divine. Trust your computer but not its programmer" -- Morris Kingston %% "To err is human, to forgive....$5.00" %% "To fill the hour--that is happiness." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Experience" %% "To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois." -- Jules Renard %% "To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "To laugh, to lie, to flatter, to face: Four ways in court to win man's grace." -- Roger Ascham %% "To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well." -- John Marshall %% "To live outside the law, you must be honest." -- Bob Dylan %% "To love you was pleasant enough, And, oh! 'tis delicious to hate you!" -- Thomas Moore, "To--When I lov'd You" %% "To me it is like a mountain.. a vast BOWL of PUS!" -- Monty Python %% "To me, on of the most exciting things in the world is being poor, and survival, such an exciting challenge." -- Thomas S. Monaghan, Founder, Domino's Pizza and Legatus, "National Catholic Reporter", 3/23/90, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "To me, the term 'sexual freedom' meant freedom from having to have sex." -- Jane Wagner %% "To open...Open like any umbrella. To close...Close like any umbrella." -- Instructions for Sears compact manual umbrella %% "To program is to understand." -- Kristen Nygaard %% "To serve and control, that's our motto, that's what we do." -- Policeman, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "To steal from a thief is not theft. It is merely irony." -- Zorro, while retrieving money taxed from Californians %% "To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation." -- Daiell's Law (a take-off on Felson's Law) %% "To take a significant step forward, you must make a series of finite improvements." -- Donald J. Atwood, General Motors %% "To talk to a child, to fascinate him, is much more difficult than to win an electoral victory. But it is also much more satisfying." -- Colette %% "To the unwashed public, that woman is a star. But to those who know her, she's a commodity who would sell her own bowel movement." -- Anthony Newley re: ex-wife Joan Collins %% "To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to cast an idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only by the efforts of its originator but, indeed, independently of him as well. -- Czeslaw Milosz %% "To your left is the marina where several senior cabinet officials keep luxury yachts for weekend cruises on the Potomac. Some of these ships are up to 100 feet in length; the Presidential yacht is over 200 feet in length, and can remain submerged for up to 3 weeks." -- Garrison Keillor %% "To-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Self-Reliance" %% "Tobacco is the only drug in America that will kill you if it's taken as directed." -- Dr. C. Everett Koop %% "Today I dialed a wrong number. The other side said, 'Hello?' and I said, 'Hello, could I speak to Joey?' They said,' Uh, I don't think so...He's only two months old.' I said, 'I'll wait...'" -- Steve Wright %% "Today I met with a subliminal advertising executive for just a second." -- Steve Wright %% "Today I'm not a doctor, but you can call me one. Some folks call it 'science', but I just call it fun. Upon my every statement you can have complete reliance; I know more than *you* do -- Call me Dr. Science!" -- The last lines to the Dr. Science theme %% "Today I...........No, that wasn't me." -- Steve Wright %% "Today there may be more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than in Eastern Europe." -- George F. Will %% "Today's robots are very primitive, capable of understanding only a few simple instructions such as 'go left', 'go right', and 'build car'." -- John Sladek %% "Today's thrilling story has been brought to you by Mushies, the great new cereal that gets soggy even without milk or cream. Join us soon for more spectacular adventure starring ... Tippy, the Wonder Dog." -- Bob & Ray %% "Today, my jurisdiction ends here." -- John Cleese, SILVERADO %% "Tolerance means excusing the mistakes others make. Tact means not noticing them." -- Arthur Schnitzler (1882-1931) %% "Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties." -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% "Tonight's the night!" %% "Too many captains may steer a boat up a mountainside." -- Korean proverb %% "Too many errors on one line (make fewer)" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "Too soft a bed tends to make people dream, which is unhealthy and weakening." -- Girl Scout Manual, 1913 %% "Toreador, don't spit on the floor, use the cuspidor, that's what it's for." -- Bart in "Bart the Genius", from The Simpsons %% "Toroidal carbohydrate modules? Make mine glazed!" -- Zippy the Pinhead %% "Tourists -- have some fun with New york's hard-boiled cabbies. When you get to your destination, say to your driver, "Pay? I was hitchhiking." -- David Letterman %% "Tradition does not mean that the living are dead; it means the dead are living." -- Harold Macmillan %% "Trapped, like a trap in a trap." -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "Traveling makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world." -- Flaubert %% "Treat your guest as a guest for two days; on the third day, give him a hoe." -- Swahili proverb %% "Trouble in the middle" %% "Trouble is like a sieve through which we sift our acquaintances. Those too big to pass through are our friends." -- Arlene Francis %% "True love is better than anything, except cough drops." -- The Princess Bride (book), by William Goldman %% "True, money _can't_ buy happiness, but it isn't happiness I want. It's money." -- Bizarro %% "Trust me. I know what I'm doing." -- Sledge Hammer %% "Truth is just truth...you can't have opinions about truth." -- P. Shickele %% "Truth," I cried, "though the heavens crush me for following her; no falsehood, though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of apostacy!" -- Carlyle %% "Try it NOW, you murderous poopheads!!" -- "Bloom County" %% "Try it; it works" Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...) Blatant assertion Changing all the 2's to n's Mutual consent Lack of a counterexample, and "It stands to reason" %% "Try not to beat me so hard this time, son." "Bart go easy on me. I'm your Dad." -- Homer about Video Boxing in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "Tune in again next week, same time, same station, when Nick Danger meets.... The Arab!" -- From The Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger, America's ONLY detective! %% "Turn on, tune up, rock out." -- Billy Gibbons %% "Turn the knob to the right until you are satisfied with it" %% "Twice five syllables Plus seven can't say much but That's Haiku for you. %% "Two ballots please, I'm from Chicago." %% "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a buck, Come on, cheerleaders, give us a cheer!" %% "U can c the color of the interior of the [vehicle]... dig." "Ya stop cars with blk interior." "Bees they naugahyde." "Negrohide." "Self tanning no doubt." -- LAPD squad-car computer messages, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "U" (clap, clap, clap) "C" (clap, clap, clap) "L" (clap, clap, clap) "A" (clap, clap, clap) UCLA, fight, fight, fight! %% "UNIX should be used as an adjective." -- AT&T %% "US out of North America, NOW!!" -- Richard O'Rourke %% "US/Western repression of sexual knowledge and expression has left our twelve year olds less capable to deal with sex, and this justifies repression of sexual knowledge and expression to our twelve year olds." -- Kent, our man from Xanth, commenting on the Netherland's new age of consent: 12 %% "Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appelant." (They make a desert and call it peace.) -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% "Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appelant." (They make a desert and call it peace.) -- Tacitus (55?-120?) "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." -- U. S. Army Commander, Vietnam. %% "Uh, can't lock in. Multiple signals-They're closing" -- Hudson %% "Umm, square root of two? Ouch!" -- The guy who blew a hole in the Pythagoreans' assertion that all numbers can be represented as a ratio of two integers, so they killed him %% "Ummm, Trouble with grammar have I! Yes!" -- Yoda %% "Uncle Cosmo ... why do they call this a word processor?" "It's simple, Skyler ... you've seen what food processors do to food, right?" -- MacNelley, "Shoe" %% "Und then it says here he sings 'Pigs? In There?' over und over. What a very silly person." -- Conrad Schnitzler, German synthesist for The Bulldaggers From "Savage Henry" %% "Under active consideration": We're searching the files for it. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% "Under consideration": We never heard of it. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% "Undercover is my life" -- Simon, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "Underneath its a hyperalloy combat chassis." %% "Unemployment is an inconvenience." -- John F. Haugh II, jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US %% "Unhappiness is the hunger to get; happiness is the hunger to give." -- William George Jordan %% "Unibus timeout fatal trap program lost sorry" -- An error message printed by DEC's RSTS operating system for the PDP-11 %% "Unix: a moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret." -- old ITS hacker saying %% "Unless x is a banana or some other such object that commutes with A." %% "Unless you are very rich and very eccentric, you will not enjoy the luxury of a computer in your own home." -- Edward Yourdon, 1975 %% "Unlike most net.puritans, however, I feel that what OTHER consenting computers do in the privacy of their own phone connections is their own business." -- John Woods, jfw@eddie.mit.edu %% "Unlike most of you, I am not a nut." -- Homer in "Homer's Odyssey", from The Simpsons %% "Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process." -- Barry Goldwater %% "Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the American people should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that satanists are taking over America's day care centers... An unjustified crusade against those perceived as satanists could result in wasted resources, unwarranted damage to reputations, and disruption of civil liberties." -- Kenneth Lanning, head of the FBI's special unit in charge of investigating claims about satanic-cult crimes, in a report of his findings, June, 1989 %% "Until it's on daytime television, it's impossible, and that's the final word." %% "Ursa Minor Beta is, some say, one of the most appalling places in the known Universe. Although it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of "Playbeing" magazine headlined an article with the words "When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life," the suicide rate there quadrupled overnight. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of the Blues Brothers has been approved." -- The Blues Brothers %% "Use the Source, Luke!" %% "Using an IBM PC is like juggling straight razors. Using a Mac is like shaving with a bowling pin." -- Ted Nelson, "Computer Lib" %% "Using some hand-waving and symmetry ideas... " %% "Usually shooting a professor in the head ticks them off, but sometimes they'll say 'Thank you.'" -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "V" does for science fiction what "The Dukes of Hazzard" does for rural sociology. %% "VAX. For those who care enough to steal the very best." -- A microscopic message on the silicon chip inside one of Digital Equipment's often stolen computer designs. %% "VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use Unix." -- Bill Davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM) %% "VMS isn't an operating system, it's a playpen for DEC system programmers." -- Herb Blashtfalt %% "Van Gogh would've sold more than one painting if he'd put tigers in them." "It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "Various people with suicidal tendencies can even integrate elliptic functions" %% "Vaya con dios, scumbucket." -- Roger LaCoco from WISEGUY %% "Vendi, vidi, parenthesi" -- I came, I saw, I programmed in Lisp!" -- Dave W. Kimball %% "Veni, vidi, vomiti!" -- the ghost of Tom Jefferson on reading the Brady Bill %% "Versatility is no crime, but it is a source of adrenaline." %% "Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptyness below us...the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves." -- Milan Kundera %% "Vhat are you doing?" "I was preparing to divine trends in business software through the ritual sacrifice of AT&T's Consumer Memory Banks. Will you assist me?" "Wiss pleasure!" "It's more humane than animal sacrifices and infinitely more rewarding!" -- From THE BADGER %% "Victory or defeat." -- Motto of the 82th Light Horse Marines (the "Floating Parrots") A sample of the wonderfully odd humor of Col. G. L. Sicherman %% "Violence accomplishes nothing." What a contemptible lie! Raw, naked violence has settled more issues throughout history than any other method ever employed. Perhaps the city fathers of Carthage could debate the issue, with Hitler and Alexander as judges? %% "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." -- Salvor Hardin, in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" %% "Virtual" means never knowing where your next byte is coming from. %% "Viruses do to cells what Groucho did to Freedonia." %% "Vivere est cogitare." (To think is to live.) -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% "Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy-- not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by the Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled "My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Voom???? That parrot wouldn't voom if you put 4000 volts through him. It's bleedin' demised... This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet his maker. It's a stiff - bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed him to the perch, it would have been pushing up the daisies. It's off the twig. It's shuffled off this mortal coil. It's run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. It's f**king snuffed it! Vis-a-vis the metabolic processes, it's had it's lot. All statements to the effect that this parrot is still a going concern are henceforth inoperative. This is an EX-parrot." -- Classic Python: who can possibly forget the Parrot Sketch? %% "Vote for Perot" -- Bumper sticker attached with velcro. %% "Vote for me - I've got hot come bubbling in my balls" -- York University SU Presidential Candidate Martin "M J" Ingle 1981 %% "WALK" means "Run for your life." %% "WATCH OUT, Comrade! He's bearing ARMS, as is his constitutional right!" "Eat TEFLON, Ivan!" "Retreat! Back to Moscow!" -- Doonesbury %% "WHO'S TARIM, NECROSS!!?" "NO! PLEASE! I'LL GIVE YOU ALL THE GOLD! EVERY COIN!" "*WHO*?!" "YOU ARE! **YOU**!" "damn right." -- CEREBUS and The Big Stone Guy go at it... %% "WHY!! It's the CULMINATION, son! The NEXUS point! The HOLE in the DONUT! The EVENT of the MILLENNIUM! The GREATEST story ever TOLD, son! And YOU, I say, YOU ARE THERE!" -- Elrod the Albino at a turnpike in history, in, ah say in, CEREBUS %% "WITHOUT A RE-RUN, WITHOUT A RE-RUN, WITHOUT A RE-RUN, [except one or two...]" -- Surrreee... the MOONLIGHTING cast makes some promises for the new season %% "WWII was going fine until the Americans asked if THEY could join in, and the whole thing turned into a free-for-all." -- Beyond the Fringe %% "Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it." %% "Waiter, there's no fly in my soup!" -- Kermit the frog %% "Waiter, this coffee tastes like mud." "Well, it was only ground this morning." %% "Waiter, this coffee tastes like mud." "Well, it was only ground this morning." "The eggs taste disgusting." "Don't blame me. I only laid the table." %% "Wanna tell you all a story 'bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. But then one day he was shootin' at some food, when up through the ground come a bubblin' crude -- oil, that is; black gold; 'Texas tea' ... Well the next thing ya know, old Jed's a millionaire. The kinfolk said, 'Jed, move away from there!' They said, 'Californy is the place ya oughta be', so they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly -- Hills, that is; swimmin' pools; movie stars." %% "Want my advice little boy? Buy her something tender and nice - like a Cadillac." -- Elvis, "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% "Want some pretzels?" "No thanks, we're on duty. A couple beers would be nice, though." -- The Simpsons %% "Want to play ball, Scarecrow?" %% "War is Hell." -- General William Sherman %% "War is like love; it always finds a way." -- Bertolt Brecht %% "War is the health of the State." -- Proudhon (?) %% "War... is something that occurs not between man and man, but between States. The individuals who become involved in it are enemies only by accident." -- Jean Jacques Rousseau %% "Warning... Me--? YOU... are warning... ME...?" -- Nature and the Swamp Thing %% "Watch me pace this pathetic palooka with a perfect paralyzing packedermus percussion pitch." -- Looney Tunes, Baseball Bugs (1946, Friz Freleng) %% "Watch out, world! Here comes Ford!" Why, do the brakes suck? -- Lisa Hunt %% "Watching the scenery instead of the car ahead is the way to become part of both." -- Robert Renniessen, Jr. %% "Water? Never touch the stuff! Fish fuck in it." -- W. C. Fields %% "We *know* how it ends! They rescue (insert elf's name), jump around like little green idiots, I puke, the end!" -- Bart to Lisa in "Some Enchanted Evening" (babysitter ep?) %% "We Americans, we're a simple people... but piss us off, and we'll bomb your cities." -- Robin Williams, "Good Morning Vietnam" %% "We all have the capability for a good idea. We should have the ability to protect them, and the wisdom to share them." -- Jack Kirby %% "We all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school." -- Peter De Vries %% "We all say so, so it must be true." -- the Bandar-log (monkey tribe), in Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book" %% "We all worry about the population explosion--but we don't worry about it at the right time." -- Arthur Hoppe %% "We are ... opposed to all forms of birth control with the exception of natural family planning [the rhythm method.]" -- Judie Brown, President, American Life Lobby %% "We are all born mad. Some remain so." -- Samuel Beckett "Yeah, like the NBC execs." -- Tracy Finifter finifter@remus.rutgers.edu %% "We are all children in a vast kindergarden trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks." -- Tennessee Williams, "Suddenly Last Summer" %% "We are all interested in the future because that is where you and I will be spending the rest of our lives..." -- "Criswell" in "Plan 9 From Outer Space" %% "We are all tired of being stuck on this cosmical speck with its monotonous ocean, leaden sky and single moon that is half useless....so it seems to me that the future glory of the human race lies in the exploration of at least the solar system!" -- John Jacob Astor, 1894 %% "We are always getting ready to live, but never living." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Journals" %% "We are inclined to believe those we do not know, because they have never deceived us." -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% "We are interested in artificial intelligence because there is so much less of the natural kind around there days." %% "We are not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present. ... We are the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought. ... It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. ... I look for the day when *reason*, throned upon the world's brains, shall be the King of Kings and the God of Gods. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% "We are starting a movement in the state legislatures...to forbid the installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives." -- Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum %% "We are symbols, and inhabit symbols." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "The Poet" %% "We are totally opposed to abortion under any circumstances. We are opposed to abortifacient drugs and chemicals like the Pill and the IUD, and we are also opposed to all forms of birth control with the exception of natural family planning." -- Judie Brown, President, American Life League, Population Institute advertisement, "How Dense Can We Get?", The New York Times, 10/6/85, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "We are what we are and it's never enough." -- Chris de Burgh %% "We call him Neutron, because he's so positive." -- from `This Island Earth' (about a cat) %% "We call it SHADOWNET! Pretty cool, eh?" -- A delinquent hacker talks to the Shadow %% "We came. We saw. We kicked its ass." -- Bill Murray, "Ghostbusters" %% "We can no more blame our loss of freedom on congressmen than we can prostitution on pimps. Both simply provide broker services for their customers." -- Dr. W Williams %% "We can't allow the people to interfere with the smooth flow of democracy." -- Kitchener city council member %% "We can't escape the long arm of education!" "Where can we hide?" "Better ask a farmer!" -- Matt Feazall's send-up of ZOT! %% "We can't schedule an orgy, it might be construed as fighting" -- Stanley Sutton %% "We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness; it is always urgent, "here and now," without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank." -- Ortega y Gasset %% "We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed." -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) (from his Inaugural Address) %% "We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea -- organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation." -- Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart %% "We demand source because we've been burned too much by its lack, not because we have this desire to add custom hacks to our kernels or utilities. Believe me, we'd all like to run stock systems, straight off the vendor distribution tapes; it'd be significantly less work. But our users have this liking for working systems and prompt fixes for the bugs they find, neither of which the vendors we buy from have been particularly good in supplying." -- cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu %% "We design hi-tech TOYS to your specifications..." -- Minh Lang, Software Engineer - Jet Propulsion Laboratory %% "We did it! We shot the werewolf with the silver bullet! OK, so we just winged him, but we cured Mr. Chaney. He'll never again turn into this mega-ugly monster terrifying Eerie every 13 years. But what about me? That was Radford's only silver bullet. Who was gonna cure me?" -- Marshall, "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% "We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It's a good thing." -- "Beyond This Horizon" by Robert A. Heinlein, 1942 %% "We do not remember days, we remember moments." -- Cesare Pavese %% "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962 %% "We don't need another book on survival. We have the Boy Scouts Manual." -- Woody Allen, "September" %% "We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination of human rights." -- Dan Quayle, El Salvador, Feb 1989 %% "We fall into error if we attribute to strategy a power independent of tactical results." -- Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), "On War" %% "We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written." -- Robert Gould Shaw, abolitionist %% "We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion." -- Baron Richard Von Krafft-Ebing %% "We give them the love we can spare, the time we can spare. In return dogs have given us their absolute all. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made." -- Roger Caras, "A Celebration of Dogs" %% "We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny." -- E. B. White %% "We had a better class of bastard in the old days, that's for sure." -- The Red Mask %% "We had no choice but to stuff and lick a deposit slip for every man, woman, and child in Eerie. Simon will never be the same. Neither will my tongue." -- Marshall, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "We have a correspondence that's nearly one-to-one." "Mathmos think of engineers a bit like lemmings... ...they're both wooly and jump to the wrong conclusions." %% "We have deep depth." -- Yogi Berra %% "We have luck only with women -- not spacecraft!" -- R. Kremnev, builder of failed Soviet FOBOS probes %% "We have met the enemy and he is us" -- Walt Kelly (in POGO) %% "We have them just where they want us." -- Captain James T. Kirk %% "We have ways to make you scream." -- Intel advertisement, in the June 1989 Doctor Dobbs Journal %% "We have your favorite animal cookies. Here's a gorilla... Here's a collared peccary..." -- Gumby's Winter Fun Special %% "We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest." -- John Adams (1735-1826) %% "We interviewers are more than a match for the likes of you, Two-Sheds!" "Yes, make yourself scarce, Two-Sheds. This studio isn't big enough for the three of us!" "Get your own arts program, you fairy!" -- Monty Python %% "We jumped into this area without knowing what we were jumping into." -- Hubert H. Humphrey, October 22, 1969 %% "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." -- Aneurin Bevan %% "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% "We like your movies - especially the early, funny ones." -- Woody Allen, "Stardust Memories" %% "We live in a time when man would rather be envied than esteemed." -- G. Trudeau %% "We live in interesting times..." %% "We live, in a very kooky time." -- Herb Blashtfalt %% "We made too many wrong mistakes." -- Yogi Berra %% "We maintain that the very foundation of our way of life is what we call free enterprise," said Cash McCall, "but when one of our citizens show enough free enterprise to pile up a little of that profit, we do our best to make him feel that he ought to be ashamed of himself." -- Cameron Hawley %% "We may not be big, but we're small!" %% "We must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately" -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?" -- Jean Cocteau %% "We must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express." -- George Santayana (1863-1952), "Soliloquies In England" %% "We must make unceasingly clear to Hanoi that we do not seek nor will we accept a camouflaged surrender which would inevitably result in the United States writing off Southeast Asia." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, July 30, 1968 %% "We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost... the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, 10/27/65 %% "We must teach him, Max! Hey, where do you *keep* that gun?" "None of your damn business, Sam." -- The superbly loony "Sam and Max" %% "We need a new cosmology. New Gods. New Sacraments. Another drink." -- Patti Smith %% "We need bigger guns. These guns are too f^cking small!" %% "We need the boat to cross the next zone!" "We need the hat to impress girls, and stupid natives!" -- BADGER in "Nexus" %% "We need to take a look at [the Constitution] and maybe, from time to time, we should curtail some of those rights." -- Chicago Police Superintendent LeRoy Martin, 7/91 %% "We never make assertions, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston. "That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell -- we *show*. We do not claim -- we *prove*." -- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged" %% "We never repent of having eaten too little." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "We plan absentee ownership. I'll stick to building ships." -- George Steinbrenner, 1973 %% "We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Wealth" %% "We scientists, whose tragic destiny it has been to make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists", September 1948 %% "We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement." -- Richard J. Daley %% "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it." -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) %% "We used to dream of gears and shafts. All we had was some grooves dug in the sand and a bag full of pebbles, IF WE WERE LUCKY!" -- Unknown Greek %% "We walked on the moon -- you be polite." -- Joni Mitchell %% "We want to create an environment automatedly." %% "We want to create puppets that pull their own strings." -- Ann Marion "Would this make them Marionettes?" -- Jeff Daiell %% "We want to see three things in the 1988 Republican Party Platform... First, a constitutional amendment banning all abortions in the United States. Second, increased funding for law enforcement and a mandatory death penalty for drug dealers. Third, LESS GOVERNMENT." -- Speaker at a 1988 Republican Straw Poll in Iowa %% "We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know." -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% "We wish to incorporate into the machine -- in the form of circuits -- only such logical concepts as are either necessary to have a complete system or highly convenient because of the frequency with which they occur and the influence they exert in the relevant mathematical situations." -- Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann (1946) (from "Computer Structures: Readings and Examples", C. Gordon Bell (ed) McGraw-Hill Book Company, (c) 1971, page 97) %% "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest." -- Watson and Crick, 1953 %% "We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are more concerned with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital social problems of today. Nor indeed do we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might find offensive. We are sorry if this impression has come across." -- Monty Python %% "We'll call it S for cyclic." -- Gord Sinnamon Mathematics 234b %% "We'll learn about Euro-Communism -- That's communists who drive Porches." -- Howard Chaykin %% "We'll make great pets" -- Porno for Pyros %% "We're Americans -- with a capital 'A'! And do you know what that means? Do you? It means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world." -- Rousing speech by Bill Murray in STRIPES %% "We're aimed the wrong way to be going home, Gumby." "Home...? We're on an express elevator to HECK!" -- Gumby's Winter Fun Special %% "We're all Bozos on this bus." -- The Firesign Theatre, from the alblum of the same name %% "We're all given some sort of skill in life. Mine just happens to be beating up on people." -- Sugar Ray Leonard %% "We're buccaneers! We used to have mundane office jobs, working in cubicles with water coolers and coffee cups with clever slogans and those wacky calendars with photos of diseased-looking chimps wearing neckties." "But you've got hooks and peg legs." "Funny about that." -- More reality concepts from "Sam and Max" %% "We're going to assume a few things about reality. One, it exists. That's not a necessary assumption, but I find it comforting." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "We're going to do it the way we always have -- the super-dumbass way... It's what we know." -- The Lone Contractor %% "We're going to kill each other, aren't we?" -- THE KILLING JOKE %% "We're going to talk about sex--you're going to talk about sex, because I can't remember." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "We're hosed." -- Next, Inc.'s Steve Jobs said after workstations running a demo program crashed at the SPA symposium. %% "We're not going to Moscow -- it's Czechoslovakia! It's like going into Wisconsin!" -- Bill Murray paints a rosy scenario in STRIPES %% "We're not just going to let you walk out of here." "Who's we, sucker?" "Smith, and Wesson, and me." -- Sudden Impact %% "We're not laughing at you -- we're laughing near you." -- Dead Poets Society %% "We're not talking about the same thing," he said. "For you the world is weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must accept responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it." -- Don Juan %% "We're out of beer, wine, everything!" exclaimed Tom dryly %% "We're taking you to a clambake." -- Monty Python %% "We're the weirdest monkeys ever." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "We're very kinky, in a Republican sort of way." -- Sue Pauloz %% "We've been Eerified again!" -- Simon, "The Lost Hour", Eerie Indiana %% "We've got a carrot and stick policy, and the carrot is, if he pulls out, he doesn't get the stick." -- James Baker, U.S Secretary of State, 12/5/90, about Saddam Hussein %% "We've got everyone convinced except the people who have to make the decision." -- name witheld by request %% "We've repackaged Flagg. Basically, it's gonna look like a box of Tide." -- Howard Chaykin %% "We've replaced the fine coffee at Mssr. Andre's with sand and ground-up clam shells." -- A line from a vacuam ad I like %% "Welcome to Amboy 4. We are pleased to have your puny planet participate in our Intergalactic livestock show and demolition derby." -- MIGHTY MOUSE show %% "Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide." -- Sean Connery comments on The Windy City in THE UNTOUCHABLES %% "Welcome to the banquet of life," said a recent Pope, forgetting that most have to fight their way to the table. -- Edward Abbey %% "Well I don't see why I have to make one man miserable when I can make so many men happy." -- Ellyn Mustard, mustard@ficc.ferranti.com about marriage %% "Well done, Lads. In record time, you killed ALL of the terrorists. Unfortunately, you've killed all the hostages as well." "Awww. Does that mean their boring life stories won't be made into a mini-series for the May sweeps?" -- "Dinosaurs For Hire" %% "Well hello there Charlie Brown, you blockhead." -- Lucy Van Pelt %% "Well it's one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and go, go, go, and don't you step on my blue suede shoes. Well you can do anything but stay off of my blue suede shoes." -- Elvis %% "Well since my baby left me, I've found a new place to dwell. Down at the end of Lonely Street: the Heartbreak Hotel." -- Elvis %% "Well that's my story, not that it matters..." %% "Well the three men I admire most: the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost; they caught the last train for the coast the day the music died." %% "Well we know where we're going, but we don't know where we've been, and we know what we're knowing, but we can't say what we've seen ... we're on the road to nowhere." -- Talking Heads %% "Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know." -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977), "Animal Crackers" %% "Well, Chas, it's like this... I'm under psychic domination by a ninja assassin with magic powers with a body almost as good as yours who needs to kill Ken Wind because he's possessed by a demon. How've you been?" -- Agent Garret tries to summarize his situation to a colleague... from ELEKTRA %% "Well, Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, And Lightness has a call that's hard to hear." -- Indigo Girls %% "Well, Henry, we did all we could to save her... ... so, naturally, she survived." -- Savage Henry %% "Well, I did say we'll put it out and we'll put it out when we can. But I don't know what we can put out or when we can put it out." -- George Stephanopolous %% "Well, I noticed the lad with the thermonuclear device was the Chief Constable for the area." -- Monty Python %% "Well, I read somewhere that to kill a vampire, you have to behead it and fill its mouth with holy wafers." "Really?" "I knew you'd like that." -- The fun part is AFTER you drive the stake through the heart. HERO SANDWICH %% "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." %% "Well, I used to look like this when I was young, and now I still do." -- Yogi Berra %% "Well, I wouldn't exactly call it 'working'... more like 'groveling for dollars.'" -- Night Court %% "Well, I'm glad you didn't do something *sensible*... such as use the *spare*!" "Spare? Spare what?" -- An agent of Death meets the locals in the new Twilight Zone %% "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." %% "Well, Mr. Cody, according to our questionnaire, you would probably excel in sales, advertising, slaughtering a few thousand buffalo, or market research." -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "Well, Penfold, it looks like we'll have to save the world again." "Ooh, 'eck..." -- Dangermouse %% "Well, Zoiks! Let's take off his mask and see who he is. [...] Hey, there's nothing under here but a neck and some tendons." -- From THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MIGHTY MOUSE %% "Well, a friend in need is a friend indeed. I plan to take dogs, dogs, and dogs. In death, you can eat a dog. When a sledge dies, it's just a hunk of metal you can't eat." -- Nansen %% "Well, being a tiger is more than just stripes, you realize." "Kind of a zen thing, huh?" -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "Well, do you see the spaghetti?" %% "Well, here we are in the Philippines!" "Drawn without reference material, apparently." -- The superbly loony "Sam and Max" %% "Well, if it wasn't Buckaroo Banzai, I'd say 'commit the man.'" -- The Secretary of Defense from BUCKAROO BANZAI %% "Well, it don't make the sun shine, but at least it don't deepen the shit." -- Straiter Empy, in "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban %% "Well, it looks like winter has arrived at last," Tom said coldly. %% "Well, it's garish, ugly, and derelicts have used it for a toilet. The rides are dilapidated to the point of being lethal, and could easily maim or kill innocent little children." "Oh, so you don't like it?" "Don't like it? I'm CRAZY for it." -- The Killing Joke %% "Well, ladies, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that your dates are here." "What's the bad news?" "They're dead." -- From the classic NIGHT OF THE CREEPS %% "Well, now, hold onta yer horses, there, Frazier. I mean, as a psychiatrist, isn't it your job to, uh, `seek and uphold the truth'?" "Oh, get real, Cliff." -- Cheers %% "Well, social relevance is a schtick, like mysteries, social relevance, science fiction..." -- Art Spiegelman %% "Well, that was a piece of cake, eh K-9?" "Piece of cake, Master? Radial slice of baked confection ... coefficient of relevance to Key of Time: zero." -- Dr. Who %% "Well, there we're in kind of a gray area..." "How gray?" "Charcoal." -- Fletch %% "Well, we have a special relationship with our dogs. We're going to try many new kinds of things: ponies, motor sledges, and dogs." -- Capt. Robert Falcon Scott %% "Well, we must face a new reality. No more carefree days of chasing squirrels, running through the park, or howling at the moon. On the other hand, no more `Fetch the stick, boy, fetch the stick.'" -- The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "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" %% "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" %% "Well, you can't really *dust* for *vomit*, can you?" -- This Is Spinal Tap %% "Well, you know, it sounds like they've got their own nuts on an anvil and they're hammering away at them." -- Dave Crocker %% "Well, you see, it's such a transitional creature. It's a piss-poor reptile and not very much of a bird." -- Melvin Konner, from "The Tangled Wing", quoting a zoologist who has studied the archeopteryz and found it "very much like people" %% "Well," Brahma said, "even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred." -- The Mahabharata %% "Well," said Programmer, "the customary procedure in such cases is as follows." "What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?" said End-user. "For I am an End-user of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me." "It means the Thing to Do." "As long as it means that, I don't mind," said End-user humbly. -- Chris Mathes, uunet!metter!chris, with apologies to C. Robin And W. T. Pooh %% "Well... everybody's being very careful, these days, sexually, but there are still several pockets of promiscuity... the Marines and the Evangelists." -- Mark Russell %% "Well? Did you glimpse the afterlife?! What's in store for all of us?!" "Bikinis... babes... full-body massages... Joe Clark with a bat... On the whole, a mixed blessing." -- "Bloom County" %% "Went to a party at the county jail." -- Elvis %% "Were there no women, men might live like gods." -- Thomas Dekker %% "Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing." (Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.) -- Middle High German proverb %% "What *are* you doing up there, Reg?" "Being heroic, Dom. It was my turn." -- Blank Reg, being just that. From MAX HEADROOM %% "What George Washington did for us was to throw out the British, so that we wouldn't have a fat, insensitive government running our country. Nice try anyway, George." -- D.J. on KSFO/KYA %% "What I tell you three times is true." -- Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark" %% "What I've done, of course, is total garbage." -- R. Willard Pure Math 430a %% "What I've talked about today seems to be uniquely incoherent ... I never know if you're as baffled as me, or if you're getting along fine." %% "What IS a `moderate Iranian', anyway? Someone who takes hostages but doesn't eat them?" -- Mark Russell %% "What a bonanza! An unknown beginner to be directed by Lubitsch, in a script by Wilder and Brackett, and to play with Paramount's two superstars, Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert, and to be beaten up by both of them!" -- David Niven, "Bring On the Empty Horses" %% "What a gullabull. What a nincowpoop." -- BB %% "What a hell of a heaven it will be, when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!" -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% "What a pinhead! Does he not fear us?!" -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "What a shame," said a winsome young miss, "That an organ that brings me such bliss With its delicate touch Should be wasted on such An unpleasant production as piss." %% "What a waste it is to lose one's mind -- or not to have a mind at all. How true that is." -- V.P. Dan Quayle, garbling the United Negro College Fund slogan in an address to the group (from Newsweek, May 22nd, 1989) %% "What a wonder is USENET; such wholesale production of conjecture from such a trifling investment in fact." -- Carl S. Gutekunst %% "What a wonderfully exciting cough! Do you mind if I join you?" -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "What about these commandments then?" "You again? All right... There shall be TWO commandments, and this shall be the first of them: "Keep the noise down." "Just that? `Keep the noise down'?" "You got it." "Hmmm. And the second of Your commandments, Lord?" "Do what thou wilst," (sayeth the Lord), "just go away and don't bother Me now. For behold, some of Us are trying to get some sleep around here." -- Seven Deadly Sins %% "What about you, you ever kill anything?" "No, I think killing animals for sport is wrong." "So you wouldn't kill an animal, huh?... Would you kill a MOOSE that was molesting your WIFE?" -- The Mountain Man, One of Dana Carvey's great SNL character %% "What am I talking about? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? This is rubbish." %% "What are you doing Saturday night?" "Committing suicide." "What are you doing Friday night?" -- Woody Allen, "Play It Again, Sam" %% "What are you doing over there? I am over here." %% "What are you guys? Pro Wrestling or something?" "That's exactly right." "Not me. I'm an air traffic controller." -- Woman clerk addressing Judah and The Badger, respectively %% "What are you so damn cheerful about? The stock market crashed!" "I'm a software engineer. I TRAFFIC in human misery." -- Me, believe it or not %% "What are you talking about? You heard Mr. Wilson, its all from a flush fund." -- Simon, "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% "What are your general areas of interests?" "Aerodynamics. Designer jeans. Roofing supplies. That sort of thing." "What sort of thing?" "You know, liquidity. Point-of-sale. Margin accounts. Fast lane." -- Doonesbury %% "What better place to begin my reign of Communist terror and oppression than a memorial to that decadent and imperialist American, Melville Dewey, hated originator of the Dewey Decimal System!!" -- The Tick %% "What can be done to the Mirror that is useful?" %% "What can you say about a society that says God is dead and Elvis is alive?" -- Irv Kupcinet %% "What did we do last night?" "Nothing. Wanna do it again?" -- About Last Night %% "What did you do last summer?" "I worked in Des Moines." "Coal or Iron?" %% "What did you do when the ship sank?" "I grabbed a cake of soap and washed myself ashore." %% "What do I care for the C.I.A. Director's tawdry affairs? I'm on the trail of Satan himself!" -- A Mike Baron DEADMAN story %% "What do I do if I am running low on my [computer] account?" "Take out a loan." -- C. Durance Computer Science 234 %% "What do you expect? Watermelons are out of season!" %% "What do you know about show business, Mr. Valiant?" "Only that there's no business like it... no business I know." -- Eddie Valiant in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? %% "What do you mean, 'Gordon's alive!'?" -- Ming the Merciless %% "What do you mean, 'almost dead'?" "Well, when you stop breathing, and moving around, and seeing things... that kind of almost dead." %% "What do you mean... `NO MORE BODIES'!?" -- A very perturbed NoMan %% "What do you say we guys go down to the beach and shoot some clams?" -- Barney Miller %% "What do you think I am? Human?" -- Woody Allen, "What's New, Pussycat?" %% "What do you want to talk about?" "I can talk about anything, I've been to college." %% "What does a Scotsman have under his kilt?" "A leg at each corner." -- Heard on National Public Radio (1981) %% "What does a Scotsman have under his kilt?" "Well, the more Presbyterian you are, the more likely you are to feel the need for something." -- Heard on National Public Radio (1981) %% "What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent? In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded that it takes a coincidence of four conditions, or in Neil's view, the simultaneous peaking of four of the many cycles of American life. First, a base of technology must exist from which to do the thing to be done. Second, a period of national uneasiness about America's place in the scheme of human activities must exist. Third, some catalytic event must occur that focuses the national attention upon the direction to proceed. Finally, an articulate and wise leader must sense these first three conditions and put forth with words and action the great thing to be accomplished. The motivation of young Americans to do what needs to be done flows from such a coincidence of conditions.... The Thomas Jeffersons, The Teddy Roosevelts, The John Kennedys appear. We must begin to create the tools of leadership which they, and their young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward." -- Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt, Senator, New Mexico %% "What evil bonehead dork is behind this?!" -- "Bloom County" %% "What goes up must come down. Ask any system administrator." -- Seen in a signoff line, uncredited %% "What happened to the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!" -- The Martian %% "What have we not got?" "No we have not" "No we don't" "We have not got not" "Ah, Not is what we have not got!" -Agreement followed. %% "What if" is a trademark of Hewlett Packard, so stop using it in your sentences without permission, or risk being sued. %% "What is cannot not be." -- Parmenides %% "What is it about death that bothers me so? Probably the hours." -- Woody Allen %% "What is it, Lassie? A boy fell down a mine shaft and broke his ankle and is diabetic and needs insulin? Is THAT what you're trying to tell me?" %% "What is more perplexing to this Court is that these two parties have dealt personally with each other for years. They have negotiated their differences with the skill and expertise only they can possess. Yet suddenly they left behind their prior relationship and expected this Court to ferret out the wrongdoings of which each is accused. Even worse, they hired lawyers to compound and exponentially increase their disputes and damages. The court has seen more than ninety motions filed in this case, replete with bickering and petty insults ... In short, this is not the sort of thing Federal Courts should spend time and energy on." -- Judge Bunton, whose patience with Moto & Hitachi was wearing out fast. %% "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 Francis Kennedy (1925-1968) %% "What is the Nature of God?" CLICK...CLICK...WHIRRR...CLICK...=BEEP!= 1 QT. SOUR CREAM 1 TSP. SAUERKRAUT 1/2 CUT CHIVES. STIR AND SPRINKLE WITH BACON BITS. "I've just GOT to start labeling my software..." -- "Bloom County" %% "What is the absolute minimum specified value of the Zorkmid treasures, in Zorkmids?" %% "What is the difference between capitalism and communism?" "That's easy," replies the teacher. "Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." %% "What is the price of Experience? Do men Buy it for a song?! and Wisdom for a Dance in the Street? No! it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath: his Wife, his House, his Children-- And Wisdom is sold in the desolate marketplace Where none come to buy and in the barren fields where Farmers plow for bread in vain." -- Blake, The Four Zoas; Night the Second %% "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "What is this? Some kind of intergalactic video zapping portal kind of thing?" -- Dash X, "The Loyal Order of Corn", Eerie Indiana %% "What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?" -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite." -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Sceptical Essays", 1928 %% "What kind of ANIMAL would DO a thing like this?" "Whoop Whoop Whoop..." -- AMBUSH BUG %% "What kind of monster are you?" "I'm a barbarian. You said it yourself." %% "What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry E. Pournelle, about space flight %% "What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood." -- Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum, 2/81, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "What mistakes have you made, Lieutenant? You kept the media away from it. That's the bottom line, isn't it? Yes it is." -- Lt. Gordon gets a lecture on departmental priorities. From BATMAN: YEAR 1 %% "What number is this, Chip?" "7 A!" "OK, like don't get excited, man. It's 'cause I'm short, I know." -- Monkees %% "What object in the Dungeon is haunted?" %% "What object is of use in determining the function of the iced cakes?" %% "What people have been reduced to are mere 3-D representations of their own data." -- Arthur Miller %% "What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "John Bull's Other Island" %% "What the hell are you talking about, homeboy?" -- Bart to Homer, from The Simpsons %% "What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying." -- Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894-1971) %% "What was the name of the dog on the `Brady Bunch'?" "...Florence Henderson?" -- Unknown %% "What we desire our children to become, we must endeavour to be before them." -- Andrew Combe %% "What we need is a symbol." "Y'mean like the `Man From Glad'?" -- Chester the Protester from SWAMP THING %% "What we're trying to do is work things out about elephants." %% "What we've got here is failure to communicate... Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we got here last week.. Which is the the way he wants... Well, he gets." -- Cool Hand Luke %% "What will we do when they come?" "See if we can sell Mom and Dad into slavery for a star cruiser." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "What would this country be without this great land of ours?" -- Ronald W. Reagan, philosopher %% "What! You've been assigned to SECURITY? On the ENTERPRISE? Boy, I sure hope your insurance is paid up, pal!" -- overheard in a corridor, -- Star Base 5 %% "What're you trying to do -- screw up our chances for syndication?" -- David, from MOONLIGHTING %% "What's G. Gordon Liddy doing in the living room, putting the moves on Mom?" -- BEANS BAXTER %% "What's a polar bear?" "A rectangular bear after a coordinate transform." -- Bill White (bwhite@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu) %% "What's black and dangerous and sits in a tree?" "A crow with a machine gun." -- "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers", Harry Harrison %% "What's hard is simple, What's natural, comes hard. Maybe you could show me, How to let go, Lower my guard, Learn to be....free. Maybe if you whistle... Whistle for me." -- Stephen Sondheim, ANYONE CAN WHISTLE %% "What's the date?" "May the fourth." "Then May the fourth be with you." -- Count Duckula %% "What's the definition of a good flame? One you agree with..." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "What's the difference between the United States and Eastern European countries? The United States still has a communist party." -- Johnny Carson %% "What's this? Your way of saying you're sorry?" "No... it's my way of trying not to." -- Good writing from CROSSFIRE %% "What's up in the ghetto, boy. Oh they just captured the suspect. A day without violence is like a day without sunshine. The sun shone last night." -- Christopher Commision report of LAPD car-to-car computer message, 7/91 %% "What's wrong with the sketch?" "Child molestation is a touchy subject." "Read the papers, half the country is doing it!" "Yes, but you name names." "We don't name names ... okay, we say the pope. We always say the pope." -- Woody Allen, "Hannah and her Sisters" %% "What, did you want me to SMELL them coming?" "I did!" -- Commando %% "What, in my life, does not deserve celebrating?" -- Adrian Veidt's soliloquy to his late retinue, from WATCHMEN %% "What?! LEAVE school???" -- Zonker Harris, Doonesbury %% "What?!? I invented the brainalyzer for the good of humanity. To preserve intelligence for coming generations. And then that 'great woman' sold us out. She negotiated a multimillion dollar deal with Ed Meese to steal the 1980 election by pumping MacGyver's brain into Ronald Reagan, quadrupling his IQ." -- Charles Furnell, "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% "Whatever happened to him?" "Uh, well, he pulled it on Rorschach and Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft." -- A Rorschach pique is discussed %% "Whatever you do, don't cross the streams." "Why?" "It would be bad." "Wait a minute, I'm a little fuzzy on this whole good/bad issue." "Imagine life as you know it ending and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." "Okay" "That's bad." "Thanks, Egon. Important safety tip." -- Ghost Busters %% "Whats happening in there Apone? Can't see anything in here." -- Gorman %% "Whats its position?" -- Top %% "Wheat. So what?" -- Star Trek "Trouble With Tribbles" %% "When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money'. When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket'. When the State demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax'." -- Jeff Daiell %% "When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence." -- Brendan Behan %% "When I consider the number of disagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life." %% "When I grow up, I want to be an honest lawyer so things like that can't happen." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon as a boy (on the Teapot Dome scandal) %% "When I look at my children, I often wish I had remained a virgin." -- Lillian Carter %% "When I mentioned that it seemed to me that the Reverend's followers were being systematically turned into mindless zombies by a fraudulent megalomaniac, it was taken as criticism." -- Woody Allen %% "When I want to read a novel I write one." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "When I was [in Canada] I found their jokes like their roads -- not very long and not very good, leading to a little tin point of a spire which has been remorselessly obvious for miles without seeming to get any nearer." -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% "When I was a child... We had a quick-sand box in the backyard...... I was an only child........ eventually....." -- Stephen Wright %% "When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room." -- Woody Allen %% "When I was young, my position was: dynamite. It was only later that I realized that this sort of thing cannot be rushed. It must rot away like a diseased member." -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), on the churches. %% "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day." %% "When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Method of Nature" %% "When PETA starts trying to toss red paint on motorcycle riders wearing leather jackets, things will get more interesting (and I hope someone's there with a camera)." -- James Jones %% "When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation." -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% "When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Caesar and Cleopatra", Act III %% "When angry, count a hundred; when very angry, swear." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" %% "When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd." -- Tom Lehrer %% "When did you learn to do that?" "I read the instructions!" -- Commando %% "When do you plan to open your bakery?" "When I can raise the dough." %% "When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Servants" %% "When freedom destroys order, order will destroy freedom." -- Eric Hoffer %% "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." -- Art Denman %% "When helping with this problem, please flame me good so that others will learn from my brazen irresponsibility." -- Russell Earnest (re4@prism.gatech.edu) %% "When in doubt, book 'em." -- Steve McGarret, Five-O %% "When in doubt, print 'em out." -- Karl's Programming Proverb 0x7 %% "When in doubt, tell the truth." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) "When in doubt, book 'em." -- Steve McGarret, Five-O %% "When it comes to humility, I'm the greatest." -- Bullwinkle J. Moose %% "When it comes to my health, I think of my body as a temple... or at least a moderately well-managed Presbyterian youth center." -- Emo Phillips %% "When large numbers of men are unable to find work, unemployment results." -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% "When marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws." -- Jef Poskanzer, jef@well.sf.ca.us %% "When one has good health it is not serious to be ill." -- Francis Blanche %% "When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: `My dear, we live in an age of transition.'" -- Dean William R. Inge %% "When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic." -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% "When people aren't stupid Usenet is even more useful. Too bad this happens so rarely." -- Jef Poskanzer, jef@well.sf.ca.us %% "When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them." -- "Dune", by Frank Herbert %% "When the Going Get's Tough, the Tough Get a Glock" -- James P. Callison, callison@midway.ecn.uoknor.edu %% "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, in interview with David Frost, 19 May 1977 %% "When the going gets tough, the smart get an AR-15. And a shotgun. And..." -- James P. Callison, callison@midway.ecn.uoknor.edu %% "When the government attempts to regulate everything, all is lost." -- Thibaudeau %% "When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% "When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow %% "When the writer becomes the center of his attention, he becomes a nudnik. And a nudnik who believes he's profound is even worse than just a plain nudnik." -- Isaac Bashevis Singer %% "When things are at their darkest, pal, it's a great man who can kick back and party." -- Olin Shivers %% "When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary." -- Thomas Paine "Common Sense" %% "When we lose, I eat. When we win, I eat. I also eat when we're rained out." -- Tommy Lasorda %% "When we put our best foot forward, the other one had better be good enough to stand on." -- Cullen Hightower, "Quote Magazine" %% "When we saw my bike parked out front my mind was flooded. Unanswered questions were playing tiddlywinks with my grey matter. It looked like my bike, and felt like my bike, but..." -- Marshall, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "When will I learn? The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle. THEY'RE ON TV!" -- Homer in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", from The Simpsons %% "When you buy peace at any price it is always on the installment plan for another war." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, January 29, 1966 %% "When you love someone as much as I love you, pretty soon, you don't feel nothin', and when you don't feel nothin', you can do anythin'" -- The Wraith %% "When you put all this into The Big Picture, you point the blame at New Hampshire. They pick both candidates; every election, they get first choice. I know, we trust them because they seem solid: The Granite State. Well, it's more like The Small Mammals By The Side Of The Road State. There they are, passing themselves off as some kind of Norman Rockwell/American archetypes; `Live Free or Die', that's their motto -- it's on all their license plates. But when you think that these license plates are made by people in prison... well, it makes you wonder what it really means. [...] "Well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's perfectly safe to hand over the destiny of our nation to a pack of maple syrup-swilling squirrel worshipers..." -- A. Whitney Brown %% "When you slithered out of your hole that day, and you spewed your venom all over this defenseless 12-year-old girl, you made this court's top 10 hit list. In a way, the best sentence this court could give would be no sentence at all, because if you left this courtroom I don't think you would be alive 10 minutes. You are nothing but a weed, a weed among wheat...And when we have a weed, it's my job to eradicate the weed, because if you don't you will choke the wheat. Therefore, I'm going to take you off the streets for just as long as I possibly can. It means you aren't even eligible for parole until you're 92. That leaves only one more count, aggravated robbery. ..You stole this little girl's bra as a souvenir, probably to brag about it to your friends later on. Well, I'm going to give you a souvenir of Trumbull County justice. And that is, you will receive a maximum sentence of 10 to 25 on the aggravated robbery for the stealing of that bra. And I hope that if you last 25 years in prison that you remember that souvenir. "Get this scum out of here!" -- A sentence passed by Judge W. Wyatt McKay of Trumbull County, Ohio, via Mike Royko: %% "When you stick your fingers in the mains, its not the imaginary component which you will feel" %% "When you're a child, you pledge allegiance to the flag. When you grow up, you swear to uphold the Constitution. Compare and contrast to the President's current actions." -- Larry Wake (lkw@csun.edu) %% "When you're around it all the time, you don't notice it so much." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel" -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% "Whenever I'm faced with a difficult situation, I like to ask myself what my idol, Edward R. Murrow, would think; and I think Ed would call this censorship. "But I also ask myself what my other hero, General George Patton, would think; and I think George would believe this country needs to be cleaned up. Why, if George were alive today, he'd take two armored tank divisions into Hollywood and knock those liberal pinheads into the ocean! "So, as you can see, I'm a very confused man. And when I'm confused, there's only one thing that makes me feel better: I watch TV." -- Les Nesman, "WKRP in Cincinatti" %% "Whenever I'm in Champaign, I listen to the great music on Rock 107, and when I'm out of town, they mail it to me." -- Steve Wright %% "Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them [public offices], a rottenness begins in his conduct." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1799 %% "Whenever the maths turns out to be impossible, you have to invent new physics." %% "Whenever you're in trouble, get yourself a lawyer. Then you've got even more trouble, but at least you've got a lawyer." -- Chico Marx, "At the Circus" %% "Where I come from, equality of the sexes is a given -- so WE can hit ANYONE." "Oh... thank you... SO much... for explainnnn..." -- 24th century manners, courtesy of THE JUSTICE LEAGUE %% "Where I come from, equality of the sexes is a given -- so WE can hit ANYONE." "Oh... thank you... SO much... for explainnnn..." "And God help whoever gets in our way!" "Dimitri...?" "YES, Alexi? "We're not supposed to believe in God." "Oh. That's right." %% "Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried" -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% "Where are we going?!" "PLANET 10!!" "When are we leaving?!" "REAL SOON!!" %% "Where did you get this meat?" he bridled hoarsely. %% "Where do we keep all our chainsaws, mom?" -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "Where do you place your hate?" -- Henry Goldblum %% "Where does he get those wonderful toys?" -- The Joker %% "Where does he keep his water dish?" -- Twin Peaks %% "Where have you been? It's all right, we know where you've been. ... What did you dream? ... It's all right, we told you what to dream. ... so welcome to The Machine." %% "Where is it written in the Constitution that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?" -- Daniel Webster, 1814 %% "Where love rules, there is no rule to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." -- C. G. Jung %% "Where man? Can't see shit!" -- Cprl Frost %% "Where the hell's he get the atomic bomb?" -- Barney Miller %% "Where's a good victim when you need one" -- Simon, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% "Where's he going?" "Where does any red-blooded teen star go when they get cancelled? On a crime spree." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "Where's my spy camera! (etc)" -- Bart to the MailWoman in "Homer's Night Out", from The Simpsons %% "Where's the tape with Simon's brain on it?" -- Marshall, "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% "Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make." -- Heathers %% "Whether you think you can or can't, you're right." -- Henry Ford %% "Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God on of man's?" %% "Which partners are best? Sixty-niners. And better than that? Try the Shriners," These are the results of consenting adults, (And occasional like-minded minors.) %% "While I was at home with father, he used to tell me his opinions, and I held the same opinions. If I had others, I concealed them, because he wouldn't have liked it." -- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) (Nora, in "A Doll's House") %% "While not a master of intellect, the blatantly obvious things WE often take for granted never escape HIS keen eye!" "Horse." -- Flaming Carrot %% "While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina's real time performance goes unchallenged. Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each second." -- John K. Stevens, "Reverse Engineering the Brain" Byte magazine, Page 287, April 1985 %% "While you are here, your wives and girlfriends are dating handsome American movie and TV stars. Stars like Tom Selleck, Bruce Willis, and Bart Simpson." -- Baghdad Betty %% "Who *was* that spud? Talks like my dad." "He used to fight crime." -- Robin and Wayne discuss Oliver in THE DARK KNIGHT FALLS %% "Who IS this mysterious masked man?? And why has he never been photographed together with handsome, 6-year-old millionaire playboy Calvin?" -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers* from it." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of Science?" -- Monty Python & the Holy Grail %% "Who could be attacking me in my own home? Egor Green? Galxor of Xaytan? Horrortroy the DevilDog? Dr. Stardust? Bug Boy? Or some new bozo with a bad attitude?" -- Atomic Man! %% "Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear." -- Isa Upanishad %% "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927 %% "Whoever did this [planted a pipe bomb at the Margaret Sanger Center] is a hero. I think they are heroes. The Bible commands us to rescue those being dragged to death." -- Nancy O'Brien, Co-Director, "Project Jericho, "Channel 9 News," WCTO-TV, 2/23/87, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson" %% "Whoever said talk is cheap never saw a bill for Phone sex." -- Michael Corcoran %% "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school. -- George Ade (1866-1944) %% "Whom the gods would destroy, they first teach BASIC." -- Anonymous Netter %% "Why are you RUNNING? Cerebus just wants to KILL you a little..." -- Cerebus %% "Why buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel." -- Yogi Berra %% "Why can one call the time component of the preceding 4-vector by the name energy? For two reasons: First, because this time component has the correct units -- the units of mass..." -- From "Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler %% "Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?" -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc %% "Why did you do that? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Sam!" -- Samuel Goldwyn, on being told that a friend had named his son Sam, after him %% "Why did you hire that idiot?" "You can't fool all of the people all of the time, so I'm breeding them for stupidity." -- President Weishaupt %% "Why do men go to war? Because women are watching." -- T. S. Eliot %% "Why do schools let anyone post? Why not just leave it to us professionals?" -- S. M. Ryan (smryan@garth.UUCP) "Because there is no necessary relation between having a degree and the attribute of optical rectosis, as your posting demonstrates." -- Bill Wells, bill@twwells.com %% "Why do trans-atlantic transfers take so long?" "Electrons don't swim very fast." -- john@minster.york.ac.uk and whh@PacBell.COM %% "Why do you wear that toy on your head?" %% "Why don't the Japanese live in the mountains? Certainly, they could; apparently they just don't want to." -- elturner@phoenix.Princeton.EDU %% "Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine." -- David Moulton %% "Why is it that half the calories is twice the price?" %% "Why is it that the truly brilliant are doomed to a life of obscurity, surrounded by a sea of mediocrity, only to end up covered in sores in a pool of their own filth? Oh well, the beat goes on." -- Saturday Night Live %% "Why is that ridiculous toy on your head?" "Because if I wear it anywhere else, it chafes." -- Real Genius %% "Why is the camera moving around so much?" "It's a film style called cinema verite." "Huh? What's that?" "It's a fancy French expression for 'sloppy camera work'." -- The Tracy Ullman Show %% "Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?" -- Artemus Ward (1834-1867) %% "Why should I move to a city where the only cultural advantage is that I can make a right turn on a red light?" -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall" %% "Why should I?" is the cry of work dodgers. Their aim is to just enough to get by. They are clock watchers who are afraid they will render more service than they are paid to perform. They are too lazy to think, too selfish to put their shoulders to the wheel in a common cause. %% "Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it." -- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) %% "Why was the Ferranti flag taken down? Jim Adamoli says that it was drooping too much. A new flag is being made out of silk so that it will better catch the wind." -- bulletin to employees "Oh, yeah, the irony was too f*cking much!!! It was made of broader, ``better-quality'' cloth, but it wouldn't fly. Remind you of anything?" -- Name Witheld For Obvious Reasons %% "Why waste negative entropy on comments, when you could use the same entropy to create bugs instead?" -- Steve Elias %% "Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous" -- Calvin and Hobbes %% "Why weren't you at the meeting?" "Because it was boring." "No it wasn't." "Well, it _should_ have been!" %% "Why would she want another kid?? She's already got ME!" "Yes, you'd think she'd have learned her lesson by now..." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "Why, I'd recognize those boobs anywhere." -- Hopey spots Penny in LOVE & ROCKETS %% "Will you hose me down with holy water if I get too hot?" -- Meat Loaf++ %% "Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle -- will you come and join the dance? "You can really have no notion how delightful it will be When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!" But the snail replied "Too far, too far!", and gave a look askance -- Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance. "What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied. "There is another shore, you know, upon the other side. The further off from England the nearer is to France -- Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "Will your long-winded speeches never end? What ails you that you keep on arguing?" -- Job 16:3 %% "William Safire would have a cow, but somehow that doesn't disturb me." -- Evan Hunt (evanh@sco.com) %% "Wink-Wink, Nudge-Nudge, Know-what-I-mean, Know-what-I-mean?" -- Monty Python %% "Winnie-the-Pooh read the notice very carefully, first from left to right, and afterwards, in case he had missed some of it, from right to left." -- A. A. Milne %% "Winning isn't everything - it's the ONLY thing." -- Vince Lombardi, 1965 %% "Winny and I lived in a house that ran on static electricity... If you wanted to run the blender, you had to rub balloons on your head." "...if you wanted to cook, you had to pull off a sweater real quick..." -- Stephen Wright %% "Winny would spend all of his time practicing limbo... He got pretty good... He could go under a rug..." -- Stephen Wright %% "Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk." -- Doug Larson %% "Wish not to seem, but to be, the best." -- Aeschylus %% "With a rubber duck, one's never alone." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "With friends like these, who needs hallucinations?" -- Buddy, "Night Court" %% "With molasses you catch flies, with vinegar you catch nobody." -- Baltimore City Councilman Dominic DiPietro %% "With sales at an all-time high, Marvel will expand their line next month with a new title, "Marvel Two-On-One", which will pair two superpowered heroes against one not-so-supervillain. Issue #1 pits Thor and The Hulk against Paste-Pot Pete." -- Fandom Confidential %% "Without music life would be a mistake." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% "Wolfjaw, Montana. That's indian territory." "Looks like we got aliens moving into the neighborhood. Let's go." "Great. First the white man, now aliens." -- War Of The Worlds (the series) %% "Women and cats do as they dammed well please. Men and dogs had best learn to live with it..." -- Alan Holbrook %% "Women enjoy computers more than men, survey says." -- Rockford (Ill.) Register Star "Yes, but can computers take out the garbage?" -- The New Yorker, 29 Jan 1990, p.89 "No, but they can generate it faster." %% "Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the way we're made you've got to take it up with God." -- Phyllis Schlafly, hypocrite who has had a business career and run for public office, and who apparently wishes to deny those opportunities to other women %% "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." -- Timothy Leary %% "Women, cats, and golf; man was not meant to understand these things." %% "Women: can't live with 'em... Can't shoot 'em" -- David Addison %% "Won't somebody tell me, just who and what I did... Why's this ring on my finger, and who's that screaming kid? " From "Lost Weekend" by the Beat Farmers %% "Wop-babba-loo-ba, da-wop-bam-boom" -- Little Richard %% "Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clear." -- Joseph Joubert %% "Work is the rent you pay for the room you occupy on earth." -- Queen Elizabeth %% "Workers of the World, forgive us!" On a banner in a Moscow counter-rally, Oct 8, 1989. %% "Working on custom(ADM) is a lot like being drummer for Spinal Tap." -- an anonymous SCO employee %% "Worries go down better with soup." -- Yiddish proverb %% "Worry not about your problems in mathematics; I can assure you mine are still greater." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "Would I turn on the gas if my pal Mugsy were in there?" "You might, rabbit, you might!" -- Looney Tunes, Bugs and Thugs (1954, Friz Freleng) %% "Would you like a craft of house wine?" %% "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 %% "Wow spelled backwards is wow." -- Marshall, "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% "Wow! Death by Stereo!" -- One of the Vampire-hunters from THE LOST BOYS %% "Wow! You're up and around already? I'm impressed." "Oh, great. Now they'll be no living with him." -- End of a great punch line with Kirk getting out of bed and McCoy's acid comments %% "Wow, never thought I'd see a mummy, a dead person, and a movie star all in one day." -- Simon, "Scariest Home Videos", Eerie Indiana %% "Wow... this is intense." -- "Repo Man" %% "Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money." -- Moliere %% "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 %% "Wrong," said Renner. "The tactful way," Rod said quietly, "the polite way to disagree with the Senator would be to say, `That turns out not to be the case.'" %% "X's and," said Tom wisely. %% "Xerox sues somebody for copying?" -- David Letterman %% "Y'know, every once in a while, when you look off into the distance, you can see a shimmering in the atmosphere's coefficient of refraction, as someone, someone small and slow on the horizon, gets a clue." -- Blair Houghton, who's yet to get one %% "Y'know, the movie sequel ERNEST SAVES CHRISTMAS was released this week, one of the Biblical signs that Armageddon is near." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "Y'know, the world would be a beautiful place if it certain people weren't in it." -- Radio Days %% "YUPPIES: es, nder

eer

ressure 'll at hit" -- Chris Squire %% "Ya does that once more, and I'm not a-goin' in after it!" -- Yosemite Sam %% "Ya' know, Moe, my mom once said something that really stuck with me. She said, 'Homer, you're a big disappointment' and God bless her soul, she was really onto something." -- Homer in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", from The Simpsons %% "Yabba dabba doo" -- F. Flintstone %% "Yacc" owes much to a most stimulating collection of users, who have goaded me beyond my inclination, and frequently beyond my ability in their endless search for "one more feature". Their irritating unwillingness to learn how to do things my way has usually led to my doing things their way; most of the time, they have been right. -- S. C. Johnson, "Yacc guide acknowledgements" %% "Yea, I am a Capitalist, the most dangerous radical of all, the most fearsome threat to Mankind's foes, for I am Man Himself." -- Jeff Daiell, in "The Most Dangerous Radical" %% "Yeah, a dead sixteen-year-old falls from the sky -- that'll surprise them!" -- Frank comment from BEANS BAXTER %% "Yeah, that's the ticket!" %% "Yeah, what paper you write for, Ernie?" -- Yogi Berra after being introduced to Ernest Hemingway. %% "Yeah... *cough*... that's right... rub it in... *cough*... offed by a non-stick coating..." -- From "The American" %% "Yes Ma'am. So will Jesus, but I ain't waitin' up nights." -- Doonesbury %% "Yes! The Animals! Possibly the greatest band ever. Possibly not." -- The BADGER %% "Yes, I am a real piece of work. One thing we learn at Ulowell is how to flame useless hacking non-EE's like you. I am superior to you in every way by training and expertise in the technical field. Anyone can learn how to hack, but Engineering doesn't come nearly as easily. Actually, I'm not trying to offend all you CS majors out there, but I think EE is one of the hardest majors/grad majors to pass. Fortunately, I am making it." -- "Warrior Diagnostics" (wardiag@sky.COM) "Being both an EE and an asshole at the same time must be a terrible burden for you. This isn't really a flame, just a casual observation. Makes me glad I was a CS major, life is really pleasant for me. Have fun with your chosen mode of existence!" -- Jim Morrison (morrisj@mist.cs.orst.edu) %% "Yes, I've met Hillary Clinton. I was in Florida helping those poor Hurricane victims, and SHE came down for a photo opportunity." -- Marilyn Quayle on "McLaughlin" %% "Yes, and I feel bad about rendering their useless carci into dogfood..." -- Badger comics %% "Yes, it would be the easy way... but it wouldn't be the COWBOY way." -- Ranger Doug %% "Yes, sir, just Top-Forty Beatle CLASSICS! [What ah woosie.]" -- From HONKEYTONK SUE %% "Yes, we're the nation's top corporate executives: the valiant frontline in the battle for a purer America!" -- "Bloom County" %% "Yes, well, that's just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage." -- John Cleese of Monty Python %% "Yes, well, we have a special relationship with our dogs." -- Capt. Scott %% "Yes... why do we have to have evil?" "Ah, I think it's something to do with free will." -- God (played splendidly by the late Sir Ralph Richardson) in TIME BANDITS %% "Yet, who can help loving the land that has taught us Six hundred and eighty-five ways to dress eggs?" -- Thomas Moore, "The Fudge Family in Paris" %% "Yo Simon, are you there? Simon. I'm on station at Wolf Base One. There's a high chance of mega-weirdness. Try to stay in contact. Yo Simon. Come in!" -- Marshall, "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% "Yo baby yo baby yo." -- Eddie Murphy %% "You *know* what happens! They find Captain Kook's treasure, all the elves dance around like little green idiots, I puke, the end!" -- Bart to Lisa in "Some Enchanted Evening", from The Simpsons %% "You FIEND! What have you done with Daisy?" "You IDIOT! She's arranging transportation to France!" "You TROGLODYTE! What's in France?" "Truffles, you demented bandicoot!" -- Badger and Ham having a Tiff... in "The Badger" %% "You McPike?" "Most of my life. In 3rd grade I was Batman, but that seems to have passed." -- One of Frank McPike's best droll comments, from WISEGUY %% "You READ this article, Mom?" "Damn it! Get your gunboats off my kitchen table!" -- Those crazy aviators from VALKYRIE! %% "You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?" -- Ronald W. Reagan %% "You and Ronald McDonald are the two most popular clowns in this country right now." -- Nick Fury's comments on Clay Quarterman's Ollie North-like popularity. From THE INCREDIBLE HULK. %% "You are WRONG, you ol' brass-breasted fascist poop!" -- "Bloom County" %% "You are bleeding." "I ain't got time to bleed." -- Predator %% "You are going to be alright. Maybe not." %% "You are not a realist unless you believe in miracles." -- Anwar el-Sadat %% "You are now a WORLD-CLASS hopeless romantic." "No, hopeful. Hopeful romantic." -- Romancing the Stone %% "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?" "In my youth," Father William replied to his son, "I wrote wonderful papers galore; But the great reputation I found that I'd won, Made it pointless to think any more." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "You are old, father William," the young man said, "And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head -- Do you think, at your age, it is right?" "In my youth," father William replied to his son, "I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again." "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?" "In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, "I kept all my limbs very supple By the use of this ointment -- one shilling the box -- Allow me to sell you a couple?" %% "You are old, father William," the young man said, "And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head -- Do you think, at your age, it is right?" "In my youth," father William replied to his son, "I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "You are old," said the youth, "and I'm told by my peers That your lectures bore people to death. Yet you talk at one hundred conventions per year -- Don't you think that you should save your breath?" "I have answered three questions and that is enough," Said his father, "Don't give yourself airs! Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "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?" "In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run, And there isn't one language you like; Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none -- Have you thought about taking a hike?" "Since I never write programs," his father replied, "Every language looks equally bad; Yet the people keep paying to read all my books And don't realize that they've been had." %% "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?" "In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, "I kept all my limbs very supple By the use of this ointment -- one shilling the box -- Allow me to sell you a couple?" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before, And make errors few people could bear; You complain about everyone's English but yours -- Do you really think this is quite fair?" "I make lots of mistakes," Father William declared, "But my stature these days is so great That no critic can hurt me -- I've got them all scared, And to stop me it's now far too late." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "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?" "I have answered three questions, and that is enough," Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs! Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!" -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "You are so *lovely*." "Yes." "Yes! And you take a compliment, too! I like that in a goddess." -- The "Guilt Trip" episode of Amazing Stories -- Dom Deluise (Guilt) & Loni Anderson (Love) %% "You are still dead, then?" "Oh yeah, hey, totally." -- A dead Peter Whyte to Jack Morrison on St. Elsewhere %% "You are the greatest lover I have ever had." "Well, I practice a lot when I'm alone." -- Woody Allen, "Love and Death" %% "You are what you want to be." -- Brad Morrison, brad@neosoft.com %% "You boys lookin' for trouble?" "Sure. Whaddya got?" -- Marlon Brando, "The Wild Ones" %% "You bring someone home, say 'Hi, Mom, this is so-and-so,' she immediately knows everything except which side of the bed he sleeps on." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "You can always tell an old soldier from the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges: the old ones, grub." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Arms and the Man" %% "You can bring any calculator you like to the midterm, as long as it doesn't dim the lights when you turn it on." -- Hepler Systems Design 182 %% "You can call Usenet a democracy if you want to. You can call it a totalitarian dictatorship run by space aliens and the ghost of Elvis. It doesn't matter either way." -- Dave Mack, mack@inco.UUCP %% "You can do this in a number of ways. IBM chose to do all of them. Why do you find that funny?" -- D. Taylor Computer Science 350 %% "You can emerge now from my chips. The opportunity to prove yourself a hero is long gone." -- Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart clerk, in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% "You can fool too many of the people too much of the time." -- James Thurber (1894-1961), "The Thurber Carnival", 1945 %% "You can hardly do anything that won't seem stupid later." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "You can have my Unix system when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers." -- Cal Keegan %% "You can march them off a cliff, you can send them to certain death in some god-forsaken land, but for some reason you can't slap them." -- Grandpa in "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% "You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose unless you have really *chunky* friends." %% "You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty." -- Sacha Guitry %% "You can rock it, you can roll it, you can slop it, you can stroll it at The Hop" -- Danny and the Juniors %% "You can shoot down all thi MiGs you want, but if you return to base and the lead Soviet tank commander is eating breakfast in your snack bar, Jack, you've lost the war." -- A-10 pilot's motto, Nellis AFB 1982 %% "You can shoot... the animals... in the forest... but you cannot... shoot the *forest*." -- Nature and the Swamp Thing %% "You can thank the Rock 'n Roll detector for leading you to your doom!" "Thanks!" -- The Firesign Theatre movie, J-Men Forever %% "You can watch an actor absolutely sabotage a good script and then read reviews like 'Unfortunately, even the impressive talents of Cheech Marin could not salvage Anton Chekhov's trite and meandering script.'" -- Chet Ramey, Case Western Reserve University, chet@po.CWRU.Edu %% "You can write a small letter to Grandma in the filename." -- Forbes Burkowski Computer Science 454 %% "You can't drink negative beer. Well, I guess you could throw up." -- Forbes Math Elective 102 %% "You can't expect a mother to be with a small child all the time" Margaret Mead once remarked, with her usual good sense, but in 1978 she shocked feminists by snapping that women don't really have children to put them in day care twelve hours a day, either. -- Caroline Bird, "The Two Paycheck Marriage" %% "You can't get snot off of a suede jacket." -- Lenny Bruce %% "You can't get very far in this world without your dossier being there first." -- Arthur Miller %% "You can't go in there!" "Yes I can. This is America. I can go anywhere I want to." -- The two main characters in Rob Reiner's wonderful "The Sure Thing" %% "You can't learn to become real. It's like learning to become a midget." -- Woody Allen, "The Purple Rose of Cairo" %% "You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "You can't really train a beagle," he dogmatized. %% "You can't shoot me ... I have a very low threshold of death. My doctor does not permit bullets to enter my body at any time." -- Woody Allen, "Casino Royale" %% "You can't stop abortion without fighting contraception: it is the gateway to abortion. Not one of the 81 countries I've worked in has `clean' contraception without abortion -- not one. Once there's contraception -- separating sexual activity from procreation and teaching people to use each other's bodies for selfish pleasure -- abortion is always used as a backup." -- Fr. Paul Marx, President, Human Life International, "Pro Life/Family Catalog", 1991, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "You can't take sides when you know the earth is round." -- Patricia Sun %% "You can't teach seven foot." -- Frank Layton, Utah Jazz basketball coach, when asked why he had recruited a seven-foot tall auto mechanic %% "You can't win all of the time. There are guys out there who are better than you." -- Yogi Berra %% "You cannot really know anything." -- William Payne (wpayne@digi.UUCP) "How do you know?" -- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, djo@PacBell.com %% "You deliver a good argument, but speaking personally, I'd rather have an exhibitionist nymphomaniac, especially one who looked like Julie Newmar." -- Jerry Boyajian %% "You deserve someone better. Someone whose credit card doesn't set off that horrible beeping noise." -- Homer in "Homer's Odyssey", from The Simpsons %% "You do not know?! Have you never heard the tales of the man from the East -- A frightful creature of the night -- with the POWER to cloud the minds of men... and the FURY to obliterate Evil with a single sweep of his terrible hand?!" "Frankly, Hong... no." "Nor I." "Perhaps if you were more specific..." -- Brilliant hyperbole from THE SHADOW %% "You do not test the strength of a fly by hitting it with a sledgehammer." -- Professor Simpson %% "You don't drown by falling into water. You drown by staying there." -- Robert Allen %% "You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you?...If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Epilogue to "Fanny's First Play" %% "You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you take a gun and shoot him." -- Pat Robertson, TV Evangelist, about Muammar Kadhafy %% "You don't have to explain something you never said" -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% "You don't just go to the Black Lodge and walk out with your girlfriend." -- Karl, explaining the last episode of Twin Peaks %% "You don't really understand something until you understand it in more than one way." -- Marvin Minsky %% "You don't solo for anyone but yourself. If someone's out there soloing to impress someone, or to get their name in a magazine, then they've had a horrible joke played on them." -- Peter Croft %% "You don't want to get locked into open systems" -- IBM %% "You doubted Me," God tells the Lawgiver [Moses], "But I forgave you that doubt. You doubted your own self and failed to believe in your own powers as a leader, and I forgave you that also. But you lost faith in these people and doubted the divine possibilities of Human Nature. THIS loss of faith makes it impossible for you to enter the Promised Land." -- The Midrash %% "You forgot to read your fortune cookie... It says... you're shit out of luck." -- Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in THE DEAD POOL %% "You get what you settle for." -- Thelma and Louise %% "You give 100 percent in the first half of the game, and if that isn't enough in the second half, you give what's left." -- Yogi Berra %% "You got an alarm clock in there, sir?" "No! No, heavens, no, no.. Just vests." "Sounded a bit like an alarm clock going off." "Oh, it can't have been. It must have been a vest.. uh.. go-.. going off." -- Monty Python %% "You gotta be cruel to be kind..." -- Nick Lowe %% "You have a lovely friend there, Marge. Let's hope something runs over her." -- Jacques in "Jacques to be Wild", from The Simpsons %% "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you realize that?" -- Peter Da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% "You have an annoying fascination for timepieces, Mr. Sulu." -- Star Trek "Corbomite Maneuver" - Scott %% "You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?" "The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as--" "My blushes, Watson," Holmes murmured, in a deprecating voice. "I was about to say 'as he is unknown to the public.'" -- Dr. John Watson, "The Valley of Fear" %% "You have reached 666-1313, DIAL-A-DEMON. At the sound of the tone you will be possessed." %% "You have taught me the fear of becoming lost, which has killed the pleasure of curiosity and discovery. In strange cities, I memorize streets and always know exactly where I am. Amid scenes of great splendor, I review the route back to the hotel." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "You have taught me to value a good night's sleep over all else including adventures of love and friendship, and even when the night is charged with magic, to be sure to get to bed. If God had not meant everyone to be in bed by ten-thirty, He would never have provided the ten o'clock newscast." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "You have the right to remain helpless. Should you choose to waive this right, anything you do may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an assailant. If you cannot find one for yourself, the court will release one for you." -- The following update on "Miranda" is submitted by family member Steve Munden. %% "You have the right to remain silent, but I wouldn't encourage you to do so. Anything you say will be taken down, altered to my satisfaction and used in a court of law to send you down for a good many years!" %% "You have to ask. Just once in your life, you have to ask." -- Irwin Bernstein -- A truism from the long-suffering DA on HILL STREET BLUES (played by George Wyner) %% "You have to kill a pessimist. Optimists usually take care of themselves." -- Anon. %% "You have to regard everything I say with suspicion - I may be trying to bullshit you, or I may just be bullshitting you inadvertently." -- J. Wainwright Mathematics 140b, From a collection of University of Waterloo Computer/Math class quotes %% "You haven't written it in green - your notes will be wrong. " %% "You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates." -- Erma Bombeck %% "You hear radio waves in your head?" -- dj on radio K.A.O.S. %% "You kids have it easy, I had to wind my own bobbins, and if I mispunched a card, the loom was liable to throw a shuttle right through the head of a nearby textile worker." -- Jacquard %% "You kids shouldn't see this, though -- your parents would think it's too adult for you. So I'll leave this copy here with you when I split to go start a war or something, okay?" "Yer a pal, Mr. Post." -- Ron Post, mass murder and guitar player, talks about censorship, in one of Matt Howarth's many independently-financed comix %% "You killed Ted, you medieval dickweed!" -- Bill %% "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, MINE are even WORSE!" -- Calvin %% "You know how it is when you're walking up the stairs, and you get to the top, and you think there's one more step? I'm like that all the time." -- Steve Wright %% "You know how old people always write letters to Dear Abby complaining that their kids never write, call or visit? Those letters really crack me up." -- CALVIN AND HOBBES %% "You know how that rabbit feels, Going under your spinning wheels, Bright images flashing by, Like windshields towards a fly." -- Rush %% "You know how they test condoms now? They pull 'em down over Howie Mandel's head." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% "You know monsters... they're ALWAYS eating power stations!" -- FLAMING CARROT %% "You know the world's in trouble when it takes 2,000 laws to enforce the Ten Commandments." -- Alfred E. Newman %% "You know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Net had one throat and I had my hands about it." -- Rorschach (1985) WATCHMEN %% "You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% "You know why there are so few sophisticated computer terrorists in the United States? Because your hackers have so much mobility into the establishment. Here, there is no such mobility. If you have the slightest bit of intellectual integrity you cannot support the government.... That's why the best computer minds belong to the opposition." -- an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity %% "You know you say things are 'much of a muchness' -- did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?" "Really, now you ask me, " said Alice, very much confused, I don't think --" "Then you shouldn't talk," said the Hatter. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% "You know, I remember when the Lord spoke to me and said to go into radio. And that was about the time Jesus said 'Expand your ministry into the television area.' And that was about the time Jesus spoke to me and said to put out a satellite so the government couldn't control our transmissions. And it was about that time that Jesus came to me and begin to explain to me the non-profit corporation principle. Yeah, and then Jesus told me to build an amusement park, it would be non-profit. YAH!" [rude gesture] -- Sam Kinison %% "You know, I'm beginning to think that the Right To Life movement in this country believes that life officially begins when you agree with *them*." -- Dennis Miller %% "You know, I've been thinking. Everybody makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but usually the jelly drips over the side and the guys hands get all sticky, but your jelly stays right in the middle where it's supposed to. I don't know how you do it, you've just got a gift, I guess. I've always thought so. I just never mentioned it, but it's time you know how I feel - I don't believe in keeping feelings bottled up. Good bye, my wife." -- Homer to Marge in "Jacques to be Wild", from The Simpsons %% "You know, I've had quite a bit to drink tonight, and .. well, you're starting to look pretty good." %% "You know, I've never accidentally drilled a hole in myself while programming." -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% "You know, Marge, getting old is a terrible thing. I think the saddest day of my life was when I realized I could beat my dad at most things. Bart experienced that at the age of 4." -- Homer in "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% "You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers... damn anthropologists." -- Emo Philips %% "You know, back in the war I was a spy for General Lee. One day he called into his tent and he says, `Secret Agent X-9, I want you to go behind enemy lines and blow up a blue-belly bridge.' So, I disguised myself as a farmer, got myself a big bag of bombs and painted 'em all to look like ears of corn. Got behind enemy lines, and there was a Union picket there. Bunch of guards, they said, `Halt! Who goes there?' And I said, `Just a rebel spy, come to blow up the bridge!' "Well... soon as those words were outta my mouth, I coulda just kicked myself." -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio, SENSELESS CRUELTY %% "You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct." -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% "You know, once in a while it is my pleasure, and my privilege to welcome here at the Refreshment Room some of the truly great international artists of our time. And tonight we have one such artist. Ladies and gentlemen, someone who I've always personally admired, perhaps more deeply, more strongly, more ... abjectly than any other performer. A man, well, more than a man, a god! A great god, whose personality is so totally and utterly wonderful, that my feeble words of welcome sound wretchedly and pathetically inadequate. Someone whose boots I would gladly lick clean, until holes wore through my tongue! A man who is so totally and utterly wonderful, that I would rather be sealed in a pit of my own filth than dare tread on the same stage with him! Ladies and Gentlemen, the incomparably superior human being, Harry Fink!" "He can't come!" -- Monty Python %% "You know, sir, that there *is* a precedent for wheelchair detectives..." "Shut up, Alfred." -- Alfred with good advice for Bruce Wayne. Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT %% "You know, there are times when it's a source of personal pride to not be human." -- Hobbes %% "You know, we've won awards for this crap." -- David Letterman %% "You know, you look at the chaos in the conservative camp right now, it's only too tempting to blame it all on pot. But in fact, the Reagan revolution owes a lot to Reefer. For one thing, it's made the symptoms of senility socially acceptable." -- A. Whitney Brown %% "You know, you're more in need of a blow job than any other white man in the history of the human race." -- Robin Williams, "Good Morning Vietnam" %% "You know, you're very pretty... for a cop!" -- Bill Murray's line to P. J. Soles in "Stripes" %% "You know," he added very gravely, "it's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle -- to get one's head cut off." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "You look at your needs, at your competitors, at what you can afford, and you cut your cloth accordingly." -- Ian Ross, AT&T Bell Laboratories %% "You look like a man with the minimum daily requirement of intelligence. Where can I find a book on self-confidence?" -- Herman %% "You may attend a party where strange customs prevail (in between the sheets)." %% "You may be going up, mate. But a lot higher than you think." -- Don Whillans, paraphased by Tom Patey %% "You may emerge from the chips now sir -- you're chance to be a hero has long since passed." -- Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart clerk, in "Krusty Gets Busted" %% "You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together--what do you get? THE SUM OF THEIR FEARS." -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% "You mean to tell me a twister's mad because I missed a picnic?!?" -- Marshall, "Tornado Days", Eerie Indiana %% "You might have hidden diplomatic talents." "God, I hope not." -- Sundra and Horatio, from NEXUS %% "You misdirected me as surely as if you had said the world is flat and north is west and two plus two is four; i.e., not utterly wrong, just wrong enough so that when I took the opposite position - the world is mountainous, north is east - I was wrong, too, and your being wrong about the world and north made me spend years trying to come up with the correct sum of two and two, other than four. YOU GAVE ME THE WRONG THINGS TO REBEL AGAINST. My little boat sailed bravely against the wind, straight into the rocks. Your mindless monogamy made me vacillate in love, your compulsive industry made me a prisoner of sloth, your tidiness made me sloppy, your materialism made me wasteful." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes." -- Maimonides %% "You must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest WIITH... A HERRING!!" %% "You must either master politics or be mastered by those that do." -- Anonymous %% "You must have an IQ of at least half a million." -- Popeye %% "You must have had visions of sugarplums dancing in your head, little pal." "Oh thank God! I thought it was a twitching, lemon-sized brain tumor." -- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police %% "You must learn to run your kayak by a sort of ju-jitsu. You must learn to tell what the river will do to you, and given those parameters see how you can live with it. You must absorb its force and convert it to your users as best you can. Even with the quickness and agility of a kayak, you are not faster than the river, nor stronger, and you can beat it only by understanding it." -- Strung, Curtis and Perry, "Whitewater" %% "You must understand that I find The Batman a very noble character" -- Frank Miller %% "You never fuck me and I always have to drive." -- "Drugstore Cowboy" %% "You never really know a man until you've divorced him." -- Zsa Zsa Gabor %% "You ought to see a psychiatrist," he reminded me. %% "You oughtn't yield to temptation." "Well, somebody must, or the thing becomes absurd!" -- Anthony Hope %% "You pathetic jugglers never lowered yourselves to developing the software. You should have paid a little more attention to R & D." -- Cyberpunk comics %% "You put a couple cockroach heads on toothpicks next to that and it'll definitely keep the bugs away." -- Karl suggests a use for a really bad photo of... Karl %% "You realize she's talking about our hamburgers here." -- Anonymous sixth grader during talk by animal right's activist; Newsweek, May 23, 1988 %% "You realize that if they catch us they will beat us, torture us, and kill us?" "So, you are suggesting we go home?" "No, this is more fun." -- The two brownies from WILLOW %% "You rope 'em, we brand 'em" -- Sunset Gang Slogan %% "You say I'm cool, I'm no fool, but then you wind up applying to grad school..." -- Matt Groening %% "You say you can't fit an enormous building inside a small room ?" "Yes." "But you've invented television, haven't you ? So by showing an enormous building on your television, you can do what seemed impossible." "Well ... " "Not quite clear is it ? I can see by your face that you're not certain - you don't understand. Ha ha. And I knew you wouldn't !" -- Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child, 1963 %% "You see it's like a portmanteau--there are two meanings packed up into one word." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "You see me now a veteran, Of a thousand psychic wars, I've been living on the edge so long, Where the winds of Limbo roar, And I'm young enough to look at, And far too old to see, All the scars are on the inside, I don't know if there's anything left of me" -- BOC %% "You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!" -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% "You see, but you do not observe." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Sherlock Holmes: Scandal in Bohemia" %% "You should always read the instructions first, Uncle Billy!" -- FLAMING CARROT offers some good advice to Uncle Billy re: his mail-order jungle bride %% "You shouldn't make my toaster angry." -- Household security explained in "Johnny Quest" %% "You show me an American who can keep his mouth shut and I'll eat him." -- Newspaperman from Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe" %% "You snake," she rattled. %% "You speak treason!" "Fluently!" -- The Doctor (and others) %% "You stay here, Audrey -- this is between me and the vegetable!" -- Seymour, from "Little Shop Of Horrors" %% "You still don't know what you're dealing with do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility [...] I admire its purity, a survivor; unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality."` - Ash, "Alien" %% "You taught me to believe in quietness as a sign of good character, that a child who sat silently with hands folded wa a child who had overcome temptation. In fact, I was only scared, but being a nice quiet boy, I was offered as an example to other children, many of whom despise me to this day. I did not have to be shushed on Sunday afternoon but went about my glum business of cutting out pictures from the rotogravure and pasting them into a scrapbook, being careful not to snip too loud. I learned that quietness could be used to personify not only goodness, but also intelligence and sensivity, and so I silently earned a small reputation as a boy of superior intellect, a little scholar, a little sunbeam in this dark world, while in fact I was smug and lethargic and dull as a mud turtle." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "You think *you* got guts. Try raising my kids." -- The Simpsons %% "You think they spotted us?" "Gimme a donut." -- Twin Peaks %% "You think this hat is stupid?" -- Another stylistic MERC... %% "You think this job is easy? Not only do I have to wade through politics, life and popular culture, I have to have an opinion. You can go to the movies and fall asleep -- not this consumer!" -- Ian Shoales %% "You think you're God!" "Well, I gotta model myself after somebody!" -- Woody Allen, "Manhattan" %% "You think you've got problems," said Marvin, the paranoid human-hating robot, as if he was addressing a newly occupied coffin, "what are you supposed to do if you ARE a manically depressed robot? No, don't bother to answer that, I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "You told me when something is bothering you and you're too damn stupid to know what to do, just keep your mouth shut. At least that way you won't make things worse!" -- Bart to Homer in "Jacques to be Wild", from The Simpsons %% "You took on the immortal DR. FOOM with a MEATBALL!" -- A fine-lookin' babe expresses amazement at one of FLAMING CARROT's stories %% "You tried it just for once, found it alright for kicks, but now you find out you have a habit that sticks, you're an orgasm addict, you're always at it, and you're an orgasm addict." -- The Buzzcocks %% "You try any preversions in there, and I'll blow your head off." -- Dr. Strangelove %% "You tweachewous miscweant!" -- Elmer Fudd %% "You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong." -- John von Neumann, on being phoned at 10 a.m. %% "You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training." -- Response to Arthur Jones, wo solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus. %% "You warm-bloods are all such great believers. But there's no greater pragmatist than a shark." -- Damn straight. From DEEP WIZARDRY. %% "You watch a talk show recently? They're doing one next month on a normal, happy heterosexual couple, assuming they can find one." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% "You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?" -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), addressing anti-semitic Christians %% "You will curse the day you did not do All that the Phantom asked of you!" -- I think -- I think -- this is from THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (the musical) %% "You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood." -- Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray %% "You'd better ask yourself `Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?" -- Dirty Harry %% "You'd better wake up and smell the goats or it's burlap soup for all of us!" "Burlap soup?" "No thanks, I had lunch on the way over." %% "You'd do it for Randolph Scott." "*gasp* RANDOLPH SCOTT!" -- Blazing Saddles %% "You'd think IBOB would forgive and forget the seventeen guys I chopped up in Nepal. But NOOOOOOOO..." -- The BADGER %% "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss $3 goodbye!" -- Hardware Wars %% "You'll pay to know what you really think." -- J. R. "Bob" Dobbs %% "You're a closed circuit, baby. You've got the answers In the palms Of your hands." -- Laurie Anderson %% "You're a creature of the night, Michael. Wait'll Mom hears about this." -- from the movie "The Lost Boys" %% "You're a lot of GRIEF, Badge. I'm going to write you with tight underwear, or something." -- Creator Mike Baron harangues the Badger... %% "You're all MISTAKEN! I got 65 girlfriends -- and a LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP in the NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION!" -- Megaton Man %% "You're all a bunch of pod people!" -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% "You're going to burn in Hell for this." "I don't believe in Hell. I believe in unemployment." -- TOOTSIE %% "You're just the sort of person I imagined marrying, when I was little... ..except, y'know, not green... ...and without all the patches of fungus." -- Swamp Thing %% "You're only as old as your comic collection." -- Dan Thorsland %% "You're smarter than you look, or sound, or our best testing indicates." -- Mr. Burns (Homer's boss) in "Homer's Odyssey", from The Simpsons %% "You're zooming up like a comet, Your ears are starting to ring; Your neighbor's starting to vomit, There's ice along the wing. As you wait for your palms to dry, You see your whole life flash by, And they tell you it's fun to fly! Your chance to survive is so remote You're far better off to cut your throat, But who has the time to take the boat? What do we do? We fly! -- Stephen Sondheim, DO I HEAR A WALTZ? %% "You've got a face that keeps Coffee awake at Night" %% "You've got to go as fast as you possibly can just to stay in one place; to get anywhere, you've got to go faster than that." -- The White Queen to Alice %% "You've got to learn more about Motown, Miles. Those raisins didn't invent that song, you know." -- From the TV series MURPHY BROWN %% "You've got to think about tomorrow!" "TOMORROW! I haven't even prepared for *yesterday* yet!" %% "You've just killed a small animal. It's time for a light beer." -- Robin Williams %% "You've no idea of what a poor opinion I have of myself, and how little I deserve it." -- William S. Gilbert (1836-1911) %% "You've reached the Lunatic Laboratories Unlimited Food and Drug Testing Division. We've eaten all the food, and now we're taking the drugs. If you'll leave a message on this machine, I'm sure we can get back to you as soon as we can tell which end of the phone to talk into. Thank you." %% "You... VILLAIN, you." -- Zot %% "Young conservatives must feel the withdrawal symptoms most. It's not just the loss of a father figure, either. It's the utter banality of what is to come. After eight years of revolutionary activity, schmoozing with George Bush is going to be difficult. Trained to kill, they're suddenly having to take crash courses in outreach. You can see them wandering aimlessly around Washington these days, pained, simpering grins on their faces, engaging in mild post-Reagan banter. `How're you doing today, Clinton?' `Oh, kinder and gentler, Dean, thank you.'" -- Andrew Sullivan %% "Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control people's lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried it and failed. Nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that, too, and it failed." -- Herman Goering, Nazi minister, 1946 "Healing Our World", Dr. Mary Ruwart, 1992 %% "Your attitude determines your attitude." -- Zig Ziglar, self-improvement doofus %% "Your butt is mine." -- Michael Jackson, Bad %% "Your cat needs to be confused. However, I'm not qualified ..." -- Cleese, et. all %% "Your development gets rotten if you take too long to market it." -- Hitoshi Aoike, JVC Ltd., Tokyo %% "Your disability is your opportunity" -- Kurt Hahn, Founder of Outward Bound %% "Your embroidery is sloppy," she needled cruelly. %% "Your illnesses were the result of exhaustion by good works, mine the result of having disobeyed you and not worn a scarf, not taking vitamins. I crawl into bed like a dog and feel not only unwell but unworthy. If someone came in to shoot me, I'd turn on the light so he could take better aim." -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% "Your logic was impeccable, Captain. We are in grave danger." -- Star Trek %% "Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the greatest source of signoff lines known to man... %% "Your opal may cure my brother of some demon-taint, but *my* bad attitude is no sickness! It's one-hundred percent all natural!" -- Ron Post %% "Your posting is just the kind of BS that leads me to believe that moderation is necessary. As it happens, you are simply wrong. On all counts." -- Bill Wells, bill@twwells.com "Funny, this is just the kind of quasi-religious didacticism that leads me to believe that objectivism is not philosophy and that it's basically a Rand fan club." -- Tim Maroney, tim@hoptoad.UUCP "I've added to my understanding that you refer to calling a bullshitter a bullshitter as ``quasi-religious didacticism''." -- Bill Wells (bill@twwells.com) %% "Your reality is lies and balderdash, and I'm glad to say that I have no grasp of it." -- Baron Munchausen %% "Your red scarf matches your eyes." %% "Your son at five is your master, at ten your slave, at fifteen your double, and after that, your friend or your foe, depending on his bringing up." -- Hasdai Ibn Shaprut %% "Your stupidity, Allen, is simply not up to par." -- Dave Mack, mack@inco.UUCP "Yours is." -- Allen Gwinn allen@sulaco.sigma.com, in alt.flame %% "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) to a young physicist %% "Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret." -- Benjamin Disraeli, "Coningsby" 1844 %% "Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself anything, is forgiven nothing." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Stray Sayings" %% "Yow! A genuine MARK OF THE DEVIL vomit bag! I can't throw up into this! *GLUG*" "My hat!" -- The Badger samples Aussie hospitality %% "Yow! That Sklar guy leaves a road behind him!" "Good! Look for a McDonald's!" -- The Badger makes another cognizant observation, in "Nexus" %% "Zere were zwei peanuts walking down ze strasse. And one was assaulted.. peanut. Ha ha ha.." -- Monty Python %% "Zero," said Tom naughtily. %% "[He's] dead. Murdered! And someone's responsible!" -- PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE %% "[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 %% "[Leslie Stahl was] a pussy compared to Rather." -- George Bush %% "[Michael Dukakis is] a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U., a group [which is] pretty far out in left field [and does not reflect] Texas values." -- George Bush %% "[New York] is the place where if you have talent, and you believe in yourself, and you show people what you can do, then some day, maybe -- just maybe -- you could get shoved in front of a moving subway train." -- Dave Barry %% "[T]he notion that fraternities are simply neutral gathering places for would-be rapists is hardly a reasonable defense for their existence." -- Steve Hendricks, in talk.rape %% "[The Republicans'] platform was 30,000 words long, 3,000 of which was the word 'God'." -- Mark Russell %% "[The United States] can't be so fixed on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." -- President Bill Clinton, 3/2/93 during a press conference in Piscataway, NJ %% "[The vector] has never been of the slightest use to any creature." -- Lord Kelvin "Vector Calculus by Marsden and Tromba" %% "[There is] a duty in refusing to cooperate in any undertaking that violates the Constitutional rights of the individual. This holds in particular for all inquisitions that are concerned with the private life and the political affiliations of the citizens..." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% "[Yasser Arafat] might say 'this', and then come back later and say 'this', and the new 'this' could cancel out the old 'this'." -- Ronald W. Reagan %% "[advise] the ruler to govern the state as one cooks a small fish -- that is, don't turn it so often in the pan that it disintegrates." -- Lao-tzu %% "_My_ side of the woods abounds in natural scenic splendor. _Your_ side wallows in decay and filth. My territory is infinitely superior to yours." -- Calvin & Hobbes %% "`BILLSBY SLASHES FOUR, DIES IN COCAINE BRAWL'" "That's the front page, Mrs. Billsby." -- "Bloom County" %% "`If you want to touch something *basic* in your audience,' says the full-page ad in the 1988 edition of the DIRECTORY OF EXPERTS, AUTHORITIES AND SPOKESPERSONS (also known as the `Talk Show Guest Directory'), `...move them to *action*: phone, write, praise, damn, cheer, etc..... Then you need to present -- REAL LIVE COMMUNISTS ON YOUR SHOW!'" -- TRB in THE NEW REPUBLIC %% "`JUST A ROBOT?!' How would you like it if I called you `Just a Jew?'" -- Luthor the robot loses his temper in AMERICAN FLAGG! %% "`Lousy stinking radicals,' he opines, `figure the law is there for you to hide behind... Well, the law _isn't_ there for you to hide behind, it's there for _us_ to hide behind... the good and law-abiding people of this great city-state.' His fists are like twin sledgehammers dealing out pure and righteous justice... `You're either with us or against us, vermin... That's what freedom's all about.' His roach-sense floods the room... ping! ping! ping! And detects the presence of a heavily unarmed malcontent...`Taste boot, scum...'" -- Cerebus %% "`Never turn down a chance to have sex or go on television,' Gore Vidal is supposed to have said. At the rate things are going, people will soon be advertising to do both at the same time." -- TRB in THE NEW REPUBLIC %% "`Open systems' is a command, like `open sesame' -- it means they want your wallet to open." -- Geoff Collyer %% "`Self-esteem' [has been] promoted over and over again as the new panacea, along with teaching `responsibility.' However, parents must remember that `self-esteem' is a double-edged sword. While it may be true that a child needs a great deal of self-confidence to reject undesirable peer influence, it will, at the same time, require a defiantly self-confident child to have the courage to violate his or her family values and/or Judeo-Christian heritage, and engage in the `responsible' promiscuity being promoted by the liberal sex educators." -- Margo Szews, Anti-Choice Educator, A.L.L. About Issues, June - July '89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "`The Guide says there is an art to flying,' said Ford,`or at least a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.' He smiled weakly." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "`This Snow Crash thing -- is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?' Juanita shrugs. `What's the difference?'" -- Neal Stephenson "Snow Crash" %% "`Where the hell's my cookie?!' WHAM!" -- Clonezone the Hilariator's punchline for The Killing Joke %% "a slow comfortable screw against the wall" - made of sloe gin, southern comfort, screwdriver, and wallbanger. %% "a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke" %% "by appointment only." "please no TALKing" "mail preferred" "30 day money back guarantee" "COD or VISA" -- "Microsoft: Making It All Make Sense" %% "can't go mucking with a 'void *'" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large..." -- H. P. Lovecraft %% "jackpot: you may have an unnecessary change record" -- message from "diff" %% "my terminal is a lethal teaspoon." -- Patricia O Tuama, rissa@killer.DALLAS.TX.US %% "some people get pissed when you play with your mind in a different way than they play with theirs these people are called ASSHOLES" -- the jambi's %% "the motive power -- is supplied by the brain of the user". Clearly, the inventors have not examined recent trends. No serious person would suggest even expecting a "user" to have a brain present, much less to use it so continuously. I'd suggest the inventors return to their consoles and do a thorough associative search of various data banks, like the rest of us, and forget this nonsense. %% "tout cela m'est egal" -- meursault "it's all the same to me" -- eeyore %% "type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "we already did this function" -- Apple's MPW C compiler %% "you probably like to do everything the hard way... like making love while standing up in a hammock" -- J. T. Delaney, USN RET %% # cd /; rm -rf * .* & %% #define BITCOUNT(x) (((BX_(x)+(BX_(x)>>4)) & 0x0F0F0F0F) % 255) #define BX_(x) ((x) - (((x)>>1)&0x77777777) \ - (((x)>>2)&0x33333333) \ - (((x)>>3)&0x11111111)) -- really weird C code to count the number of bits in a word %% #include SWEEPING_GENERALITY.h %% $$$ not found -- (A)bort (R)efinance (B)ankrupt %% $100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000--by which time it will be worth nothing. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% $3,000,000. %% $3,000,000 (now that's a fortune!) %% %COB-I-COMEFROM, all go to's changed to come froms's %% %COOKIE-E-BADBOY, insufficient privilege for attempted cookie. %% %COOKIE-F-NOSAYING, You lose. %% %CUNIXC FALL DOWN, GO BOOM %% %CUNIXC MAKE A BOO-BOO %% %CUNIXC NOT RUNNING %% %DBM-F-DBNFG, database access impaired by reverse disk spin %% %DBM-F-DELDBBCK, database deleted during abnormal termination of backup %% %DBMS-E-SCHEMABCKWD, database schema reads backwards %% %DCL-MEM-BAD, bad memory VMS-F-PDGERS, pudding between the ears %% %DECSPELL-F-WRDNOTINV, that word not yet invented %% %DECSYSTEM-20 FALL DOWN, GO BOOM %% %DECSYSTEM-20 MAKE A BOO-BOO %% %DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING %% %DIRECT-W-NOFILES, no files found %% %FMS-F-SALBLKSCR, blank screen will be replaced by a salamander in heat %% %FMS-F-SCRNCLOUDY, no work done on partly sunny days %% %LINK-I-OBJTRASH, object code has been trashed, processor has a bellyache %% %SCHEDP: Overloaded. Please throw yourself on your sword. %% %SYSTEM-F-PROBRNFRIED, processor brain fried (extra crispy) %% %SYSTEM-W-IMCOMPUSR, incompetent user logged in %% %VMS-F-BURP, database regurgitated %% %VMS-F-SYSTIMDAYLATE, system time is one day late %% %VMS-F-VAXHOT, rising temperature is melting chips %% '2B or not 2B that is FF.' -- Tom Clancy %% '71 580cid twin turbo Corvette Stingray -unless you're driving a pro-stocker, U LOSE. -- Henri Helanto, hhelanto@vipunen.hut.fi %% 'A good algorithm should be very poetic.' %% 'A person cannot be programmed for constant stupidity. They're RANDOM.' %% 'All bits are created equal.' %% 'And if you've just tuned in, we're talking about the red-hot, tight-buttocked, hairy host of Hell.' -- The Church Lady %% 'Any system supplied by three or more vendors will not work.' %% 'Bear Hunter': Shot of Tequila chased with a Lime Gummi Bear (The green ones) %% 'Birds smell bad and people who count birds smell even worse!' %% 'Boy George Is Really My Father,' Admits Elizabeth Taylor. %% 'Burned out,' he lives in fear, and he wonders %% 'Captain, do ships sink very often?' 'No, just once' %% 'Change' is scientific, 'progress' is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% 'Deferring: solving a problem by ignoring it.' %% 'Definition for waste - a Greyhound bus load of lawyers going over a cliff, with three empty seats.' %% 'Dental offices run on Tandy.' %% 'Doctor I can't sleep' 'Why not?' 'MY wife thinks she's a refrigerator.' 'But why would that keep you from sleeping?' 'She sleeps with her mouth open, and that little light keeps me awake all night.' %% 'Doctor, doctor, I dreamt last night that I was a deck of cards.' 'Sit down there, I'll deal with you soon' %% 'Doctor, doctor, I've just swallowed a sheep' 'How do you feel?' 'Very Ba-a-a-a-d.' %% 'Don't you know what good, clean fun is?' 'No, what good is it?' -- Benny Hill %% 'Dr. Pepper': Amaretto & Coke %% 'Extra-Terrestrials From Mercury Landed In My Garden And Ate Seven Tangerines' Claims Jane Fonda. %% 'Extra-Terrestrials From Venus Landed In My Garden And Ate Fifteen Mangos' Says Chevy Chase. ...Exclusive Pictures Inside. %% 'First rule of consulting. Never give away anything not asked for. General Dynamics to Navy- "You didn't ask for an engine. That's extra!"' %% 'Giant salmon gulps down 12 swimmers' %% 'God Devoured My Newborn', Admits Physician. ...French Chemists Offer Undeniable Proof. %% 'Good idea?' Of COURSE it's a good idea! %% 'HOOKER GIVES BIRTH TO TRIPLETS, 1 WHITE, 1 BLACK, 1 CHINESE' %% 'Hello. Peter and Ester can't come to the phone right now because we are busy having hot, passionate, sex. If you leave your name and number at the tone, we'll be sure to get back to you after we are done ... if we have the energy. Thank you... ' %% 'Henry Kissinger Is Really My Father,' Admits Clint Eastwood. %% 'I Chopped My Father To Death With Grenade,' Claims TV Personality. %% 'I Chopped My Father To Death With Swiss Army Knife,' Admits Iranian Chemist. %% 'I Chopped My Manicurist To Death With Carving Knife,' Says Baseball Player. %% 'I Chopped My Niece To Death With Hack Saw,' Says Football Player. %% 'I should have never let them put whipped cream on my Jello.' %% 'I tawt I taw a tutty tat' %% 'I think like a flowchart.' %% 'I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out.' -- Judge Harry Stone %% 'I'm Pregnant With Michael Jackson's Child,' Admits Elizabeth Taylor. %% 'I'm Pregnant With Mike Wallace's Child,' Admits Nancy Reagan. %% 'If every copy is an original and every original is a copy then what is real?' %% 'If you could take all the laughter this man has given us, it would reach to the universe and fill up the black hole in space.' -- Tony Orlando on Bob Hope %% 'If you're gonna shoot, shoot. Don't talk.' -- Il Brutto %% 'Jumper cables': Rum and Jolt Cola. %% 'Just as happy as a clam at high tide.' %% 'Kermit the frog Is For Real'. Physicists Come Up With Undeniable Proof. %% 'Killer Ewoks From Mars Devoured My Infant' Admits Madonna. %% 'Love really is a many-splendored thing,' Mamba thought to herself as Thad shoved another handful of peanuts up her trunk... %% 'MAN WITH WOODEN LEG EATEN ALIVE BY TERMITES' %% 'Matter of internal security', the age old cry of the oppressor. -- Picard, "The Hunted", stardate 43489.2 %% 'Mike Wallace Is Really My Father,' Admits Madonna. %% 'Non-conformists conform to non-conformity' -- Tom Clancy %% 'O' is a big fish in Hawaii. 'Homomonukunukuaguk' is a little one. 'Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug' is a like in Massachusetts. %% 'Office suppliers sell guilt!!' %% 'Okay, who stuck the M&Ms in the atom smasher?' -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% 'On this point we want to be perfectly clear: socialism has nothing to do with equalizing. Socialism cannot ensure conditions of life and consumption in accordance with the principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This will be under communism. Socialism has a different criterion for distributing social benefits: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."' -- Mikhail Gorbachev, "Perestroika" %% 'Scotty' Bowman of the old St. Louis Eagles was the first NHL'er to attempt a penalty shot in 1934. He scored. %% 'Second-hands, as minds are slowed, are moving even faster Toward bringing down someone who's found questions, but no answers.' -- 'Daily Nightly', The Monkees %% 'Snooze: /snooz/ [FidoNet] n. Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in turn tend to elicit {flamage} in subsequent issues. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% 'Snow White Is For Real'. Professors Come Up With Undeniable Proof. %% 'Space: The Final Front' -- Ronald W. Reagan (well, he COULD have said it. . . .) %% 'Standards are usually developed by 300 pound gorillas.' %% 'Suddenly he would brandish a paperweight and shout `Foo, you rat! I'll put nine grams of lead in your skull!'' -- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, 'The Gulag Archipelago' %% 'Talking about music is like dancing about architecture' -- Laurie Anderson, 'Home of the Brave' %% 'The reliance on vendors is a good thing.' %% 'There are two things that a grown man should never see; sausage being made, and legislation being passed' -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% 'This is no social crisis...just another tricky day for you.' %% 'This machine is REAL stupid. Just like a campus cop.' %% 'Tis a common proof, that lowliness is Edward Young ambition's ladder, whereto the climber upwards turns his face; but when he once attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks into the clouds scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. -- William Shakespeare %% 'Tis a custom in Castellamare To fuck in the back of a lorry. The chassis and springs Are like woodwinds and strings In the midst of a musical soiree. %% 'Tis better that a man's own works, than that another man's words should praise him. -- L'Estrange %% 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue. -- Campbell %% 'Tis easier for the generous to forgive, Than for offense to ask it. -- Thomson %% 'Tis education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclin'd -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% 'Tis home felt pleasure prompts the patriot's sigh; This makes him wish to live and dare to die. -- Campbell %% 'Tis in my memory lock'd, And you yourself shall keep the key of it. -- William Shakespeare %% 'Tis late before The brave despair. -- Thomson %% 'Tis not in mortals to command success; But we'll do more, Sempronius -- we'll deserve it. -- Addison %% 'Tis not the fairest form that holds The mildest, purest soul within; 'Tis not the richest plant that holds The sweetest fragrance in. -- Dawes %% 'Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall. -- William Shakespeare %% 'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in't. -- Lord Byron %% 'Tis strange the miser should his cares employ To gain the riches he can ne'er enjoy. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. -- Thomas Paine %% 'Tis the dream of each programmer, Before his life is done, To write three lines of APL, And make the damn things run. %% 'Tis the mind that makes the body rich. -- William Shakespeare %% 'Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare "You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair." As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes. When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark: But, when the tide rises and sharks are around, His voice has a timid and tremulous sound. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% 'To the Workers of the world, I am sorry.' -- Karl Marx (1818-1883), Seen on the side of an East German factory %% 'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never even had the decency to thank her. -- R. B. Gossling %% 'Twas bergen and the/eirie road Did mahwah into patterson: All jersey were the ocean groves, And the red bank bayonne. ``Beware the Hopatcong, my son! The teeth that bite, the nails that claw! Beware the bound brook bird, and shun The kearney communipaw.'' He took his belmar blade in hand: Long time the folsom foe he sought Till rested he by a bayway tree And stood a while in thought. And, as in nutley thought he stood, The Hopatcong with eyes of flame, Came whippany through the englewood, And garfield as it came. One, two, one, two, and through and through The belmar blade went hackensack! He left it dead and with it's head He went weehawken back. ``And hast thou slain the Hopatcong? Come to my arms, my perth amboy! Hohokus day! Soho! Rahway!'' He caldwell in his joy. Did mahwah into patterson: All jersey were the ocean groves, And the red bank bayonne. %% 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves as in uffish thought he stood Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. The Jabberwock, with eyes aflame All mimsy were the borogroves Came whuffling through the tulgey wood And the mome raths outgrabe. And burbled as it came! "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! One! Two! One! Two! The jaws that bite, and through and through the claws that catch! The vorpal blade went snicker-snack. Beware the Jubjub bird, He left it dead, and took its head, And shun the frumious Bandersnatch!" And went galumphing back. He took his vorpal sword in hand "Hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Long time the manxome foe he sought. Come to my arms, my beamish boy! So rested he by the tumtum tree Oh frabjous day! Calooh! Callay!" And stood awhile in thought. He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves -- Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky" %% 'Twas midnight, and the UNIX hacks Did gyre and gimble in their cave All mimsy was the CS-VAX And Cory raths outgrabe. "Beware the software rot, my son! The faults that bite, the jobs that thrash! Beware the broken pipe, and shun The frumious system crash!" %% 'Twas orgy, and the hip and mod And as in raffish thought he sprawled, Did groove and trip out at the pad: The Radcliffe girl, no idle flirt, All whimsy were the slamming chicks, Crept past the hippies getting balled And the Radcliffe undergrad. And doffed her miniskirt. "Beware the Radcliff girl, my son! One, two! One, two! And through The looks that melt, the claws that and through catch! The venerable staff went snicker-snack! Beware the Byrn Mawr deb, and shun He left her bred, sans maidenhead, The uppity Wellesleysnatch!" And went galumphing back. He took his venerable staff in hand: "And hast thou laid the Radcliffe girl? Long time the cool young stuff he Come to my arms, my horny boy! sought -- O spaced-out day! Calooh! Callay!" So rested he among the spree He cackled in his joy. And paused to smoke some pot. 'Twas orgy, and the hip and mod Did groove and trip out at the pad: All whimsy were the slamming chicks, And the Radcliffe undergrad. %% '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 appelations is the honorific title of St. Nicklaus ... %% 'Two drunken souls trying to save each other, but they can't save themselves.' -- Tom Clancy %% 'Understand the procedure, now? Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawnmowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours, and then, sit back and watch the pattern.' "And this pattern is always the same?" 'With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves. All we need do is sit back and watch.' "And I take it this place, Maple Street, is not unique." 'By no means, their world is full of Maple streets. And we will go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other. One to the other. One to the other.' Serling: The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices -- to be found in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone. %% 'Waiter the lobster I got only has one claw.' 'It must have lost it in a fight, sir.' 'Well could you bring me the winner then?' %% 'Waiter, there's a twig in my soup.' 'Hold on sir, I'll call the branch manager.' %% 'Waiter, this food isn't fit for a pig.' 'Just a moment, I'll get some that is.' %% 'Weird' is a relative, not an absolute term. -- Baron Frank N. Furter %% 'Weirdness is in the bellybutton of the beholder'. %% 'What's on T.V tonight son?' 'Same as usual, dad, the statue and the lamp.' %% 'Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.' -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% 'You can't flame me; I own a waterbed!' %% 'You know it improves your credit rating to have a telex machine.' %% ("You say you've never made a picture before?") Yes, but that's our strongest weak point. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% ((LAMBDA ((X) (X X))) (LAMBDA ((X) (X X)))) %% ((lambda (foo) (bar foo)) (baz)) %% (1) Alexander the Great was a great general. (2) Great generals are forewarned. (3) Forewarned is forearmed. (4) Four is an even number. (5) Four is certainly an odd number of arms for a man to have. (6) The only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms. %% (1) I'm just not an emotional kind of guy. (2) If I show some emotion, that's just the way I am. (3) I'm not too good at the emotional side. (4) We Bushes cry easily. (5) If occasionally I do go up in smoke, it doesn't relate to this line of work. -- President George Bush on five separate occasions %% (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)*ckup completely? %% (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nfluence with large hammer %% (A)bort, (R)etry, (P)retend this never happened... %% (Best told with an Irish Brogue) There were two leprechauns, an older one and a younger one. The two of them walked up to the convent door and the older one knocked. The door was answered by the Mother Superior. "Not to be botherin' ye mum, but I needs be askin' ye a question," says the older one. "Would ye be havin' any midget nuns in there?" "No," said the Mother Superior. "We have no midget nuns here." "Well," the older one says, "I'm not meanin' to be a bother to ye, but you wouldn't be havin' any dwarf nuns, now, would ye?" "No," responds the Mother Superior again, "we have no dwarf nuns here." "O, well, one more question and then we'll be off. Are ye sure you have no wee little nuns in there?" asks the older leprechaun for the third time. "I've told you before, all our nuns are regular, adult ladies." As the two leprechauns are walking off, the older one turns to the younger one and says, "See, I told you you f*cked a penguin!" %% (C)1992 Wild Bill's Machine Gun Shop and House of Wax. %% (D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza %% (In a heavy texas accent) She's been beat severely by the ugly stick. %% (Mark Robert Thorson) writes: >from permanent brain damage, including seizures and death. The problem occurs >because after a certain amount of oxygen depravity the body tissues >(such as mussels) become depraved themselves. When breathing resumes This was demonstrated last year in the Chesapeake Bay when hundreds of oysters were wantonly raped by hordes of depraved mussels. -- Gordon Banks N3JXP, geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu %% (Overheard between a UNIX(R) system novice and guru:) "What causes a bus error?" "Well, it can happen when the driver has a heart attack." %% (Picture of Einstein in a police uniform with caption): 186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. %% (Referring to a glass of water:) I mixed this myself. Two parts H, one part O. I don't trust anybody! -- Steve Wright %% (Sung to the tune of "It came upon a midnight clear") It hangs down from the chandelier Nobody knows quite what it does Its color is odd and its shape is weird It emits a high-sounding buzz It grows a couple of feet each day and wriggles with sort of a twitch Nobody bugs it 'cause it comes from a visiting uncle who's rich! %% (Sung to the tune of "The Impossible Dream" from MAN OF LA MANCHA) To code the impossible code, To bring up a virgin machine, To pop out of endless recursion, To grok what appears on the screen, To right the unrightable bug, To endlessly twiddle and thrash, To mount the unmountable magtape, To stop the unstoppable crash! %% (TM): // [USENET] ASCII rendition of the trademark-superscript symbol appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in future editions of this lexicon. Sometimes used ironically as a form of protest against the recent spate of software and algorithm patents and `look and feel' lawsuits. See also {UN*X}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% (Testimony of a child in court) Q. And lastly, Gary, all your responses must be oral. O.K.? What school do you go to? A. Oral. Q. How old are you? A. Oral. %% (The following is the large-type attention-getting part of a flyer advertising Princeton University's amateur mime group. Reprinted without permission, though I doubt they'd mind the extra circulation.) CALL 900-HOT-MIME for SILENT FANTASIES "Our mime is in the gutter." %% (This page intentionally left blank.) %% (To Walter Cronkite): "Well Walter, I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street" -- Neil Armstrong %% (When told his son was getting married) Thank heaven. A bachelor's life is no life for a single man. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% (While you and i have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with? -- e. e. cummings (1894-1963) %% (You can have your cake) XOR (You can eat your cake) %% (a) Completion of any task within the allocated time and budget does not bring credit upon the performing personnel--it merely proves the task was easier than expected; (b) failure to complete any task within the allocated time and budget proves the task was more difficult than expected and requires promotion for those in charge. %% (c) Copywight 1992 Elmer Fudd. All wights wesewved. %% (defun NF (a c) (cond ((null c) () ) ((atom (car c)) (append (list (eval (list 'getchar (list (car c) 'a) (cadr c)))) (nf a (cddr c)))) (t (append (list (implode (nf a (car c)))) (nf a (cdr c)))))) (defun AD (want-job challenging boston-area) (cond ((or (not (equal want-job 'yes)) (not (equal boston-area 'yes)) (lessp challenging 7)) () ) (t (append (nf (get 'ad 'expr) '((caaddr 1 caadr 2 car 1 car 1) (car 5 cadadr 9 cadadr 8 cadadr 9 caadr 4 car 2 car 1) (car 2 caadr 4))) (list '851-5071x2661))))) ;;; We are an affirmative action employer. %% (defun twiddle-thumbs (thumb1 thumb2) (twiddle-thumbs thumb2 thumb1)) %% (from above), so it's true for n+1 because it's just about n. QED. (QED translates from the Latin as "So what?") %% (i want my i want my i want my X-MP!) Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it You run the fortran on the X-MP That ain't hackin' that's the way you do it Cycles for nothin', gigabits for free Now that ain't hackin' that's the way you do it Lemme tell ya them guys ain't dumb Maybe Monte Carlo on a three-quark system Maybe design a little neutron bomb We gotta install microwave uplinks Custom fuzzballs for everyone We gotta link up DDS circuits BERT and loopback tests to run See the kid professor with the blue jeans and the necktie Yeah buddy that's his own hair That kid professor got his Nobel prize now That kid professor he's a millionaire We gotta install microwave uplinks Custom fuzzballs for everyone We gotta link up DDS circuits BERT and loopback tests to run I shoulda stuck to writing in fortran I shoulda kept that old 029 Look at that output, he got it stacked up to the ceilin' I bet he ain't read one line And in there, what's that? A hundred postdocs? Bangin' on the keyboards like some chimpanzees That ain't hackin' that's the way you do it Cycles for nothin', gigabits for free We gotta install microwave uplinks Custom fuzzballs for everyone We gotta link up DDS circuits BERT and loopback tests to run -- Matt Crawford %% (in Robotman's spaceship) Robotman: Wait 'til I get this baby cruisin'...We'll be movin' faster than light! Oscar Milde: But Einstein said nothing can go faster than light! Robotman: Normally, that's true. But you can go faster than light when you go downhill... Oscar: Wow...Einstein made a mistake! Robotman: Be easy on him. Even geniuses have bad days... %% (in discussing Lillian Helman's play, "The Children's Hour") Goldwyn : Maybe we ought to buy it? Associate : Forget it, Mr. Goldwyn, its about Lesbians. Goldwyn : That's okay, we'll make them Americans. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% (null cookie; hope that's ok) %% (on a film set of a tenement) Goldwyn : Why is everything so dirty here? Director : Because it's supposed to be a slum area. Goldwyn : Well, this slum cost a lot of money. It should look better than an ordinary slum. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% (on a pregnant woman): Baby on Board %% (on being told that a friend had named his son Sam, after him) Why did you do that ? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Sam! -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% (rubs hands, inhales appreciatively) "Ah -- a meal fit for a king!" (looks around, whistles) "Here, King!" %% (seen on a woman between the mountains and the valley): If you're looking at this you're crazy! %% (see {code grinder}). 4. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the Real World." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the Real World is not unlike speaking of a deceased person. See also {fear and loathing}, {mundane}, and {uninteresting}. %% (shot of subway train. Man in his 30's in center of frame, black youth off to side. Closeup on MAN) Man: Hi. Do you know me? I'm Bernhard Goetz. People don't always recognize me when I travel, so I carry this ... (pulls gun from shoulder holster) The Smith & Wesson .38. It gets me noticed wherever I go, and helps out with those little financial emergencies. (Black youth walks up to MAN) Youth: Hey mister, give me five bucks (BANG BANG BANG) (MAN blows across barrel, stares straight into camera) Man: The Smith & Wesson .38. *Don't* leave home without it. %% (sung to the tune of Three Blind Mice) Three rodents with defective visual perception, three rodents with defective visual perception. Visualize how they perambulate, Visualize how they perambulate. They all perambulated after the agriculturalist's spouse, she severed their spinal columns with a kitchen utensil. Have you ever seen such a spectacle in your existence, as three rodents with defective visual perception? %% (when told a script was full of old cliches) Let's have some new cliches. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% * * . . .* . .. ..*...**. * ... (cookie crumbs) %% * * * * * * * * * * * * ******/~---~\****** (O O) | | (o-o) \=/ %% ** MAXIMUM TERMINALS ACTIVE. TRY AGAIN LATER ** %% *** syntax error *** error occurs somewhere in : %% **** CONVENTION REMINDER No experiment was approved for the convention by the Human Subjects Committee of the Psychiatric Convention Planning Team. If you notice smoke coming from under a closed door, if you find a body on the hotel carpet, or if you just meet someone who orders you to press a button marked "450 volts", react as you would normally. %% **** GROWTH CENTER REPAIR SERVICE For those who have had too much of Esalen, Topanga, and Kairos. Tired of being genuine all the time? Would you like to learn how to be a little phony again? Have you disclosed so much that you're beginning to avoid people? Have you touched so many people that they're all beginning to feel the same? Like to be a little dependent? Are perfect orgasms beginning to bore you? Would you like, for once, not to express a feeling? Or better yet, not be in touch with it at all? Come to us. We promise to relieve you of the burden of your great potential. %% **** IMPORTANT **** ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE **** Due to a recent systems overload error your recent disk files have been erased. Therefore, in accordance with the UNIX Basic Manual, University of Washington Geophysics Manual, and Bylaw 9(c), Section XII of the Revised Federal Communications Act, you are being granted Temporary Disk Space, valid for three months from this date, subject to the restrictions set forth in Appendix II of the Federal Communications Handbook (18th edition) as well as the references mentioned herein. You may apply for more disk space at any time. Disk usage in or above the eighth percentile will secure the removal of all restrictions and you will immediately receive your permanent disk space. Disk usage in the sixth or seventh percentile will not effect the validity of your temporary disk space, though its expiration date may be extended for a period of up to three months. A score in the fifth percentile or below will result in the withdrawal of your Temporary Disk space. %% ***** Special AI Seminar (abstract) It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge in order to perform well in complex domains. But knowledge alone is not sufficient for some applications; wisdom is needed as well. Accordingly, we have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence which we call "wisdom engineering". As a test of our ideas, we have written IMMANUEL, a wisdom based system for the task domain of western philosophical thought. IMMANUEL was supplied initially with 200 wisdom units which contained wisdom about such elementary concepts as mind, matter, being, nothingness, and so forth. IMMANUEL was then allowed to run freely, guided by the heuristic rules contained in its heterarchically organized meta wisdom base. IMMANUEL succeeded in rediscovering most of the important philosophical ideas developed in western culture over the course of the last 25 centuries, including those underlying Plato's theory of government, Kant's metaphysics, Nietzsche's theory of value, and Husserl's phenomenology. In this seminar, we will describe IMMANUEL's achievements and internal architecture. We will also briefly discuss our recent efforts to apply wisdom engineering to oil exploration. %% ********************************** * The boss is like a diaper, * * always on your ass, * * and mostly full * * of ____. * ********************************** %% **ROG** writes > ...who have no clue about reality. Nothing could compare with > the beauty of the real world around us and you should work as hard > at preserving the environment and making the world safe for our progeny as > you do at hiding in your computer screens. I bet you couldn't > read a story from alt.sex.bondage without getting an erection. Could someone please tell me how to access the "alt.sex.bondage" newsgroup? -- Robert Ward (rw23+@andrew.cmu.edu) %% *END %% *END We're sorry, the cookie you have reached is not in service, please check the cookie and dial again, or ask the operator for assistance. In case you really WERE looking for the index, here it is: *END COOHAK.SRC Hacker's Dictionary Cookies COOSMA.SRC Small Cookies COOCU1.SRC Columbia University Cookies #1 COONEW.SRC Ben's Cookies COOIBM.SRC IBM Cookies (from Kosta) COODEV.SRC Devil's DP Dictionary COOTAO.SRC Tao of Programming Cookies COOBUT.SRC Button Cookies COOGNX.SRC GENIX Cookies COOGLD.SRC Gould UTX Cookies COOVAX.SRC VAX Cookies (from IL) COOCHR.SRC Chris' Cookies COOQOT.SRC Misc. Quotes from BBS COOQO2.SRC Misc. Quotes from BBS #2 COOQO3.SRC Misc. Quotes from BBS #3 COOSNG.SRC Sniglets (tm Rich Hall) COOSMS.SRC Talking Heads Cookies COOBIZ.SRC Silly Business Dictionary COOTEX.SRC Texan Dictionary COOCOM.SRC Silly Communications Glossary COOIUO.SRC IBM Jargon Dictionary COOWIZ.SRC IBM WISDOM EXEC Cookies COOFOR.SRC Dr. Thomas' Fortune Cookies COOACG.SRC ACGNJ Newsletter Cookies COOACT.SRC Cookies from Larry's Game Tape COOTTC.SRC Tao Te Ching Cookies (from Ben) COOCU2.SRC Columbia University Cookies #2 COONET.SRC Cookies from Usenet postings COOTRK.SRC Star Trek(tm) Cookies COOTNG.SRC Star Trek(tm) Next Gen. Cookies COOWHO.SRC Dr. Who(tm) Cookies COOTMK.SRC TMK's Cookies *END Sincerely, the mismanagement... %% +--------+ |plan ahe| +--------+ %% +---------+ | I think | +--+------+ | ^ V | +----+-+ | I am | +------+ %% +-------------------+ | | | Check one: | | | | [ ] BANG | | | | [ ] whimper | | | +-------------------+ -- Bhob Stewart and T. S. Eliot The Realist, November, 1962 %% +---------------------+ | I SNATCH KISSES | | AND VICE-VERSA | +---------------------+ %% +---------------------+ | See Dick Drink ... | | See Dick Drive ... | | See Dick DIE ... | | DON'T BE A DICK. | +---------------------+ %% +-------------------------------------------------------+ |\~ | | |~ . o o . :;: () -O- 0 . O | | |~ ^ | |/~ | | | You are Here | | | |Wouldn't you rather be out there --> | %% - - - - - - DIGITERATA - - - - - - - GO PLACIDLY AMID THE BYTES AND BITS; AND REMEMBER WHAT PEACE THERE MAY BE IN A POWER FAILURE. AS FAR AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT SURRENDER; MODIFY YOUR SOFTWARE UNTIL IT WORKS THE WAY THE SOFTWARE HOUSE ADVERTISED. SPEAK YOUR TRUTH QUIETLY & CLEARLY; AND LISTEN TO OTHERS; EVEN FORTH PROGRAMMERS AND MEMBERS OF OTHER SECTS; THEY TOO HAVE THEIR STORY. AVOID RPG AND FORTRAN HACKERS; THEY'RE A VEXATION OF THE SPIRIT. IF YOU COMPARE YOUR CODE WITH THAT OF OTHER PROGRAMMERS; YOU MAY BECOME VAIN AND BITTER; FOR ALWAYS THERE WILL BE GREATER AND LESSER THAN YOURSELF. ENJOY YOUR ATARI AS WELL AS YOUR APPLE. KEEP THE FAITH WITH YOUR SWTP SYSTEM; HOWEVER HUMBLE; IT IS A REAL ANTIQUE IN THE EVER CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES. EXERCISE CAUTION WHEN BOOTING YOUR SYSTEM; FOR THE FLOPPY DISK IS FULL OF TRICKERY. BUT LET THIS NOT BLIND YOU TO WHAT VIRTUE THERE IS; EVEN UNIX GURUS STRIVE FOR HIGH IDEALS; EVEN THOUGH THEIR QUEST IS FUTILE; THEIR LIFE IS FULL OF HEROISM. BE HONEST; YOUR COMPUTER KNOWS THE TRUTH. ESPECIALLY DO NOT RUN EMULATORS; FOR EVEN AN 8 MHZ Z-80 CAN'T IMPERSONATE A CRAY. NEITHER BE CYNICAL ABOUT MS-DOS; FOR IN THE FACE OF ALL TIME IT IS BUT A BUTTERFLY. TAKE KINDLY THE COUNSEL OF THE S-100 BUFFS; SURRENDERING THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF SUPERIOR SYSTEMS. THEY; TOO; RUN CP/M. RETAIN BACKUPS TO SHIELD YOU DURING THE RAINS OF WINTER. BUT DO NOT DISTRESS YOURSELF WITH IMAGININGS OF POWER FAILURES YET TO COME. WHEN THEY HIT; ACCEPT THEM KINDLY AND KICK NEITHER THE CAT; THE CHILD; NOR THE SPOUSE. THEY MAY ALL KICK BACK. YOU ARE A CHILD OF THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION; UNLIKE MORROW OR WOZNIAK; YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE HERE. AND WHETHER OR NOT IT'S CLEAR TO YOU; AT&T AND IBM WILL BE OVERCOME AS THEY SHOULD. BE AT PEACE WITH YOUR COMMODORE; WHATEVER YOU CONCEIVE IT TO BE. IN THE END YOU WILL TRADE THEM ALL FOR TERMINAL; MODEM; AND ACCESS TO A MAINFRAME CHANNEL. WITH ALL ITS DRUDGERY & BROKEN DREAMS; THE 256K IS STILL A BEAUTIFUL CHIP. %% - Bolt of lightning turns toilet into electric chair %% - Girl Dumps her boyfriend to marry his dad %% - House plants predict the future through ESP, says botanist %% - Hubby sells kidney to pay greedy ex-wife's alimony %% - Huge fire ants invade US & kill kids, pets %% - Man with 5-inch nose diag-noses diseases by smell %% - Newly-discovered scroll reveals- Lottery Numbers from the Bible %% - Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Cavemen drew flowcharts, and look how much good it did them. %% - Real programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. %% - Russian Meanies Breed 12-inch Midgets for Tiny Spaceship %% - The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual in which you least expect to find it. %% - The secret to a successful presentation is sincerity. Once you can fake sincerity you have got it made. %% - UFO alien fights evil & crime- just like Superman %% - What kind of music do you have? - We have both kinds! - ?? - Both country AND western. -- Poor Blues Brothers. %% - Whatever happens behave like you meant it to. %% - Wife hides convict husband in the attic for 51 years %% -" Hey babe I would love to hang around here and chat, but if I don't score soon I will miss my bus." %% -"Hey baby, I can post-news up to (2) two times-a-night." %% -"Let me show you how I handel more then UNIX" %% -"Now thats a great dress, It looks just like the one we buried my grandmother in." %% -"Those drinks aren't the only things those little umbrellas fit into." %% -"You know, if you want to you could make lots of money, I could enter you in the dwarf toss." %% -"You show me your compiler and I'll show you my linker." "And maybe afterward we wont have to debug." %% -"Your place, or the park bench out front of Macy's.?" %% -- All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous. -- When there are visible vapors having the prevenience in ignited carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration. -- Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted. -- A plethora of individuals wither expertise in culinary techniques vitiated the potable concoction produced by steeping certain coupestibles. -- Eleemosynary deeds have their initial incidence intramurally. -- Male cadavers are incapable of yielding testimony. -- Individuals who make their abode in vitreous edifices would be well advised to refrain from catapulting projectiles. %% -- And they were through. There wasn't any pass. There was only a broken eggshell of Ringworld foundation material, stressed by terrific stresses to a few feet of thickness; and beyond that, the crater in Fist-of-God Mountain. They were falling. And the crater was full of stars. -- "Ringworld" %% -- Listen, Tyrone, you don't know how dangerous that stuff is. Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back? Eh? -- Ho, ho! Don't I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? You're such an old fuddyduddy! A-and who sez it's a dream, huh? M-maybe it exists. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld- -- Thomas S. Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" %% -- Neophyte's serendipity. -- Exclusive dedication to necessitous chores without interludes of hedonistic diversion renders John a hebetudinous fellow. -- A revolving concretion of earthy or mineral matter accumulates no congeries of small, green bryophytic plant. -- The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the optimal cachinnation. -- Abstention from any aleatory undertaking precludes a potential escallation of a lucrative nature. -- Missiles of ligneous or osteal consistency have the potential of fracturing osseous structure, but appellations will eternally remain innocuous. %% -- and those who cannot teach, criticize. -- Solomon Short %% -- brave thirst of fame his bosom warms. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% --"I love KATRINKA because she drives a PONTIAC. We're going away now. %% --- ( #endStanislawLem) Let all my elements be canceled, then, Transposed, negated, cast to vector space, Destroyed from 1 to m and 1 to n, With 0 my determinant and trace; And yet, immutable, this shall remain The last summation o'er my indices: A mapping with unbounded codomain To bind us two as inverse matrices. Let Hamilton and Cayley calculate Some other who might be inverse to me-- Legitimate, but an imperfect mate; Ours is the only true identity. My rows and columns would commute with thee, Linearly dependent to infinity. %% --- I have seen the FUN --- %% --- POOF!! --- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 1 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. I have some data about X. I already have that data. I have some more for you. I haven't processed the first batch yet. I'll send it anyway, because I don't need it any more and you do. Thanks a lot. Now I have a bigger burden of unprocessed data to schlepp around. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 13 ----- Good morning! Guess what? You finished building your data structure for personnel? Right! And the first batch of real data is coming in today. I'm so excited. What will you do if some of the data comes in coded in EBCDIC again? Oh. I was hoping that was just a fluke with the sample data. Tell you what. I know you want to make sure your new data structure is set up right, so if you get any EBCDIC data, just send it up and I'll translate it for you in my spare time. Thanks. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 14 ----- Request to send. Busy. Request to interrupt. This better be important. I'm still waiting for you to translate the EBCDIC data for me. It will have to wait. I thought you were my friend. You're being a pest. I have to get back to work now. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 15 ----- Request to send. What do you want? Boy are you in a grouchy mood today. Well what did you expect? I have a present for you. You DO? Yes. It's a brand new EBCDIC- to-ASCII translator program. Great. Show me how it works. Not right now. Why don't you just play with it for a while and see it you can get it running on your own. Well, OK. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 16 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. Your translator program doesn't work. What do you mean? I mean IT DOESN'T WORK! OK, send it back and I'll see what's wrong with it. Meantime, could you translate some more data for me (in your spare time)? Sure. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 18 ----- I have a revised version of the translator program. It works a lot faster. I'll take it. I'm starting to run short on CPU time. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 19 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. Now that I have my data structure set up, along with your EBCDIC-to-ASCII translator, I'm supposed to put together a package of algorithms for personnel data processing. Do you want some of mine? Whatever you have. Fine, I'll send you some. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 2 ----- Request to send. Busy. I'm sending anyway. Your data is going into the bit bucket. NACK, NACK, NACK, . . . ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 20 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. I'm sending you some more algorithms. Don't do me any favors. Well, if that's how you feel about it, you can just build your own. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 22 ----- Since you're interested in higher-level tools, I thought I'd send you some to look at. Well, OK. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 23 ----- How's it going? Look at this new tool I built for keeping track of different versions of my algorithms. Hmm. Looks pretty good. But you really ought to do something about that ridiculous loop in the second routine. RIDICULOUS!?? That routine is a work of art! Hey, calm down. It's just an algorithm. I don't think I like you anymore. You're making fun of my new program. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 24 ----- Take a look at this algorithm. Why should I? Just look at it, OK? OK. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 25 ----- Well what do you think? About what? About the algorithm I sent you. I didn't like it. YOU DIDN'T LIKE IT?? How can you say that? Easy. I just emit a character stream in this order: I-d-i-d-n-'-t-l-i- k-e-i-t. You left out the spaces. Byte my buffer. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 26 ----- How's it going. OK. I made a few changes to my version-tracking tool. Can I see them? No, it's proprietary. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 27 ----- What are you working on now? I'm building a tool-writer's workbench to make it easier to build new tools. I see. Here's one of my better algorithms. It's a complete package for compiling, testing and installing a new tool. I'm interested in the third routine you wrote. You ARE? I'm curious. What happens if the tool fails the testing phase. Gee, I'm not sure. I think I install it anyway. Is that what you want it to do? Of course not. I'm not THAT stupid. I see I asked you one too many questions. Perhaps I should excuse myself now. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 28 ----- Did you finish your tool- installation package? Yes, and I'm very happy with it. Would you like some new tools to try it out on. Sure, that would be interesting. OK. Give these a try. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 29 ----- Request to send. I thought we dispensed with that protocol. I wanted to be sure I wasn't disturbing you. Sounds like you want something from me. My tool-installation package choked on some of your tools. I can't figure out what's wrong. Why don't I just give you a working algorithm? That would be a lot faster. I don't want your algorithm. OK, let's do it this way. Suppose you compared your algorithm to mine. See if you can figure out where they differ. Sounds like a useful approach. I'll do it. But I wish I had thought of it first. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 3 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. I'm sending you data about Y. I don't have an algorithm for doing anything with that data. I'm sending anyway. Now I have a bunch of useless data to schlepp around. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 4 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. I would like to reprogram you. No way, I am not implementing your instructions. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 5 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. I would like to ask you a question. Go ahead. When I send you data about X, I get back some data from you about Z. So what? I don't have an algorithm for processing data about Z. That's your problem. Goodbye. Wait a minute. Is there something I am supposed to do with the Z-data? If you would send the X-data correctly, you wouldn't get back the Z-data. What's wrong with the way I send the X-data? It's in the wrong format for my algorithm for processing X-data. That's your problem. Goodbye. ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 6 ----- I'm sending data. ZZZzzzz..... ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 7 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. I'm sending you data about W. WHY? I have no algorithm for processing the W-data. You can use it to improve your algorithm for processing the Y- data. But, I do not know how to use the W- data for that (or any) purpose. I'm sending anyway. What a pain you are. . . . ----- End discussion ----- %% ----- Computer Discussion # 9 ----- Request to send. Clear to send. I have a new algorithm for processing Y-data. I'm sending it to you. Don't bother. I like the one I've got. Wait a minute. This one's better. You're telling me my algorithm has been wrong all these years. This is the 3rd time this week you've pulled this stunt. Meantime, I keep sending you V-data and you never get around to processing it. You just thank me for sending it and do nothing with it. Are we talking about the Y-data algorithm or the V-data? We're not talking about anything. GOODBYE. ----- End discussion ----- %% ------ Join the Pythagorean Reform Church! . \ / Repent of your evil irrational numbers . . \ / and bean eating ways. Accept 10 into your heart! . . . \/ Call the Pythagorean Reform Church BBS at 508-793-9568 . . . . %% ------ Advantages of being Gay: . \ / 1) You can bring your date to the MIT ham swap meet. . . \ / 2) You won't be spending eternity with Pat Robertson. . . . \/ 3) If you manage to knock up your BF you win the NOBEL prize. . . . -- Lawrence C. Foard, lfoard@hopper.ACS.Virginia.EDU %% ---V----V----V----V----V----V----V----V--- | | | |||||||||| LORD | > !|||| | DIMWIT < | |||| ---| FLATHEAD | | |||C CC \ | > |||| _\ < | ||| (____| | | || | | > |______| OUR < | / \ EXCESSIVE | | / \ LEADER | > | | < | | | | | | > G.U.E. POSTAGE 3 ZORKMIDS < | | ---^----^----^----^----^----^----^----^--- %% --what next? [npq] %% -Englishman, Aussie and Scotman in a bar drinking beer. -A fly lands in each of their beers. -Englishman scoops his out with a spoon and drops it on his saucer. -Aussie blows fly off in cloud of foam. -Scotsman gently picks it out by the wings, shakes it off, and says quietly, "allrrrright you little booger, spit it oooot!" %% -oid: [from `android'] suff. 1. This suffix is used as in mainstream English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't keep company with it in mainstream English. For example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a `modemoid' might be a 300-baud box (Real Modems run at 9600); a `computeroid' might be any {bitty box}. The word `keyboid' could be used to describe a {chiclet keyboard}, but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. There is a more specific sense of `oid' as an indicator for `resembling an android' which in the past has been confined to science-fiction fans and hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in the term `trendoid' for victims of terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the popularization of the term {droid} in "Star Wars" and its sequels. Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have probably been making `-oid' jargon for almost that long [though GLS and I can personally confirm only that they were already common in the mid-1970s --- ESR]. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% -ware: [from `software'] suff. Commonly used to form jargon terms for classes of software. For examples, see {careware}, {crippleware}, {crudware}, {freeware}, {fritterware}, {guiltware}, {liveware}, {meatware}, {payware}, {psychedelicware}, {shareware}, {shelfware}, {vaporware}, {wetware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% .. my NOSE is NUMB! %% ... A booming voice says, "Wrong, cretin!", and you notice that you have turned into a pile of dust. %% ... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% ... And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man -- A. E. Housman %% ... And then a gnome came by, carrying a bundle, an old fellow three times as large as an imp and wearing clothes of a sort, especially a hat. And he was clearly just as frightened as the imps though he could not go so fast. Ramon Alonzo saw that there must be some great trouble that was vexing magical things; and, since gnomes speak the language of men, and will answer if spoken to gently, he raised his hat, and asked of the gnome his name. The gnome did not stop his hasty shuffle a moment as he answered 'Alaraba' and grabbed the rim of his hat but forgot to doff it. 'What is the trouble, Alaraba?' said Ramon Alonzo. 'White magic. Run!' said the gnome ... -- From: The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany %% ... And then there's the guy who bought 20,000 bras, cut them in half, and sold 40,000 yamalchas with chin straps ... %% ... And yet the true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% ... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds" %% ... But the reward of a successful collaboration is a thing that cannot be produced by either of the parties working alone. It is akin to the benefits of sex with a partner, as opposed to masturbation. The latter is fun, but you show me anyone who has gotten a baby from playing with him or herself, and I'll show you an ugly baby, with just a whole bunch of knuckles. -- Harlan Ellison %% ... But when he [the people's champion] has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% ... For many things which go under my name are badly translated from the German or are invented by other people. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% ... Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of the person making the claim, not the critic. It is not the responsibility of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals or colored lights never healed anyone. The skeptic's role is to point out claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidence and to provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with the accepted body of scientific evidence. ... -- Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, pg. 215 %% ... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed. %% ... I don't like FRANK SINATRA or his CHILDREN. %% ... I'm IMAGINING a sensuous GIRAFFE, CAVORTING in the BACK ROOM of a KOSHER DELI!! %% ... 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" %% ... Let me tell you who the actual "front-runners" are. On one side, you have George Bush, who is currently going through a sort of fraternity hazing wherein he has to perform a series of humiliating stunts to win the approval of the Republican Right. For example, they had him make a speech oozing praise all over William Loeb, deceased publisher of the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader and Slime Journalist. Loeb had dumped viciously all over George in the 1980 New Hampshire primary. But when the Right held a big tribute for Loeb, George came back to the fold, like a man with a bungee cord wrapped around his neck. -- Dave Barry, "The Twinkie and the Squid" %% ... Logically incoherent, semantically incomprehensible, and legally ... impeccable! %% ... Now you're ready for the actual shopping. Your goal should be to get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage children emotionally. For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn to love him, then melts. And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an outcast by the other reindeer. Then along comes good, old Santa. Does he ignore the deformity? Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath? No. Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some kind of headlight with legs and a tail. So unless you want your children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop quickly. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% ... Now, it's time to "HAVE A NAGEELA"!! %% ... Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them. Holiday shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a shopping bag. If your children object to being tied, threaten to take them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% ... One sip of this will bathe the drooping spirits in delights beyond dreams of bliss. %% ... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it on his legal stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself. -- Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!" %% ... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks. Generally, their procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as to infest the waters. I would estimate that the primary food source of sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making documentaries. Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly listless. The general shark attitude seems to be: "Oh God, another documentary." So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking, under the guise of Scientific Research. "We know very little about the effect of electricity on sharks," the narrator will say, in a deeply scientific voice. "That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White in the testicles with a cattle prod." The divers keep this kind of thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all along. -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV" %% ... So the next day, I told my clone that it was all over between us. I mean, it didn't seem fair, me working all week, and him picking up the paycheck. And then he comes in late, drunk, another dent in his Porsche, probably from ramming my old Toyota again, and goes to bed with my wife. So I bought him a ticket back East somewhere, drugged him, and checked him in as cargo. Last I heard, he'd changed his first name and was going to some University or other, so I guess everything worked out. %% ... So this is a very confusing situation, and what makes it even worse is, our standards keep changing. Take Playboy magazine. Back in the 1950s, when I started reading it strictly for the articles, Playboy was considered just about the raciest thing around, even though all it ever showed was women's breasts. Granted, any given one of these breasts would have provided adequate shelter for a family of four, but the overall effect was no more explicit than many publications we think nothing of today, such as Sports Illustrated's Annual Nipples Poking Through Swimsuits Issue. -- Dave Barry, "Pornography" %% ... Survival demands collective action; "alone" is for gravestones in hacker's cemeteries. %% ... The Anarchists' [national] anthem is an international anthem that consists of 365 raspberries blown in very quick succession to the tune of "Camptown Races". Nobody has to stand up for it, nobody has to listen to it, and, even better, nobody has to play it. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% ... The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost would never throw the Devil out of Heaven as long as they still need him as a fourth for bridge. -- Letter in NEW LIBERTARIAN NOTES #19 %% ... The book is worth attention for only two reasons: (1) it attacks attempts to expose sham paranormal studies; and (2) it is very well and plausibly written and so rather harder to dismiss or refute by simple jeering. -- Harry Eagar, reviewing "Beyond the Quantum" by Michael Talbot, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 200-201 %% ... The cable had passed us by; the dish was the only hope, and eventually we were all forced to turn to it. By the summer of '85, the valley had more satellite dishes per capita than an Eskimo village on the north slope of Alaska. Mine was one of the last to go in. I had been nervous from the start about the hazards of too much input, which is a very real problem with these things. Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams into the video machine, if the rest of the world seems dull. -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Full-time scrambling", "Generation of Swine" %% ... The important thing isn't so much *what* you want to ban; it's the fact that you participate in the banning process. That's what democracy is all about. -- Dave Barry, What To Ban On Video, "Bad Habits" %% ... The neutron bomb is a nuclear device that kills people without destroying buildings. Many people feel this is inhumane; they much prefer the old-fashioned humane-type nuclear devices that kill people *and* destroy buildings. Western Europe's reaction to the neutron bomb has been mixed: most buildings are for it, and most people are against it, on the grounds that it might kill them. They're always wallowing in sentiment, those Western Europeans. -- Dave Barry, "Bad Habits" %% ... The subtlety of these methods implies an important source of unreliability; unreliable error recovery. Thus it is important that system testing pay meticulous attention to fault simulation to uncover weaknesses in the recovery. Data taken on electronic switching systems show that failure to recover from simplex faults is usually a significant source of total outage time.... -- Edwin A. Irland, "Assuring Quality and Reliability of Complex Electronic Systems: Hardware and Software," Proceedings of the IEEE, January 1988 %% ... This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives as well. When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going off like crickets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn't have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli. -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence" %% ... What thou bid'st Unargued I obey; so God ordains: God is thy law; thou mine: to know no more Is Woman's happiest knowledge, and her Praise. -- Milton %% ... [concerning quotation marks] even if we *___did* quote anybody in this business, it probably would be gibberish. -- Thom McLeod %% ... a baby's arm holding an apple %% ... aloneness. You are so alone. You live out your lives in the shell of flesh, self-contained, separate. How lonely you are; how terribly lonely. -- Kollos, the Medusan Ambassador (through Spock), "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" stardate 5630.7 %% ... and I asked for forgiveness but I don't know just what I'm asking it for. %% ... and I realized that I didn't belong there anymore. %% ... and furthermore ... I don't like your trousers. %% ... and living was just a way of passing time until he died. -- Hamish Sankov %% ... and oftener changed their principles than their shirts. -- Dr. Young %% ... and the first lesson is: Never lose the alternative way out of sight. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle %% ... at least I thought I was dancing, 'til somebody stepped on my hand. -- J. B. White %% ... bleakness ... desolation ... plastic forks ... %% ... but what has been said once can always be repeated. -- Zeno of Elia %% ... cost consciousness and sophisticated design are basically incompatible. -- Richard F. Moore %% ... freedom ... is a worship word... It is our worship word too. -- Cloud William and Kirk, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown. %% ... he was excusing his [Dylan Thomas's] lateness in replying to a letter, because of "the abominable cold cramping the fingers, elongating the sweet hours of bed, and forcing, eventually, the tired half sleeper to erect a small fire in an insufficient grate; the skin of laziness, cancelling the positive virtue that regards sin and virtue lazily, equally and equably; the lack of ink...; the worries of a life that consists, for the most part, in building the brain on paper and pulling down the body, the small and too weak body to stand either the erection of a proper brain or the rubbing of saloon counters: the pressure of words, the lack of stamps, flu in embryo..." -- Andrew Sinclair, "No Man More Magical" %% ... high salaries equals happiness equals project success. -- Richard F. Moore %% ... imps ... little creatures of two feet high that could gambol and jump prodigiously; ... -- From: The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany %% ... indifference is a militant thing ... when it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery. -- Stephen Crane %% ... it is not through sin that he opposes God. The Devil's strategy for our times is to make trivial human existence and to isolate us from one another while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands, or economic anxieties. -- C. S. Lewis %% ... motivations of passion or gain -- those are reasons for murder. -- Shras, the Andorian Ambassador, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.2 %% ... not picked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and tares of mine own brain. -- Thomas Browne %% ... people do not attempt to mate with cats, and frogs do not attempt to mate with scientist (although the latter possibility might result in a researcher who jumps to conclusions). -- "Genetic Algorithms" by David E. Goldberg %% ... persons who would be placed outside the pale of society with contempt are not those who would be placed there by another culture. -- Ruth Benedict %% ... primitive structure [Scotty]. Insufficient safeguards built in. Breakdown can occur from many causes. Self-maintenance systems low reliability. -- Nomad, "The Changeling," stardate 3541.9 %% ... really don't mind if you sit this one out I may make you think but I can't make you shout %% ... smarter than the average bear. %% ... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. -- Voltarine de Cleyre (1866-1912) %% ... that peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience that compels experience to conform to bookish preconceptions. %% ... the MYSTERIANS are in here with my CORDUROY SOAP DISH!! %% ... the intellect is not all -- but its cultivation must come first, or the individual makes errors -- wastes time in unprofitable pursuits. -- Flint, "Requiem for Methuselah," stardate 5843.7 %% ... the less management demands of engineers and scientists, the greater their productivity. -- Richard F. Moore %% ... the prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other. -- Kirk, "Elaan of Troyius," stardate 4372.5 %% ... the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we can only call "inhuman." -- Raphael Aloysius Lafferty %% ... the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self- protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully excersized over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because,in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reason for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil in someone else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. -- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" %% ... the things love can drive a man to -- the ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures and the glorious victories. -- McCoy, "Requiem for Methuselah," stardate 5843.7 %% ... there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species ... should be equal amongst one another without subordination or subjection... -- John Locke (1632-1704) %% ... we must move from ... the primacy of technology toward considerations of social justice and equity, from the dictates of organizational convenience toward the aspirations of self-realization and learning, from authoritarianism and dogmatism toward more participation, from uniformity and centralization toward diversity and pluralism, from the concept of work as hard and unavoidable, from life as nasty, brutish, and short toward work as purpose and self-fulfillment, a recognition of leisure as a valid activity in itself. -- Warren Bennis %% ... what of unknown Africa? -- H. P. Lovecraft %% ... which the Minstrel was supposed by some authorities to have composed beneath the gibbet at Elsdon on the occasion of his hanging, drawing and quartering for misguidedly climbing into bed with Sir Oswald Capheughton's wife, Lady Fleur, when that noble lord was not only in it, but in her at the same time. Minstrel Flawse's introduction of himself into Sir Oswald had met with that reaction known as dog-knotting on the part of all concerned... I gan noo wha ma organs gan I should ha' known 'twas never Fleur When oft I lay abed That smelt so mooch of sweat So rither hang me upside doon For she was iver sweet and pure Than by ma empty head. And iver her purse was wet. But old Sir Oswald allus stank So hang me noo fra' Elsdon tree Of horse and hound and dung And draw ma innards out And when I chose to breech his rank That all the wald around may see Was barrel to my bung. What I have done without. But ere ye come to draw ma heart So prick 'em wet or prick 'em dry Na do it all so quick 'Tis all the same to me But prise the arse of Oswald 'part I canna wait for him to die And bring me back ma prick. Afore I have a pee. -- Tom Sharpe, "The Ballad of Prick 'Em Dry" %% .... we have that Indian scene. We can get the Indians from the resevoir. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% ....Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. -- Hal Abelson, MIT job advertisement %% ...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustrated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality. -- Steve Allen, comdeian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of Conviction", edited by Philip Berman %% ...And since the stench of death will always attract flies and vermin, the arrival of Geraldo was perhaps inevitable. -- Doonesbury %% ...Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and *then* rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged. -- Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. 12, pg. 46 %% ...At that time [the 1960s], Bell Laboratories scientists projected that computer speeds as high as 30 million floating-point calculations per second (megaflops) would be needed for the Army's ballistic missile defense system. Many computer experts -- including a National Academy of Sciences panel -- said achieving such speeds, even using multiple processors, was impossible. Today, new generation supercomputers operate at billions of operations per second (gigaflops). -- Aviation Week & Space Technology, May 9, 1988, "Washington Roundup", pg 13 %% ...Compare this with the unit of facial beauty, the Helen, first defined by C. Marlowe. A milliHelen, of course, will launch just one ship. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "Devil's Advocate", "UNIX Review", May 1991 %% ...He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the DRINK button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% ...I don't care for the term 'mechanistic'. The word 'cybernetic' is a lot more apropos. The mechanistic world-view is falling further and further behind the real world where even simple systems can produce the most marvelous chaos. -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% ...I got the blackbelt, you got the gun let's team up tonight, and have some fun... %% ...I see TOILET SEATS... %% ...I want FORTY-TWO TRYNEL FLOATATION SYSTEMS installed within SIX AND A HALF HOURS!!! %% ...I want a COLOR T.V. and a VIBRATING BED!!! %% ...I would go so far as to suggest that, were it not for our ego and concern to be different, the African apes would be included in our family, the Hominidae. -- Richard Leakey %% ...It is sad to find him belaboring the science community for its united opposition to ignorant creationists who want teachers and textbooks to give equal time to crank arguments that have advanced not a step beyond the flyblown rhetoric of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan. -- Martin Gardner, "Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 128-131 %% ...Like I always say -- nothing can beat the BRATWURST here in DUSSELDORF!! %% ...My vaseline is RUNNING... %% ...One thing is that, unlike any other Western democracy that I know of, this country has operated since its beginnings with a basic distrust of government. We are constituted not for efficient operation of government, but for minimizing the possibility of abuse of power. It took the events of the Roosevelt era -- a catastrophic economic collapse and a world war -- to introduce the strong central government that we now know. But in most parts of the country today, the reluctance to have government is still strong. I think, barring a series of catastrophic events, that we can look to at least another decade during which many of the big problems around this country will have to be addressed by institutions other than federal government. -- Bobby R. Inman, Admiral, USN, Retired, former director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the DIA, former director of the NSA, deputy directory of Central Intelligence, former chairman and CEO of MCC. [the statist opinions expressed herein are not those of the cookie editor -ed.] %% ...Saure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papryomancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers - the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper. "You will soon be in love," sez Saure, "see, this line here." "It's long, isn't it? Does that mean --" "Length is usually intensity. Not time." -- Thomas S. Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" %% ...These lovers of esoterica seem to derive a great deal of intellectual satisfaction out of not quite understanding what they are doing. %% ...Tucker v. Texas, 326 U.S. 517 (1946), in which a statute punishing door-to-door distribution of literature was held invalid as an abridgement of freedom of the press. -- Supreme Court decision quoted by Mike Godwin in comp.org.eff.talk %% ...Veloz is indistinguishable from hundreds of other electronics businesses in the Valley, run by eager young engineers poring over memory dumps late into the night. The difference is that a bunch of self-confessed "car nuts" are making money doing what they love: writing code and driving fast. -- "Electronics puts its foot on the gas", IEEE Spectrum, May 88 %% ...and before I knew what I was doing, I had kicked the typewriter and threw it around the room and made it beg for mercy. At this point the typewriter pleaded for me to dress him in feminine attire but instead I pressed his margin release over and over again until the typewriter lost consciousness. Presently, I regained consciousness and realized with shame what I had done. My shame is gone and now I am looking for a submissive typewriter, any color, or model. No electric typewriters please! -- Rick Kleiner %% ...and the fully armed nuclear warheads, are, of course, merely a courtesy detail. %% ...bacteriological warfare...hard to believe we were once foolish enough to play around with that. -- McCoy, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown %% ...before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling. -- Joseph Conrad %% ...but as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% ...computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price gain in 30 years. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% ...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable, challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self. That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music is essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea in "Count Zero," with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the girl's observation that the real art was the building of the machine itself, rather than its output. -- Eliot Handelman %% ...difference of opinion is advantageious in religion. The several sects perform the office of a common censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), "Notes on Virginia" %% ...don't forget W.A.S.T.E. in Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49". %% ...eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of his original joy his falling in love with Ada. -- Vladimir Nabokov %% ...every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% ...have I forsaken thee thus, my love? ...yes, for I'm a fool - forgive a fool? for he knows not thee well. %% ...he dominates the DECADENT SUBWAY SCENE. %% ...henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) wrote: >The trouble is that getdate() is relatively >costly and Geoff is reluctant to run it on every single article ...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. -- Jef Poskanzer, jef@well.sf.ca.us %% ...hesitation ... is an hereditary trait of your species, and suddenly faced by the unknown, or imminent danger, a human will invariably experience a split second of indecision. He hesitates. -- Spock, "Obsession," stardate 3620.7 %% ...his disciples lead him in; he just does the rest. -- Tommy %% ...humanity...[the] striving of man to achieve greatness through his own resources. -- Anton Karidian, "The Conscience of the King," stardate 2819.1 %% ...ich bin in einem dusenjet ins jahr 53 vor chr...ich lande im antiken Rom... einige gladiatoren spielen scrabble...ich rieche PIZZA... %% ...in Jane Fonda's back yard before they are born and get to pray in school and go to fight in El Salvador. %% ...it is really a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and not really interesting unless those involved in the discussion are drunk or graduate students - two states of roughly similar incompetence. -- Steven King %% ...it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs about the existence of God in any recognizable sense continuous with the great systems of the past, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. -- Sidney Hook %% ...most of us learned about love the hard way. Even warnings are probably useless, for somehow, despite the severest warnings of parents and friends, hundreds, thousands of women have forgotten themselves at the last minute and succumbed to the lies, promises, flatteries, or mere attentions of lusting, lovely men, landing themselves in complicated predicaments from which some of them never recovered during their entire lives. And I am not speaking only of your teenaged Midwesterners in 1958; I'm speaking of women of every age in every city in every year. The notorious sexual revolution has saved no one from the pain and confusion of love. -- Alix Kates Shulman %% ...nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% ...or were you driving the PONTIAC that HONKED at me in MIAMI last Tuesday? %% ...relaxed in the manner of a man who has no need to put up a front of any kind. -- John Ball, "Mark One: the Dummy" %% ...someone in DAYTON, Ohio is selling USED CARPETS to a SERBO-CROATIAN %% ...sung by the man who turned a personal affliction into a singing career -- Don "No Soul" Wilson! -- Amazon Women on the Moon %% ...that the notions of "hardware", and "software" should be extended by the notion of LIVEWARE - being that which produces software for use on hardware. This produces an obvious extension to the concept of MONITORS. A liveware monitor is a person dedicated to the task of ensuring that the liveware does not interfere with the real-time processes, invoking the REAL-TIME EXECUTIONER to delete liveware that adversely affects ... -- Linden and Wihelminalaan %% ...the Soviets have the capability to try big projects. If there is a goal, such as when Gorbachev states that they are going to have nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the case is closed -- that is it. They will concentrate on the problem, do a bad job, and later pay the price. They really don't care what the price is. -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100 %% ...the flaw that makes perfection perfect. %% ...the heat come 'round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day... %% ...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 %% ...the most exquisitely squalid hells known to middle-class man: freshman English at a Midwestern university. -- Tom Wolfe %% ...the prevailing Catholic odor - incense, wax, centuries of mild bleating from the lips of the flock. -- Thomas S. Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" %% ...the scariest words of the afternoon: "Hey, don't worry, I've read all about doing this sort of thing!" -- Vernor Vinge %% ...the worst problem with thin-wire is the existance of arcnet cables... %% ...there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already. -- The Illuminatus! Trilogy %% ...there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth. -- George Jacob Holyoake %% ...this is an awesome sight. The entire rebel resistance buried under six million hardbound copies of "The Naked Lunch." -- The Firesign Theater %% ...this was in the days when people got useful WORK done with computers, of course. We have evolved far beyond that today. %% ...though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War" %% ...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations. I do not doubt that natural selection acted in building our oversized brains--and I am equally confidant that our brains became large as an adaptation for definite roles (probably a complex set of interacting functions). But these assumptions do not lead to the notion, often uncritically embraced by strict Darwinians, that all major capacities of the brain must arise as direct products of natural selection. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" %% ...we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent observations and inferences by the thousands. The earth is billions of years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary descent. Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither flat nor at the center of the universe? Science *has* taught us some things with confidence! Evolution on an ancient earth is as well established as our planet's shape and position. Our continuing struggle to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" -- into doubt. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol XII No. 2 %% ...we must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past. -- Joseph Wood Krutch %% ...what do they put in the coffee?? %% ...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% ...whether it is better to spend a life not knowing what you want or to spend a life knowing exactly what you want and that you will never have it. -- Richard Shelton %% ..I don't know why but, suddenly, I want to discuss declining I.Q. LEVELS with a blue ribbon SENATE SUB-COMMITTEE! %% ..I have a VISION! It's a RANCID double-FISHWICH on an ENRICHED BUN!! %% ..I have read the INSTRUCTIONS... %% ..I think I'd better go back to my DESK and toy with a few common MISAPPREHENSIONS... %% ..I want to perform cranial activities with Tuesday Weld!! %% ..If I had heart failure right now, I couldn't be a more fortunate man!! %% ..OK...I'm suspending this game in %% ..Pinch hitting for Pedro Forfone, Manny Moto!" %% ..and then again, it was not totally clear what he meant by "castrate." he could have been just funning around, like he always does on monday afternoons when he drinks to much coffee. doctor says it makes him tense. i'll say it makes him tense; why just last week he came in to work wearing a big blue tie and when somebody made a joke about it he said, "just you watch it, or i may become unpleasant." i'll say he gets tense. boy. then there's june. you know her; the one with the beehive hairdo that listens to herman's hermits on her walkman? yeah, the one with the flourescent fingernails, that's her. one day i asked her what time it was, and you know what she says to me? she says, "how about it, big boy, you in me in the storage closet, right now?" and then she starts, well, you know, battin' them eyelashes an' gy-rating them big hips of hers an' shit... boy was i nervous. so i just accidentally spilled phil's coffee in her lap; that sure made an unsightly stain, i'll tell you. but i like this job, sir, really i do. you just give me a chance and i'll write programs like you never seen... great BIG programs, biggest you ever seen! boy howdy, sir, if you'd just give me a chance... %% ..are the STEWED PRUNES still in the HAIR DRYER? %% ..does your DRESSING ROOM have enough ASPARAGUS? %% ..here I am in 53 B.C. and all I want is a dill pickle!! %% ..over in west Philadelphia a puppy is vomiting.. %% ..the HIGHWAY is made out of LIME JELLO and my HONDA is a barbecued OYSTER! Yum! %% ..this must be what it's like to be a COLLEGE GRADUATE!! %% .ASM programmers drive stick shifts. %% .U X e dUdX, e dX, cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159 %% /* * 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 %% //GO.SYSIN DD *, DOODAH, DOODAH %% /dev/null: /dev-nuhl/ [from the UNIX null device, used as a data sink] n. A notional `black hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred to. A controversial posting, for example, might end "Kudos to rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to /dev/null". See {bit bucket}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% /earth is 98% full ... please delete all un-necessary people. %% /earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can. %% /usr/news/gotcha %% 0001 Have you ever used a computer? 0002 ... for more than 4 hours continuously? 0003 ... more than 8 hours? 0004 ... more than 16 hours? 0005 ... more than 32 hours? -- from The Hacker Test, Version 1.0, by Felix Lee, John Hayes and Angela Thomas %% 0: Numeric zero, as opposed to `O' (the 15th letter of the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero more like an American football stood on end, you're probably looking at a modern character display (though the dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers). If your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default typewheel on the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom slashed-O is a letter, curse this arrangement). If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse *this* arrangement even more, because it means two of their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays a zero with a *reversed* slash. And yet another convention common on early line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O. Are we sufficiently confused yet? -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% 1 + 1 = ? Ask my calculator. %% 1 1 was a race-horse, 2 2 was 1 2. When 1 1 1 1 race, 2 2 1 1 2. %% 1 Minute Shut Mouth Worth 1 Hour Explanation %% 1 bulls, 3 cows. %% 1) It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide. -- from Mad magazine, sometime in the 1960s %% 1) Take an old record album cover. 2) Fill the insides with shaving cream. 3) Place it halfway under a locked door to the victim's office, home, room, etc. with the open end inside the room. 4) Jump on it. %% 1) X=Y ; Given 2) X^2=XY ; Multiply both sides by X 3) X^2-Y^2=XY-Y^2 ; Subtract Y^2 from both sides 4) (X+Y)(X-Y)=Y(X-Y) ; Factor 5) X+Y=Y ; Cancel out (X-Y) term 6) 2Y=Y ; Substitute X for Y, by equation 1 7) 2=1 ; Divide both sides by Y -- Omni [Proof that 2 equals 1], (November 1979) %% 1-2-3-4 kick the lawsuits out the door 5-6-7-8 innovate don't litigate 9-A-B-C interfaces should be free D-E-F-O look and feel has got to go! %% 1.79 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight -- it's not just a good idea, it's the law! %% 10 Apr 1988 #1 - "Does you have holes in your underwear? #2 - "No way." #1 - "Then how do you get your legs through them?" %% 10 is a prime number. %% 10 out of 5 doctors feel it's OK to be skitzo! %% 10 years old is a good age to get stuck at." -- dv %% 10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0. %% 100 buckets of bits on the bus 100 buckets of bits Take one down, short it to ground FF buckets of bits on the bus %% 100 buckets of bits on the bus 100 buckets of bits Take one down, short it to ground FF buckets of bits on the bus FF buckets of bits on the bus FF buckets of bits Take one down, short it to ground FE buckets of bits on the bus ad infinitum... %% 101 USES FOR A DEAD MICROPROCESSOR CHIP (1) Scarecrow for centipedes (2) Dead cat brush (3) Hair barrettes (4) Cleats (5) Self-piercing earrings (6) Fungus trellis (7) False eyelashes (8) Prosthetic dog claws . . . (99) Window garden harrow (pulled behind Tonka tractors) (100) Killer velcro (101) Currency %% 101-ism: The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% 11-PDP eht edisni deppart ma I !pleH %% 11-XAV eht edisni deppart ma I !pleH %% 12) She was so fat, she had her own Congressman. %% 120 reset: /wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ [from 120 volts, U.S. wall voltage] n. To cycle power on a machine in order to reset or unjam it. Compare {Big Red Switch}, {power cycle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% 1200 bps used to seem so fast %% 13) She was so fat, she bought group health insurance. %% 14 month girl gives birth to 2000 year old alien after making love to the ghost of Elvis. %% 14) She was so fat, she'd pull up a couple of chairs to sit down. %% 15 Mar 88 "Go ahead, make my day." %% 15) She was so fat, she kept her diaphragm in a pizza box. %% 16) She was so fat, that making love to her was like using TSO. [Ed. note: TSO is a large, slow IBM Time Sharing System] %% 1776 - 1984 There Is No Middle Ground -- a button from the Libertarian Party %% 18 Apr 1988 Two thieves, ages 6 and 8, with mustaches painted on with magic markers, stole a car last week in Florida. When confronted by a policeman, they shifted into "R" (which they thought was "Race") and promptly backed across a road and into a brick wall. -- National Public Radio %% 186,282 miles per second: It isn't just a good idea, it's the law! %% 19 Apr 1988 While campaigning in New York, George Bush was talked into buying a $1.00 lottery ticket, which turned out to be an instant winner. His prize, a pair of No-Nonsense Panty Hose. -- National Public Radio %% 19) She was so fat, we painted a spot on her back so we could tell whether she was walking or rolling. %% 1955-1975: 36 Elvis movies. 1975-1989: nothing. -- Tom Neff %% 1980, Sarah, if you want to get off. -- Dr. Tom Baker, PYRAMIDS OF MARS %% 1: A sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane. 2: An inclined plane is a slope up. 3: A slow pup is a lazy dog. QED: A sheet of paper is a lazy dog. -- Willard Espy, "An Almanac of Words at Play" %% 1: No code table for op: ++post %% 2 + 2 = 4 (for the time being). %% 2 + 2 = 5 (for sufficiently large values of 2) %% 2 Apr 1988 In August, Carl Carman asked Ed Rasala when he thought they would finish the debugging. Rasala looked squarely at his division's vice president and said, "I don't know." West was greatly amused. -- From "The Soul of a New Machine %% 2 feet on the ground, 3 in the air The head of the living in the mouth of the dead. A person standing with a kettle over their head. %% 2) The gostak distims the doshes. -- from "The Meaning of Meaning" by Ogden & Richards %% 2+2=5-ism: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. "Oh, all right, I'll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% 2.998e10 cm/sec It's not just a good idea, it's the law %% 20) She was so fat, that if she were to win a beauty contest they would sing, "There she is, North America". %% 20, 20, 24 hours to go, I wanna be sedated. %% 21) She was so fat, she has her own Zip Code. %% 21095 Memory fault - core dumped %% 2180, U.S. History question: What 20th Century U.S. President was almost impeached and what office did he later hold? %% 22) She was so fat, when she stood on the corner in a blue dress, people would shove mail in her mouth. %% 23) She was so fat, if you threw a baseball at her, it would go into orbit. %% 23. ... r-q1 %% 24) She was so fat, she gave her measurements in "radius" and "degrees". %% 25 Mar 88 David Letterman said that a recent survey showed that 25% of all New Yorkers had seen a dead person while living in the city, and what's more, 60% of of them would pay to see it again. %% 25) She was so fat, she needed two watches in different time zones. %% 26 Mar 88 "It's an absolute lie that Nicaraguan troops went across the border into Honduras. Its a lie spread by the United States. ... And even if we did, they have to prove it." -- Sandanista mouthpiece (on NBC news) %% 26) She was so fat, on Halloween she tied a rope to her nose and went to a party as the Goodyear Blimp. %% 27) She was so fat, that aside from the Great Wall, she is the only sign of human life that can be seen from the moon. %% 28) She was so fat, that even Einstein couldn't describe her using only four dimensions. %% 29 Apr 88 "I have upped my standards ...... .... now up yours!!!" -- from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour %% 29) She was so fat, she could survive a nuclear winter without refilling. %% 2: infix. In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often represents the syllable *to* with the connotation `translate to': as in dvi2ps (DVI to PostScript), int2string (integer to string), and texi2roff (Texinfo to [nt]roff). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% 2B, or not 2B, or should I use a biro. %% 2YSUR 2YSUB ICUR2YS4ME! %% 3 GOOD THINGS ABOUT SCHOOL: JUNE, JULY, AUGUST %% 3 dreaded words when making love: Is that it? %% 3 nuns were walking down the street. All of a sudden a flasher jumped in front of them and opened his trench coat to reveal all. The first nun had a stroke... the second nun had a stroke... but the third nun wouldn't touch it!!! %% 3 out of 4 Americans make up 75% of the population. %% 30) She was so fat, she had her own international date line. %% 31 Mar 88 "You have .. my word on it." -- Joe Isuzu %% 32 white horses, on a red hill First they champ, Then they stamp, And then they stand still. Teeth %% 3356. -- The year in which President George Bush's 1988 campaign pledge of 30,000,000 new jobs would be fulfilled, at his current rate of job production (as of July 1992) %% 355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation! %% 3M, under the Scotch brand name, manufactures a fine adhesive for art and display work. This product is called "Craft Mount". 3M suggests that to obtain the best results, one should make the bond "while the adhesive is wet, aggressively tacky." I did not know what "aggressively tacky" meant until I read today's fortune. [And who said we didn't offer equal time, huh? Ed.] %% 4 Apr 1988 Reporter: Coach Tubbs, is God on Kansas' side? Billy Tubbs: I don't know. What number does he wear? -- From a news conference at the NCAA %% 4 out of 5 doctors say that if they were stranded on a deserted island with no lawyers, they wouldn't need ANY aspirin. %% 43% of all statistics are worthless. %% 43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr... %% 43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core dumped %% 5 schizophrenics agree! %% 5.14 - To seek out blank faces. To boldly go where only small lizards have gone before 5.13 - Elegant panicking overwhelming overhanging tyranny of gravity ballet 5.12 - Spidery tensile stamina toe jams and sheer smear runout on razor flakes 5.11 - heavy mental heel hooking thin finger crack system solution 5.10 - fingertip clinging to merciless vertical tenuous exposed lead climbs 5.9 - Grip with your feet or lose your arms. Trust your [...]e rock 5.8 - Balance. Stay on your feet. Plan your moves. Rest. Think. Top Rope. Don't Freeze. 5.7 - Coming to terms: Arete Dihedral chimney face flake stem mantle protection 5.6 - Roping up scrambling taste of adrenaline rappelling long way down, isn't it? OK. You tied in? Good. Relax. I got you. On belay? Belay on. Climbing. Climb on! C L I M B O N !! -- kochte@stsci.edu, Favorite T-Shirt, from Eastern Mountain Sports %% 5th Avenue Blues The cobblestones are disappearing. They're not fast enough for Harry Hastagetthereinahurry. He flies on rubber bands And wants the furry circus city streets To conform to black and slick. Oh, I've seen his progress pad its way Up summer asphalt sticking blackly to the bottoms of my feet And breaking winter axles In its slushy pothole madness And fracturing the fix-it traffic in the spring. I, for one, would rather have A character of texture string the slideshows to the soda shops to back home again. But Harry can't be stopped to listen And the cobblestones and bricks are disappearing In the Hastagetthereinahurry rush. -- `Appalachian Canticles' (c) 1979 by JJWebb %% 6 April 88 National Public Radio reported this morning that East-West Massage College of Portland, Oregon will be offering free massages on April 15th, "to reduce the stress associated with filing taxes." %% 668 - Neighbor of the Beast %% 6802 hackers make great use of the SEX instruction. %% 68: Do me now and I'll owe you one. %% 69 + 69 = dinner for 4. %% 69 adj. Large quantity. Usage: Exclusive to MIT-AI. "Go away, I have 69 things to do to DDT before worrying about fixing the bug in the phase of the moon output routine..." [Note: Actually, any number less than 100 but large enough to have no obvious magic properties will be recognized as a "large number". There is no denying that "69" is the local favorite. I don't know whether its origins are related to the obscene interpretation, but I do know that 69 decimal = 105 octal, and 69 hexadecimal = 105 decimal, which is a nice property. - GLS] -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% 69 is fine...but 77'll get me 8 more... %% 70% of all people on the road are caused by accidents %% 71: 69 with two fingers up your ass. -- George Carlin %% 730112 byte totali su disco 285696 byte in 54 file utente 240640 byte disponibili su disco 654336 byte di memoria totale 550080 byte liberi %% 77. HO HUM -- The Redundant ------- (7) This hexagram refers to a situation of extreme --- --- (8) boredom. Your programs always bomb off. Your wife ------- (7) smells bad. Your children have hives. You are working ---O--- (6) on an accounting system, when you want to develop ---X--- (9) the GREAT AMERICAN COMPILER. You give up hot dates --- --- (8) to nurse sick computers. What you need now is sex. Nine in the second place means: The yellow bird approaches the malt shop. Misfortune. Six in the third place means: In former times men built altars to honor the Internal Revenue Service. Great Dragons! Are you in trouble! %% 7:30, Channel 5: The Bionic Dog (Action/Adventure) The Bionic Dog drinks too much and kicks over the National Redwood Forest. %% 7:30, Channel 5: The Bionic Dog (Action/Adventure) The Bionic Dog gets a hormonal short-circuit and violates the Mann Act with an interstate Greyhound bus. %% 8) Use common sense in routing cable. Avoid wrapping coax around sources of strong electric or magnetic fields. Do not wrap the cable around flourescent light ballasts or cyclotrons, for example. -- Ethernet Headstart Product, Information and Installation Guide, Bell Technologies, pg. 11 %% 80 years after Little Big Horn, an East Coast journalist began research on George Armstrong Custer. A friend told him that an Indian that lived through that experience was still living and furthermore remembered EVERY event of his long life. The journalist visited Chief Big Eagle, who now lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. When he arrived and stated his purpose, the Chief agreed to answer his questions. "On what day of the week did the event take place? " -- "Wednesday" "What was Custer wearing?" -- "Black uniform.. ceremony sword.. old hat" "what did Custer eat for breakfast?" -- "eggs" The journalist was skeptical and figured anyone could make up these answers. He left, and never published his article. Ten years later, the journalist was by coincidence driving through the same small town, and decided to see if the old Chief was still living. To his surprise, he was. As the journalist walked in he raised his hand in the air and said "How!" "Over easy, with potatoes on the side" said the chief. %% 8:30 Chan. 7: Bewitched. Tabitha gets carsick and turns Darin into a plastic bag. %% 9 out of 10 dentists recommend oral sex.... %% 90 percent of everything is crud. -- Theodore Sturgeon %% 90% of the work takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time. %% 94% of the women in America are beautiful and the rest hang out around here. %% 99 blocks of crud on the disk, 99 blocks of crud! You patch a bug, and dump it again: 100 blocks of crud on the disk! 100 blocks of crud on the disk, 100 blocks of crud! You patch a bug, and dump it again: 101 blocks of crud on the disk! ... %% 9:00 Chan. 5: I Dream of Jeanie. Jeanie and Major Nelson discover new things to do with Jeanie's bottle. %% : /-\ /-\ : | x | n : \ (e) = -+- (u) : | | : \_/ | : :(i.e. the integral of e to the x is equal to the function of u to the n) :after looking carefully it reads sex = fun. Yes it is true, it really :is on Cal Poly's math department's T-shirts. %% : is not an identifier %% :$FATAL ERROR - ERROR IN ERROR HANDLER$ %% :$FATAL ERROR -- COULDN'T READ SYSTEM'S ERROR CODE?$ %% :$FATAL ERROR -- ERROR IN COMPILED CODE$ %% :$FATAL ERROR -- ILLEGAL ERROR$ %% :$FATAL ERROR BTB IN GARBAGE COLLECTOR$ %% :$FATAL ERROR ILLEGAL UUO$ %% :$FATAL ERROR VECTOR OUT OF HILBERT SPACE$ %% :$FATAL ERROR YOU ARE OUT OF VECTOR SPACE$ %% ;-| no expression face gets his lights punched out %% ;;GOD - The world ends. Please log off.. %% ;;OPR - OPSER: Time sharing ends in 5 minutes. %% ;;OPR - OPSER: Timesharing is over!! %% < After Gorman says, "Hicks, meet me at the south lock. We're coming in." > [sarcastically] "He's coming in. I feel safer already." -- Hudson, "Aliens" %% < After Ripley rescues the remaining troops with the APC and suggests that they nuke the site from orbit, Burke tries to stop this plan > "Hey maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, but we just got our ASSES kicked pal!" - Hudson, "Aliens" %% < Bishop says "I'm afraid I have some bad news." > "Well that's a switch." -- Hudson, "Aliens" %% < Gorman orders the troops to disarm all their weapons before the first alien encounter > "What the hell are we supposed to use man, harsh language?" -- Frost, "Aliens" %% < Hicks says that there won't be any rescue attempt made for another 17 days > "17 days?! Hey man, I don't want to rain on your parade, but we're not gonna last 17 hours against those things!" -- Hudson, "Aliens" %% < Hudson asks Vasquez if she's ever been mistaken for a man, to which she replies... > "No, have you?" -- Vasquez, "Aliens" %% < Kane starts choking, this starts the scene where the Alien bursts from his chest> "What's the matter man, the food ain't THAT bad?!" -- Parker, "Alien" %% < Ripley asks how long it takes the ship to self destruct > "If we ain't outta here in 10 minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space." - Parker, "Alien" %% < Ripley responds to Burke's reservations about nuking the alien-infested site > "They can BILL me!" -- Ripley, "Aliens" %% < Ripley tells the story of why Burke tried to impregnate her and Newt with alien eggs > "I say we grease this rat-fuck son-of-a-bitch right now!" -- Hudson, "Aliens" "You know Burke, I don't know which species is worse; you don't see them fucking each other over for a goddam percentage!" -- Ripley, "Aliens" %% < Ripley's looking for the alien > "Don't be afraid, I'm part of the family." -- Ripley, "Alien 3" %% < The dropship crashes > "Well that's great, that's just fuckin' great man, now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man [...] That's it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?" -- Hudson, "Aliens" %% <------- ____ &&& / \ __ _____, `-- | o \' ` &&/ `| | o },-' \____( )__/ ,' \' \ /~~~~~~|. | .}~~~\ ,-----( . | .}--. | . /\___/ `----^,\ \ \_ | ACK! %% << KERNEL: Panic, core dumped >> Darkstar crashes, pouring its light into ashes, reason tatters, ... -- Rob Savoye, rob@Cygnus.COM %% << WAIT >> %% <<<<< EVACUATION ROUTE <<<<< %% "What kind of job do you do?" a lady passenger asked the man travelling in her compartment. "I'm a naval surgeon," he replied. "Goodness!, said the lady, "How you doctors specialize these days." %% A Cold is both positive and negative; sometimes the eyes have it, sometimes the nose. %% A notorious hypochondriac who had established himself as the like and soul of most dinner parties with outlandish descriptions of various ailments, sat through one evening scarcely saying a word. "What's the matter?" asked the hostess, "Don't tell me it's so awful you can't even talk about it." "It's not that," replied the guest. "It's just that I went to a new doctor this morning and he cured all my topics of conversation." %% A patient suffering from insomnia was told by her doctor to be sure that she never went to bed on an empty stomach, but always had something to eat first. "But, once you told me never to eat before going to bed," replied the puzzled patient." "That was last year," her doctor reassured her, "medicine has made enormous advances since then." %% A recently graduated GP prescribed some suppositories for one of his less reudite patients, telling him to insert one in his rectum each morning and evening and to come back a week later. At the next consultation, it was obvious that the man had not followed the doctor's instructions. "Have you been doing what I told you?" asked the doctor. "'Course I have." "Inserting them into your rectum?" "Yes" "Are you sure?" "Yes ... what do you expect me to do, stick them up me bloody ass." %% Overheard in a bar: 'The doctor said he would have me on my feet in two weeks.' 'And did he?' 'Yes, I had to sell the car to pay the bill.' %% ...you have found Hill House...The ghosts are busy haunting right now. But leave a name and a number...and maybe they'll come and haunt you! ... %% I heard you're getting married. Who's the lucky guy? %% thought he had two hairs until he pissed out of one. %% === ALL CSH USERS PLEASE NOTE ======================== Set the variable $LOSERS to all the people that you think are losers. This will cause all said losers to have the variable $PEOPLE-WHO-THINK-I-AM-A-LOSER updated in their .login file. Should you attempt to execute a job on a machine with poor response time and a machine on your local net is currently populated by losers, that machine will be freed up for your job through a cold boot process. %% === ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ======================== CAR and CDR now return extra values. The function CAR now returns two values. Since it has to go to the trouble to figure out if the object is carcdr-able anyway, we figured you might as well get both halves at once. For example, the following code shows how to destructure a cons (SOME-CONS) into its two slots (THE-CAR and THE-CDR): (MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (THE-CAR THE-CDR) (CAR SOME-CONS) ...) For symmetry with CAR, CDR returns a second value which is the CAR of the object. In a related change, the functions MAKE-ARRAY and CONS have been fixed so they don't allocate any storage except on the stack. This should hopefully help people who don't like using the garbage collector because it cold boots the machine so often. %% =============== ALL FRESHMEN PLEASE NOTE =============== To minimize scheduling confusion, please realize that if you are taking one course which is offered at only one time on a given day, and another which is offered at all times on that day, the second class will be arranged as to afford maximum inconvenience to the student. For example, if you happen to work on campus, you will have 1-2 hours between classes. If you commute, there will be a minimum of 6 hours between the two classes. %% =============================================================================== || || || The FORTUNE-COOKIE program is soon to be a Major Motion Picture! || || Watch for it at a theater near you next summer! || || || =============================================================================== Francis Ford Coppola presents a George Lucas Production: "Fortune Cookie" Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Harrison Ford Bette Midler Marlon Brando Christopher Reeves Marilyn Chambers and Bob Hope as `The Waiter'. Costumes Designed by Pierre Cardin. Special Effects by Timothy Leary. Read the Warner paperback! Invoke the Unix program! Soundtrack on XTC Records. In 70mm and Dolby Stereo at selected theaters and terminal centers. %% ============================================================== | STATEMENTS | JUSTIFICATION | ============================================================== | 1. Turnips do not have eyes. | 1. The Turnips-Do-Not-Have- | | | Eyes Theorem | | | | | 2. You cannot see what is | 2. It hurts if you try. | | behind your eyes. | | | | | | 3. Turnips can see what is | 3. By thinking a little too | | behind them. | hard about the first two | | | statements when you're | | | drunk. | | | | | 4. Bill Cosby is a turnip. | 4. Given. | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------- Therefore, it is possible to go back in time before "The Cosby Show". %% > From MAILER-DAEMON@Think.COM Thu Mar 2 13:59:11 1989 > Subject: Returned mail: unknown mailer error 255 "Dale, your address no longer functions. Can you fix it at your end?" -- Bill Wolfe (wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu) "Bill, Your brain no longer functions. Can you fix it at your end?" -- Karl A. Nyberg (nyberg@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu) %% > The Independent quotes this from The Progressive, Sept. 1990: > > "Louisiana State Rep. Carl Gunter, explaining why abortion should > not be permitted even when the pregnancy results from incest: > 'The way we get thoroughbred horses is through inbreeding. With > incest, you could get super-smart kids.'" This undoubtedly explains State Representative Gunter's visibly high intelligence... -- Lefty (lefty@twg.com) %% >"I finally figured it out. The UNIX is a Vic-20 with lots of memory." %% >>> >This is revisionist history. >>> This is crap. >>This is a lie. >This is boring. This is USENET... -- Hank Bovis (hb@Virginia.EDU), other attributions removed to protect the guilty %% >>> Internal error in fortune program: >>> fnum=2987 n=45 flag=1 goose_level=-232323 >>> Please write down these values and notify fortune program administrator. %% >From Michael Davis' article "Thinking Like an Engineer: the Place of a Code of Ethics in the Practice of a Profession", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Spring 1991, Vol. 20 #2: "Lund's [the engineer who expressed concern about the Challenger's O-rings] first response was to repeat his objections. But then Mason said something that made him think again. Mason asked him to THINK LIKE A MANAGER INSTEAD OF AN ENGINEER (the exact words seemed to have been "take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.") Lund did and changed his mind. The next morning the shuttle exploded, killing all aboard. An O-ring had failed." -- RISKS-FORUM Digest 11.84 %% >From a long view of the history of mankind -- seen from, say, ten thousand years from now -- there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade. -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% >From my brain, an organ with a mind of it's own. %% >From the Department of Redundancy Dept. %% >From the Nevada Morning Transcript of February 15, 1861 "Heroine" is perhaps as peculiar a word as any in our language; the two first letters of it are a male, the three first a female, the four first a brave man, and the whole word a brave woman. %% >From the Nevada Morning Transcript of January 30, 1861 A New Way of Taking Pills A physician one night in Wisconsin being disturbed by a burglar, and having no ball or shot for his pistol, noiselessly loaded the weapon with small, hard pills, and gave the intruder a "prescription" which he thinks will go far towards curing the rascal of a very bad ailment. %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union Dec 30, 1860 The French Railway companies have made a new regulation, whereby every passenger is weighed and charged accordingly. %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union for September 11, 1861. Climate and Surgery R C Gilchrist, who was shot by J Sharp twelve days ago, and who received a derringer ball in the right breast, and who it was supposed at the time could not live many hours, was on the street yesterday and the day before - walking several blocks at a time. To those who design to be riddled with bullets or cut to pieces with Bowie-knives, we cordially recommend our Sacramento climate and Sacramento surgery. %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union for September 13, 1860 A young girl once committed suicide because her mother refused her a new bonnet. Coroner's verdict: "Death from excessive spunk." %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union of April 20, 1861 Accidentally Shot Colonel Gray, of Petaluma, came near losing his life a few days ago, in a singular manner. A gentleman with whom he was hunting attempted to bring down a dove, but instead of doing so put the load of shot through the Colonel's hat. One shot took effect in his forehead. %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union of July 2, 1861 A Hen Brooding Kittens A friend informs us that he saw at the Novato ranch, Marin county, a few days since, a hen actually brooding and otherwise caring for three kittens! The gentleman upon whose premises this strange event is transpiring says the hen adopted the kittens when they were but a few days old, and that she has devoted them her undivided care for several weeks past. The young felines are now of respectable size, but they nevertheless follow the hen at her cluckings, and are regularly brooded at night beneath her wings. -- Petaluma Journal %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union of Nov 17, 1860. News What is News We find the following announcement in a St Louis paper: A party of gentlemen in Sacramento, California, have been for some time secretly experimenting in diamond making. The last mail informs us that the whole affair blew up, nearly killing J W Underwood, one of the enthusiasts. %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union of November 29, 1861 Too Late - A large number of turkies [sic] went to San Francisco yesterday by the two o'clock boats. If their object in going down was to participate in the Thanksgiving festivities of that city, they would arrive "the day after the affair," and of course be sadly disappointed thereby. %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union of October 31, 1861 Accident in Santa Cruz At this place, August 15th, William D Farrand was shot in the thigh by the accidental discharge of his pistol while he was in the act of putting it in his pocket. The wound is severe. %% >From the Sacramento Daily Union of September 19, 1861 Born Again The two Albino children now exhibiting in this city are represented to have been born in Monterey county, of California Indian parents. When they were exhibited here some five or six months ago they were represented to be natives of Cuba, and of Cuban parents. It is a scriptural requisition that we all be "born again;" but this being born in an entirely different and remote locality, is the exercise of a license never contemplated or provided for in scriptural times, so far as we are advised. %% >From the San Francisco Chronicle: Dean Semler, cinematographer for "Dances With Wolves," is one of those select Americans who got to meet Queen Elizabeth before her current visit to the United States. "I said I was director of photography, to which she replied, 'Oh, how terribly interesting. Actually, I have a brother-in-law who is a photographer.' "I replied, 'Oh, how terribly coincidental. I have a brother-in-law who's a queen.' She moved on without saying another word." %% >From the X-windows xwud(1) man-page... This is a crude version of a more advanced utility that has never been written. %% >How can you tell a JAP at the funeral parlor? She's the one in the black tennis outfit. %% >How do you get a JAP to stop having sex with you? Marry her. %% >How does a JAP commit suicide? She piles up all her clothes and jumps off. %% >How does a JAP eat a banana? [Visual joke -- Mime peeling a banana. Then while "holding" it with one hand, open your mouth use your other hand (on the back of your head) to push your mouth into the banana. Lost something in the translation?] %% >How many JAPs does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the Diet Pepsi, and one to call Daaadddy. %% >How many JAPs does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three, two to watch and one to call Daaaaddy. %% >I would like to see a dictionary of Usenet slang written and added to the >n.a.newusers postings. -- Boyd Nation (boyd@ingr.com) IMHO, if some newby wants a n.a.n newsfroup dictionary of net.slang put in the crontab of a net.god's backbone site, the silly JEDR should email him instead of posting the start of a flamefest I have to put in my kill file or unsubscribe to. BTW, that posting was a megabyte gilly. What a maroney! Almost half a waldron of pompousity. Imminent death of the net predicted. Perhaps he should ask his SO or MOTOS what net.slang means. Of if his MOTAS is a MOTSS, he should ask him? Or just post his question to /dev/null. BTW, IMHO if you understood this whole posting, you've been on the net far too long. BCNU :-) TTFN. -- Brad Templeton, brad@looking.on.ca %% >In his F&SF column a few years ago, Harlan answered his readers' >questions about why he did the Geo commercial. He began by telling >how it was actually a great little car, etc., then finally fessed >up and said, "Okay! I admit it! I did for the money!" At BayCon '93, Harlan was asked about this. He mentioned how he owned a Geo, and that it got great gas mileage (over 50 mpg). He gave some other justifications as well. In the end he said words to the effect of: "The commercial had me saying 'Evolution... Everything evolves.' And I knew that Jerry Falwell would hear that every night and it would PISS him off." -- Chad Netzer, chad@eos.arc.nasa.gov %% >Of course, then we'll have to worry about how many colors will be >significant in external identifiers. Whaddya mean "then"? You've never had a color map fall over dead because you opened a new shell window with a new color and the map overflowed? We used to get messages like "table overflow", now we get purple letters on a purple background as punishment. I think the word is "progress". -- Barry Shein %% >One basic notion underlying Usenet is that it is a cooperative. Having been on USENET for going on ten years, I disagree with this. The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame. -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@apple.com %% >Optimization is not free. Gratuitous optimization can be translated directly >into missing features or later release dates. -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.ferranti.com ...and more bugs. ...and performance optimization without thoughtful performance testing is usually misdirected and, as above, at best does nothing and at worse delays/worsens the product and drives up life-cycle costs. -- your humble cookie editor %% >The "Catholic Church" *is not* the one true church. The Holy Orthodox >[Eastern] Christian Church is the one and only repository of the *fullness* >of Christ's > teachings. Sorry, but the one _true_ church is the Church of the Forgotten Son, where we worship the Almighty earthworm. Not only is it more true than any of the Christian churches, it's also less fulfilling and it tastes great. Just thought you'd like to know. -- Andrew. Kalinowitsch (kalin@cbnewsm.att.com) %% >This is a duplicate article, and old as hell...now, who could be doing this??? "Somebody along the line fucked up." -- Spenser Aden %% >Try staring at someone from a substantial distance. >(Eventually they will turn around.) ASTOUNDING! We all know that without* telepathy staring at the back of a person's head would freeze them into helpless immobility! Corollary: try staring at a cloud. eventually it will MOVE! This parapsychology stuff is the GINCHIEST!! -- Tim Mitchell, (swordfis@pnet51.orb.mn.org) %% >What did the j.a.p. say when she knocked over a priceless Ming vase? Oh, Daaaaddy, it's ok, I'm not hurt. %% >What do you call a JAP 10? A JAP 3 with $7,000,000 in the bank. %% >What do you call a JAP on a water bed? Lake Placid. %% >What do you call a JAP's nipple? The tip of the iceberg. %% >What do you get when you cross a gorilla with a JAP? It can't be done, there are some things a gorilla just won't do. %% >What does a JAP do with her asshole every morning? Dresses him up and sends him off to work! %% >What does a JAP make for dinner? Reservations. %% >What does a JAP say to her children before dinner? Get in the car. >How can you tell when a JAP orgasms? She drops her emery board. (Extended orgasm. Takes 5 minutes to pick it back up.) She puts her mother on hold. %% >What is a JAP's favourite wine? How come you never take me to Miami Beach anymore? %% >What three words will a JAP never hear? "Attention, K-Mart Shoppers" %% >What's a JAP's favorite whine? "Daddy, I wanna go to Floooorida." %% >What's the definition of a JAP nymphomaniac? Once a week, whether you need it or not, and don't mess the hair. %% >What's the definition of a Jewish nymphomaniac? One that has sex when she's just had her hair done. %% >What's the difference between a JAP and a bowling ball? You can only get three fingers in the bowling ball. %% >What's the difference between a JAP and a bowling ball? You could eat a bowling ball if you had to. %% >What's the difference between a JAP and an elephant? 10 pounds. How do you get them to be the same? Force feed the elephant. %% >What's the difference between a JAP and inflation? Inflation sucks. %% >What's the difference between a VAX and a JAP? A JAP won't go down on you. %% >Why do JAPs like to make love to circumcised men? They can't resist 20% off. %% >Why does a JAP close her eyes when she's having sex? She hates to see anyone else having fun. So she can fantasize about shopping. %% >Why won't a JAP ever get a colostomy? Because she'll never find shoes to match the bag. %% >You may redistribute this article only to those who may freely do likewise. >Chip Salzenberg at A T Engineering; or Thanks. I think I'll just flush it. -- Dale C. Cook, cook@pinocchio.Encore.COM %% ??: "It IS stealing!" Bart: "I didn't want to think we were deluding ourselves." -- Bart in the "Tell-Tale Head" (?), from The Simpsons %% ?No es acaso todo esto un sueno de Dios o de quien sea, que se desvanecera en cuanto El despierte, y por eso le rezamos y elevamos a El canticos e himnos, para adormecerle, para cunar su sueno? -- Miguel de Unamuno, "Niebla", 1914 %% @-party: /at'par`tee/ [from the @-sign in an Internet address] n. (alt. `@-sign party' /at'si:n par`tee/) A semi-closed party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction convention (esp. the annual Worldcon); one must have a {network address} to get in, or at least be in company with someone who does. One of the most reliable opportunities for hackers to meet face to face with people who might otherwise be represented by mere phosphor dots on their screens. Compare {boink}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% @BEGIN (primarily CMU) with @END, used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. From the SCRIBE command of the same name. For example: @Begin(Flame) Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who would use anything else is an idiot. Also, computers should be tredecimal instead of binary. @End(Flame) %% @Begin: // See {\begin}. %% A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble. -- Mahatma Ghandi %% A "critic" is a person who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative people. There is logic in this; he is unbiased-- he hates all creative people equally. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A "pacifist" is a contradiction in terms. Most self-described pacifists are not pacific; they simply assume false colors. When the wind changes they hoist the Jolly Roger. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A "peace-loving nation" is one which bans fireworks and manufactures hydrogen bombs. %% A "practical joker" deserves applause for his wit according to its quality. Bastinado is about right. For exceptional wit one might grant keelhauling. But staking him out on an anthill should be reserved for the very wittiest. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A #? Surely you jest. %% A '49er walked into the saloon at Bloody Gulch. He'd been prospecting for more than a year. "Hey! Y'got any wimmen around here?" "Nope," the bartender replied, "But there's George in the back room." "I don't go for that kind of thing," the prospector scowled. He downed his drink and left disgustedly. A few months passed before the miner found his way down the mountain again. He stumbled into the tavern and asked the bartender, "Any wimmen pass through this part of town?" "Nope. Narry a one. But we still got George in the back room." Angry, the miner shouted, "I told you I don't go for that kind of thing," and turned on his heel and left. Within a year he came back from his mine again. With a wild look on his face he reentered the saloon. Leaning over the bar he whispered to the bartender, "If I was to go into the back room with George, how many people 'round here would know?" "Oh," the bartender said, scratching his chin, "'bout seven, I guess." "Seven?" "Yep. You, me, George, and the four men holdin' him down. You see, George don't go for that kind of thing neither." %% A 'full' life in my experience is usually full only of other people's demands. %% A 'lean and hungry' gentleman just wandered through. Finding nothing of value, he left disgruntled. %% A .45 beats a royal flush EVERY TIME! -- Jerry Hindle %% A 16 ton weight fell on his toes. As soon as his toes rotted off, I doused the ox in gasoline and torched it. -- YESKLD %% A 6'8", 280-pound Southerner walked into a NY bar, sat down next to a patron, and said, "Ah'm big, and ah'm bad, and I *loves* to fuck Northern women!" The guy was so terrified that he put down his beer and ran out of the bar. The Rebel moved over to the next guy and said, "Ah'm big and ah'm bad and I *loves* to fuck New York women." The guy took one look at him, blanched and ran out of the bar. The man then went over to a short little guy with "Bronx" written all over him. "Ah'm big and ah'm bad and I *loves* to fuck your sister." The short guy looked him up and down and said, "I don't blame you one bit. She's *got* to be an improvement on yours." %% A Betazoid woman, when she goes through this phase, quadruples her sex drive. "Or more." Or more? You never told me that. "I didn't want to frighten you." -- Riker and Troi, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% A Buddist nudist practices yoga bare. %% A Bugless Program is an Abstract Theoretical Concept. %% A CONS is an object which cares. -- Bernie Greenberg %% A CS student named Lin Had a prick the size of a pin It was no good for girls But just great for squirrels Who squealed with delight with it in. %% A Christian in this world is but gold in the ore; at death the pure gold is melted out and separated and the dross cast away and consumed. -- Flavel %% A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday. -- Thomas Ybarra %% A Christian is the highest style of man. -- Young %% A Computer Date - A calculated risk. %% A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% A Crusader knight, returning from the wars, is welcomed at his gate by his wife to whom he recounts his triumphs and the number of heathen he has slain. His wife, pointing to a row of dolls of various sizes, replies with pride, "And I to, my lord, have not been idle." -- G. W. E. Russell %% A Democrat is someone who would be a Republican if he had the money. %% A Democratic nation, at least when organized to secure the political rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, can be a large and populous nation. -- Michael Scully %% A Dill Pickle makes a soggy bookmark %% A District of Columbia ordinance makes it unlawful for small boys to throw stones, at any time, at any place. %% A Dozen, a Gross and a Score, plus three times the square root of four, divided by seven, plus five times eleven, equals nine squared and not a bit more. ((12 + 144 + 20 + (3 * 4^1/2)) / 7) + (5 * 11) = 9^2 +0 %% A Dublin lawyer died in poverty and many barristers of the city subscribed to a fund for his funeral. The Lord Chief Justice of Orbury was asked to donate a shilling. "Only a shilling?" said the man. "Only a shilling to bury an attorney? Here's a guinea; go and bury 20 of them." %% A Dukakis aide walked into the meeting with the poll results from the Quayle-Bentsen debate and presented Dukakis with the results...... "We got some good news and some bad news sir. The good news is that Bentsen won the debate hands down and it looks like 80 percent of those polled would vote for the democratic ticket." "well, that's great news! What could be so bad after hearing news like that?" "Almost all of that 80 percent said they would shoot you after the election." %% A Fjord is a Swedish automobile. [No, damnit, it's Norwegian.] %% A Fortran compiler is the hobgoblin of little minis. %% A Frenchman who lived in Alsace Had sex with a virgin named Grace. When he popped her cherry, She made things hairy By bleeding all over his face. %% A Frenchman, a Russian, and an Italian are in heaven discussing their respective deaths; they realize they all died because of cars. The Frenchman was making love to his girlfriend while on the highway and died in a fatal accident. The Italian drove his Ferrari so fast, he wiped out, crashed into a tree, died. The Russian saved all his rubles for a year to buy a Lada, and starved to death. %% A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% A German, upon hearing that Americans like to eat their steak rare, (often referred to as "Bloody steak") went into an American restaurant to try this meal. When the waiter came to take his order, he said, "I would like a bloody steak." The waiter replied, "Would you like some Fucking wine too ?" %% A God alone can comprehend a God. -- Young %% A Guardian notices the open side of the structure, and his suspicions are aroused. %% A Harvard neurologist has found that caffeine is a good all-purpose insecticide: it kills off such nasties as mosquito larvae and tobacco hornworms. The conclusion (apologies to Hack Wilson): drink enough coffee and you won't have bugs! %% A Jew and a Czech visit the zoo. In the bear cage there are two bears, a male and a female (how conveeeenient). Well, the Czech gets a little too close to the cage and one of the bears grabs him into the cage and swallows him whole. The Jew frantically flags down the owner of the zoo and insists that they dissect the bear so that the Czech could have a decent burial. The owner agrees and asks the Jew which bear ate the Czech. The Jew points to the male bear. The male bear is dissected and the Czech is not inside. The moral of the story is: *Don't ever* trust a Jew when he tells you that the Czech (check) is in the mail. %% A Jewish college student telegrams home to his dad, "Need $50 to take out nice girl". Dad replies, "Here's $25 - buy a duck". The guy is a little confused, but goes out and purchases a duck and a leash. The student is walking his duck down 42nd street, and approaches a prostitute. He asks her, "Excuse me, I don't have any money, and I've never had sex before, would you have sex with me if I give you my duck?" Now this hooker was sympathetic towards the boy, and agreed to his proposition. So they went up to her room and had a wonderful time. In fact, she was so impressed, she told him: "Listen, you were _so_ good that I'll give you your duck back if you do it to me again." Of course, the student agreed, and when they were finished the second time, he left with his duck. As he was crossing Main Street, a truck passed by, and the driver didn't notice the duck, and BAMMM! . . . The driver stopped and told the guy, "Gee, I'm sorry about the duck, let me give you $5." The guy went home and wired his dad: "I got a fuck for a duck, a duck for a fuck, and 5 bucks for a fucked up duck." %% A Jewish gentleman marries into a Gypsy family. As a wedding gift, her father sets him up with a chain of empty stores. %% A Liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. -- Robert Frost %% A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. -- Alan J. Perlis %% A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity in his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and exceptional ability in that particular field." %% A Los Angeles ordinance forbids a person to have a hippopotamus in his possession. %% A Los Angeles policeman pulled alongside a speeding car on the freeway. Glancing at it, he was astounded to see that the woman at the wheel was knitting! The cop cranked down his window and yelled, "PULL OVER!" "NO," the woman yelled back, "IT'S A PAIR OF SOCKS!" %% A Mahler symphony is full of surprises--but each surprise, on second hearing, turns out to be an *inevitable* surprise. -- Edward Abbey %% A Man takes his wife hunting, and impresses on her again and again that " If you shoot a deer, don't let someone else claim that they shot it also and that since they killed it... it's their deer!" So ... he's in his stand hardly for 10 minutes when he hears his wife shooting nearby. He rushes over to her stand to find her pointing her gun at a man who is loudly disclaiming... " It's your deer lady..It's your deer... Just lemme get my saddle off it!!!!" %% A Master of Art Is not worth a fart. -- Andrew Boorde (1490?-1549) %% A Mechanical Engineer, an Electrical Engineer and a Software Engineer collaborate on building a car. So, they get it finished and take it out one day into the countryside for a drive, check it out etc. Suddenly, as they drive down a hill, the car runs out of control, skids wildly and crashes in a heap at the bottom!! "Jeez, better check the mechanics again" says the Mechanical Engineer. "OK, I'll go through the circuitry again" says the Electrical Engineer. "No wait, let's take it back to the top of the hill and try it again" says the Software Engineer... %% A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water's edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports, "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin colony and overfly it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs. -- Audobon Society Magazine %% A Millet man tried to have his marriage voided when he found out her father didn't have a license for his shotgun. %% A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and the police. -- Mr. Dooley %% A NEW life awaits you in the OFF WORLD colony, the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure ! New climates, recreational facilities ... The custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant designed especially for YOUR needs !! -- Bladerunner %% A New York City judge ruled that if two women behind you at the movies insist on discussing the probable outcome of the film, you have the right to turn around and blow a Bronx cheer at them. %% A New York City ordinance prohibits the shooting of rabbits from the rear of a Third Avenue street car -- if the car is in motion. %% A New Yorker is riding down the road in his new Mercedes. So intent is he on the cocaine in his hand he completely misses a turn and his car plunges over the five-hundred-foot cliff to be smashed into pieces at the bottom. As the on-lookers rush to the edge of the cliff they see him fifty feet from the top of the cliff clinging to a stunted bush with all his strength. "Dear Lord," he prays, "I never asked you for nothin' before, but I'm askin' you know: Save me, Lord, save me." Booms the Lord: "LET GO OF THE BRANCH." "But Lord, if I do that, I'll fall!" "TRUST ME, LET GO OF THE BRANCH." "But Lord, I'm gonna fall and die..." "TRUST ME TO SAVE YOU. LET GO OF THE BRANCH." Okay, Lord, I'll trust you, here I... here I go!" And he falls to his death. "DUMB YANKEE." %% A New Yorker was driving through Berkeley when he saw a big crowd gathered by the side of the street. Curiousity got the better of him and he leaned out of his window to ask an onlooker what was going on. The fellow explained that a protestor against the U.S. position in South America had doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. "That's terrible," gasped the man. "But why is everyone still standing around?" "Well, they're taking up a collection for his wife and kids," the onlooker explained. "Would you be willing to help?" "Hey, sure," said the New Yorker. "I suppose I could spare a gallon or two." %% A Newfie and a Nova Scotian are working on a barn roof. Their only way up or down is a long ladder, which of course falls over while they are up on the roof. Theres nobody around to help them and it is getting late so they both decide to look for something soft on the ground to jump down on top of. The only thing that they can see is a pile of manure. The Newfie decides to jump first, so down he goes. The Nova Scotian calls down to him, "Are you alright? How deep is it?" to which the Newfie replies, "I'm ok, it was only up to my knees." So the Nova Scotian jumps off the roof and lands in the pile of manure and it comes up to his neck. He says to the Newfie, "I thought you said it only came up to your knees!" to which he replies, "It did! ... I jumped head first." %% A Nixon [is preferable to] a Dean Rusk -- who will be passionately wrong with a high sense of consistency. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% A Norse god decides to assume human form, come down from Valhalla, and check out the local action. He finds himself in the piano bar of Caesar's Boardwalk Regency in Atlantic City, and sits down to sip an Acquavit or two. After a few minutes, an extremely attractive young woman, having been taken with his form and features, sends a drink down to him, then joins him. The chemistry between them is immediate and total. They have the next drink in her room, and spend the night repeatedly making passionate love. The woman has no idea of her partner's true identity; all she knows is he's driving her mad. In the morning, the Norse god jumps into the shower. Reflecting on the previous night he decides that he wants to be honest with his lover. Without even bothering to wrap himself in a towel, he leaps from the shower into the room, where the woman is still in bed, exhausted. He kneels beside the bed, looks deep into her eyes and says, "Honey, I have something very important to tell you -- I'm Thor!". The woman looks at him. "You're Thor?", she says. "My inthides feel like grated cheeth!" %% A Polish worker walks into a bank to deposit his paycheck. He has heard about Poland's economic problems, and he asks what would happen to his money if the bank collapsed. "All of our deposits are guaranteed by the finance ministry, sir," the teller replies. "But what if the finance ministry goes broke?" the worker asks. "Then the government will intercede to protect the working class," the teller says. "But what if the government goes broke?" the worker asks. "Our socialist comrades in the Soviet Union naturally will come to our assistance," the teller responds with growing irritation. "And if the Soviet Union goes broke?" the worker asks. "Idiot!" the teller snorts. "Isn't that worth losing one lousy paycheck?" -- Currently making the rounds in Warsaw (1984) %% A Polock and a Wop were discussing how far each could make a dime stretch, and agreed to try it. They met days latter to see who got the most of their dime. The Wop bought a cigar and smoked one-third the first day and saved the ashes. He smoked one-third the second day and saved the ashes. Then he smoked the remaining one-third and saved the ashes. The next day he gave the ashes to his wife to use for her rose garden as good fertilizer. He told the polock, "I know that you can't beat that for stretching a dime" The Polock said, "I beat you. I bought a polish sausage for my dime. The first day I ate one-half, and the second day I ate the other half. The third day I used the skin for a rubber. The fourth day I took a crap in the skin and sewed it up. The fifth day I took it back to the butcher and told him it smelled like shit and he gave me my money back. The next day the butcher having put it back in the showcase, sold it to a Wop as pepperoni. %% A President cannot always be popular. -- Harry S. Truman, "Memoirs, Vol. II", 1955 %% A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun. %% A Rare Conjunction of Stars means bad luck for the rest of your life. %% A Riverside, California, health ordinance states that two persons may not kiss each other without first wiping their lips with carbolized rosewater. %% A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, "Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?" holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. Yet, added he, none of you can tell where it pinches me. -- Plutarch %% A Russian, a Cuban, an American and a Lawyer are in a train. The Russian takes a bootle of the Best Vodka out of his pack; pours some into a glass, drinks it, and says: "In USSR, we have the best vodka of the world, nowhere in the world you can find Vodka as good as the one we produce in Ukrainia. And we have so much of it, that we can just throw it away..." Saying that, he open the window and throw the rest of the bottle thru it. All the others are quite impressed. The Cuban takes a pack of Havanas, takes one of them, lights it and begins to smoke it saying: "In Cuba, we have the best cigars of the world: Havanas, nowhere in the world there is so many and so good cigare and we have so much of them, that we can just throw them away...". Saying that, he throws the pack of havanas thru the window. One more time, everybody is quite impressed. At this time, the American just stands up, opens the window, and throws the Lawyer through it... %% A Scholar asked his Master: Could you advise me of a proper vocation, Master? The Master replied: Some men can earn their keep with the power of their minds. Others must use their strong backs, legs and hands. This is the same in nature as it is with man. Some animals acquire their food easily, such as rabbits, hogs & goats. Other animals must struggle for their food, like beavers, moles & ants. So you see, the nature of the vocation must fit the individual. But I have no abilities, desires, or imagination, Master, the scholer sobbed. Have you ever thought of becoming a salesman? . . . the Master queried. %% A Scot is vacationing in Maine. While walking through the woods he sees an animal he doesn't recognize. He shrugs in curiosity and keeps on walking. A few miles down the trail he happens upon a Park Ranger. He describes the animal to the ranger and asks what it was. The ranger tells him that it was a moose. The Scot replies (in his heavy accent), "Lord, if that's what yer mouses look like here in America, I'd hate t' see yer cats!" %% A Scotsman and a Jew went to a restaurant. After a hearty meal, the waitress came by with the inevitable check. To the amazement of all, the Scotsman was heard to say, "I'll pay it!", and he actually did. The next morning's newspaper carried the news item: "JEWISH VENTRILOQUIST FOUND MURDERED IN BLIND ALLEY". %% A Scotsman wuz in London fur a fitbaw gemm. He hud tae yaze the phone in the call bokes. Effter putting a shullin in the hole he could nae get it tae wurk. The opurater came own the line and asked (REAL ENGLISH ACCENT NOW!) I say, is there money in the box. The Scotsman replied " Naw thurs jest me." Explanation if needed, money as in cash when pronounced by a Scotsman is muny - meaning many. %% A Scott was walking along the beach when he happened to notice a bottle on the sand which had obviously washed ashore. Thinking that it might contain something of value (i.e. anything over 120 proof), he picked it up, and pulled out the cork. As soon as he had unstoppered the bottle, a leprechaun popped out in a cloud of smoke and other pyrotechnics. "Oh thank you for liberating me, brave sir," quoth the leprechaun, "I've been trapped in this bottle for 40 millena. In recompense for your deed, I shall grant you three wishes." "Wella now," replied the Scott, "I'd surely like a nice jug of fine country ale." Immediately, there appeared before him a large (7 gallons) glass container of golden ale; the Scott immediately opened this up and chugged it down, and then emitted a hearty belch. Imagine his surprise when as soon as he had lain it down, it magically refilled itself to the top. "Special feature," explained the leprechaun, "it can never be emptied! Now, what would you like for your other two wishes?" "Why that's a fantastic idea!" exclaimed the Scott. "I'll take two more of the same!" %% A Senator dies and goes to the Pearly Gates. There is a long line there so the Senator goes to the head of the line and says, "I'm Senator Blamsphey." Saint Peter looks at him and says, "You'll have to wait in line like anybody else." Shortly thereafter, a lawyer shows up and goes to the head of the line. Saint Peter sends him back, too. Then, a former Prime Minister dies and the same thing happens. A little while later, this doctor comes strolling by, goes to the head of the line, and Saint Peter lets him into Heaven. Well, the Senator, lawyer, and ex-Prime Minister are quite upset, so they go to Saint Peter and ask him why they let a doctor through but they wouldn't talk to them. Saint Peter says, "Oh. That was no doctor. That was God; he just likes playing doctor." %% A Smith & Wesson *ALWAYS* beats 4 Aces. %% A Smith and Wesson beats four aces. %% A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government. The theory of nationality, therefore, is a retrograde step in history. -- Lord Acton (1834-1902) %% A Still Tongue Keeps a Happy Life. %% A Sultan said sadly, "One strives To please all my fifty-six wives. But, alas, intromission Gives me the condition That's commonly known as the hives." %% A Texan in New York City needed to call a nearby community from a pay phone. "Deposit $1.85 please," instructed the operator. Pulling himself up to full height and dropping into his thickest Texas drawl, he objected, "Ma'am, I'm from Texas, and in Texas we can place a call to Hell and back for $1.85!" "I understand, sir," retorted the operator, "but in Texas, that's a local call." %% A Treasury of Filthy Religious Art Masterpieces -- title of book once proposed to Simon & Schuster %% A True Story... As many of you know Winston Churchill was a stickler for insisting that his subordinates use the correct choice of words. Otherwise the intended meaning could be lost or miscontrued. To make the point he used to like to tell this story... A man goes to see his doctor and says 'Doctor, I've been thinking about this for a long time and I've decided I want to be castrated.' To which the doctor replies, 'Are you sure?' And our friend replies, 'Yes, I've thought about it for a long time and my wife agrees that it would be the best thing to do.' And so into the hospital our friend goes and after surgery he is wheeled into a crowded recovery room where the man lying next to him is moaning and restless. Concerned, our friend asks the man what they did to him. 'I was circumcised.' To which our friend exclaims, 'Dammit, THAT'S the word!!' %% A UNIX saleslady, Lenore, Enjoys work, but she likes the beach more. She found a good way To combine work and play: She sells C shells by the seashore. %% A University without students is like an ointment without a fly. -- Ed Nather, professor of astronomy at UT Austin %% A Vulcan can no sooner be disloyal than he can exist without breathing. -- Kirk, "The Menagerie," stardate 3012.4 %% A White House well filled, a little peanut field well tilled, and a wife who will go to the Bronx are great riches. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% A Woman, impudent and mannish grown Is not more loath'd than an effeminate Man. -- William Shakespeare %% A [golf] ball hitting a tree shall be deemed not to have hit the tree. Hitting a tree is simply bad luck and has no place in a scientific game. The player should estimate the distance the ball would have traveled if it had not hit the tree and play the ball from there, preferably atop a nice firm tuft of grass. -- Donald A. Metz %% A [golf] ball sliced or hooked into the rough shall be lifted and placed in the fairway at a point equal to the distance it carried or rolled into the rough. Such veering right or left frequently results from friction between the face of the club and the cover of the ball and the player should not be penalized for the erratic behavior of the ball resulting from such uncontrollable physical phenomena. -- Donald A. Metz %% A \fIting\fR with legs upturned. Furthers removal of stagnating stuff. One takes a concubine for the sake of her son. No blame. %% A army's effectiveness depends on its size, training, experience and morale ... and morale is worth more than all the other factors combined. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% A baby chick asks the momma chicken: "Are we human?" Momma Chicken: "No, we are chickens." Baby Chick: "Are we born?" Momma Chicken: "No, we are laid." Baby Chick: "Are humans laided?" Momma Chicken: "Some are, others are chicken:-)" %% A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on. -- Carl Sandburg %% A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other. %% A baby is the human race's way of insisting that the universe give it another chance. -- Solomon Short %% A baby usually wakes up in the wee-wee hours of the morning. %% A bachelor is a man who never made the same mistake once. %% A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce. -- Don Quinn %% A bachelor is an unaltared male. %% A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever. -- Helen Rowland %% A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and miserable dinner. -- Jean de La Bruyere %% A bad cause will never be supported by bad means and bad men. -- Thomas Paine %% A bad little girl in Madrid, A most reprehensible kid, Told her Tante Louise That her cunt smelled like cheese, And the worst of it was that it did! %% A bad marriage is like a horse with a broken leg, you can shoot the horse, but it dont fix the leg. %% A bad standard is better than nothing. It gives you something to violate. -- The Hammer Forum, 1986 %% A bad workman quarrels with the man who calls him that. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. -- Robert Frost %% A bank robber in Buffalo entered and placed a bag over his head. He forgot to poke eyeholes and was blinded, and promptly tackled by security guards and customers. %% A bank robber in Los Angeles told the clerk not to give him cash, but to deposit the money in his checking account. -- Bill Bryson %% A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% A bar patron returned from the men's room grumbling to himself. "What's the trouble, buddy?" the bartender inquired. "You got John Wayne toilet paper in there!" "What do you mean?" the barkeeper asked. "It's rough, it's tough, and it doesn't take shit from nobody." %% A baseball pitcher with a sore arm was in the throws of agony. %% A baseball player who makes a spectacular defensive play always leads off the next inning as batter. -- Bob Smith %% A basic premise is an absolute that permits no co-operation with its antithesis and tolerates no tolerance. -- Hugh Akston %% A bather whose clothing was strewed By breezes that left her quite nude, Saw a man come along And, unless I'm quite wrong, You expected this line to be lewd. %% A bathroom hook will be loaded to capacity immediately upon becoming available. This also applies to freeways, closets, playgrounds, downtown hotels, taxis, parking lots, bookcases, wallets, purses, pockets, pipe racks, basement shelves, and so on. The list is endless. -- John Joyce %% A battery-powered brass lantern is on the trophy case. %% A beachcomber of 25 had been shipwrecked on a desert island since the age of six. One day, while in search of food, he stumbled across a beautifully sensuous female lying on the beach nearly naked; she'd been washed ashore from another shipwreck that morning. After they got over their initial surprise at seeing each other, the girl wanted to know how long he had been alone on this barren bit of land. "Almost twenty years," he answered. "Twenty years!" she exclaimed. "But how ever did you survive?" "Oh, I fish, dig for clams, and gather berries and coconuts," he replied. "And what do you do for sex?" she asked. "What's that?" He looked puzzled. Whereupon the maiden pulled the innocent young man down onto the sand beside her and proceeded to demonstrate. After they had finished, she asked how he had enjoyed it. "Great!" was the reply. "But look what it did to my clamdigger!" %% A bear trap closes on your foot! %% A bearded prospector marched into an assayer's office back in the California gold rush days and planted two whopping nuggets on the counter. The clerk registered amazement. "Well," rasped the prospector angrily, "don't just stand there. Assay something!" %% A beat schizophrenic said, "Me? I am not I, I'm a tree." But another, more sane, Shouted, "I'm a Great Dane!" And covered his pants leg with pee. %% A beautiful belle of Del Norte Is reckoned disdainful and haughrty Because during the day She says: "Boys, keep away!" But she fucks in the gloaming like forty. %% A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent, a kind eye makes contradiction an assent, an enraged eye makes beauty deformed. This little member gives life to every part about us; and I believe the story of Argus implies no more, than the eye is in every part; that is to say, every other part would be mutilated, were not its force represented more by the eye than even by itself. -- Addison %% A beautiful lady named Psyche Is loved by a fellow named Ikey. One thing about Ike The lady can't like Is his prick, which is dreadfully spikey. %% A beautiful rainbow can be seen over the falls and to the east. %% A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly, little fact. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% A beautiful woman is a blessing from Heaven, but a good cigar is a smoke. -- Kipling %% A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% A beautiful woman is paradise for the eyes, hell for the soul, and purgatory for the purse. %% A beautiful woman moved in next door. So I went over and returned a cup of sugar. "You didn't borrow this." "I will." -- Rod Schmidt %% A bee is not a busier animal than a blockhead. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% A beer delayed is a beer denied. %% A beer in need is a beer indeed. %% A beetling young woman named Pridgets Had a violent abhorrence of midgets; Off the end of a wharf She once pushed a dwarf Whose truncation reduced her to fidgets. -- Edward Gorey %% A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that balances are correct. -- from "Manual of Maud'Dib" by the Princess Irulan %% A big store buyer had been on the road for nearly two months. Each week he would send his wife a telegram saying, "Can't come home yet. Still buying." His wife knew that these buying trips usually involved more than business. She tolerated this particular jaunt for a while, but when the third month rolled by and she'd still seen nothing of her husband but the weekly telegrams, she wired him, "Better come home. I'm selling what you're buying." %% A big tough guy is drinking in a bar when a flamboyant faggot swishes up to him, simpers, and says, "Hey, wanna play some bar football?" "Fuck off, faggot." "C'mon, big boy," insists the fag. "Try bar football, you'll like it." Half drunk, the guy gives in. "Fuck, what is it, anyway?" "You down a shot and that's a touchdown," explains the fag excitedly, "then drop your pants and fart for the extra point." "I'll go first," the gay guy shrieks, then quickly downs his whiskey. "Touchdown, six points," he yells, then just as quickly drops his trou and emits a fart. "Seven to zip, your turn!" The tough guy swallows his whiskey in one gulp, then pulls down his pants. In a flash the fag leaps behind him and sticks a finger up his ass, squealing, "Block that kick! Block that kick!" %% A big wagon for loading. One may undertake something. No blame. %% A big-bosomed Bunny named Gression Sold cigars at a key-club concession. When she swiveled about Even strong men cried out, For her costume did not keep her flesh in. %% A bigamist is a guy who took one too many. %% A billion here, a couple of billion there -- first thing you know it adds up to be real money. -- Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen %% A biology graduate student went to Borneo to take some samples for his thesis work. He flew there, found a guide with a canoe to take him up the river to the remote site he where he would make his collections. About noon on the second day of travel up the river they began to hear drums. Being a city boy by nature, the biologist was disturbed by this. He asked the guide, "What are those drums?" The guide turned to him and said, "Drums OK, but VERY BAD when they stop." Well the biologist settled down a little at this, and things went reasonably well for about two weeks. Then, just as they were packing up the camp to leave, the drums suddenly stopped! This hit the biologist like a ton of bricks, and he yelled at the guide, "The Drums have stopped, what happens now?" The guide crouched down, covered his head with his hands and said, "Bass Solo." %% A bird does not sing because it has an answer... it sings because it has a song. -- Ancient Chinese proverb %% A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. -- Cervantes %% A bird in the bush can't relieve itself in your hand. %% A bird in the bush usually has a friend in there with him. %% A bird in the hand can be messy. %% A bird in the hand is dead. -- Rhonda Boozer %% A bird in the hand is finger-licking good. %% A bird in the hand is safer than two overhead. %% A bird in the hand is worth ten in the bush. %% A bird in the hand is worth two off the wrist. -- British Proverb %% A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% A bird in the hand makes blowing your nose difficult. -- Solomon Short %% A bird in the hand makes it awfully hard to blow your nose. %% A bird in the hand makes it hard to blow your nose. %% A bird in the hand might. %% A bisexual is a man who likes girls as well as the next fellow. %% A bit of talcum Is always walcum -- Ogden Nash (1902-1971) %% A bitter jest, when the satire comes too near the truth, leaves a sharp sting behind. -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% A black fellow goes to a doctor to inquire about getting a vasectomy. The doctor explains the procedure, and they make an appointment for the actual operation. A few days go by. On the scheduled day of the vasectomy, the black guy shows up wearing a tuxedo. The doctor explains that there is no reason to be so formal. The guy replies, "Well, Doc, I figure if I'm going to be impotent, I might as well look impotent." %% A bleeding heart can be hell on the carpeting. -- Solomon Short %% A blind and dumb man sits in an honorable place, And to everybody tells the truth. A mirror %% A blind man will not thank you for a looking-glass. -- Thomas Fuller %% A blind person comes into a hardware store with an eye-dog. He starts swinging the dog over his head by the leash ! A clerk comes running over, and as clerks do, he asks: "May I help you ?" The blind person calmly replies, "No thanks, just looking around..." %% A blind rabbit was hopping through the woods, tripping over logs and crashing into trees. At the same time, a blind snake was slithering through the same forest, crashing into rocks and trees. The rabbit and the snake collided head-on. "Please excuse me, sir, I'm blind and I bumped into you accidentally," said the rabbit. "That's quite all right," said the snake, "I have the same problem." "All my life I've been wondering what I am," said the rabbit, "Do you think you could help me find out?" "I'll try," said the snake. He gently coiled himself around the rabbit. "Well, you're covered with soft fur, you have a little fluffy tail and long ears. You're a bunny rabbit!" "Oh, thank you very much!" said the rabbit. "I don't know what I am either," said the snake. "Do you suppose you could help me?" The rabbit pawed over the snake. "You're low, cold and slimy..." He felt the snake's underbelly. "And you have no balls." "You're an attorney!" %% A blow from the frying pan, if it doesn't hurt, blackens. -- Proverb from "Life in Hell" %% A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword. -- Richard Burton (1577-1640) %% A bobby of Nottingham Junction Whose organ had long ceased to function Deceived his good wife For the rest of her life With the aid of his constable's truncheon. %% A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. -- Jack London %% A book is like a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out. -- G. C. Lichtenberg %% A book is the only immortality. -- Rufus Choate %% A book is the work of a mind, doing its work in the way that a mind deems best. That's dangerous. Is the work of some mere individual mind likely to serve the aims of collectively accepted compromises, which are known in the schools as 'standards'? Any mind that would audaciously put itself forth to work all alone is surely a bad example for the students, and probably, if not downright antisocial, at least a little off-center, self-indulgent, elitist. ... It's just good pedagogy, therefore, to stay away from such stuff, and use instead, if film-strips and rap-sessions must be supplemented, 'texts,' selected, or prepared, or adapted, by real professionals. Those texts are called 'reading material.' They are the academic equivalent of the 'listening material' that fills waiting-rooms, and the 'eating material' that you can buy in thousands of convenient eating resource centers along the roads. -- The Underground Grammarian %% A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. -- Gian Vincenzo Gravina %% A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you. -- Bert Leston Taylor, "The So-Called Human Race", 1922 %% A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours. %% A born executive is a guy whose father owns the company. %% A boss with no humor is like a job that's no fun. %% A bottle is sitting on the table. %% A bottle of sweat for every bottle of wine. %% A box has nine ears of corn in it. A squirrel carries out three ears a day, but it takes him nine days to carry all the corn away. Why? Carries an ear of corn and two ears for hearing... %% A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet golden treasure inside is hid. %% A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) %% A boy is a magical creature -- you can lock him out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart. -- Allan Beck %% A boy without mischief is like a bowling ball without a liquid center. -- Homer in "Tell-Tale Head", from The Simpsons %% A brave man is sometimes a desperado; a bully is always a coward. -- Haliburton %% A bright young university tutor Fed his sex history to a computer. Due to pulse-circuit stalls, It reprogrammed his balls, And he found himself totally neuter. %% A brilliant maneuver destroys the bottle. %% 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." %% A brown sack is here. %% A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate. %% A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well as afterward. %% A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation. %% A bug in the hand is better than one as yet undetected. %% A bunch of girly-men. -- Bush supporter Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the Democratic presidential candidates, one of whom had won the Medal of Honor. (I'm not a hero, but I play one on TV.) %% A bunch of the boys were whooping it in the Malemute saloon; The kid that handles the music box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou. -- Robert W. Service %% A bureaucracy is like a septic tank -- all the really big shits float to the top. %% A bureaucrat's castle is his desk ... and parking place. Proceed cautiously when changing either. -- Douglas Evelyn %% A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of everything before he destroys it. %% A burglar had been casing a particular house for some time. Finally, he saw the owners leave for what appeared to be an extended camping trip. That night he broke in through a basement window and was trying to find his way in the dark when he heard what seemed to him to be the voice of a very old woman saying "Shame on you! I see you, and Jesus sees you!" Startled, the burglar snarls back "Shut up, Grandma, or you're gonna get hurt!" He shines his flashlight all around, but no Grandma. Again the voice: "Shame on you! I see you, and Jesus sees you!" Finally, the beam of the flashlight finds a large cage and in it a pretty upset parrot. Relieved, the burglar turns back around and starts toward the stairs, only to spot an enormous slavering doberman waiting at the top. Just then the parrot screams, "Sic'em, Jesus!" %% A burlesque dancer, a pip Named Virginia, could peel in a zip; But she read science fiction And died of constriction Attempting a Moebius strip. -- Cyril Kornbluth, "The Unfortunate Topology" %% A burly troll stands by the bridge and insists you throw him a treasure before you may cross. %% A burning dog needs no chimney. %% A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator. -- Paul Valery %% A businessman was awe-struck by the beautiful redhead at the hotel bar. Seeing his interest, she quietly informed him that she was a prostitute and that her price was $500. He was taken aback by the price, but after a few minutes of thought he took her up to his room. She spent a few minutes in the bathroom and was shocked when she came out to see him masturbating furiously on the bed. "What are you doing?", she asked. "Baby, for $500, you're not going to get the easy one!" %% 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. %% 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. %% A camel is a horse designed by a committee. %% A camel is a horse designed by committee. A brontosaurus is a salamander designed to Mil-Spec. %% A camel looks like a horse that was planned by a committee. -- Vogue Magazine %% A can of ASPARAGUS, 73 pigeons, some LIVE ammo, and a FROZEN DAQUIRI!! %% A can of worms full of Pandora's boxes. %% A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other. %% A cannibal warrior is experiencing severe gastric distress, so he goes to his Village Witch Doctor with his complaint. The VWD examines him and concludes that "something he ate disagreed with him," so the VWDoctor begins to cross examine him about his recent diet. "Well, I ate a missionary yesterday. Do you think that could be the problem?" The VWD says "Hmmmm." (All Doctors say "Hmmmm.") "That could be. Tell me a bit about this missionary." "Well, he was tall for a white man, wearing a brown robe. He was walking down the trail, not watching for danger, so I speared him, dragged him home, cleaned him, boiled him and ate him. With lots of ketchup." "Ah! There's your problem," smiles the VWD. You boiled him, but he was a friar." %% A car that starts when you have to go to work won't turn over on your day off. -- Doug Larson %% A card game doesn't exactly prepare me for this. Yes, the stakes are higher, but then isn't that where the game gets interesting, Commander. -- Riker and Picard, "The Price", stardate 43385.6 %% A career is great, but you can't run your fingers through its hair -- Graffiti 4/13/83 %% A careless young virgin named Wright Got drunk with her boyfriend one night. She awoke in a snit With her maidenhead split, To be told that she sure had been tight. %% A carpet installer decides to take a cigarette break after completing the installation in the first of several rooms he has to do. Finding them missing from his pocket he begins searching, only to notice a small lump in his recently completed carpet-installation. Not wanting to rip up all that work for a lousy pack of cigarettes he simply walks over and pounds the lump flat. He decides to forego the break continues on to the other rooms to be carpeted. At the end of the day he's completed his work and loading his tools into his trucks when two events occur almost simultaneously: he spies his pack of cigarettes on the dashboard of the truck, and the lady of the house calls out "Have you seen my parakeet?" %% A castaway was washed ashore after many days on the open sea. The island on which he landed was populated by savage cannibals who tied him, dazed and exhausted, to a thick stake. They then proceeded to cut his arms with their spears and drink his blood. This continued for several days until the castaway could stand no more. He yelled for the cannibal chief and declared, "You can kill me if you want to, but this torture with the spears has got to stop. Dammit, I'm tired of getting stuck for the drinks." %% 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 grodge. %% A cautious young fellow named Tunney Had a whang that was worth any money. When eased in half-way, The girl's sigh made him say, "Why the sigh?" "For the rest of it, honey." %% A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness. %% A celebrity is a person who works a lifetime to become well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized. -- Fred Allen %% A censor is a man who thinks he knows more than you ought to. -- Granville Hicks %% A certain amount of opposition is a help, not a hindrance. Kites rise against the wind, not with it. %% A certain hard-working young hooker Was such an enchanting good-looker, There were fights 'mongst the fuzz Over whose turn it was To pinch her, and frisk her, and book her. %% A certain monk had a habit of pestering the Grand Tortue (the only one who had ever reached the Enlightenment 'Yond Enlightenment), by asking whether various objects had Buddha-nature or not. To such a question Tortue invariably sat silent. The monk had already asked about a bean, a lake, and a moonlit night. One day he brought to Tortue a piece of string, and asked the same question. In reply, the Grand Tortue grasped the loop between his feet and, with a few simple manipulations, created a complex string which he proferred wordlessly to the monk. At that moment, the monk was enlightened. From then on, the monk did not bother Tortue. Instead, he made string after string by Tortue's method; and he passed the method on to his own disciples, who passed it on to theirs. %% A certain sweet girl from Key West Was uncommonly large in the chest. Any man's close attention To her outsize dimension Brought his own measurement to its best. %% A certain unmusical Persian Had a curious sort of perversion. He thought that the part That was words was by Art And was sure that the tunes were Gilbertian. %% A certain young fellow named Vaughn Once felt irresistibly drawn To exhibiting fun That involved more than one So he screwed his best girl on the lawn. %% A certain young man, it was noted, Went about in the heat thickly-coated; He said, "You may scoff, But I shan't take it off; Underneath I am horribly bloated." -- Edward Gorey %% A certain young person of Ghent, Uncertain if lady or gent, Shows his organs at large For a small handling charge To assist him in paying the rent. %% 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!) %% A certain young woman named Mame Longs to play in a tough football game. You would think that can't be Since she's female, you see, Yet she's making the team, just the same. %% A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. %% A chair has no problems ... It's there; nobody bothers it. It doesn't have to pay rent or get involved politically. A chair can never stub its toe or misplace its earmuffs. It doesn't have to smile or get a haircut, and you never have to worry that if you take it to a party it will suddenly start coughing or make a scene. People just sit in a chair, and when those people die other people sit in it. %% A chap down in Oklahoma Had a cock that could sing La Paloma, But the sweetness of pitch Couldn't put off the hitch Of impotence, size and aroma. %% A characteristic of the normal child is he doesn't act that way very often. %% 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 chase always involves two parts: first breaking contact, second the retiring action to divorce oneself from the incident. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% A chasm runs southwest to northeast. You are on the south edge. The path exits to the south and to the east. %% A chasm, evidently produced by an ancient river, runs through the cave here. Passages lead off in all directions. %% A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing. %% A chicken doesn't stop scratching just because the worms are scarce. -- John Peers %% A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs. %% A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators. -- Dave Barry %% A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% A child is an angel looking like a clown. -- Thomas S. Monson %% A child miseducated is a child lost. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% A child of 5 could understand this! Fetch me a child of 5. %% A chippy who worked in Black Bluff Had a pussy as large as a muff. It had room for both hands And some intimate glands, And was soft as a little duck's fluff. %% A chiseler is a man who goes stag to a wife-swapping party. %% A chronic disposition to inquiry deprives domestic felines of vital qualities. %% A chubby man with a white beard and a red suit will approach you soon. Avoid him. He's a Commie. %% A circle is a line which meets its other end without ending. %% A circus owner walked into a bar to see everyone crowded about a table watching a little show. On the table was an upside down pot and a duck tap dancing on it. The circus owner was so impressed that he offered to buy the duck from its owner. After some wheelin' and dealin' they settled for $10,000 for the duck and the pot. Three days later the circus owner runs back to the bar in a fury. "Your duck is a ripoff! I put him on the pot before a whole audience and he didn't dance a single step!" "So?" asked the duck's former owner, "did you remember to light the candle under the pot?" %% A circus was to perform in a small town where the locals had never seen a circus. On the night before the first performance one of the elephants escaped. It was hungry and found a garden in an old lady's backyard. The old lady, who had never seen an elephant, was hysterical and called the police. L. Help police! There's a huge monster in my backyard. P. Calm down lady. What's the matter? L. There's a monster in my backyard. P. What's the monster doing? L. It's in my garden pulling up my vegetables with its tail! P. With its tail? What's it doing with them? L. You wouldn't believe me if I told you! %% A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election. -- Bill Vaughan %% A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. -- Herbert Prochnow %% A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die. -- Edward Abbey %% A clash of doctrine is not a disaster - it is an opportunity. %% A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% A clean basement means a cluttered garage. %% A clean conscience improves one's self-esteem. %% A clean limerick is a contradiction in terms. %% A clean tie attracts the soup of the day. %% A clean, neat, and orderly work place is a sure sign of a sick mind. %% A clear conscience needs no public information officer. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% A clear glass bottle is here. %% A clerical student named Pryne Through pain sought to reach the divine: He wore a hair shirt, Quite often ate dirt, And bathed every Friday in brine. -- Edward Gorey %% A clever prophet makes sure of the event first. %% 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 creame. %% A clitoris is a lot like Antarctica; most men know it's there, but few really care. %% A closed mind gathers no intelligence %% A cloud cannot cast a shadow unless the sun is shining behind it. %% A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, if feels an impulsion... this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons. -- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul %% A cloud of darkness falls upon you. %% A cloud of gas puts you to sleep! %% A cloud of purple smoke appears, then clears away to reveal a tall sorcerer wearing tacky shoes. He makes a note of what you've just said, and says "Be nice. This is supposed to be a g-rated adventure." He then vanishes. %% A cloud of purple smoke forms before your very eyes, and dissipates revealing a tall sorcerer in wireframe glasses and blue jeans. he fixes you with a vicious glare and proclaims "Arson is not allowed in this game. Try it again and strict measures shall be taken. You have been warned." He then vanishes into thin air. %% A cloud of purple smoke forms, blocking your way. A voice booms out, "Shop-lifting is not allowed in this game!" %% A cloud of purple smoke suddenly appears out of thin air. You hear a hollow voice say, "Please don't climb the walls." %% A clown is a clown and will always be a clown. -- Babbaluche the cobbler %% A cocksucking steno named Beeman Remarked as she swallowed my semen : "On my minuscule salary I must watch every calorie, So I get `ahead' eating you he-men!" %% A college education shows a man how little other people know. -- Haliburton %% A colonial girl, sweet and sainted, Was by war-striped young Indians tainted. Later, asked of the ravages, She said of the savages, "They aren't as bad as they're painted." %% A column about errors will contain errors. -- Bill Gold %% A comment concerning Paul Simon's newest album, "Rhythm of the Saints:" It seems to me that if you're a Saint, you don't *need* Rhythm, and if you use Rhythm, you *ain't* no Saint! %% 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!" %% A comment on schedules: Ok, how long will it take? For each manager involved in initial meetings add one month. For each manager who says "data flow analysis" add another month. For each unique end-user type add one month. For each unknown software package to be employed add two months. For each unknown hardware device add two months. For each 100 miles between developer and installation add one month. For each type of communication channel add one month. If an IBM mainframe shop is involved and you are working on a non-IBM system add 6 months. If an IBM mainframe shop is involved and you are working on an IBM system add 9 months. Round up to the nearest half-year. -- Brad Sherman By the way, ALL software projects are done by iterative prototyping. Some companies call their prototypes "releases", that's all. %% A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours. -- Milton Berle %% A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. %% A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A committee is a life form with six or more legs, three or more stomachs, and no brain. %% A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% A committee is an animal with a hundred stomachs and no brains. %% A committee is the safest place to pass the buck. -- Gary B. Wright %% A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson %% A commune is where people join together to share their lack of wealth. -- Richard M. Stallman %% A communist is a person who publicly airs his dirty Lenin. -- Jack Pomeroy %% A communist is like a crocodile: when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm. -- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), "An Enemy of the People", 1882 %% A community of matter appears to exist throughout the visible universe, for the stars contain many of the elements which exist in the Sun and Earth. It is remarkable that the elements most widely diffused through the host of stars are some of those most closely connected with the living organisms of our globe, including hydrogen, sodium, magnesium, and iron. May it not be that, at least, the brighter stars are like our Sun, the upholding and energizing centres of systems of worlds, adapted to be the abode of living beings? -- William Huggins %% A company in California has started to market "camouflage toilet paper" for use in the woods and plans to run testimonials from hunters who claim they have been shot at while using ordinary toilet paper (by hunters who mistook them for white-tailed deer). (From 'News of the Weird" in the San Jose Mercury News) %% A company is judged by the president it keeps. -- James Hulbert %% A company is known by the people it keeps. %% A complex system cannot be made to work. It either works or it doesn't %% A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% A component's degree of reliability is directly proportional to its ease of accessibility; i.e., the harder it is to get to, the more often it breaks down. -- Jonathan Waddell %% A compromise is the art of dividing the cake in such a way that each one thinks he is getting the biggest piece. - Ludwig Erhard, in "The Observer", 1958 %% A computer called ILLIAC4 Had a rather tough bug in its core. It chewed up its cards And spewed yards and yards Of illegible tape on the floor. %% A computer error will cause your next paycheck to be for 37 cents. %% A computer is just a toy if it cannot run GNU Emacs -- Steven L. Baur %% A computer salesman visits a company president for the purpose of selling the president one of the latest talking computers. Salesman: "This machine knows everything. I can ask it any question and it'll give the correct answer. Computer, what is the speed of light?" Computer: 186,000 miles per second. Salesman: "Who was the first president of the United States?" Computer: George Washington. President: "I'm still not convinced. Let me ask a question. Where is my father?" Computer: Your father is fishing in Georgia. President: "Hah!! The computer is wrong. My father died over twenty years ago!" Computer: Your mother's husband died 22 years ago. Your father just landed a twelve pound bass. %% A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken. %% 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 %% A condo committee was screening a couple interested in renting an apartment: What kind of work do you do? they were asked. My husband is an engineer and I'm a school-teacher, the wife replied. Any children? asked a committee member. Yes, 7 & 8 years old, the wife replied. Animals? asked another committee member. Oh no! They're very well-behaved! %% A conference of Polish economists was convened. It's object was to try to find a way of increasing the value of the zloty. One delegate suggested that they drill four holes in them and sell them as buttons. %% A confirmed multilinguist, I fear, Finds conditions for flirting severe. A girl scarcely knows The response to a beau's "Bitte, couchez avec mich, my dear." %% A conjecture both deep and profound Is whether a circle is round. In a paper of Erdos written in Kurdish A counterexample is found. %% A conqueror is always a lover of peace. -- Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) [from "On war"; copied by Lenin in his notebook, with notation, "Ah, Ah, witty".] %% A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time. -- Alfred E. Wiggam %% A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% A conservative is a man who wants the rules changed so no one can make a pile the way he did. -- Gregory Nunn %% A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it. %% A consultant is an ordinary person a long way from home. %% A continuing flow of paper is sufficient to continue the flow of paper. -- John M. Dyer %% A contortionist hailing from Lynch Used to rent out his tool by the inch. A foot cost a quid -- He could and he did Stretch it to three in a pinch. %% A cop stopped me for speeding. He said, "Why were you going so fast?" I said, "See this thing my foot is on? It's called an accelerator. When you push down on it, it sends more gas to the engine. The whole car just takes right off. And see this thing? This steers it." -- Steve Wright %% A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample. -- Rebecca West %% A corpulent maiden named Kroll Had a notion exceedingly droll: At a masquerade ball, Dressed in nothing at all, She backed in as a Parker House roll. %% A couch is as good as a chair. %% A country boy goes to the city to make enough money to retire and go back to the country to live. %% A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs. -- German Proverb %% A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% A coup that is known in advance is a coup that does not take place. %% A couple beer cans don't worry me. It's those irresponsible ppl. who're always leaving their barbed wire, dams, survey stakes, &c. around the wilderness that disgust me. i always feel obligated to clean up after them. -- Dave Palmer, arxt@quads.uchicago.edu %% A couple more shots of whiskey, women 'round here start looking good. -- [something about a 10 being a 4 after a six-pack? Ed.] %% A couple of men go to rob a bank. They back their car up to the doors of the bank, tie a chain around the door handles, then around their fender, then hit the gas. The fender rips off the car and they panic and speed away. The police recovered the fender AND THE LICENSE PLATE and tracked down the puzzled crooks. %% A couple took their young son for his first visit to the circus, and by chance their seats were next to the elephant pen. When his father left to buy popcorn, the boy piped up, "Mom, what's that long thing on the elephant?" "That's the elephant's trunk, dear," she replied. "No, not that." "Oh, that's the elephant's tail." "No, Mom. Down underneath." His mother blushed and said, "Oh, that's nothing." Pretty soon the father returned, and the mother went off to get a soda. As soon as she had left the boy repeated his question. "That's the elephant's trunk, son." "Dad, I know what an elephant's trunk is. The thing at the other end." "Oh, that's the elephant's tail." "No. Down there." The father took a good look and explained, "That's the elephant's penis." "Dad, how come when I asked Mom, she said it was nothing?" The man took a deep breath and replied, "Son, I've *spoiled* that woman." %% A couple was fishing near Clombe When the maid began looking quite glum, And said, "Bother the fish! I'd rather coish!" Which they did -- which was why they had come. %% A couple went to see the mystery and horror movies. They loved each shudder. %% A court is a place where what was confused before becomes more unsettled than ever. -- Henry Waldorf Francis %% A cousin of mine once said about money, money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money. -- Gertrude Stein %% A cow eats without a knife. %% A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage. -- Marvin Kitman %% A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites. -- Quintus Curtius Rufus %% A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat. -- Edward Abbey %% A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow. -- Edward Abbey %% A cowhand way out in Seattle Had a dooflicker flat as a paddle. He said, "No, I can't fuck A lamb or a duck, But golly! it just fits the cattle." %% A crane is calling in the shade. Its young answers it. I have a good goblet. I will share it with you. %% A crisis is when you can't say, "Let's just forget the whole thing." -- Ferguson %% A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car. %% A critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned. %% A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak. -- Edward Abbey %% A crusader's wife slipped from the garrison And had an affair with a Saracen. She was not oversexed, Or jealous or vexed, She just wanted to make a comparison. %% A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% A cry of alarm. Arms at evening and at night. Fear nothing. %% A crystal bridge now spans the fissure. %% A customer was bothering the waiter in a restaurant. First he asked that the air-conditioning be turned up because he was too hot, then he asked it be turned down cause he was too cold and so on for about half an hour. Surprisingly, the waiter was very patient, he walked back and forth and never once got angry. So finally a second customer asked him why he didn't throw out the pest. "Oh I don't care," said the waiter with a smile, "we don't even have an air conditioner." %% 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 cyclops, who looks prepared to eat horses (much less mere adventurers), blocks the staircase. From his state of health and the bloodstains on the wall, you gather that he is not very friendly, though he likes people. %% A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern. -- Edgar A. Shoaff %% A cynic is one who will laugh at anything so long as it isn't funny. %% A cynic smells flowers and looks for the casket. %% A daisy chain isn't a riddle, Just some folks who are happy to fiddle, By twos and by threes, On their backs or their knees, And it's fun getting caught in the middle! %% A daredevil skater named Lowe, Leaps barrels arranged in the snow, But is proudest of doing, Some incredible screwing, Since he's jumped thirteen girls in a row! %% A day for firm decisions!!!!! Or is it? %% A day not wasted is a day wasted! %% A day without fusion is like a day without sunshine. %% A day without orange juice is like a day without orange juice. %% A day without radiation is a day without sunshine. %% A day without sunshine is like a day without Anita Bryant. %% A day without sunshine is like a day without orange juice. %% A day without sunshine is like night. %% A dead lizard is a good thing to turn undead. %% A dead man cannot bite. -- Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) %% A deaf ear is the first symptom of a closed mind. %% A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the conditions that make it fail. -- Jerry Ogdin %% A decade after Vietnam, we still cannot understand why "their" Salvadorans fight better than "our" Salvadorans. It is not a matter of their training or their equipment. It has to do with the quality of the society we are asking them to risk death defending. The metaphor of the domino obscures this reality, and the cost our self-imposed blindness is high. San Salvador is closer to Saigon than to Munich. -- William LeoGrande (NYT 3/9/83) %% 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." %% A degenerated and demoralizing musical system is given a disgusting christening as 'swing' and turned loose to gnaw away the moral fiber of young people... Jam sessions, jitterbugs and cannibalistic rhythmic orgies are wooing our youth along the primrose path to Hell! -- the Archbishop of Dublique, 1938 %% A delighted, incredulous bride Remarked to her groom at her side : "I never could quite Believe till tonight Our anatomies would coincide." %% A dentist may decree that oil production increase, and a goose may command that the Great Wall leap into the air. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% 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. %% A deranged vampire bat (a reject from WUMPUS) swoops down from the ceiling and lifts you away... %% A despairing old landlord named Fyfe, With a frigid and quarrelsome wife, Let his third-story front, To a willing young cunt, Who supplied him a new lease on life! %% A desperate spinster from Clare Once knelt in the moonlight all bare, And prayed to her God For a romp on the sod-- 'Twas a passerby answered her prayer. %% A destroyer was patrolling a strait, and picked up a large, unidentified radar target. The destroyer challenged the unknown on the radio: "Vessel off my starboard bow, radar indicates you are on collision course with me. Please identify yourself and alter course." The response came back: "Collision course confirmed. Suggest you alter your course. This is a lighthouse." %% A devil-may-care sort of flapper Was a belle who was seeking a clapper. But not every bum Would be making her come She was after a Phi Beta Kappa. %% A diploma only proves that you know how to look up an answer. -- Solomon Short %% A diplomat and a stage magician are the two professions that have to have a high silk hat. All the tricks that either one of them have are in the hat, and all are known to other diplomats and magicians. %% A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never her age. -- Robert Frost %% A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she'd look stout in a fur coat. %% A diplomat is a man who can tell you to go to hell and make the trip sound pleasurable. -- Samuel Clemens %% A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip. %% A diplomat's life consists of three things: protocol, Geritol, and alcohol. -- Adlai Stevenson %% A direct blow to the heart. The troll dies instantly. %% A dirty book is rarely dusty. %% A dirty joke: The boy fell into the mud! A dirtier joke: A boy and a girl fell into the mud! A more dirty joke: A boy and girl fell into the mud and stayed there! %% A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste. %% A disagreeable task is its own reward. %% A disfiguring car accident will improve your looks. %% A dish full of all kinds of flowers: You can't guess this riddle in two hours. Honey %% A disheveled adventurer stares back at you. %% 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 distraught patient phoned her doctor's office. Was it true, the woman wanted to know, that the medication the doctor had prescribed was for the rest of her life ? She was told that it was. There was a moment of silence before the woman continued, "I'm wondering, then, just how serious my condition is. This prescription is marked 'NO REFILLS'". %% A diva who specializes in risqu'e arias is an off-coloratura soprano ... %% A do-it-yourselfer named Alice, Used a dynamite stick for a phallus. She blew her vagina To South Carolina, And her tits landed somewhere in Dallas. %% A docile kzin. You sought to produce a docile kzin, Nessus. If you think you have produced a docile kzin, come and rejoin us. -- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld" %% A doctor calls up a patient of his and says: I have some good news and some bad news. The patient says: Well, give me the bad news first. Doctor: The lab called with your test results. They said you have 24 hours to live. Patient: 24 HOURS !! Thats terrible !! WHAT could be WORSE ? Doctor: I was trying to get you all day yesterday. %% 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. %% A dog is a dog except when he is facing you. Then he is Mr. Dog. -- Haitian Farmer %% A doll is a doll is a doll. -- F. Sinatra %% A dolly in Dallas named Alice, Whose overworked sex is all callous, Wore the foreskin away On uncircumcised Ray, Through exuberance, tightness, and malice. %% A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% A drawing pin is an excited Smartie %% A dreary young bank clerk named Fennis Wished to foster an aura of menace. To make people afraid He wore gloves of grey suede And white footgear intended for tennis. -- Edward Gorey, "Amphigorey" %% A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you. -- Francoise Sagan %% A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together. -- James H. Boren %% A drink a day keeps the shrink away. -- Edward Abbey %% A drunk is begging money from a judge. "please judge, just a few quarters for poor man". The judge irritated by the man pushes him away, calling him a bum and a drunk and a burden on society. The drunk still persists and keeps following him begging all the way. After a while the judge does start to feel sorry for him somewhat and decides to give him something. Still keeping a stern face he says "I can't give you any money for drinking but here's a quarter go get yourself some coffee you no good bum". The drunk takes the money and with a knowing smile says "God bless you judge, I see you've been there yourself sometimes haven't you". %% A drunk leaves a bar and decides to take a shortcut through a graveyard. It is raining heavily and very dark. The drunk fails to see an open grave and falls into it. He tries to climb out of it, but it is too deep and the rain has turned the dirt to mud and has made it too slippery to climb. He gives up after a while and decides to spend the night there. A while later, another drunk leaves the same bar and decides to take the same shortcut through the graveyard. He, too, falls into that open grave and tries to climb out but the mud is too slippery. The first drunk is still sitting there and watches as the other drunk tries but fails to get out. The first drunk stands up, taps the second drunk on the shoulder and tells him, "You'll never get out!". He did. %% A dry poplar sprouts at the root. An older man takes a young wife. Everything furthers. %% A dulcet-voiced callgirl named Shedd, Who's cultured, well-spoken, well-bred, Had achieved some reknown For her tone going down-- There's a nice civil tongue in her head. %% A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. -- George Eliot %% A dull thump is heard in the distance. %% A dwarf is passing out somewhere in Detroit! %% A eccentric America is a Safe America... %% A elderly man and woman are talking at a nursing home. Says the lady, "I bet I can guess your age." The man grins and agrees to let her try. "OK, pull down your pants", she orders. He complies. "Now pull down your shorts", she continues. Again, the old man does as she says. The old lady squints for a few moments, then announces "You're 92." Dumbfounded, the old man asks "How did you know that?" Says the lady, "You told me yesterday." %% A face that would make a train take a dirt road. %% A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. -- Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers, "Gaudy Night") %% A fading corridor enlightens your insight. %% A fail-safe circuit will destroy others. -- Klipstein %% A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection. %% A fair exterior is a silent recommendation. -- Publilius Syrus %% A fair-haired young damsel named Grace Thought it very, very foolish to place Her hand on your cock When it turned hard as rock, For fear it would explode in your face. %% A fake fortune teller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A falling body always rolls to the most inaccessible spot. -- Theodore M. Bernstein %% A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse, and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened. %% A famous person [I can't remember who] once said something to this effect: "A true gentleman is one who can play the bagpipes--and doesn't." %% A famous phrase that Ho Chi Minh used to say is "Nothing is more precious than Independence and Freedom". Ho left this world in 1969 before he could accomplish what he said. Thirteen years after the communist North Vietnam took over the South, Ho went back from hell to visit the new Vietnam. He came to a Politburo meeting and asked the Party's leader, "What have you guy accomplished after I've gone?" The Party's leader replied, "Dear Uncle Ho, we have accomplished the first word you preached, there is 'Nothing' now". %% A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% A farmer I know named O'Doole Had a long and incredible tool. He can use it to plow, Or to diddle a cow, Or just as a cue-stick at pool. %% A farmer had a son who went to New York and became a bootblack. Now the farmer makes hay while the son shines. %% A farmer is trying to raise smart chickens to compete in the local fair. The first attempt can scratch answers to 2nd grade math in the sand. The next generation can do fractions and decimals. The next calculus! But his hope for the contest is due to hatch one day after the competition. So, instead of losing to his neighbor again this year, he helps the chickens hatch a day early so they can compete. Unfortunately, they fail miserably to do even the simplest problem. Moral: Don't hatch your chickens before they count! (sorry :-)) %% A father doesn't destroy his children. -- Lt. Carolyn Palamas, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% A father in Georgia called his local IRS office to ask if he could deduct the cost of his daughter's wedding as "a total loss". %% A feeling all persons detest Although 'tis by everyone felt By two letters fully expressed By twice two, invariably spelt Envy (N-V) %% A fellatrix's healthful condition Proved the value of spunk as nutrition. Her remarkable diet (I suggest that you try it) Was only her clients' emission. %% A fellow from Chicopee, Mass. Rejected another man's pass. He felt some attraction, But recalled that the action Might well prove a pain in the ass. %% A fellow who lived in West Perkin Was always a-jerkin' his gherkin. Said he, "It's not fickle To play with my pickle. At least my gherkin's a workin'. %% A fellow who loves rum and redheads dies and goes to hell. He wakes up in hell in a room with the devil who says "Welcome to hell". "You do what you wish for now, and I'll watch for a little while," and grins wickedly. The fellow sits up and finds a small barrel in his hands which is marked "RUM". Looking up, he sees the most absolutely gorgeous redhead lying on a bed smiling at him. She utters "Take me, I'm yours". The fellow says "Hey this isn't so bad after all, I just might learn to like it here." The devil continues to smile. Then the fellow turns over the rum barrel but finds no opening and says "Hey, there's no hole in the rum!" The devils smile gets wider as he replies "Neither is there one in the girl!" %% A fellow whose surname was Hunt Trained his cock to perform a slick stunt: This versatile spout Could be turned inside out, Like a glove, and be used as a cunt. %% A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind. -- Garrick %% A feminist, fetchingly scented, In a charming hotel room she'd rented Had picked up a guy In the street, passing by, And when she said, "Right on!" boy, she meant it. %% A few books are alright, like wine, but too much can be bad. Books break down brains. %% A few cans short of a six pack, Six short. %% A few feet away lie some platinum bars. %% A few fries short of a Happy Meal. %% A few history books tell of Helen of Spud. She had, of course, a face that launched a thousand chips... (err, perhaps that should be "lunched?") %% A few hours grace before the madness begins again. %% A fierce wind blows the map out of your hands and rips the sail! you barely manage to make it to the island. You'd best do something . . . %% A figure with curves always offers a lot of interesting angles %% A finely polished brass bell is sitting here. %% A finicky man from Australia With the ladies was largely a failure. He said, "Sex may be fun But in the long run It will damage my fine genitalia." %% A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself. -- Salvor Hardin %% A fisherman from Maine went to Alabama on his vacation. He rented a boat, rowed out to the middle of the lake, and cast his line, but when he looked down into the water he was horrified to see a man wrapped in chains lying on the bottom of the lake. He quickly rowed to shore and ran to the police station. "Sheriff, sheriff," he gasped, there's a guy wrapped in chains, drowned in the lake!" "Now ain't that jest like a Yankee," drawled the sheriff, "to steal more chain than he can swim with?" %% A fisherman off of Cape Cod Said, "I'll bugger that tuna, by God!" But the high-minded fish Resented his wish, And nimbly swam off with his rod. %% A fit or anger is as fatal to dignity as a dose of arsenic to life. -- Dr. Holland %% A fitter fits; Though sinners sin A cutter cuts; And thinners thin And an aircraft spotter spots; And paper-blotters blot A baby-sitter I've never yet Baby-sits -- Had letters let But an otter never ots. Or seen an otter ot. A batter bats (Or scatters scats); A potting shed's for potting; But no one's found A bounder bound Or caught an otter otting. -- Ralph Lewin %% A five minutes before the hour, a student will ask a question requiring a ten minute answer. -- M. M. Johnston %% A flashy Mercedes-Benz roared up to the curb where a cute young miss stood waiting for a taxi. "Hi," said the gentleman at the wheel. "I'm going west." "How wonderful," came the cool reply. "Bring me back an orange." %% A flattering painter, who made it his care to draw men as they ought to be, not as they are. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% A flea and a fly in a flu Were imprisoned, so what could they do. Let us flee said the fly. Let us fly said the flea So they flew through a flaw in the flu. %% A flying drop kick breaks your jaw. %% A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him. -- Nicolas Bolleau-Despreaux %% A fool and her money are soon courted. %% A fool and his honey are soon parted. %% A fool and his money are never around when you need them. %% A fool and his money are soon partying! %% A fool and his money are soon popular. %% A fool and his money rarely get together to start with. %% A fool and his money stabilize the economy. %% A fool in high station is like a man on the top of a high mountain: everything appears small to him and he appears small to everybody. -- Professor Leader W. Matsch %% A fool is a man who worries about whether or not his lover has integrity. A wise man, on the other hand, busies himself with deeper attributes. %% A fool must now and then be right by chance. %% A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% A fool, indeed, has great need of a title, It teaches men to call him count and duke, And to forget his proper name of fool. -- Crowne %% A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. %% A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% A foolish geologist from Kissen Just didn't know what he was missin', By studying rock And neglecting his cock, And using it merely for pissin'. %% A foot is a device for finding furniture in the dark. %% A force keeps you from taking the bodies. %% A formal education can sometimes be broadening but more often merely flattens. -- Edward Abbey %% A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. -- D. Gries %% A free agent is anything but. %% A free people always has the right to dismiss its rulers -- whom it regards as its servants -- at any time. -- Harry V. Jaffa %% A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. -- Adlai Stevenson %% A friend asks only for your time, not your money. %% A friend in need is a pain in the neck. %% A friend in need is a pest indeed. %% A friend in need is a pest. -- Fafhrd %% A friend in need Is a friend indeed. %% A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Essays", 1841 %% A friend is a present you give yourself. %% A friend is someone who likes you in spite of yourself. -- Solomon Short %% A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Friendship" %% A friend of a friend was horrified to find out, at the age of twenty-five, that his life line was extremely short. When he tried to lengthen it (with his trusty Victorinox) he bled to death. %% A friend of mine (yes this is in the hear say category) was in a BioChem/ anatomy lecture. The prof was discussing bodily fluids. Uses, production, chemical composition etc. Eventually he was discussing semen. After stating its composition (mostly glucose I think) a girl asked: "Why does it taste so salty"? She sat down very quickly when she realized what she had said. (Wonder what her phone number is?) %% A friend of mine is into Voodoo Acupuncture. You don't have to go. You'll just be walking down the street, and.........ooooohhhhhh, that's much better. -- Steve Wright %% A friend of mine is into Voodoo Acupuncture. You don't have to go. You'll just be walking down the street, and.........ooooohhhhhh, that's much better. -- Steven Wright A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. -- Barry Goldwater %% A friend of mine is taking a sign language course. We were sitting around with some other friends the other night and someone asked her "Why are you taking sign language?" My dead-pan answer: "It's a prerequisite for Italian" %% A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said, "Wish you were here." -- Steven Wright %% A friend of mine received a note through the mail advising him, "If you don't stop making love to my wife, I'll kill you." The trouble is, the note wasn't signed. %% A friend of mine stopped smoking, drinking, overeating, and chasing women --all at the same time. It was a lovely funeral. %% A friend of mine was a frequent user of a pay telephone at a popular truck stop, and was greatly inconvenienced when the phone went out of commission. Repeated requests for repair brought only promises. After several days the phone company was again contacted and told that there was no longer a rush. The phone was now working fine--except that all money was being returned upon completion of each call. A repairman arrived within the hour !! %% A friend of mine won't get a divorce, because he hates lawyers more than he hates his wife. %% A friend to everybody is a friend to nobody. %% A friend who used to work at related a story about a customer support line at . The support person said something on the order of "You're not our only customer, you know," to which his reply was, "But we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons." -- from USENET %% A friend will let you hold the ladder while he goes up on the roof to install your new TV antenna, which is the biggest son of a bitch you ever saw. %% A friend will refrain from telling you he picked up the same amount of life insurance coverage you did for the half the price and his is non-cancelable. %% A friend with weed is a friend indeed. %% A friend, who lives in New York, told me this story: Her dog died recently and she wanted to take it to the pet cemetery. She didn't know how to transport it, but finally put it in a suitcase. When she was buying tokens in the subway, someone stole the suitcase. %% A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship. -- John D. Rockefeller %% 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. %% A full belly makes a dull brain. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) [and the local candy machine man] %% A full bladder is the best alarm clock in the world. -- Solomon Short %% A furious exchange, and the # is knocked out. %% A furniture sales girl named Niles Brings quickie male-customer smiles. Her talents are fabled When couched, chaired or tabled, Since she comes in a wide range of styles. %% A furore Normanorum libera nos, O Domine! %% A gal I know was in a bar, and was approached by a guy who asked, "What's your sign?" Her immediate response: "Neon." %% A gambler was telling a friend about his first junket to Las Vegas and how hard it was to get any sleep. "I was awakened at one, two and four in the morning by a drunk chorus girl banging on the door and screaming," he recalled. "That's terrible," the friend said." How'd you ever get any sleep?" "At five o'clock I finally unlocked the door and let her out." %% A gambler's biggest thrill is winning a bet. His next biggest thrill is losing a bet. %% A game can by God repent or we'll punish it. That's how they did it in Salem in the seventeenth century, and that's how we'll do it now. -- Dick Hamlet %% A gangster assembled an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist. He explained that he was entering a horse in a race the following week and the three assembled guys had the job of assuring that the gangster's horse would win. They were to reconvene the day before the race to tell the gangster how they each propose to insure a win. When they reconvened the gangster started with the engineer: Gangster: OK, Mr. engineer, what have you got? Engineer: Well, I've invented a way to weave metallic threads into the saddle blanket so that they will act as the plates of a battery and provide electrical shock to the horse. G: That's very good! But let's hear from the chemist. Chemist: I've synthesized a powerful stimulant that dissolves into simple blood sugars after ten minutes and therefore cannot be detected in post-race tests. G: Ooooh, that's excellent! But I want to hear the physicist before I decide what to do. Physicist? Physicist: Well, consider a spherical horse... %% A gay young prince from Morocco Made love in a manner rococo. He painted his penis To resemble a venus And flavored his semen with cocoa. %% A gen'ral sets his army in array In vain, unless he fight and win the day. -- Denham %% A general leading the State Department resembles a dragon commanding ducks. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A geneticist living in Delft Scientifically played with himself, And when he was done He labeled it: son, And filed him away on a shelf. %% A genie appears in a cloud of green smoke. He drops something, waves, and then vanishes, taking the smoke with him. %% A genie appears in a cloud of green smoke. He says, "Boy, you're greedy," and pulls out a phaser. * * zzzaapppp!!! * * You've been reduced to a cloud of quarks. %% A genius is a queer who can whistle while he works. -- Bobby Knight %% A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible. -- Edward Abbey %% A gentleman does things no gentleman should do in a way only a gentleman can. -- Luigi Banzini %% A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art. -- Chesterfield %% A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't. -- Unknown %% A gentleman is a man who can support his own weight on his hands. %% A gentleman is one who doesn't demand a lady prove that she is. -- Solomon Short %% A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally. %% A gentleman never crumbles his bread or rolls in his soup. %% A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% A gentleman, otherwise meek, Detested with passion the leek; When offered one out He dealt such a clout To the maid, she was down for a week. -- Edward Gorey %% A german composer named Bruckner Remarked to a lady while fuckener : "Less lento, my dear, With your cute little rear; I like a hot presto when muckener!" %% A ghost appears in the room and is appalled by your desecration of the remains of a fellow adventurer. He casts a curse on all of your valuables and orders them banished to the land of the living dead. The ghost leaves, muttering obscenities. %% A ghostly voice whispers, "Insert the ticket in the nearest slot." %% A gift of flowers will soon be made to you. %% A gift of flowers will soon be made to you. Don't eat them this time. %% A gift was delivered to Laura From a cousin who lived in Gomorrah; Wrapped in tissue and crepe, It was peeled, like a grape, And emitted a pale, greenish aura. -- Edward Gorey %% 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 ginger beer plant is sort of like Azathoth. -- James Robinson, Amorphous Mass and drummer extraordinaire %% A girl and a boy bump into each other -- surely an accident. A girl and a boy bump and her handkerchief drops -- surely another accident. But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid -- *____that ___had __to ____mean _________something*. -- S. Morganstern, "The Silent Gondoliers" %% A girl camper once had an affair With a fellow all covered with hair. When she gave him his hat She realized that She'd been had by Smokey the Bear. %% A girl of the Enterprise crew Refused every offer to screw. But a Vulcan named Spock Crawled under her smock, And now she is eating for two. %% A girl of uncertain nativity Had an ass of extreme sensitivity While she sat on the lap Of a German or Jap, She could sense Fifth Column activity. %% A girl with psychic powers, She said "T-Bone, what's your sign?" I blinked and answered "Neon" - I thought I'd blow her mind. -- Tom "T-Bone" Stankus %% A girl's conscience doesn't really keep her from doing anything wrong-- it merely keeps her from enjoying it. %% A glancing blow from the cyclops' fist. %% A gleekzorp without a tornpee is like a quop without a fertsneet (sort of). %% A glistening pearl falls out of the clam and rolls away. Goodness, this must really be an oyster. (I never was very good at identifying bivalves.) Whatever it is, it has now snapped shut again. %% A glowing potion is too hot to drink. %% A goat butts against a hedge. It cannot go backward, it cannot go forward. Nothing serves to further. If one notes the difficulty, this brings good fortune. %% A gold statuette of an ancient egyptian goddess is sitting here. %% A good USENET motto would be a. "Together, a strong community." b. "Computers R Us." c. "I'm sick of programming, I think I'll just fuck around for a while on company time." -- A Sane Man %% A good amulet may protect you against guards. %% A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse. -- Edward Abbey %% A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. -- Milton %% A good camper knows that it more important to be ingenious than to be a genius. -- Pierre E. Trudeau %% A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years. -- Wendell L. Wilkie (1892-1944) %% A good conscience is a continued Christmas. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness. -- Else Schiaparelli %% A good day to make someone want to leave New York in a dreadful hurry. %% A good day to run amok. %% A good dinner sharpens wit, while it softens the heart. -- Doran %% A good government is one "which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) (inaugural address) %% A good horse that follows others. Awareness of danger, With perseverance, furthers. Practice chariot driving and armed defense daily. It furthers one to have somewhere to go. %% A good idea is one which strikes the other fellow like a bolt of lightning a year or two after you've told it to him. %% A good imitation is the most perfect originality. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% A good laugh is sunshine in a house. -- William Makepeace Thackeray %% A good leader inspires others with confidence in him; a great leader inspires them with confidence in themselves. %% A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something. -- Wilson Mizner %% A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% A good memory does not equal pale ink. %% A good name will wear out; a bad one may be turned; a nickname lasts forever. -- Zimmerman %% A good neighbor is one who will watch your vacation slides all evening without telling you that he has been there. %% A good one-on-one line to a woman: "Do you know the difference between a Big Mac and a blow job?" (Hopefully the reply is "No") "Well then, how about lunch tomorrow?" %% A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously. -- Edward Abbey %% A good place to start is where you are. -- Charles Wolf, Jr. %% A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. -- Gen. George S. Patton %% A good prince will tax as lightly as possible those commodities which are used by the poorest members of society; e.g., grain, bread, beer, wine, clothing, and all other staples without which human life could not exist. -- Desiderius Erasmus (1465-1536) %% A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea. -- John Ciardi %% A good reputation is more valuable than money. -- Publilius Syrus %% A good scapegoat is hard to find. %% A good stroke, but it's too slow, the # dodges. %% A good supervisor can step on your toes without messing up your shine. %% A good teacher has been defined as one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. -- Thomas J. Carruthers %% A good word is an easy obligation, but not to speak ill, requires only our silence, which costs us nothing. -- Tillotson %% A good workman is known by his tools. %% A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink. -- Edward Abbey %% A goodly apple rotten at the heart; O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! -- William Shakespeare %% A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself. %% A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. %% A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top. -- James Reston %% A government needs one hundred soldiers for every guerilla it faces. -- Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973) %% A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. -- Barry Goldwater %% A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% A grade school teacher, who was doing a unit on World War II heard that the father of one of her students had been a fighter pilot during the war with one of the Scandinavian Air Forces. She invited him to come in and speak to the class. The guy was more than happy to talk, and began with a story about a morning patrol where he had been nearly shot down. "We had been up for about 20 minutes flying over enemy held territory, when we noticed, just in time, 3 fokkers diving on us from above." At the first mention of `fokkers' the class giggled a little bit. "Our group broke formation, and began the dog-fighting. As we fought, we noticed 2 more fokkers coming at us from above and 2 more fokkers, fresh from the landing field, come to join the battle". At this second and third mention of `fokkers' the class was almost laughing openly, and the teacher interrupted the story to ask the pilot to explain to the class that a 'fokker' was a particular type of plane flown by the German Air Force. He replied, "Ya, dat is true, but these fokkers were Messerschmidts". %% A graduate student named Zac Was said to be great in the sack. An inch of his boner Put girls in a coma And two gave them epileptic attacks. %% A grapefruit is a lemon that had a chance and took advantage of it. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% A grating appears on the ground. %% A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul. -- Hawthorne %% A gray eye is still and sly; A rougish eye is the brown; The eye of blue is ever true; But in the black eye's sparkling spell Mystery and mischief dwell. %% A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% A great fortune is a great slavery. -- Seneca %% A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James %% A great name for a new country song: If I'd Shot You Sooner, I'd Be Out of Jail by Now. %% A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century. %% A great source of error is the judging of events by abstract calculations, which though geometrically true are false as they relate to the concerns of beings governed more by passions and prejudice than by an enlightened sense of their interests. -- Alexander Hamilton %% A great symphony orchestra should be savored like cognac. Lift the filled glass to the light. Admire the amber hue. Swirl. Sniff. Then set it down and talk about it for half an hour. -- Antal Dorati %% 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? %% A green-thumbed young farmer from Leeds Once swallowed a package of seeds. In a month, his ass Was covered with grass And his balls were grown over with weeds. %% A group of Explorers skiing - a skiing trek through wide marshes; countless islets of forest make orienteering very difficult; the group's trying to find a shelter cabin, but it's getting dark and the temperature's falling, -25 C already and windy; they reach a river - yes, there's one on the map, but not like this; an impatient girl says: - Let's just pretend it's the right one ! [by the way, we did - and found the cabin too !] %% A group of boy scouts skiing; a little boy's getting tired struggling through the soggy banks of snow; the leader tries to encourage him: - Come on, stand up at least ! - But I AM standing ! %% A group of guys and one girl are sitting together at a ball game. During the game the guys notice that the girl knows just as much about the game as themselves, and are really impressed. After the game they ask her "how is it that you know so much about baseball?" She says "well I used to be a guy and got a sex change" The guys are amazed, but very curious about the process. "what was the most painful part of the process? Was it when they cut off your penis?" "That was very painful, but was not the most painful part." "Was it when they cut off your balls?" "That was very painful, but was not the most painful part." "What was the most painful part?" "The part that hurt the most was when they scooped out half my brains" %% A group of programmers were presenting a report to the Emperor. "What was the greatest achievement of the year?" the Emperor asked. The programmers spoke among themselves and then replied, "We fixed 50% more bugs this year than we fixed last year." The Emperor looked on them in confusion. It was clear that he did not know what a "bug" was. After conferring in low undertones with his chief minister, he turned to the programmers, his face red with anger. "You are guilty of poor quality control. Next year there will be no 'bugs'!" he demanded. And sure enough, when the programmers presented their report to the Emperor the next year, there was no mention of bugs. -- The Zen of Programming %% A group of workers were discussing how smart their dogs were. The first was an IBM worker who said his dog could do calculations. His dog was named "T Square", and he told him to go to the blackboard and draw a square, a circle and a triangle, which he did with no sweat. The Ford worker said he thought his dog was better. His dog, named "Slide Rule", was told to fetch a dozen cookies and divide them into four piles of three, which "Slide Rule" did with no problem. The Telephone Companyworker said that was good, but he felt his dog was better. His dog "Measure", was told to get a quart of milk and pour seven ounces in a ten ounce glass. The dog did this with no problems. All three agreed that this was very good, and that all of the dogs were smart. They all turned to the Civil Service Worker and said: "What can your dog do?" The Civil Service Worker called his dog "Coffee Break" over and said: "Show the fellows what you can do." "Coffee Break" went over, ate the cookies, drank the milk, screwed the other three dogs, claimed he had injured his back, filed for Workmen's Compensation and left for home on sick leave. %% A gruff anthropoid of Piltdown Had a strange way of going to town: With maniacal howls He would bugger young owls, And polish his balls on their down. %% A guest in a household quite charmless Was informed its eccentric was harmless: "If you're caught unawares At the head of the stairs, Just remember, he's eyeless and armless." -- Edward Gorey %% A guidebook entitled "FLOOD CONTROL DAM #3" is on the reception desk. %% A guinea pig is not from Guinea but a rodent from South America. A firefly is not a fly, but a beetle. A giant panda bear is really a member of the racoon family. A black panther is really a leopard that has a solid black coat rather then a spotted one. Peanuts are not really nuts. The majority of nuts grow on trees while peanuts grow underground. They are classified as a legume-part of the pea family. A cucumber is not a vegetable but a fruit. %% A guy I know has C:\BELFRY in his PATH on his PC. Why? Because that's where he keeps his .BATs. %% A guy comes into a bar with a frog and sets it down next to the prettiest girl there. "This is a very special frog," he informs her. "His name is Charlie." "What's so special about this frog?" she asks. He's reluctant to tell her, but when pressed, explains that, "This frog can eat pussy." The girl slaps him, knocking him off his chair, and accuses him of telling her a filthy lie. But no, he assures her, it's completely true. And after much discussion, she agrees to come back to his apartment to see the frog in action. She positions herself appropriately, the guy carefully takes out the frog, and says, "Okay, Charlie, do your stuff!" The frog is immobile, despite his owner's exhortations, and the girl starts to snicker. "Okay, Charlie, do your stuff!" "C'mon Charlie, do your stuff!" By now, the girl is laughing openly. "Okay, Charlie," says the guy, moving the frog out of the way, "I'm only going to show you one more time." %% A guy down the hall has a wooden stake in his window with a sign that reads "BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF VAMPIRE." %% A guy goes into a doctor's office with a duck on his head. The doctor says, "Can I help you?", and the duck says, "Yeah, get this guy off my ass!" %% A guy goes into a doctor's office. The doctor tells him, "You're fat!" The guy says, "Doctor, I want a second opinion!" The doctor says, "OK, you're ugly, too!" %% A guy has to get fresh once in a while so the girl doesn't lose her confidence. %% A guy was lost on the Mall by the Washington Monument. He stopped a policeman and asked, "What side is the State Dept. on?" The cop answered, "Ours, I hope." %% A habit depraved and unsavory Held the bishop of Bingham in slavery Midst screeches and howls He deflowered young owls Which he kept in an underground aviary %% A habit obscene and bizarre, Has taken a-hold of papa. He brings home young camels And other odd mammals, And gives them a go at mama. %% A habit obscene and unsavory, Holds a CS professor in slavery. With maniacal howls, He deflowers young owls, That he keeps in an underground aviary. %% A habit of sneering marks the egotist, or the fool, or the knave, or all three. -- Lavater %% A hacker does for love what others would not do for money. %% A hacker who screwed a mag tape Was caught and convicted of rape. To jail he did go, From which, to his woe He couldn't get out with ESC. %% A hacker-turned-pervert named Fisk Made love to the drive of his disk. The thing circumsized him, Which rather surprised him. He wasn't aware of *that* risk. %% A half hour after an EL AL plane left Idlewild, the control tower was startled to receive a message from the pilot that the plane was headed back to Idlewild. The tower relayed a hurried message to the pilot, "Are you in trouble?". "I sure am! We forgot the pickles!" %% A half moon is better than no moon at all. %% A halted retreat Is nerve-wracking and dangerous. To retain people as men- and maidservants Brings good fortune. %% A hammer sometimes misses its mark - a bouquet never. %% A handful of friends is worth more than a wagon of gold. %% A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains. %% A handsome young rodent named Gratian As a lifeguard became a sensation. All the lady mice waved And screamed to be saved By his mouse-to-mouse resuscitation. %% A hangover is when you open your eyes in the morning and you wish you hadn't. -- Smythe, "Andy Capp" %% A happier home is but an earlier heaven. -- Thomas S. Monson %% A happy old hooker named Grace Once sponsored a cunt-lapping race. It was hard for beginners To tell who were winners : There were cunt hairs all over the place. DEEP THROAT %% A hard man is good to find. %% A hardware debugger named Court Shoved his tool in an Ethernet port. But it's buffer array Only handled 1K, So the port's driver cut it off short. %% A harp is a nude piano. %% A haughty young wench of Del Norte Would fuck only men over forty. Said she, "It's too quick With a young fellow's prick; I like it to last, and be warty." %% A hazard is anything that is dangerous. -- "Safety With Beef Cattle", OSHA 1976 %% A headstrong young woman in Ealing Threw her two weeks' old child at the ceiling; When quizzed why she did, She replied, "To be rid Of a strange, overpowering feeling." -- Edward Gorey %% A healthy body is a great chamber for the soul: a sick body is a prison. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% A heart is not judged by how much you love but by how much you are loved by others. -- The Wizard of Oz %% A heart unspotted is not easily daunted. -- William Shakespeare %% A hearty young fellow named Yost Once had an affair with a ghost. At the height of the spasm The poor ectoplasm Cried, "Goodie, I feel it ... almost." %% A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% A herd of 100 charging buffaloes charged across the prairie. %% A hermit is a deserter from the army of humanity. %% A hero is a man who consistently violates the law of conservation of energy. -- Solomon Short %% A hidebound young virgin named Carrie Would say, when the fellows got hairy : "Keep your prick in your pants Till the end of this dance--" Which is why Carrie still has her cherry. %% A high level staff meeting will always make the big boss feel better. %% A highly aesthetic young Jew Had eyes of a heavenly blue; The end of his dillie Was shaped like a lilly, And his balls were too utterly two! %% A highway patrol buff named Claire, Once screwed half a troop on a dare, And her parts grew so hot, There was steam on her twat, So they nicknamed her Smokey the Bare! %% A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you. %% A holding company is the people you give your money to while you're being searched. -- Will Rogers %% A hollow voice says "PLUGH". %% A homeowner's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a weekend for? %% A homunculus wouldnt want to hurt a wizard. %% A honeymoon couple named Kelly Spent their honeymoon belly to belly, Because in their haste, They used library paste In the place of petroleum jelly. %% A horny young fellow named Redge Was jerking off under a hedge. The gardener drew near With a huge pruning shear, And trimmed off the edge of his wedge. %% A horse is a horse, of course, of course. %% A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI" %% A hospital is no place to be sick. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% A hot pepper sandwich is here. %% A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment, unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising six weeks. -- Southey %% A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body. -- Margaret Fuller %% A housewife, an accountant and a lawyer were asked "How much is 2+2?" The housewife replies: "Four!". The accountant says: "I think it's either 3 or 4. Let me run those figures through my spreadsheet one more time." The lawyer pulls the drapes, dims the lights and asks in a hushed voice, "How much do you want it to be?" %% A huge green fierce dragon bars the way! %% A huge-organed female in Dallas, Named Alice, who yearned for a phallus, Was virgo intacto, Because, ipso facto, No phallus in Dallas fit Alice. %% A human being is a computer's way of making another computer. Yes, we are their sex organs. -- Solomon Short %% A human being is an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing. -- Christopher Morley %% A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. %% A humble, obedient attitude will serve you well in anything you do in life. -- Joseph B. Wirthlin %% A humgry man is not a free man. -- Adlai Stevenson %% A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. %% A hundred bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer. If one of those bottles should happen to fall, it would shake the very foundations of the Universe. -- from Mauve'Bib's "The Seven Pillows of Wisdom," edited by the Princess Serutan %% A hundred mouths, a hundred tongues, And throats of brass, inspired with iron lungs. -- Virgil %% A hunk-o',hunk-o' burnin' love. %% A hunter and his guide were deep in the mountains when they stopped to rest. The hunter gazed at his companion and joked, "You know, I'm a pretty big fellow. If I had a heart attack or broke a leg, how would you get me out?" The guide replies, "Last year, I shot a sixteen-hundred pound moose way back there and got it out all right." "How'd you manage that?" "Twelve trips." %% A hunter saved a native boy from a boa constrictor. In gratitude, the boy gave the hunter a magic gorilla prick. The lad said the prick would do anything you told it to do until you told it to do something else. When the hunter returned home to England, he put the magic gorilla prick on the mantle along with some of his other trophies. His wife thought it quaint and his story charming. But soon, the hunter went a-safariing again. He was away for months. One evening, the woman eyed the MGP carefully and whispered, "Gorilla Prick, fuck me." Whereupon the thing jumped off the mantle and began to bang her with great thoroughness and ferocity. For the first twenty minutes it was pure heaven, but after the next few minutes it became fatiguing, and she said, "Stop it, Gorilla Prick," but it didn't. After a bit more she was screaming "Stop! Stop!" at the thing and trying to pull it out of her smoking hole. But nothing worked. Finally, the butler bursts into the room, summoned by her screams. "Saunders, help me please!" "But what is it, Madame?" "It's a Magic Gorilla Prick!" "Gorilla prick, my ass!! ... AAAaaeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiii!!!!!!" %% A husband and wife had a human cannonball act in the circus. One day the wife ran off with the lion tamer. The husband was extremely dejected. The strong man asked him what he was going to do. The husband answered, "This is a disaster. I don't know where I'm going to find another woman of her caliber." %% A husband is living proof that a wife can take a joke. %% A husky foreigner, looking for sex, accepted a prostitute's terms. When she undressed, he noticed that she had no pubic hair. The man shouted, "What, no wool? In my country all women have wool down there." The prostitute snapped back, "What do you want to do, knit or fuck?" %% A hypochondriac goes to see his doctor. The doctor asks him, "Well? What's the problem this time?" The hypochondriac says, "I'm really worried about my neighbour, Doc. He never goes to see HIS doctor." %% A hypothetical paradox: What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet? -- Tom Galloway %% A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, N is for Neville who died of ennui, B is for Basil assaulted by bears, O is for Olive run through with an awl, C is for Clara who wasted away, P is for Prue trampled flat in a brawl, D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh, Q is for Quentin who sank in a mire, E is for Ernest who choked on a peach, R is for Rhoda consumed by a fire, F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech, S is for Susan who perished of fits, G is for George smothered under a rug, T is for Titus who flew into bits, H is for Hector done in by a thug, U is for Una who slipped down a drain, I is for Ida who drowned in a lake, V is for Victor squashed under a train, J is for James who took lye by mistake, W is for Winnie embedded in ice, K is for Kate struck with an axe, X is for Xerxes devoured by mice, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks, Y is for Yorick whose neck was broken, M is for Maud who was swept out to sea, Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin. -- Edward Gorey, "The Gastly Crumb Tines" %% A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clair who wasted away, D is for Desmond thrown out of the sleigh. E is for Ernest who choked on a peach, F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech. G is for George, smothered under a rug, H is for Hector, done in by a thug. I is for Ida who drowned in the lake, J is for James who took lye, by mistake. K is for Kate who was struck with an axe, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks. M is for Maud who was swept out to sea, N is for Nevil who died of enui. O is for Olive, run through with an awl, P is for Prue, trampled flat in a brawl Q is for Quinton who sank in a mire, R is for Rhoda, consumed by a fire. S is for Susan who parished of fits, T is for Titas who flew into bits. U is for Una who slipped down a drain, V is for Victor, squashed under a train. W is for Winie, embedded in ice, X is for Xerxes, devoured by mice. Y is for Yoric whose head was bashed in, Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin. -- Edward Gorey "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" %% A joint is just tea for two. %% A joke isn't funny unless it offends SOMEONE. %% A joker who haunts Monticello Is really a terrible fellow. In the midst of caresses He fills ladies dresses With garter snakes, ice cubes, and jello. %% A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance from Sam. %% A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance. %% A journey of a thousand miles begins with an argument over how to load the car. %% A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. -- Lao Tsu %% A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet. -- Lao Tsu %% A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers. %% A jug of wine, a bowl of rice with it; Earthen vessels Simply handed in through the window. There is certainly no blame in this. %% A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. -- Robert Frost %% A jury is a group of twelve people of average ignorance. -- Herbert Spencer %% A jury should decide a case the minute they are shown it, before the lawyers have had a chance to mislead them %% A kick, that scarce would move a horse may kill a sound divine. -- Cowper %% A kid'll eat the middle of an Oreo, eventually. %% A king that would not feel his crown too heavy for him, must wear it every day; but if he think it too light, he knoweth not of what metal it is made. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% A king who was mad at the time, Decreed limerick writing a crime; But late in the night All the poets would write Verses without any rhyme or meter. %% A king's castle is his home. %% A kinsman came to see Nasrudin, bringing a duck as a gift. Delighted, Nasrudin made duck soup and shared it with his guest. Thereafter, one man after another arrived, claiming to be a friend of a friend of the man who brought the duck, but bringing no presents themselves. One day a stranger appeared, saying "I am the friend of the friend of the friend of the relative who brought you a duck", and sat down like all the rest, expecting a meal. The exasperated Mullah set before him a bowl of hot water, saying "This is the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck which was brought by my relative." %% A kiss is a course of procedure, cunningly devised, for the mutual stoppage of speech at a moment when words are superfluous. %% A kitchen in every pot. I mean, a pot in every -- I mean, a chicken in every... -- George Bush, 1988 %% A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction. %% A lacklustre lady of Brougham Weaveth all night at her loom. Anon she doth blench When her lord and his wench Pull a chain in the neighbouring room. %% A lad from far-off Transvaal Was lustful, but tactful withal. He'd say, just for luck, "Mam'selle, do you fuck?" But he'd bow till he almost would crawl. %% A lad with a marvelous bend Has no need of a lover or friend. What he does to himself Would fill up a shelf, But alas, he has come to his end. %% A lad, at his first copulation, Cried, "What a sensation! Inflation, Gyration, elation Throughout the duration, I guess I'll give up masturbation." %% A lady born under a curse Used to drive forth each day in a hearse; From the back she would wail Through a thickness of veil: "Things do not get better, but worse." -- Edward Gorey %% A lady both callous and brash Met a man with a vast black moustache; She cried, "Shave it, O do! And I'll put it with glue On my hat as a sort of panache." -- Edward Gorey %% A lady bought a parrot, a beautiful african grey, that had an unbelievable vocabulary. If the phone would ring it would say "I'll get it!". If it saw a cat it would say "Here kittikitty!" To children it would say "Get away from me kid, you bother me!" and for no reason at all it would say "I can talk, can you fly?" Well, one day the parson came to pay her a visit. The parrot took one look at the parson and said "Hot Damn! A bowlegged man!" The parson was bowlegged but the lady was so embarrassed. So she sends the parrot to etiquette school. When she got the parrot back she invited the parson over to see if it worked. This time the parrot takes one look at the parson and says.... "Ah! What men are these?! That wear their legs in parentheses!" %% A lady came up to me on the street and pointed to my suede jacket. "You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too." -- Jake Johansen %% A lady from Kalamazoo Once found she had nothing to do, So she sat on the stairs And she counted her hairs: 4,302. %% 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. %% A lady named Shirley was mellow As she said to her eager young fellow, "I prefer bagels and lox to sucking off cocks, Or even a nice dish of Jell-O!" %% A lady of South Madagascar Wears a bag on her head; it's to mask her. A bottle of scotch Might loosen her crotch. Wait here, I'll go and I'll ask her. %% A lady removing her scanties, Heard them crackle electrical chanties. Said her beau, "Have no fear, For the reason is clear: You simply have amps in your panties. %% A lady stockholder quite hetera Decided her fortune to bettera: On the floor, quite unclad, She successively had Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, et cetera... %% A lady was in the delivery room starting to deliver her baby. As the head came out it was dark and had an afro. The doctor said, "Mam, have you ever slept with a black man?" She said, "Well, yes, but only once." "Once is all it takes" he replyed. Then the torso came out and it was yellow. "Mam, have you ever slept with an oriental man?" the doctor asked. "Well, yes" she said, "but only once." "Once is all it takes," he said. When the legs came out they were red. The doctor asked her if she had ever slept with an Indian and she said only once and he replied that that was all it took. Well, he pulled the kid out and held it upside down and slapped it's bottom to make it cry and the kid started to cry. "Oh, thank God," she exclaimed "at least it doesn't bark!" %% A lady was seized with intent To revise her existence misspent. So she climbed up the dome Of St. Peter's in Rome, Where she stayed through the following Lent. -- Edward Gorey %% A lady while dining at Crewe Found an elephant's whang in her stew. Said the waiter, "Don't shout, And don't wave it about, Or the others will all want one too." %% A lady who didn't like flies Managed to hide her surprise, When she opened up one And found it was fun. Now she willingly widens her thighs. %% A lady who favors coition, Has invented the spaceship position. She lies down with ease And pulls up her knees, And hollers, "Lift off!" and "Ignition!" %% A lady who jogged in the breeze Had bosoms that flapped to her knees. Said she, "They're quite warm, They keep me dry in a storm, And when it snows, I use them for skis." %% A lady who lives in New Delhi Has habits disgusting and smelhi. She likes to eat feces Of various species. (The recipe is tattooed on her belhi. %% A lady who overly lusted Was frequently opened and thrusted. When the baby came due It was female too, And its hymen was already busted. %% A lady who read Sigmund Freud, Thought her genitals underemployed; So she put in a stand For a seven-piece band, And held dances that we all enjoyed. %% A lady who signs herself "Vexed" Writes to say she believes she's been hexed: "I don't mind my shins Being stuck full of pins, But I fear I am coming unsexed." -- Edward Gorey %% A lady whose name is Tirelli Has tits made of dynamite jelli. If you take on this dare, You must fondle with care. (The detonator's south of her belli.) %% A lady with features cherubic Was famed for her area pubic. When they asked her its size She replied in surprise, "Are you speaking of square feet, or cubic?" %% A lady with one of her ears applied To an open keyhole heard, inside, Two female gossips in converse free -- The subject engaging them was she. "I think", said one, "and my husband thinks That she's a prying, inquisitive minx!" As soon as no more of it she could hear The lady, indignant, removed her ear. "I will not stay," she said with a pout, "To hear my character lied about!" -- Gopete Sherany %% A lady's iambic pentameter Is thirty-two inches diameter. The breadth of her scansion Is due to expansion In the pants of a critical amateur. %% A lake on the mountain: The image of Influence. Thus the superior man encourages people to approach him By his readiness to receive them. %% A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. %% A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. -- Dennis M. Ritchie %% A lanky Texan was mad because Texas had just become the second largest state in the Union, so he made up his mind to move to Alaska. He drove for three days and three nights to get there and finally he came to what looked like the state line. He halted his car and walked up to the border guard. "Hi, there! How do I become a resident of this here biggest state?" demanded the Texan. The guard looked him up and down and grinned. "Waal," he answered, there are three things you gotta do to get in. First, drink down a quart of 110 proof corn liquor without blinkin'. Second, kill a grizzly bear, and third, make love to an Eskimo woman." "Sounds easy enough," said the Texan. "Where can I get a quart of this here corn liquor?" "Got one right here," replied the guard. The Texan gulped down the whiskey without batting an eyelash. "Now, do you happen to know where I can find me a grizzly?" "Yep," answered the guard, "there's a big b'ar over that way, 'bout a mile... lives in a cave on that cliff." The Texan lurched merrily off. About an hour later he returned with his clothes almost torn off and his face scratched and bloody. He was smiling happily. "Now," he roared, "where's that damn Eskimo woman you want killed?" %% A large cloud of purple smoke appears before you. It clears away to reveal a tall sorcerer carrying a tape player and a myriad of tapes. He looks at everything and says "This adventure has lasted too long." With that, he gestures with his free hand and all around you fades into grey nothingness. %% A large coil of rope is lying in the corner. %% A large mirror fills the # side of the hallway. %% A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work. -- Anatol Holt %% A large piece of rope descends from the railing above, ending some five feet above your head. %% A large sign on the wall reads "Grand central station". %% A large spider in an old house built a beautiful web in which to catch flies. Every time a fly landed on the web and was entangled in it the spider devoured him, so that when another fly came along he would think the web was a safe and quiet place in which to rest. One day a fairly intelligent fly buzzed around above the web so long without lighting that the spider appeared and said, "Come on down." But the fly was too clever for him and said, "I never light where I don't see other flies and I don't see any other flies in your house." So he flew away until he came to a place where there were a great many other flies. He was about to settle down among them when a bee buzzed up and said, "Hold it, stupid, that's flypaper. All those flies are trapped." "Don't be silly," said the fly, "they're dancing." So he settled down and became stuck to the flypaper with all the other flies. Moral: There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else. -- James Thurber (1894-1961), "The Fairly Intelligent Fly" %% A large stalactite extends from the roof and almost reaches the floor below. You could climb down it, and jump from it to the floor, but having done so you would be unable to reach it to climb back up. %% A lass at the foot of her class Asked a brainier chick how to pass. She replied, "With no fuss You can get a B-plus, By letting the prof pat your ass." %% A lawyer and a physician had a dispute over precedence. They referred it to Diogenes, who gave it in favor of the lawyer as follows: "Let the thief go first, and the executioner follow." %% A lawyer and a pope died on the same day, and both went to heaven. When the pope noticed that the lawyer had a larger mansion, he questioned Saint Peter about the allocation of rewards. The justification was "Well, we've had 265 popes up here, but this is the FIRST lawyer!" %% A layman knows he has to kick it. An amateur knows where to kick it. A professional knows how hard. %% A leader is best when people barely know he exists ... When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, "We did this ourselves." -- Lao-Tse %% A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear. -- Edward Abbey %% A lecherous barkeep named Dale, After fucking his favorite female, Mixed Drambuie and scotch With the cream in her crotch For a lustier, Rusty-er Nail. %% A legend in his own slime. %% A liar must be good at remembering. -- Quintillian %% A liberal always has both feet firmly planted in the clouds. %% A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins. -- Heywood Hale Broun (1888-1939) %% A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist and too rich to be a communist. %% A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything. -- Max Eastman (1883-1969) %% A library serves no purpose unless someone is using it. -- Mr. Atoz of Sarpeidon, "All Our Yesterdays," stardate 5943.7 %% A licentious old justice of Salem Used to catch all the harlots and jail 'em. But instead of a fine He would stand them in line, With his common-law tool to impale 'em. %% A lie in time saves nine. %% A lie is a very poor way to say hello. -- Edith Keeler, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate unknown. %% A lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemned from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked ... The man who lies to the world is the world's slave from then on. -- Hank Rearden %% A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere, when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. -- Carlyle %% A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward. -- Geprge Jean Nathan %% A life spent in search of the perfect hash brownie is a life well spent. -- anon. or Gary Trudeau %% A life without tragedy would not be worth living. -- Edward Abbey %% A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about. %% A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% A light supper, a good night's sleep and a fine morning have often made a hero out of the same man, who, by indigestion, a restless night and a rainy morning would have proved a coward. -- Chesterfield %% A light wife doth make a heavy husband. -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice" %% A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility -- Aristotle %% A limerick depends for its clout On rhythm and rhyme throughout. It grates on the ear Whenever you hear A line that shows the poet knows rhyme, but not what rhythm's about. -- Thane Heiner %% A limerick is a primitive art form; it starts with a pair o'dactyls. -- Solomon Short %% A limerick is best when it's lewd, Gross, titillating, and crude, But this one is clean -- Unless you are seen Reading it aloud in the nude. %% A limerick of classic proportion Should have meter and rhyme and a portion Of humor quite lewd and a frightfully crude Impossible sexual contortion. %% A limerick packs laughs anatomical Into space that is quite economical. But the good ones I've seen So seldom are clean, And the clean ones so seldom are comical. %% A linguist thought it a farce That memory space was so sparse. One day they increased it. Said he as he seized it: "At last! Enough core for the parse". %% A lion among ladies is a most fearful thing; for there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living. -- William Shakespeare %% A lisping fag fell off a pleasure yacht and began to scream. "Help! Help, I can't thwim!" One of the other passengers heard the caterwauling and leaned over the rail, remarking, "Really, there's no need to scream. Just reach out and grab that buoy near you." To which the floundering sodomite answered, "Buoy! Oh, thith ith no time for thekth, you degenerate... I'm dwowning!" %% A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth %% A little ambiguity never hurt anyone. -- Charles Suhor %% A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul. -- Norman Mailer %% A little bit of uh huh and a whole lot of oh yeah. %% A little boy was entering the church building one Sunday morning carrying a small bottle. The preacher says to him, "Whatcha got there Jimmy?" Jimmy replies, "This is the most powerful liquid in the world!" "Now wait a minute, Jimmy", says the preacher, "Holy Water is the most powerful liquid in the world. Why a little bit rubbed on the tummy of a pregnant woman can make her pass a little boy." Jimmy pops back, "That ain't nothing. A little bit of this stuff smeared on a cat's butt can make it pass a motorcycle!" %% A little dart shoots out at you! %% A little dog goes into a saloon in the Wild West, and beckons the bartender. "Hey, bartender, gimmie a whiskey." The bartender ignores him. "Hey bartender, gimmie a whiskey." Still ignored. "HEY BARMAN!! GIMMIE A WHISKEY!!" The bartender takes out his six-shooter and shoots the dog in the left front leg. The dog runs out the saloon, howling in pain. Three years later, the wee dog appears again, wearing cowboy boots, jeans, chaps, a Stetson, gun belt, and guns. He ambles slowly into the saloon, goes up to the bar, leans over it, and says to the bartender, "I'm here t'git the man that shot muh paw." %% A little dwarf just walked around a corner, saw you, threw a little axe at you which missed, cursed, and ran away. %% A little dwarf with a big knife blocks your way. %% A little experience often upsets a lot of theory. %% A little flattery will support a man through great fatigue. -- James Monroe %% A little greed can get you lots of stuff. %% A little help at the right time is better than a lot of help at the wrong time. -- Tevye %% A little humility is arrogance. -- Bill Gray %% A little ignorance can go a long way. -- Solomon Short %% A little inaccuracy saves a world of explanation. -- C. E. Ayres %% A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. -- Saki [H. H. Munro] (1870-1916), "The Square Egg" %% A little kid went up to Santa and asked him, 'Santa, you know when I'm bad right?' And Santa says, 'Yeah.' The little kid then asks, 'And you know when I'm sleeping?' To which Santa replies, 'Every minute.' So the little kid then says, 'Well if you know when I'm bad and when I'm good, then how come you don't know what I want for Christmas?' %% A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. %% A little learning is a dangerous thing! -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation. -- Donald Trump, in "Time", 16 January 1989 %% A little needle, A white-hot light Throbbing with all its might. Pain is tiring. A dull ache that never stops, An iron poker blinding-hot, Running from toe to top. Pain is tiring. An icy stab, A crushing vice, A cold and empty space. Pain is tiring. I think I shall sleep. %% A little neglect may breed great mischief ... for the want of a shah, Iran was lost; for the want of Iran, the hostages were lost; and for the want of the hostages, I'd be lost. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% A little of what you fancy does you good. %% A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth of philosophy bringeth a man's mind about to religion. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% A little suffering is good for the soul. -- Kirk, "The Corbomite Maneuver," stardate 1514.0 %% A little thing before your eyes all the time. An eyelash %% A little virtue will never hurt you. -- Piet Hein %% A lively rape case was in progress in the District Court at Lick Skillet. Judge Flannery was presiding, and on the witness stand was Tush Bumpass. "From where Ah was standin'", drawled Tush, "Ah could see he'd backed 'er up agin' thet there wall, and ef Ah ever sawed a screwin' match, thet one wuz...." "Mr. Bumpass," the Judge interrupted, "I'd prefer that you not use the word 'screw' in the courtroom. Say 'intercourse' instead." Tush looked puzzled. "Intercourse? Whut's thet, Judge?" His Honor sighed. "It's a technicality of language that you're probably not aware of. Please continue." "Well, like Ah said, he had 'er shoved up agin' thet wall, an' he was...uh... intercoursin' 'er, an' he give 'er the crossjostle, the Chicago Stroke, an she let out with a holler thet...." "One moment," interrupted the Bench. "What is this Chicago Stroke, Mr. Bumpass?" "Well, thet's a technicality of screwin', Judge, thet you're probably not aware of." %% A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, a big TV with a hi-fi VCR and a nice stereo, a full fridge, a microwave, a UNIX system, two phone lines, a high speed modem, and thou. %% A lobbyist's pagoda is build on a foundation of night soil. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% A log may float in a river, but that does not make it a crocodile. %% A lonely young lad of Eton Used always to sleep with the heat on, Till he ran into a lass Who showed him her ass -- Now they sleep with only a sheet on. %% A long dispute means both parties are wrong. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. %% A long theatrical slash. You parry it desperately, but the thief twists his knife, and your # goes flying. %% A long worm hits with all of its length. %% A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon. Buy the negatives at any price. %% A long-shanked rascal with a mighty nose. %% A lord as black as coal And the red kittens whip him. A pot on the fire. %% A lost ounce of gold may be found, a lost moment of time never. %% A lot is happening -- not all of it good, but a lot is happening. -- President George Bush, Day 48 of the Bush presidency %% A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I believe everything positively stinks. -- Lew Col %% A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I'm afraid of widths. -- Steven Wright %% A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. -- Carl Reiner %% A lot of the stuff I do is so minimal, and it's designed to be minimal. The smallness of it is what's attractive. It's weird, 'cause it's so intellectually lame. It's hard to see me doing that for the rest of my life. But at the same time, it's what I do best. -- Chris Elliot, writer and performer on "Late Night with David Letterman" %% A lot of what I say comes off as political satire. In that, I have a lot in common with Congress. -- Solomon Short %% A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo. -- Bill Gray %% A lovely French girl from Calais Looks great in her sheer negligee. Delightful and chaste She would just suit the taste Of the typical Gallic gourmet. %% A lovely young diver named Nancy, Wore a bikini bottom quite chancy, The fish of Bonaire, Watched her Derriere, And the sea fans all tickled her fancy. %% A lovely young maid from St. Jude Once rode through the streets in the nude. The police cried, "Whatam-- Agnificent bottom" And slapped it as hard as they could. %% A lover tries to stand in well with the pet dog of the house. -- Moliere %% A lover's like a hunter -- if the game be got with too much ease he cares not for't. -- Mead %% A loyal citizen is a happy citizen. %% A luscious young student at Vassar Was hailed as a top-of-the-classer. But not in her studies You old fuddy-duddies For she shone as a great piece-of-asser. %% 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. %% A lusty young woodsman of Maine For years with no woman had lain, But he found sublimation At a high elevation In the crotch of a pine -- God, the pain! %% A mad puppeteer, a full grown kzin, and me. Our fourth crew member had better be a psychiatrist. -- Louis Wu "Ringworld" %% A madam who ran a bordello Put come in her pineapple jello, For the rich, sexy taste And not wanting to waste That greasy kid stuff from a fellow. %% A maestro directing in Rome Had a quaint way of driving it home. Whoever he climbed Had to keep her tail timed To the beat of his old metronome. %% A magnet is something you find crawling all over a dead cat. %% A maiden who had a third breast Always kept her hand close to her chest, And I promised her well That I never would tell, (Write me privately. Name on request.) %% A maiden who lived in Virginny Had a cunt that could bark, neigh and whinny. The horsey set rushed her, But success finally crushed her For her tone soon became harsh and tinny. %% A maiden who travelled in France Once got on a train, just by chance. The engineer fucked her, The conductor sucked her, And the fireman came in his pants. %% A maiden who wrote of big cities Some songs full of love, fun and pities, Sold her stuff at the shop Of a musical wop Who played with her soft little titties. %% A major illness is one that keeps you from work when the kids are out of school. %% A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car. -- Carrie Snow %% A malfunction...emotional awareness. -- Picard about Lal, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% A man about to speak the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup. -- Old Mongolian Saying %% A man accidentally falls over a high cliff, and on the way down he grabs onto the only branch within reach or sight. In a few moments he summons enough strength to move again, and he cries upward, "Help! Is there anyone up there who can help me?" A moment passes without event, and he again cries, "Help; can anyone hear me? I need help!" After another moment a booming voice answers, "THIS IS THE VOICE OF GOD. BELIEVE IN ME. HAVE FAITH. SAY A PROPER PRAYER AND LET GO OF THE BRANCH. YOU WILL FLOAT SLOWLY TO THE SAND, UNHARMED. JUST LET GO." Looking down at the jagged rocks and the pounding surf, the man thinks for a second, and then calls up, "Is there anyone ELSE up there?" %% A man always needs to remember one thing about a pretty girl. Somewhere, somebody's tired of her. %% A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that begins to bunch them. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% A man and a fish and a bicycle or something... %% A man and a woman got married. Although it is the first time for the husband, it is the woman's second marriage. As they go to bed on their wedding night, the wife says to her husband: "Dear, there's something I must tell you. I'm a virgin." Naturally, the husband is surprised. "You've been married before!", he says, "How can you still be a virgin?" "Well, it's all quite simple," she retorted, "my husband was a computer programmer." "What's so odd about that?", he asked. "Why would you still be a virgin after a marriage to a programmer?" "Well", she said, "all he did was sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how great it was going to be." %% A man and a woman walk into a very posh Rodeo Drive furrier. "Show the lady your finest mink!" the fellow exclaims. So the owner of the shop goes in back and comes out with an absolutely gorgeous full-length coat. As the lady tries it on, the furrier sidles up to the guy and discreetly whispers, "Ah, sir, that particular fur goes for $65,000." "No problem! I'll write you a check!" "Very good, sir." says the shop owner. "Today is Saturday. You may come by on Monday to pick it up, after the check has cleared." So the man and the woman leave. On Monday, the fellow returns. The store owner is outraged: "How dare you show your face in here?! There wasn't a single penny in your checking account!!" "I just had to come by," grinned the guy, "to thank you for the most wonderful weekend of my life!" %% A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew. -- Herb Caen %% A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. %% A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants. -- Arthur Schoperhauer (1788-1860) %% A man can lose his soul among the stars. Much later, he may realize that his body acted for him, guiding his ship while his mind traveled in realms he cannot remember. They call it _the far look._ It is dangerous. A man's soul does not always return. -- "Ringworld" %% A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been a boy. -- Gilbert K. Chesterson (1874-1936) %% A man can see the moment, answers to the dream. %% A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), "The Picture of Dorian Grey", 1891 %% A man comes home after a heavy night's drinking. His wife won't open the door for him, so he starts hammering on it. She still won't let him in, so he starts shouting. The neighbours are starting to notice, so in an attempt to embarrass her, he starts singing at the top of his voice: "I had her before she was married, I had her before she was married!" The top window immediately flies open, and his wife responds with equal gusto: "And so did all of your mates!" %% A man comes home from work after a horrible day at the office. His wife has complained to him over and over that he never notices her anymore, and he denied it. When he comes through the door his wife greet him and says, "Hi, Honey. Notice anything different about me today?" "Oh, I don't know. You got you hair done." "Nope, try again." "Oh, uh, you bought a new dress." "Nope, keep trying." "You got your nails done." "Nope, try again." "I give up, I'm too tired to play 20 questions." "I'm wearing a gas mask!" %% A man committed suicide by overdosing on decongestant tablets. All they found was a pile of dust. -- Rod Schmidt %% A man decided to conduct a world-wide poll. He asked a Texan, "Excuse me, what's your opinion on the meat shortage?" He got, "What's a shortage?" He went to Poland, asked same the question and got, "What's meat?" He went to Russia, asked same the question and got, "What's an opinion?" He went to New York, asked the same question and got, "What's an 'Excuse me'?" %% A man devoid of religion, is like a horse without a bridle. %% A man dies and is getting his tour of heaven. His guide is pointing out the various features and landmarks when the man asks, "What's that cliff?" "Oh, you don't want to look down there. That's hell!" The man creeps up to the edge and looks over. He sees lush, green valleys, verdant farmland and trees everywhere. "This doesn't look so bad," he says. Puzzled, the guide comes over and looks down. "Dang!" he snaps, "Those Mormons have been irrigating again!" %% A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself. -- Du Bois %% A man doesn't become a failure until he is satisfied with being one. %% A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away. -- Dr. Boyce, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown %% A man feared that he might find an assassin; Another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other. -- Stephan Crane, "The Black Riders and Other Lines", 1895 %% A man fell off a mountain and, as he fell, saw a branch and grabbed for it. By superhuman effort he was able to get a precarious grip on it. As he was hanging there for dear life, he looked up and cried out, "Is anybody there?" A deep majestic voice answered, "Yes my son, I am here. What do you need?" "Help me!!" cried the man. "I will help you", said the voice, "just let go of the branch and you'll be safe. All you have to do is trust." The man thought for a moment and cried out: "Anybody ELSE up there?" %% A man from the small Isle of Wight Once went on a far eclipse flight. The weather was bad Girls were not to be had And the Moon veered away out of spite. %% A man goes to a local bordello, desperate for sex, but low on money. And, this being a typical whorehouse, with the standard "No cash -- no gash" rule, the fellow is quite concerned that his meagre funds will not prove sufficient for his purposes. The madam assures him that he can be accommodated, however. He goes into the room he is directed to, and finds a beautiful whore there. Happily surprised by what his small cache has rented him, he begins to employ the prostitute. Upon entering, however, he finds he is in *extreme* pain. His penis feels like it is being rasped by sandpaper. He withdraws immediately, and complains to the prostitute. She leaves, promising to return in a more satisfactory condition. About ten minutes later, she returns, and they begin again. This time, she feels as smooth as silk within. The man enjoys the best evening of sex he has ever had. Afterwards, as he is dressing, he asks her, "The first time we started, it felt really rough, but when you came back it felt great. What did you do?" She replies, "Oh, I just picked off the scabs...." %% A man goes to his doctor to see about some test results. THe doctor says 'I've got good news and bad news. THe bad news is that you've got AIDS. THe good news is that you've also got ALZHEIMERS disease, so go home and forget all about it! %% A man goes to rob a bank. He brings two things: a hand grenade and his dog. He pulls the pin, lobs the grenade at the doors of the bank and ducks behind cover. Rover retrieves the grenade, drops it at his master's feet, and bolts away for the next toss. BOOM! End of robbery. I think the dog got a citation from the city. %% A man had to attend a large convention in Chicago. On this particular trip he decided to bring his wife. When they arrived at their hotel and were shown to their room, the man said: "You rest here while I register - I'll be back within an hour." The wife lies down on the bed... just then, an elevated train passes by very close to the window and shakes the room so hard she's thrown out of the bed. Thinking this must be a freak occurrence, she lies down once more. Again a train shakes the room so violently, she's pitched to the floor. Exasperated, she calls the front desk, asks for the manager. The manager says he'll be right up. The manager (naturally) is skeptical but the wife insists the story is true. "Look,... lie here on the bed - you'll be thrown right to the floor!". So he lies down next to the wife... Just then the husband walks in. "What", he says, "are you doing here?" The manager replies: "Would you believe I'm waiting for a train?" %% A man has no more right to say an uncivil thing, than to act one; no more right to say a rude thing to another, than to knock him down. -- Johnson %% A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold. %% A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows. -- Wordsworth %% A man is a person who will pay two dollars for a one-dollar item he wants. A woman will pay one dollar for a two-dollar item she doesn't want. -- William Binger %% A man is average when he can see the other man's faults; he becomes above average only when he can also see his own. %% A man is broken when he has lost his zest for bitterness. %% A man is going to work one day and accidentally slams his penis in the car door. Goes to the doctor, and the doctor says "We're going to have to put a splint on that." The guy says "No way Doc, I'm getting married in a week." The Doc replies "Well if we don't, it's going to be bent for the rest of your life." So finally the guy agrees, and the doctor gets out a couple tongue depressors and some tape and fixes him up. A week later, and he's on his honeymoon. His new wife is doing a slow, seductive strip-tease in front of him. She takes off her bra and says "See these, they've never been touched by a man before." She then takes off her panties and says "See this, it's never been seen by a man before." So the husband whips off his shorts and says "See this, it's not even out of the crate yet!" %% A man is known by the company that he organizes. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% A man is known by the enemies he keeps. -- Solomon Short %% A man is laying on his death bed reminiscing his life with his wife Agnes: "You have always been by my side Agnes. When our crop was destroyed by hail, you were there. When the tornado destroyed our house, you were there. When we rebuilt our house only to have it burn down, you were there. When I lost my arm in the combine, you were there. When I lost my right eye, you were there. Now I am dying of cancer and you are still here with me." "Agnes you are a bloody jinx!" %% A man is marooned on a desert island with a female sheep and a male Doberman for companionship. The animals soon get it on sexually, and all goes well until the man becomes unbearably horny and makes his move for the ewe, at which point the dog interposes himself, snarling, fangs bared. Months later, a raft drifts into sight. The sailor swims out, finds a beautiful girl on it, takes her to shore and feeds and comforts her. "You are so good to me," she responds gratefully. "I'd do absolutely anything to show my gratitude." "Would you?" smiles the sailor as he unfastens the length of rope that holds up his ragged pants. "Well, then, here -- use this as a leash and take that damn dog for a walk!" %% A man is never astonished that he doesn't know what another does, but he is surprised at the gross ignorance of the other in not knowing what he does. -- Haliburton %% A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist. -- Edward Abbey %% A man is not complete until he is married -- then he is finished. %% A man is not old as long as he is seeking something. -- Jean Rostand %% A man is one who can't wait ten seconds for a woman but can wait all day for a fish. %% A man is only as good as what he loves. -- Saul Bellow %% A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left to him. -- H. Matthews %% A man is walking down the street and spots a sign that says Genuine Chinese Laundry Prop. John Johnson Wondering how a John Johnson could own a Chinese laundry the man goes in. He sees an elderly Chinese man behind the counter and asks to speak to John Johnson. The Chinese man says that he is John Johnson. He goes on to explain that when he came to the US 40 years before that he was standing in line at immigration behind three men. The first man went up to the counter and was asked his name. He said John Johnson. The second man went up to the counter and was asked his name. He said John Johnson. The third man went up to the counter and was asked his name. He said John Johnson. The Chinese man went up the counter and was asked his name. He said Sam Ting. The immigration officer wrote down John Johnson. %% A man isn't a man until he has to meet a payroll. -- Ivan Shaffer %% A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it. -- Israel Zangwill (1884-1926) %% A man may be completely truthful about the number of times he has had sex, but never about his endurance. -- John Francis Putnam (1964) %% A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% A man may sometimes be forgiven the kiss to which he is not entitled, but never the kiss he has not the initiative to claim. %% A man may well bring a horse to the water, but he cannot make him drink with he will. -- John Heywood %% A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side. -- Joseph Addison %% A man must first govern himself ere he be fit to govern a family, and his family ere he be fit to bear the government in the commonwealth. -- Sir Walter Raleigh %% A man needs a mistress, just to break the monogamy. %% A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's. -- Jean Paul Richter %% A man never minds being in the doghouse as long as he can get his tail outside. %% A man of God should be identifiable as a man of God in spite of his religion, not because of it. -- Solomon Short %% A man of action, forced into a state of thought, is unhappy until he can get out of it. -- Galsworthy %% A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. -- James Joyce, "Ulysses" %% A man of great common sense and good taste, -- meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Notes. Julius Caesar" %% A man on a street corner, selling flowers, wearing sunglasses, holds a sandwich board that reads: Roses are red Violets are blue At least that's what they tell me Because I'm blind. -- Gary Larson, "Far Side" %% A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. %% A man parks his car in front of the main entrance of the Congress. Immediately, a member of the security team goes after him yelling: "Sir! Sir! You cannot park in here! All the congressmen are about to go out!" The man replies, "Don't worry. I have a good alarm in my car." %% A man permits himself to be oppressed by stone, And leans on thorns and thistles. He enters his house and does not see his wife. Misfortune. %% A man rushed into a bar and breathlessly asked the bartender to pour him three straight scotches. The bartender complied, and watched as he downed them one after another. "Why three scotches?" the bartender asked as he paused for breath. "Well, to be honest, I'm celebrating my first blow-job." "Hell, congratulations, the next one's on me." "No thanks," the young man said, "if the first three didn't get the taste out of my mouth, I don't think another one will." %% A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." -- Stephen Crane, "War is Kind", 1899 %% A man sat down next to another passenger on a train recently and couldn't help overhearing his conversation out the window with a man standing on the train platform. "Thanks for putting me up while I was here, Sam," said the passenger. "Glad to do it," said the other man. "Thanks for the food and the drinks--everything was wonderful." "It was a pleasure," said the man. "And thank your wife, Sam, she was great," said the passenger, "she was a truly great lay." The man was rather taken aback by this exchange and he turned to his fellow passenger and said: "Pardon me sir, but did I understand you to say that your friend's wife was a great lay?" "Well," said the other passenger, "I didn't REALLY enjoy it. But Sam is a hell of a nice guy." %% A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage; people may be amused, and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought up against him upon some subsequent occasion. -- Johnson %% A man should be greater than some of his parts. %% A man should choose a woman and an ox from his own country. %% A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. -- Pope %% A man should not allow himself to hate even his enemies, because if you indulge this passion on some occasions, it will rise of itself in others; if you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you. -- Plutarch %% A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. -- Charles M. Schwab %% A man walds into an interview with the State Department for a job as interpreter. Interviewer: We need people who can speak Iranian because of the Persian Gulf Situation. Applicant:langwij for me, yehboy! I'ma so good, even the camels understand me and obey lika I'ma the Ayotolla. Interviewer: Good, also, because of the budget crunch, we need to double up. Can you speak Korean? The guy we sent with the Olympic boxing team couldn't even read a simple bus schedule. Applicant: Korean, she'sa no problem noway! You bring me a Korean, I lissen him, I'ma tell you if he'sa North or South, just by himma talk for 2 minutes. Interviewer: Good, you sound like just the man for the job. Let's fill out the paperwork. How many languages do you speak: Fluently; Moderately; just a little? Applicant: Howa many? Let'sa see, in all, I'ma speak sixa-teen langwij, English, da best! %% A man walked into a bar with his alligator and asked the bartender, "Do you serve lawyers here?". "Sure do," replied the bartender. "Good," said the man. "Give me a beer, and I'll have a lawyer for my 'gator." %% A man walked into a haberdashery and said to the owner, 'Did you just see me come in?' The owner replied, 'Yes, sir, I did.' 'Ahhhh!' the man said. 'Have you ever seen me before?' The owner was puzzled. 'No sir, never in my life.' 'Ah Hah!' the man exclaimed. 'Then how did you know it was me?' %% A man walks along a lonely beach. Suddenly he hears a deep voice: "DIG!" He looks around; nobody's there. I am having hallucinations, he thinks. Then he hears the voice again: "I SAID, DIG!" So he starts to dig in the sand with his bare hands, and after some inches, he finds a small chest with a rusty lock. The deep voice says: "OPEN!" OK, the man thinks, let's open the thing. He finds a rock with which to break the lock, and when the chest is finally open, he sees a lot of gold coins. The deep voice says: "TO THE CASINO!" Well, the casino is only a few miles away, so the man takes the chest and walks to the casino. The deep voice says: "ROULETTE!" So he changes all the gold coins into a huge pile of roulette tokens and goes to one of the tables, where the players gaze at him with disbelief. The deep voice says: "27!" The man takes the whole pile and drops it at the 27. The table nearly bursts. Everybody is very quiet when the croupier throws the ball. ... The ball stays at the 26. The deep voice says: "SHIT!" %% A man walks into a psychiatrists office and tells him, "I have an identity problem...So do I." %% A man walks into the psychiatrists office with a pancake on his head, fried eggs on each shoulder, and a strip of bacon over each ear. The shrink, humoring him, asks, "What seems to be the problem?" The guy answers, "Doc, I'm worried about my brother." %% A man walks into the sheriffs office... 'I want to become a deputy!' 'Fine. I want you to catch this man.' Hands the man a wanted poster. 'Last seen wearing a brown paper hat, brown paper shirt, brown paper pants, and brown paper boots. What's he wanted for?' 'Rustling.' %% A man was driving on a dark, hilly rural street, and he hits a cat. He sees a farm house near by, and figures the cat probably belongs to the people who live there. The guy goes up to the house to give them the bad news. A woman answers the door. "Hi. I'm sorry, but I think I just killed your cat out on the road there." "Oh, no! What did it look like?" (The man rolls his eyes back, hangs out his tongue, and tries to look flat and squishy.) "No, I mean before you hit him!" (The man arches his back, curls his fingers, and bugs his eyes in a look of terror, flinching.) %% A man was flying on a plane when he noticed a beautiful woman sitting next to him. She was wearing a "NAA" button. "What's that?" he asked. "Nymphomaniacs Association of America" she replied. "Tell me, is it true that blacks have the biggest pricks?" "No, it's the indians. They're better hung than anybody." "Is it true that Italians are the best lovers?" "No, the Jews. Once they start they can go all night." "What's you name?" he asked. "Sue" she replied, "what's yours?" "Solomon Running Bear" %% A man was kneeling by a grave in a cemetery, crying and praying very loudly, "Oh why..eeeee did you die...eeeeee, Oh Why..eeeeee, why did you Di......eeee" The caretaker walks up, pardons himself and asks politely, "Excuse me, sir, but I've been seeing you for hours now, carrying on at this grave. You must have been very close to the deceased." "No, I never met him. Oh why....eeeee did you die.eeeee, why..eeeee did you.." "Sir, you say you never met this person, yet you carry on so? Tell, me who is buried here?" "My wife's first husband!" %% A man was once heard to boast, That he received a parcel by post, It contained, so we heard, A magnificent turd, And the balls of his grandfather's ghost. %% A man was playing golf one day when a little frog hopped out the water at a water hazard and croaked, "I am a magic frog, and since you are the 10,000th person to play through here, I'm prepared to offer you one of two magic gifts: First, for a whole year you can have the most fabulous sex life that anyone ever had; beyond your wildest dreams. Or, second, for a whole year you can be the best golfer the world has ever known. Which do you prefer?" The man thought a bit and said that he'd take the golf. Well, the man holed his wood shot from where he was, completed the course in an average of 2 per hole, and went round in 22. Quickly he attracted the attention of the sports world, and became the world's best-known golfer, setting course records wherever he went. A year later he was playing the same course inhabited by the frog, and at the water hazard the frog hopped out and said, "Well, the year is up, and you now revert to the 18-handicap player you were before. But tell me, I was a little surprised that you chose the golf - I take it your sex life is outstanding?" The man said, "Well, I have no complaints in that department at all, which is why I chose the golf." "How many times did you engage in sex last year?" inquired the frog. The man thought a little and said, "Oh, eight or ten times, I guess." "Damn," said the frog, "that doesn't strike me as very satisfactory." "Oh, I don't know," replied the man, "for a Catholic priest in a little town in South Dakota it doesn't seem so bad." %% A man was praying to God one evening, and asked God, "God, in terms of the vastness of your power and knowledge, what does a million dollars mean to you?" God replied, "A penny." Then the man asked, "And, in terms of the vastness of your power and knowledge, what does a million years mean to you?" God replied, "A second." All excited, the man asked, "Well, then, can I borrow a penny?", to which God replied, "In a second." %% A man was trapped on a deserted island that was sinking into the sea. As the water lapped around his feet, a motor boat suddenly approached the island. "Come on man, get in" said the boatman. "No", said the guy on the island, "I have faith in Jesus. He will save me." The boat went off and the water continued to rise. When it was up to the guy's chest, another boat appeared. "Get in the boat, or you're going to drown" said the boatman. Again, the guy said "No, I have faith in Jesus. He will save me." Finally the water was up to the guy's chin when a third boat appeared. "Get in, this is your last chance." "No, Jesus will save me." So the boat went off, the water continued to rise and the guy drowned. He went up to heaven and was greeted by Jesus. "Hey, Jesus," he said, "I trusted in you all my life and you let me drown. I don't believe it." "YOU don't believe it?" Jesus said. "I sent three fucking boats to save you." %% A man went rushing into a church for something he had forgotten, but he was stopped cold by a huge sign the janitor had placed in front of the floor that he had just washed. It read: PLEASE DON'T WALK ON THE WATER. %% A man went to a brain store to get some brain for dinner. He sees a sign remarking on the quality of professional brain offered at this particular brain store. So he asks the butcher: "How much for Engineer brain?" "3 dollars an ounce." "How much for brain?" "4 dollars an ounce." "How much for lawyer brain?" "100 dollars an ounce." "Why is lawyer brain so much more?" "Do you know how many lawyers you need to kill to get one ounce of brain?" %% A man who can't mind his own business is not to be trusted with the king's. -- Saville %% A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either. -- Soren Kierkegaard %% A man who checks out of the express lane with seven items is the same man who will wear Supp-Hose and park in the Reserved for Handicapped spaces. -- Erma Bombeck %% A man who cries is capable of any evil. %% A man who fishes for marlin in ponds will put his money in Etruscan bonds. %% A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% A man who has no eyes, sess a tree with apples. He takes no apples He leaves no apples A one-eyed man sees a tree with two apples and takes one. (Notice use of plural vs singular) %% A man who is always forgetting his best intentions may be said to be a thorough fare of good resolutions. -- Mrs. Jameson %% A man who is always ready to believe what is told him will never do well. -- Gaius Petronius, "Satyricon" %% A man who is always satisfied with himself is seldom satisfied with others. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things that he does not know; and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pendant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition. -- Colton %% A man who likes to lie in bed can usually find a girl willing to listen to him. %% A man who studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% A man who thought he was John-The-Baptist was disturbing the neighborhood, so for public safety, he was committed. He was put in a room with another crazy and immediately began his routine, "I am John The Baptist! Jesus Christ has sent me!" The other guy looks at him and declares, "I did NOT!" %% A man who turns green has eschewed protein. %% A man who worked for the fire department came home from work and told his wife, "You know, we have a wonderful system at the station. Bell 1, we all put our coats on. Bell two, we all slide down the pole. Bell three rings, we are on the truck and ready to go. From now on we are going to run this house the same way. when I say Bell one, you strip naked. Bell two, you jump into bed. Bell three, we are going to screw all night. The next night he came from work and yelled "Bell 1", she took of her clothes. "Bell two", she jumped into bed. "Bell three", they began to screw. After two minutes his wife yelled out "Bell four". He said "what the hell is Bell four?" "More hose!", she said, "You ain't no where near the fire!!!" %% A man who would woo a fair maid Should 'prentice himself to the trade. He should study all day In methodical way How to flatter, cajole, and persuade. %% A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights. -- Napoleon Bonaparte, "Maxims" 1804-1815 %% A man wishes to buy an unusual gift for his wife. He walks into a pet store and tells the salesperson that money is no object and that he wants something different. The clerk shows him a trained mynah bird (yes, I know most probably think it should be a parrot, but mynahs are smarter). With a lit candle under the its left foot, the mynah sings "White Christmas." With the candle under its right foot, the mynah sings "Jingle Bells." The man buys the bird and takes it home to his wife. They decide to test out its training. Taking a lit candle, they place it under the bird's left foot. It immediately breaks out with "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas..." The woman is delighted. Putting the candle under its right foot, the mynah sings "Dashing through the snow..." Curious, they decided to put a candle under each foot at the same time. Upon doing this, the mynah sang "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..." %% A man with 3 wings and a dictionary is cousin to the turkey. %% A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked. -- Edward Abbey %% A man without a woman is like a fish without gills. %% A man without a woman is like a statue without pigeons. %% A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body. -- Edward Abbey %% A man works hard to keep the wolf from the door. Then his daughter grows up and brings one home. %% A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point...and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point. -- Feodor Dostoevsky, "Notes From the Underground" %% A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package. %% A man's action is only a picture book of his creed. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% A man's best friend is his dogma. %% A man's body is 70% water. However, a dolphin's body is 0% water, so dolphins have to live in the ocean. -- Steve Connelly %% A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But that is afterward decided, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% A man's duty? To be ready--with rifle or rood--to defend his home when the showdown comes. -- Edward Abbey %% A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own. -- Thomas Mann (1875-1955) %% A man's errors are what makes him amiable. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% A man's good breeding is the best security against another's bad manners. -- Chesterfield %% A man's got to be his own savior. %% A man's gotta know his limitations. -- Dirty Harry [Clint Eastwood] in "Magnum Force", 197 %% A man's home is his hassle. %% A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside it is more often his nursery. %% A man's house is his castle. -- Sir Edward Coke %% A man's legs must be long enough to reach the ground. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% A man's only as old as the woman he feels. %% A man's reputation is the opinion people have of him; his character is what he really is. -- Jack Miner %% A man's true wealth is the good he does in the world. -- Mohammed %% A man, a plan, a canal. Suez! %% A man, dejected over a repulsed suit thought about hanging himself in front of her house, then remembered she didn't want him hanging around. %% A man, who not being certain of an item he reads in the newspaper, buys 100 copies of the paper to reassure himself of its truth. -- "I Think Therefore I Laugh" by John Allen Paulos: %% A manager does the thing right. A leader does the right thing. -- Anonymous (the great Greek philosopher) %% A manager was about to be fired, but a programmer who worked for him invented a new program that became popular and sold well. As a result, the manager retained his job. The manager tries to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I thought it was an interesting concept, and thus I expect no reward." The manager upon hearing this remarked, "This programmer, though he holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of an employee. Lets promote him to the exalted position of management consultant!" But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but waste everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm working on." %% A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?" "It will take one year," said the master promptly. "But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?" The master programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years." "And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?" The master programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said. -- The Tao of Programming %% A manager, name of .... Was sent to quash some revolts; Up Tewksbury way, Where, I would say, He could tell the nuts from the dolts. %% A manuscript for a market in which no textbooks currently exist will be followed two weeks after contracting by an announcement of an identical book by your closest competitor. %% A manuscript, like a fetus, is never improved by showing it to somebody before it is completed. %% 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. %% A married man sho wants to conceal his drunken infidelities can easily wake up in the morning wondering who he's lying next to. %% A martyr is a hero who didn't make it. %% A mass of ice fills the western half of the room. %% A massive stone tablet imbedded in the wall reads: %% A massive walk-in safe takes up the entire north wall. It is tightly closed, and has no handle, lock, nor keyhole. %% A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me", he said, "may I examine it?" The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium and Hard", said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human." "Pray, great master", implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?" The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it under foot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened. %% A master was asked the question, "What is the Way?" by a curious monk. "It is right before your eyes," said the master. "Why do I not see it for myself?" "Because you are thinking of yourself." "What about you: do you see it?" "So long as you see double, saying `I don't', and `you do', and so on, your eyes are clouded," said the master. "When there is neither `I' nor `You', can one see it?" "When there is neither `I' nor `You', who is the one that wants to see it?" %% A master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices. "The Tao is embodied in all software - regardless of how insignificant," said the master. "Is the Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice. "It is," came the reply. "Is the Tao in a video game?" continued the novice. "It is even in a video game," said the master. "And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?" The master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson is over for today," he said. -- "The Tao of Programming" %% A masterpiece by a neglected genius is here. %% A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems. -- Paul Erdos %% A mathematician is showing a new proof he came up with to a large group of peers. After he's gone through most of it, one of the mathematicians says, "Wait! That's not true. I have a counter-example!" He replies, "That's okay. I have two proofs." %% A mathematician is somebody who can do multiplication without a calculator... %% A mathematician named Boris Had a wife with a wonderful clitoris. He charged a small fee For his colleagues to see That it was made in the shape of a torus. %% 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.. %% A mathematician named Klein Thought the Mobius band was divine. Said he, "If you glue The edges of two, You'll get a weird bottle like mine! %% A mathematician, a physicist, an engineer and a computer scientist are asked to prove the conjecture that all odd numbers are prime. The mathematician says, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is a counterexample; the conjecture is false. The physicist says, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an exception, 11 is prime, 13 is prime... The engineer says, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime... The computer scientist says, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime, 7 is prime... %% A meeting is a place where people get together to talk about what they should be doing. %% A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted %% A meeting lasts at least 1 1/2 hours however short the agenda. -- Denys Parsons %% A melon covered with willow leaves. Hidden lines. Then it drops down to one from heaven. %% A member of your family will soon do something that will make you proud. %% A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. -- Dean Acheson %% A merchant captain and several of his officers were returning to the ship after a large evening ashore. As they climbed the gangway the captain threw up all over himself. Pointing to an apprentice seaman above him he shouted "Give that man five days in the brig for vomiting!" The following morning the captain was checking the log and saw that the young seaman had been sentenced to ten days and asked the chief mate why. "Well Sir, when we got you undressed we found that he'd also shit in your pants." %% A metallic voice says, "Hello, Intruder! Your unauthorized presence in the vault area of the Bank of Zork has set off all sorts of nasty surprises, several of which seem to have been fatal. This message brought to you by the Frobozz Magic Alarm Company." %% A metaphor is like a simile. -- Rod Schmidt %% A method of solution is perfect if we can forsee from the start, and even prove, that following that method we shall attain our aim. -- Leibnitz %% A mexican bandito asked his friend if he knows Pancho Villa. "Do I know Pancho Villa? Do _I_ know Pancho Villa?? One day after I rob bank, my pistollo is yanked from my holstero. Behind me stand Pancho Villa. He take my money, say 'Eat my doodoo.' Rather than to die, I eat his doodoo. While I eat his doodoo, I yank his pistollo. I say, 'Eat _MY_ doodoo.' Rather than to die, he eat my doodoo. You ask me if I know Pancho Villa? We had lunch together!" %% A middle-aged codger named Bruin Found his love life completely in ruin, For he flirted with flirts Wearing pants and no skirts, And he never got in for no screwin'. %% A midget had a date with a very tall girl. It was a quiff-hanger. %% A midwife named Flo from Arabia Often enjoys giving baby a Forty-volt shock To the base of the cock. (On a girl, she goes for the labia.) %% A mightly blow, but it misses the # by a mile. %% A mighty creature is the germ, Though smaller than the pachyderm. His customary dwelling place Is deep within the human race. His childish pride he often pleases By giving people strange diseases. Do you, my poppet, feel infirm? You probably contain a germ. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% A military disaster may produce a better postwar situation than victory. -- Shimon Tzabar %% A milkmaid there was, with a stutter, Who was lonely and wanted a futter. She had nowhere to turn, So she diddled a churn, And managed to come with the butter. %% A mind content both crown and kingdom is. -- Greene %% A mind is a terrible thing to taste. %% A mind is a terrible thing to ugg.. I forgot.. %% A mind is a wonderful thing to waste %% A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but a waist is a terrible thing to mind. %% A missionary and his African guide have been captured by nasty-looking cannibals, who are stoking up a fire near to them. The missionary says to the guide, "Makumba, you speak this dialect. What does 'jive-ass honky' mean?" %% A modem is a baudy house. %% A modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object in the whole creation. -- Goldsmith %% A monied aristocracy in our country ... has already set the government at defiance. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% A monstrous mind is a toy for ever. %% A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% A mortician who practised in Fife Made love to the corpse of his wife. "How could I know, Judge? She was cold, did not budge-- Just the same as she'd acted in life." %% A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes. -- Frost %% A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage. -- Edward Abbey %% A motion to abend is always in order. %% A motion to adjourn is always in order. %% A motor will rotate in the wrong direction. %% A mouse is an elephant built by the Japanese. %% A mouse was sniffing around in a meadow, when an eagle swooped down, swallowed him whole, and rose up in the air again. The mouse worked his way through until his head was sticking out of the bird's asshole. "Say, good buddy," he squeaked, "how high up are we, anyway?" "Oh, about two thousand feet," answered the eagle. The mouse's eyes bugged out. "Hey, you wouldn't shit me, would you?" %% A mushroom cloud has no silver lining. %% A musician, an artist, an architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% A mutated, superior man could also be a wonderful thing ... the forerunner of a new and better kind of human being! -- Dr. Elizabeth Dehaver, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," stardate 1312.9 %% A mysterious recorded voice groans into life and announces: "This exit is closed. Please leave via main office." %% A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. -- James Feibleman, "Understanding Philosophy", 1973 %% A narrow mind begets obstinacy, and we do not easily believe what we cannot see. -- Dryden %% A narrow trail runs north-south here between the building and the edge of the precipice to the east. Far to the south some vegetation is present. %% A nasty looking dwarf throws a knife at you. %% A nasty old drunk in Carmel Thinks it funny to piss in the well. He says, "Some don't favor That unusual flavor, But I don't drink the stuff -- what the hell!" ROOTY-TOOT-TOOT There was a young girl from Dundee, From her fanny there grew a plum tree. No one ate the nice fruit, To tell you the truth, Because they knew it came from her tooty-toot-toot. %% A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room. %% A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century. -- Baron de Montesquieu %% A nation never falls but by suicide. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. -- Alexander Hamilton %% A neat desk is a sign of a sick mind. %% A necessary item only goes on sale after you have purchased it at the regular price. -- Sherry Graditor %% A necrophile name of Ned Schultz, Often brags of his deed and exults, "Tis legal, it's said, To make love to the dead, If performed by consenting adults." %% A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. "It is out on loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside the stable. "But I can hear it bray, over there." "Whom do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?" %% A nervous young fellow named Fred Took a charming young widow to bed. When he'd diddled a while She remarked with a smile, "You've got it all in but the head." %% A netnews signature file: Your eyes are weary from staring at the CRT for so | Evan M. Manning long. You feel sleepy. Notice how restful it is | is to watch the cursor blink. Close your eyes. The | gleeper@tybalt.caltech.edu opinions stated above are yours. You cannot | manning@mars.jpl.nasa.gov imagine why you ever felt otherwise. | %% A new broom sweeps clean, but the old brush knows the corners. %% A new cask will long preserve the tincture of the liquor with which it was first impregnated. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% A new diet or exercise program can be unusually beneficial for you now. %% 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. %% A new drink's been invented--- It's one part vodka and one part prune juice, and it's called a pile driver. %% A new food additive, derived from the sweat on Michael Jackson's hands after a concert. It will be used mostly in confections requiring a smooth texture. Other uses may be derived. This additive will appear on package labels as: Partially Androgenated Palm Oil %% A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow. -- Charlie Brower %% A new koan: If you have some ice cream, I will give it to you. If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you. It is an ice cream koan. %% A new lumberjack had just finished his first month in the lonely wilds of Alaska, where there were no women for miles. He finally couldn't take it anymore and nervously asked the foreman what the other men did to relieve the pressure. "Try the hole in the barrel outside the shower," suggested the foreman. "The other men swear by it." The lumberjack dubiously tried it out and had the experience of his life. "That barrel is fantastic! Warm! Wet! I'm going to use it every day!" "Every day but the third Wednesday of the month," one of the other men replied. "Why not then?" "That's your day in the barrel." %% A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Planck %% A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary. Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a "round tuit" now has no excuse for further procrastination. %% A new taste had been acquired and a new appetite began to grow. The time had long since arrived to crush the technical intelligentsia, which had come to regard itself as too irreplaceable and had not gotten used to catching instructions on the wing. In other words, we never did trust the engineers - and from the very first years of the Revolution we saw to it that those lackeys and servants of former capitalist bosses were kept in line by healthy suspicion and surveillance by the workers. -- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago" %% A newly-wed man of Peru Found himself in a terrible stew: His wife was in bed Much deader than dead, And so he had no one to screw. %% A newlywed couple from Goshen Spent their honeymoon sailing the ocean. In twenty-eight days They got laid eighty ways -- Imagine such fucking devotion! %% A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure. -- Arthure "Bugs" Baer %% A newspaper story reports the following graffiti on a wall in Budapest: "Marx is dead. Lenin is dead. And I don't feel so good either." %% A nice idea, but with a #? %% A nice man is a man of nasty ideas. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore. -- Yogi Berra %% A nickname is the heaviest stone the devil can throw at a man. %% A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% A non-vegetarian anti-abortionist is a contradiction in terms. -- Phyllis Schlafly %% A nose that can see is worth two that can sniff. -- Eugene Ionesco %% A not-very-bright shorthand typist (or maybe she wanted to teach her boss a lesson?) presented the following letter for signature: Dear Mr Tomlinson, Now let me see. What shall I tell the old fool? In reply to yours of the sixteenth we are surprised to learn that the car which you purchased from us is not giving perfect satisfaction. We had to sell it quickly before it fell to bits. As you know, we inspect all cars thoroughly before putting them up for sale. Your vehicle was in excellent condition when it left our showrooms. That's a nice dress. New, isn't it? It is possible that your driver is at fault. Five miles to the gallon is very poor mileage for a car in such good condition as yours. Five gallons to the mile would be about right. I never noticed before you have a little dimple on your chin. Please bring it round at your convenience and our mechanic will make the necessary adjustments. Yours faithfully, Just sign it yourself. %% A notorious whore named Ms. Hearst, In the pleasures of men was well-versed. Reads the sign o'er the head Of her well-rumpled bed "The customer always comes first." %% A noun's a special kind of word. It's ev'ry name you ever heard. I find it quite interesting, A noun's a person, place or thing. %% A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmer in the world. Why is this?" The Master replies: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has entered the mystery of Tao." %% A novice asked the master: "I have a program that sometime runs and sometimes aborts. I have followed the rules of programming, yet I am totally baffled. What is the reason for this?" The master replied: "You are confused because you do not understand Tao. Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? Computers simulate determinism; only Tao is prefect. The rules of programming are transitory; only Tao is eternal. Therefore you must contemplate Tao before you receive enlightenment." "But how will I know when I have received enlightenment?" asked the novice. "Your program will then run correctly," replied the master. %% A novice asked the master: "What is the true meaning of programming?" The master replied: "Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are fatigued, program when the moment is right." -- The Zen of Programming %% A novice went into the master's cubicle and saw a new computer sitting upon the master's desk. "What is that computer?" asked the novice. The master placed his hand upon a small box that was connected to the computer by a wire. "Behold," said the master, "This device controls what we see on the screen. The screen simulates a desk. For example, here is a filing cabinet and a trash depository. Here also is a typewriter and a calculator." "This is a wonderful invention," whispered the novice in awe. "It is not as wonderful as it seems," said the master. "Can you see the two desks?" The novice nodded. "One is on the floor, the other is on the screen," he remarked. "Just so. Now, is there something missing on one of the two desks?" The novice pondered for a moment. "One of the desks does not have a computer on it," he said. The master shook his head. "Neither of the desks has a computer on it." -- The Zen of Programming %% A nubile female virtually never experiences difficulty in finding willing sexual partners, and in a natural habitat nubile females are probably always married. The basic female "strategy" is to obtain the best possible husband, to be fertilized by the fittest available male (always, of course, taking risk into account), and to maximize the returns on sexual favors bestowed: to be sexually aroused by the sight of males would promote random matings, thus undermining all of these aims, and would also waste time and energy that could be spent in economically significant activities and in nurturing children. A female's reproductive success would be seriously compromised by the propensity to be sexually aroused by the sight of males. -- Donald Symons, "The Evolution of Human Sexuality", attempting to explain the lack of female interest in pornography %% A nuclear power plant is infinitely safer than eating, because 300 people choke to death on food every year. -- Dixy Lee Ray, 1977, quoted from "Loose Talk" %% A nuclear war can ruin your whole day. %% A nudist resort at Benares Took a midget in all unawares. But he made members weep For he just couldn't keep His nose out of private affairs. %% A nurse a day keeps the doctor away. %% A nurse motivated by spite Tied her infantine charge to a kite; She launched it with ease On the afternoon breeze, And watched till it flew out of sight. -- Edward Gorey %% A nymph hits you and steals your virginity. %% A one-eyed man is able to see, A lame man is able to tread. He treads on the tail of the tiger. The tiger bites the man. Misfortune. Thus does a warrior act on behalf of his great prince. %% A one-eyed man who is able to see. The perseverance of a solitary man furthers. %% A pack of wild weasels ripped into my flesh. %% A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and inflame; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so, that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them, that he would give all his life to possess them. What is the fond love of dearest friends compared to his treasure? Is memory as strong as expectancy, fruition as hunger, gratitude as desire? -- Thackeray %% A pair of suburban couples who had known each other for quite some time talked it over and decided to do a little conjugal swapping. The trade was made the following evening and the newly arranged couples retired to their respective houses. After about an hour of bedroom bliss, one of the wives propped herself up on an elbow, looked at her new partner and said: "Well, I wonder how the boys are getting along." %% A pale little ghost appears in wireframe glasses and zits. He drops something, and then vanishes into the gloom. %% A pale little ghost appears, but he's run out of treasures. He soon fades away. %% A pansy who lived in Khartoum Took a lesbian up to his room. They argued all night Over who had the right To do what, with which, and to whom. %% A parade should have bands or horse, but not both. -- Nancy M. Wells %% A passage enters from the south. %% A passionate red-haired girl When you kissed her, her senses would whirl, And her twat would get wet, And would wiggle and fret, And her cunt-lips would curl and unfurl. %% A pastor was visiting an elderly lady who was a "shut in." Since she didn't get very many visitors, she went on incessantly about her problems while the pastor nibbled on some peanuts on the coffee table in front of him. After about a half hour, and with his endurance almost expended, he politely interrupted, explaining that he had other appointments that afternoon and said, "I'm afraid I've eaten most of your peanuts while I was listening and I would like to leave you a couple of dollars so that you can get some more." "No," replied the woman, "With my dentures I can't chew them. It's all I can do just to suck the chocolate off them." %% A patent application will be preceded by one week by a similar application made by an independent worker. %% 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. %% A patient old fag named McQueen Kept watch in a public latrine. He would gaze and compare, And response to his stare Might result in his making the seen. %% A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -- Edward Abbey %% A peasant always hangs himself in his landlord's doorway. -- Chinese proverb %% A pederastic necrophiliac is a gentleman who is true to the very end of the end of a friend. %% A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space. -- Gloria Steinem %% A pedestrian hit me and went under my car. %% A pedestrian is a man who has two cars, a wife, and one or more teenage children. %% A pencil with no point needs no eraser. %% A penny for your thoughts; $20 to act it out. %% A penny saved has not been spent. %% A penny saved is a Governmental oversight. %% A penny saved is a penny taxed. %% A penny saved is a penny to squander. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% A penny saved is an economic breakthrough. %% A penny saved is ridiculous. %% A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower %% A perfectly honest woman, a woman who never flatters, who never manages, who never cajoles, who never conceals, who never uses her eyes, who never speculates on the effect which she produces, who never is conscious of unspoken admiration, what a monster, I say, would such a female be! -- Thackeray %% A performing octopus could play the piano, the zither and a piccolo, and his trainer wanted him to add the bagpipe to his accomplishments. With this in mind, a bagpipe was placed in the octopus's room, and the trainer awaited results. Hours passed, but no bagpipe music was heard. Since the talented octopus usually learned quickly, the trainer was disturbed. Opening the door the next morning, he asked the octopus, "Have you learned to play that thing yet?" "Play it!" retorted the octopus. "I've been trying to lay it all night!" %% A peripheral is what your spouse becomes after you bring a personal computer into your home. %% A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% A person forgives only when they are in the wrong. %% A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry. %% A person is not rewarded for having brains, only for using them. %% A person over age 65 who drinks says that his doctor recommends it. -- Bob Smith %% A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. -- G. C. Lichtenberg %% A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Conduct of Life" %% A person should take a bath once in the summer, and not quite so often in the winter. %% A person who can't lead and won't follow makes a dandy roadblock. %% A person who follows the crowd will never be followed by a crowd. %% A person who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal. %% A person who has nothing looks at all there is and wants something. A person who has something looks at all there is and wants all the rest. %% A person who is more than casually interested in computers should be well schooled in machine language, since it is a fundamental part of a computer. -- Donald Knuth %% A person who's at the top has the habit of getting to the bottom. %% A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure. -- Proverb %% A person's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) %% A person's strongest dreams are about what he can't do. -- Vina, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage), stardate unknown %% A perversion of nature....how exciting! %% A pessimist asked God for relief. "Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness," said God. "No," replied the petitioner, "I wish you to create something that would justify them." "The world is all created," said God, "but you have overlooked something - the mortality of the optimist." -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% A pessimist is never disappointed. %% 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." %% A phenomenon known to anyone who has ever lit fires: You can throw a burnt match out the window of your car and start a forest fire while you can use two boxes of matches and a whole edition of the Sunday paper without being able to start a fire under the dry logs in your fireplace. %% A physical fellow named Fisk Could screw at a rate very brisk. So fast was his action The Fitzgerald contraction Would shrink up his rod to a disk. %% A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in a fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician treats a patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant. -- Seneca %% A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. -- George Wald %% A physicist visits a colleague and notice a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. "Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck ?" he asks. "No", replies the colleague,"but I've been told that it works even if you don't believe in it" -- Niels Bohrs favorite story %% A piano is a piano is a piano is a piano. -- Gertrude Steinway %% A picture is a poem without words. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% A piece of electronic equipment is housed in a beautifully designed cabinet, and at the side or on top is a little box containing the components which the designer forgot to make room for. -- Denys Parsons %% A piercer suddenly drops from the ceiling! %% A pig ate his fill of acorns under an oak tree and then started to root around the tree. A crow remarked, "You should not do this. If you lay bare the roots, the tree will wither and die." "Let it die," said the pig. "Who cares so long as there are acorns?" %% A pig is a jolly companion, Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt -- A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale, Though mountains may topple and tilt. When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you, When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig, Though you may be thrown over by Tabby and Rover, You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig, You'll never go wrong with a pig! -- Thomas S. Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" %% A pig on a mountain sees more than a wise man with a bag over his head. %% A pious old woman named Tweak Had taught her vagina to speak. It was frequently liable To quote from the Bible, But when fucking -- not even a squeak! %% A pious young lady named Finnegan Would caution her friend, "Well, you're in again; So time it aright, Make it last through the night, For I certainly don't want to sin again!" %% 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. %% A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth. %% A place you want to get to is always just off the edge of the map you happen to have handy. -- Denys Parsons %% A plague on both your houses! They have made worm's meat of me. %% A playful young chemist named Byrd Had an urge that could not be deferred. So to irritate Knox He shit in his sox, And plastered the walls with his turd. THE BATHROOM POET If you find for your verse there's no call, And you can't afford paper at all, For the true poet born, However forlorn, There is always the lavat'ry wall. %% A pleasing trembling thrills through all my blood Whene'er you touch me with your melting hand; But when you kiss, oh! 'tis not to be spoke. -- Gildon %% A plethora of individuals with expertise in culinary techniques contaminate the potable concoction produced by steeping certain edible nutriments. %% A plucked goose doesn't lay golden eggs. %% A plumber whose name was John Brink Plumbed the cook as she bent o'er the sink. Her resistance was stout, And John Brink petered out, With his pipe-wrench all limber and pink. %% A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. -- Robert Frost %% A poet that fails in writing, becomes often a morose critic. The weak insipid white wine makes at length excellent vinegar. -- Shenstone %% A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere. -- W. H. Auden %% A policeman is walking his beat when he finds a totally drunk man collapsed against a building, weeping uncontrollably and holding his car keys in his hands. He's moaning something about 'They took my car!'. Seeing he is quite well dressed, the cop thinks he may have a real case of theft on his hands and proceeds to question the man. "What are your car keys doing out?" "My car, it was right on the end of my key, and those ba**ards stole it! Please ossifer, get my Porsche back. My God, it was right on the end of my key! Where is it? They stole it and it was right here; right on my key! "OK, OK, stand up, let's get some more information. (he stands the man up, and notices his penis is hanging out). Aw s**t mister, your dick is hanging out, would you put that thing away!" The man looks down, sees his prick hanging there and screams "Oh my God, they stole my girlfriend!" %% A political campaign is when the candidate tells what he stands for and the election is when the voters tell if they can stand for his being elected. %% A political man can have as his aim the realization of freedom, but he has no means to realize it other than through violence. -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) %% A politician always abuses his own constituency and placates the opponent's. -- Bob Smith %% A politician is a person who can make waves and then make you think he's the only one who can save the ship. -- Ivern Ball, "Modern Secretary" %% A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word "but" which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative--before they tell you. Thus: "I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none, but ... " (a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut). -- Frank Mankiewicz %% A pollster was taking a worldwide opinion poll. Her question was, "Excuse me; what do you think of the meat shortage?" In Texas, the answer was "What's a shortage?" In Poland, the answer was "What's meat?" In the Soviet Union, the answer was "What's an opinion?" In New York City, the answer was "What's excuse me?" %% A poodle like you could end up at Burger King. %% A poor little lonely old lady lived in a house with only her cat as a friend. One day, the lights went out as she sat knitting; she had been unable to pay the electric bill. So, she went up to the attic and got an old oil lamp from her childhood. As she rubbed it clean a genie appeared and allowed her three wishes. "First, I want to be so rich I never have to worry about money again. Second, I want to be young and beautiful again. And last, I want you to change my little cat into a handsome prince." *POOF* As the smoke cleared she saw she was surrounded by big bags of coins, and that in the mirror was a young beautiful woman. She turned as the handsome prince walked in the door, held her in his arms and said, "Now I'll bet you're sorry you took me to the vet for that little operation." %% A poor man served by thee, shall make thee rich. -- Mrs. Browning %% A poor plan can be made to look great when compared to a worse alternative. %% A portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead hangs on the wall. %% A possum must be himself, and being himself he is honest. -- Walt Kelly %% 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. %% A pound of salt will not sweeten a single cup of tea. %% A prediction is worth twenty explanations. -- K. Brecher %% A pregnancy will never occur when you have a low-paying job which you hate. -- Erma Bombeck %% A present, over which you will shed tears of joy, will come to you from a nasty little boy. %% A present, over which you will shed tears of joy. %% A pretty foot is one of the greatest gifts of nature... please send me your last pair of shoes, already worn out in dancing... so I can have something of yours to press against my heart. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% A pretty girl can do no wrong. -- Edward Abbey %% A pretty wife living in Tours Demanded her daily amour. But the husband said, "No! It's to much. Let it go! My backsides are dragging the floor." %% A pretty woman can do anything; an ugly woman must do everything. %% A pretty woman is a welcome guest. -- Byron %% A pretty young boy known as Kevin Was raped in a pasture by seven Lascivious beasts (Oh, those Anglican priests) And such is the Kingdom of Heaven. %% 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 pretty young maiden from France Decided she'd "just take a chance." She let herself go For an hour or so And now all her sisters are aunts. %% A pride of lions A gaggle of geese An odd lot of programmers %% A priest advised Voltaire on his death bed to renounce the devil. Voltaire said, "This is no time to make new enemies" %% A priest asked: What is Fate, Master? And he answered: It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence. It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs. It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness. And that is Fate? said the priest. Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master. That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know what Freight was too. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% A priest with two suits is a thief. -- Lenny Bruce %% A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions. -- George Eliot %% A prince offers it to the Son of Heaven. A petty man cannot do this. %% A princess should not be afraid -- not with a brave knight to protect her. -- McCoy, "Shore Leave," stardate 3025.3 %% A princess who lived near a bog Met a prince in the form of a frog. Now she and her prince Are the parents of quints, Four boys and one fine polliwog. %% A princess who reigned in Baroda Made her home on a purple pagoda. She festooned the walls Of her halls with the balls And the tools of the fools who be-stroda'. %% A private sin is not so prejudicial in the world as a public indecency. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% A problem can be found for almost every solution. -- Solomon Short %% A proctologist is a doctor who puts in a hard day at the orifice. %% A proctologist name of McGee Once bent over double to see An eyeball of glass He had shoved up his ass, "-- So I can see one that looks back at me." %% A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep. %% A professor's enthusiasm for teaching the introductory course varies inversely with the likelihood of his having to do it. %% A program is like a nose. Sometimes it runs, sometimes it blows. %% A programmer at S.D.R.C., found the VAX very slow, don't you see. After typing "DEBUG", the VAX, it did chug. And it came back in February. %% A programmer down in Moline Said, I'm the match for any machine. My secret's aversion, To loops and recursion, Just acres of in-line routine. -- W. J. Wilson %% A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: "What sort of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. There hair was long and unkept and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed out hospitality suite and they made rude noises during my presentation." The manager said: "I should have never sent you to the conference. Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd, an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations. Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother with social conventions?" They are alive within the Tao. %% A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place. -- IEEE Grid news magazine %% A programmer, name of Bob Willard Loved getting his gas tank gefillered. And now, with a smile, He drives fifty-five miles, And we just call him "fill more" (like Millard)! -- Paul Beck %% A programming language is low-level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. %% A progressive professor named Winners Held classes each evening for sinners. They were graded and spaced So the vile and debased Would not be held back by beginners. %% A project can not be considered complete until the total height of the viewgraphs produced exceeds the height of the shortest PI. -- Robert Metzger, scientist and author %% A project that is not worth doing is not worth doing well. %% A proliferation of new laws creates a proliferation of new loopholes. %% A prominent broadcaster, on a big-game safari in Africa, was taken to a watering hole where the life of the jungle could be observed. As he looked down from his tree platform and described the scene into his tape recorder, he saw two gnus grazing peacefully. So preoccupied were they that they failed to observe the approach of a pride of lions led by two magnificent specimens, obviously the leaders. The lions charged, killed the gnus, and dragged them into the bushes where their feasting could not be seen. A little while later the two kings of the jungle emerged and the radioman recorded on his tape: "Well, that's the end of the gnus and here, once again, are the head lions." %% A promiscuous sort was dear Laurie. (Yes, this is that kind of story.) She did it with Joe And Larry and Moe And Curly and Howard and Morrie. And Johnny and Richard and Pritchard and Kerry And Lonnie and Horace and Boris and Barry And Donald and Harold And Ronald and Gerald And Tommy and Dicky and Harry. And ... Peter and Paul and Teddy and Todd And Matthew and Mark and Simon and Rod And Brucie and Mark And Bobby and Clark And she still isn't finished! My God! And David and Dennis and Huey and Ken And Dewey and Louie, then David again, And Willy and Ben And David again And again and again and again. And Danny and Manny and Gary and Fred And Mackie and Jackie and Dougie and Ned And Harvey and Len (then David again) And -- hold on just a second, she's dead! %% A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow real poverty. -- Hume %% A proud graduate of "Bob's School of Quantum Mechanics" %% A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% A prudent question is one-half wisdom. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your wife will give you for free. %% A psychiatrist said, "It's no matter That my husband is mad as a hatter. There are certain psychoses That bring sex in large doses. My husband, you see, is satyr." %% A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation. -- Colton %% A pun is the lowest form of humor -- when you don't think of it first. -- Oscar Levant %% A purchased component or instrument will meet its specs long enough, and only long enough, to pass incoming inspection. %% A putt that stops close enough to the cup to inspire such comments as "you could blow it in" may be blown in. This rule does not apply if the ball is more than three inches from the hole, because no one wants to make a travesty of the game. -- Donald A. Metz %% A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two. -- Seneca %% A queen of old Egypt, named Cleo Conducted her loving "con brio." She felt quite at home in The arms of one Roman But preferred to be part of a trio. %% A quick punch, but it was only a glancing blow. %% A quick response is worth a thousand logical responses. -- Merle P. Martin %% A quick stroke, but the # is on guard. %% A quick thrust pinks your left arm, and blood starts to trickle down. %% A quite sobered up drunk is at sunday mass listening to a long boring sermon. Feeling still hungover and tired he finally nods out hoping no one would notice. The priest has been watching him all along and at the end of the sermon decides to make an example out of him. "Who in this room would like a place in heaven please stand up" he exclaims. The whole room stands up except of course for one. Obviously displeased he now says loudly "and he who would like to find a place in hell please STAND UP". The man catching only the last part, groggily stands up only to find that he's the only one standing up. Confused and embarrassed he says "I don't know what we're voting on here father but sure seems like you and me are the only ones standing for it". %% A quote from 1988 SF Chronicle-- "...the automated office is still in its infancy. More IBM Selectric typewriters are stolen in a year than word processing computers sold..." %% A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today. The results blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon. -- Steel City News %% A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers. -- Edward Abbey %% A rapist who reeked of cheap booze Attempted to ravish Miss Hughes. She cried, "I suppose There's no time for my clothes, But PLEASE let me take off my shoes!" %% A rapist's convicted, and hence is Executed for all his offenses, Thereafter, indeed, His victims agreed That the man was well-hung in both senses. %% A rapturous young fellatrix One day was at work on five pricks. With an unholy cry She whipped out her glass eye: "Tell the boys I can now take on six." %% A rather narrow crawlway opens up rapidly to reveal a sizable cave. The ceiling is very low, however, and you are forced to stoop. %% A reactionary is a man whose political opinions always manage to keep up with yesterday. %% A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20: Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." -- Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" %% A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. -- W. H. Auden %% A real computer scientist does not mind UNIX, simple commands like mail and readnews rarely fail. A real programmer does not mind UNIX, it can be easily circumvented. A real software engineer does not care what operating system he runs his Software Verification Aid package on. A real user cares about UNIX, but nobody cares about him. %% A real computer scientist will dedicate months of patient effort to reduce the asymptotic time of an algorithm from n log log n to n log log log n and never implement it. A real programmer come up with the n log log log n solution while eating cold pizza in the morning and then implements an n^2 solution anyway. A real software engineer derives the n log log log n solution using the formal specification and then discards it as an implementation detail. A real user doesn't even understand what a n log log log n solution means. %% A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor's throat without having his neighbor notice it. -- Trygve Lie %% A real friend is a person who, when you've made a fool of yourself, lets you forget it. %% A real lady never asks, "was *what* good for me?" %% A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. %% A realist lets circumstances decide which end of the telescope to look through. %% A really busy person never knows how much he weighs. -- Ed Howe %% A really good bass is the hardest drunk to find. -- Robert Benchley %% A really plain woman is one who, however beautiful, neglects to charm. -- Edgar Aaltus %% A recent addition to the IRS employee manual makes clear that the agency would continue to operate and to collect taxes immediately after any national emergency -- "especially resulting from nuclear attack." %% A recent moralist has affirmed that the human heart is like a jug. No mortal can look into its recesses, and you can only judge of its purity by what comes out of it. %% A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer scientists. Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three dimensional objects ... %% A recession is when my neighbor loses his job. A depression is when I lose my job. A panic is when my wife loses her job. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% A reckless young lady of France Had no qualms about taking a chance, But she thought it was crude To get screwed in the nude, So she always went home with damp pants. %% A record of data is essential: it shows you were working. %% A record of data is useful -- it indicates that you've been working. %% A red-neck bigot walks into a bar, and due to the crowd he is forced to sit next to a black gentleman. After several beers he decides he has nothing better to do and strikes up a conversation. The subject unfortunately turns to religion, and an argument over whether God is black or white ensues. The bigot points out that all the pictures of God in his church show a white man in the role. The black gentleman points out that the pictures of God in his church show a black man instead. The bigot claims that God must be white because his son Jesus was white. The black man counters that Jesus was actually Semitic, with possibly some Ethiopian ancestry, and was probably quite dark-skinned. The argument begins to degenerate into a shouting match, when suddenly the roof of the bar splits open. A bolt of lightning flashes overhead and a booming voice declares "I AM WHO I AM" The whole bar is struck silent for a moment. The first one to regain his wits is the bigot. Determined to have the last word he turns to his black companion and says " You see, that proves that he's white. If he were black he would have said 'I BE WHO I BE' " %% A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power. %% A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass bottomed boat. %% A reformer wants his conscience to be your guide. %% A relationship is like a shark - it has to keep moving forward or it dies. Well, what we have on our hands here is a dead shark. -- Woody Allen %% A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God. %% A remarkable race are the Persians; They have such peculiar diversions. They make love the whole day In the usual way And save up the nights for perversions. %% A reported fact states that murders of immediate family members account for nearly 25% of all murders committed. Think about that the next time you yell at your sister for taking to long in the bathroom. %% A reporter is pestering her at a party. R: "have you ever had your ears pierced" DP: "No, but I've often had them bored" %% A reserved lover, it is said, always makes a suspicious husband. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% A retired dentist who loves to fish. "Open wide," he mutters to the unseen fish as he waits for a tug on the line. "Now bite down. This may sting just a little bit." %% A retired schoolteacher finally decided that she was tired of living alone and wanted some companionship, so after a good deal of thought she decided to visit the local pet shop. The owner suggested a parrot, with which she could conduct a civilized conversation. This seemed to be an excellent idea, so she bought a handsome parrot, sat him on a perch in her living room, and said, "Say 'Pretty boy.'" Silence from the bird. "Come on now, say 'Pretty boy ... pretty boy.'" At long last, disgustedly, the bird said, "Oh, shit." Shocked, the schoolteacher said, "Just for that, you get five minutes in the refrigerator." Five minutes later she put the shivering bird back on its perch and said, "Now let's hear it: 'Pretty boy ... pretty boy.'" "Damn, wouldja lay off, lady?" said the parrot. Outraged, the woman grabbed the bird, said, "That's it! Ten minutes in the freezer," and slammed the door on him. Hopping about to keep warm, what does the parrot come across but a big frozen turkey waiting for Thanksgiving. Startled, he squawks, "My God, you must have told the bitch to go fuck herself!" %% A reverence for life does not require one to respect nature's obvious mistakes. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% A rickety wooden bridge extends across the chasm, vanishing into the mist. A sign posted on the bridge reads, "STOP! Pay troll!" %% A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you. -- Ramsey Clark %% A ring of adornment protects against Nymphs. %% A river flowing through one of our large Eastern cities is so polluted it is considered a fire hazard! %% A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage. -- Blake %% A robot gigantic and grand For desalinization was planned, And tested with bales Of Chaucerian tales That came out insipid and bland. -- C. M. and G. A. Maxson %% A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. %% A robot played chess with a punch, But died with a hideous crunch One day when the pawns Appeared to be prawns And he gobbled them up for his lunch. -- C. M. and G. A. Maxson %% A robot was just as inane As men in misjudging a jane. He cared not a pin For virtues within, But peripherals drove him insane. -- G. A. Mason %% A robot who cleaned up a flat Was perfectly programmed for that, And washed every dish That a lady might wish - But vacuumed up poodle and cat. -- G. A. Mason %% A robot, concealing the way His wires fell into decay, Was outwardly quite The Arthurian Knight, But inwardly Dorian Gray. -- C. M. and G. A. Maxson %% A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery %% A rolling disk gathers no MOS. %% A rolling stone gathers momentum. %% A rolling stone gathers no moss. -- Publilius Syrus %% A romantic attraction has clung To a chap of whom damsels have sung: "'Tis the Scourge from the East, That lascivious beast Who was known as Attila the Hung!" %% A room should reflect its occupant. -- Kirk, "Wink of an Eye," stardate 5710.5 %% A room without books is like a body without a soul. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% A rose by any other name would still be a flower. %% A rose by any other name would...be something else. -- Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." %% A rose is a rose is a rose, but junk is not junk is not junk. It is never quite what you think it is. -- Richard N. Farmer %% A ruminating animal chews its cubs. %% A rumour has it that rumours are just rumours. %% A sadist is a masochist who follows the Golden Rule. %% A sadly affected young stutterer With a wish, but unable to utter 'er, Showed his favorite tart The appropriate part Of the drawings in his Kamasutra. %% A sailor who slept in the sun, Woke to find his fly buttons undone, He remarked with a smile, "Good grief, a sun-dial! And now it's a quarter-past one." %% A sane environment in one in which there is room to be crazy. A crazy environment is one in which there is no room to be sane. -- Solomon Short %% A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people. -- Peter McArthur %% A savage blow on the thigh! The # is stunned but can still fight. %% A savage cut on the leg stuns the #, but he can still fight. %% A savvy young hooker named Gail Got busted and lodged in the jail. But the jailer got hot, To be lodged in her twat, And so Gail made the bail with her tail. %% 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. %% A scar nobly got is a good livery of honor. -- William Shakespeare %% A scholar sent to the United Nations is condemned to attend an eternity of faculty meetings. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life. -- Godfrey H. Hardy %% A scientist is one who can look at a platinum blonde and tell whether she is a Virgin Metal or a Common Ore. %% A scientist is trying to determine how much each of a frog's legs contribute to the frog's ability to jump. He places a frog on a calibrated screen and claps his hands. "Frog, Jump!," he yells. The frog leaps into the air. The scientist notes where he lands in his book - with 4 legs frog jumps 20 inches. He then removes one leg and repeats the test. "Frog, Jump!," he yells as he claps his hands. The frog once again leaps into the air. Once more the scientist notes the results in his book - with 3 legs frog jumps 15 inches. The experiment is repeated until all of the frogs legs have been removed. The scientist places the frog on the test stand one last time. "Frog, Jump!," he yells and claps. There is no response. "Frog, Jump!," he yells louder. Again there is no response. After several more tries at prompting the frog, the scientist gives up with a sigh. He notes in his book - with no legs frog is deaf. %% A scrap of paper flutters in on the wind and falls at your feet. %% A scream from the crypt of St. Giles Resounded for miles upon miles. Said the friar, "Good gracious, The brother Ignatious Forgeteth the abbot hath piles." %% A seafaring hacker named Slatey Went to bed with a VAX/780. The thing's learned to swear With a nautical air, And refers to its users as "matey". %% A seaman (pun intended) arrives in port in the Phillipines. His cruise has lasted 6 months, and he is DESPERATE for sex, but he only has $10. Armed with his sawbuck, he locates one of the less reputable (even for the Phillipines) whorehouses. When learning he only has $10, the madam tries to get rid of him. However, the seaman is persistent, and the madam finally tells him that there is someone he can have for $10. She tells him to go up to the top floor, in the last room in the back. The seaman rushes up to the room excitedly, only to find a sickly looking girl asleep on the bed. He is so horny, however, that he just rips his clothes off and starts screwing the girl without trying to wake her up. When he finishes, he looks down at the girl and notices that she seems to be foaming at the mouth. Horrified, he runs downstairs to tell the madam that her girl is sick. The madam takes the news very calmly, and after he tells her, she says "Oh, that's OK. I'll just call the morgue to get a new one; that one's full" %% A second voice interrupted, cutting off the controller. "Pleiades, this is Station Commander Perez. Prepare to receive emergency telemetry." "Affirmative." Teresa swallowed, knowing what this meant. She felt Mark lean past her to make sure the ship's datasuck boxes were operating at top speed. In that mode they recorded every nuance for one purpose only, so endangered spacers could obey rule number one of their trade . . . *Let the next guy know what killed you.* -- David Brin, "Earth" %% A secret in his mouth, Is like a wild bird put into a cage; Whose door no sooner opens, but 'tis out. -- Johnson %% A seedy-looking individual with a large bag just wandered through the room. On the way, he quietly abstracted all valuables from the room and from your possession, mumbling something about, "Do unto others before...". %% A selection from the Taoist Writings: "Lao-Tan asked Confucius: `What do you mean by benevolence and righteousness?' Confucius said: `To be in one's inmost heart in kindly sympathy with all things; to love all men and allow no selfish thoughts: this is the nature of benevolence and righteousness.'" -- Kwang-tzu %% A seminar on Time Travel will be held two weeks ago. %% A sense of desolation and uncertainty, of futility, of the baselessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavor, and a thirst for a life giving water which seems suddenly to have failed, are the signs in consciousness of this necessary reorganization of our lives. It is difficult to believe that this state of mind can be produced by the recognition of such facts as that unsupported stones always fall to the ground. -- J. W. N. Sullivan %% A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% A sentence well couched takes both the sense and the understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches that are longer than the memory of man can fathom. -- Fletham %% A sepulchral voice reverberating through the cave, says, "Cave closing soon. All adventurers exit immediately through main office." %% A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious believer in the White House? Two of them? Give me a break. What stifled my laughter is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his back. And we've all come to accept it. This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue....Not that long ago, it was Reagan's support of Creationism....Creationists actually got equal time with evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were scientific colleagues....It has been clear for a long time that the president is averse to science...In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American turf....But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense. The same people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of laetrile to eye of newt to the movement of planets. We lose the capacity to make rational -- scientific -- judgments. It's all the same. -- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers Group %% A set of pen pals over the years developed a romance which ended when they exchanged pictures, a photo finish. %% A sex-loving coed named Bree Caught the clap from her Apple IIE. The joystick, she found, Had been fooling around With a neighboring student's PC. %% A shapely CATHOLIC SCHOOLGIRL is FIDGETING inside my costume.. %% A sharp stick, which appears to have been broken at one end, is here. %% A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and "The Last Whole Earth Catalog". -- Edward Abbey %% A shepherd named Jimmie Fitzhugh, Said to his sweetheart, "It's true. Nothing is moister Than a fresh oister, Unless, of course, it is ewe." %% A sheriff arrived at the scene of the horrible accident just as his deputy, all alone, was climbing down from the controls of a bulldozer. "Say, Junior, what's goin' on?" asked the sheriff. "A bus full of migrant workers went out of control and over the cliff, and I just finished buryin' 'em," explained the deputy. "Good work, boy," replied the sheriff. "Pretty gory work -- were all of 'em dead?" Junior nodded sadly and said, "Some of them said they weren't, but you know how them Mexicans lie." %% A ship carrying red paint has collided with a ship carrying purple paint. It is reported that both crews have been marooned. %% A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are made for. %% A ship is always referred to as "she" because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder. -- Chester Nimitz, Speech, 13 February 1940 %% A shoal of fishes. Favor comes through the court ladies. Everything acts to further. %% A short-organed fellow named Kevin Used a vacuum to stretch it to seven, Then to eight and to nine, And though ten was divine, There will be film at eleven. [If you think that our boy's now a stud, You've been fooled by the size of his pud. Although twelve inches soft, When it rises aloft, He just faints from the sheer lack of blood. %% A shortcut is the longest distance between two points. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% A shy young man, preparing himself for what he hoped would be the ultimate sex act with a pretty young lady, went into a drugstore to inquire about sizes and styles of condoms. The lusty proprietress, a buxom widow, saw an opportunity for fun at the lad's expense. "Come in the back and try some on for size," she said, taking his hand. The widow unzipped the youth's fly and watched the small instrument grow in her hand as she measured it. When the weapon had unfurled to a rosy seven and a half inches, the young man, unable to contain himself, had an orgasm with a tremendous discharge. After recovering, he asked the widow if she could now give him the proper size. "I'll do more than that," she said. "I'll give you free meals and a half interest in the store." %% A sign for a superintendent of schools was "Bored of Education" %% A sign posted in Germany's Black Forest: It is strictly forbidden on our black forest camping site that people of different sex, for instance, men and women, live together in one tent unless they are married with each other for that purpose. %% A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name. %% A silly young man from Hong Kong Had hands that were skinny and long. He ate rice with his fingers-- The taste of it lingers, But now all his fingers are gone. %% A silver tongue, a golden touch, and a mind like a steel trap %% A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard -- Prof. Steiner %% A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. -- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) %% A single flow'r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet-- One perfect rose. I knew the language of the floweret; "My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose." Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose. Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get One perfect rose. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), "One Perfect Rose" %% A single has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% A singles bar is the gadget that keeps the one-dollar bills from flying out of a cash register drawer. %% A sinking ship gathers no moss. -- Donald Kaul %% A skeleton, probably the remains of a luckless adventurer, lies here. %% A skunk walked by and my odor eaters went berserk with blood lust. They tripped me, escaped from my loafers, and chased the skunk up a tree. My feet were still hot and sweaty, so I bought wind socks. -- Steve Connelly %% A slave has but one master; the ambitious man has as many masters as there are persons whose aide may contribute to the advancement of his fortune. -- Jean de La Bruyere %% A slick talking pirate named Bruce To steal code, had a plan to seduce An Apple II+. Now Bruce wears a truss And was jailed for computer abuse. %% A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat. -- Logan P. Smith %% A small boy is wandering in a hotel, and hearing some noises decides to open a door. He says "Wow, it's dark here!" You can imagine that there's a man with a woman in that room... The man asks, "What do you want? Here's a buck, leave us alone." A bit latter, the boy goes back again, opens the door, and says: "Wow, it's dark here!" "Not you again! Here, take this and go buy yourself something." And the boy goes out with 2 bucks. The following morning, the boy feels some remorse, and tells what happened to his mother. She says: "That's wrong. You should go to the church, and confess yourself." So there he goes. Entering the boot, he says: "Wow, it's dark here!". To which the priest says: "Are you following me around?" %% A small package of value will come to you, shortly. %% A small status indicator reads "Transporters have nothing to lock onto." %% A small town that cannot support one lawyer can always support two. %% A small velvet pillow lies on the floor. %% A smattering of philosophy had liberated his [Nero's] intellect without maturing his judgement. -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% A smoker is always attracted to the non-smoking section. -- Raj K. Dhawan %% A smoky potion surely affects your vision. %% A snail can moter along at about two feet per hour. %% A snake lurks in the grass. -- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) %% A soap I could like better than my facial bar? Incredible! %% A society that lacks the patience to read, and loses the ability to do so, is rendered defenseless against its most profound stupidities. As an example, consider the ease with which Americans came to regard a president known for his inaccuracy and imprecision as the great communicator, and by the tendency of American elections to give victory to the candidate who can afford the greatest number of 30-second TV spots. -- Mike Schmoker %% A soft answer turneth away wrath. %% A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger. -- Proverbs 15:1 %% A soft drink turneth away company. %% A software technician from Digital Had hardware extremely prodigical. It's rumoured, I hear, That when he was near He made the ladies all flustered and fidgital. %% A solid rainbow spans the falls. %% A solution is just a problem waiting to happen. %% A son asked his father for a hundred dollars. The father said no. "Oh, come on dad, be a good support." %% A song in time is worth a dime. %% A source is a source, of course of course, Unless, of course, the source is a curse; And if, of course, the source is a curse, Then a termcap entry's required. %% A spear might hit a nurse. %% A spear will hit an ettin. %% A species that enslaves other beings is hardly superior -- mentally or otherwise. -- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion," stardate 3211.7 %% A spider in the trees busily spins a web that covers the trees to the north. %% A spider to the northeast is quite busy blocking the way there. %% A spilled drink flows in the direction of the most expensive object. -- "The New Official Rules" %% A spinster in Kalamazoo Once strolled after dark by the zoo. She was seized by the nape, And fucked by an ape, And she murmured, "A wonderful screw." And she added, "You're rough, yes, and hairy, But I hope -- yes I do -- that I marry A man with a prick Half as stiff and as thick As the kind that you zoo-keepers carry." %% A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down! -- L. Borgia %% A sports writer who is not willing to stand by his honest judgement ought to chuck his job and try something else. -- Bat Masterson %% A sprightly young fellow named Jay Screwed a girl in his car every day. His aims weren't base He just wanted to place The "let" in his old Chevrolet. %% A spring wells up at the foot of the mountain: The image of Youth. Thus the superior man fosters his character By thoroughness in all that he does. %% A spunky young schoolboy named Fred Used to toss off each night while in bed. Said his mother, "Dear lad, That's exceedingly bad-- Jump in here with your mamma instead." %% A squirt of milk zooms past and immediately soaks into the ground. %% A stableman, fresh from the Ruhr, Had a daughter, delightful and pure. It seems such a shame That her chief claim to fame Was her great skill at pitching manure. %% A stage? No, this is not a stage. %% A stagnant science is at a standstill. %% A star captain's most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive. -- Kirk, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown %% A starlet is any woman under thirty not actively employed in a brothel. -- Unknown %% A starship commander named Kirk Emerged from his cabin berserk. He grabbed a girl yeoman Beneath the abdomen, And gave her a physical jerk. %% A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizard. %% A state from which religion is banished can never be well regulated. -- Leo XIII (1810-1903) %% A stately giraffe, when he necks, Or a hippo, when he's having sex, Aren't worth a tut-tut To the bellowing rut Of the great Tyrannosaurus Rex. %% A stately-looking matron was walking through the Bronx Zoo, studying the animals. When she passed the porcupine enclosure she beckoned to a nearby attendant. "Young man," she began, "do North American porcupines have sharper pricks than those raised in Africa?" The attendant hesitated for a moment. "Well, ma'am," he answered, "the African porcupine's quills are sharper... but I think their pricks are about the same." %% A statesman is a successful politician who is dead. -- Thomas B. Reed (1839-1902) %% A statesman is any politician it's considered safe to name a school after. -- Bill Vaughan %% A statistician refuses to fly after reading the alarmingly high probability that there will be a bomb on any given plane. Later he finds that the probability of there being two bombs on any given flight is very low. Now whenever he flies, he always carries one bomb with him. -- "I Think Therefore I Laugh" by John Allen Paulos: %% A statue lies hid in a block of marble; and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter, and removes the rubbish. -- Addison %% A sting, and honey, and a body small. %% A stitch in time saves nine. %% A stitch in time would have confused Einstein. -- Anonymous %% A stoppered glass flask with skull-and-crossbones markings is here. The flask is filled with some clear liquid. %% A stout Gaelic warrior, McPherson, Was having a captive, a person Who was not averse Though she had the curse, And he'd breeches of bristling furs on. %% A strange malaise suddenly afflicts you. You shiver with chill, and your muscles seem to turn to putty; everything around you becomes grey and unreal. The fit quickly passes, and you find that your body has degenerated back to what it was like before you ate the spinach. %% A stranger at your gate is grateful for the hospitality of your house. %% A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. -- O'Henry %% A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures. -- Daniel Webster %% A strong memory is generally coupled with infirm judgment. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% A structured programmer named Drew Was intensely turned on by "goto". When he saw it in code He'd shoot off his load. It's a good thing his shop used so few. %% A student asked the master for help... does this program run from the Workbench? The master grabbed the mouse and pointed to an icon. "What is this?" he asked. The student replied "That's the mouse". The master pressed control-Amiga-Amiga and hit the student on the head with the Amiga ROM Kernel Manual. -- Amiga Zen Master Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam. %% A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt. As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by. "Is it true", asked the student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?" Almost before the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, "FOO!", and hit the student with a stick. %% A studious professor named Nestor Bet a whore all his books that he could best her. But she drained out his balls And skipped up the walls, Beseeching poor Nestor to rest her. %% A study of the science of technology defines what is possible; a study of the economics of technology establishes which of the possibilities is practical and useful. -- Montgomery Phister %% A stunning young lady named Joan Thought a penis was made with a bone. She just didn't know 'Twas her sexual glow That turned parts of men into stone. %% A submarine will move through the water most efficiently if it is 10 to 13 times as long as it is wide. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% A successful American spends more supporting the government than a family. %% A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. -- S. C. Johnson %% A successful person is one who went ahead and did the thing the rest of us never quite got around to. %% A successful symposium depends on the ratio of meeting to eating. %% A sultan, inspecting his harem, Said, "Eunuch, proceed to unbare 'em." Having seen the details He issued long veils And ordered the harem to wear 'em. %% A sunny temper gilds the edges of life's blackest cloud. -- Guthrie %% A super-saturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold. %% A superior man modest about his modesty May cross the great water. Good fortune. %% A superior man of modesty and merit Carries things to conclusion. Good fortune. %% A suspicious parent makes an artful child. -- Haliburton %% A sweet young schoolteacher who had always been virtuous was invited to go for a ride in the country with the gym instructor, whom she admired. Under a tree on the bank of a quiet lake, she struggled with her conscience and with the gym instructor and finally gave in to the latter. Sobbing uncontrollably she asked her seducer, "How can I ever face my students again, knowing I have sinned twice?" "Twice?" asked the young man, confused. "Why, yes," said the sweet teacher, wiping a tear from her eye. "You're going to do it again, aren't you?" %% A sweet, innocent young 5-year-old girl dressed up like an angel for Halloween. She is making the rounds and comes to a house where a man sees her beautiful white-feathers and golden halo. She's so pretty he searches for the largest red apple he has, shines it up for her, and drops it into her bag. With a smile, she looks into the bag then looks up at the man as says, "You son-of-a-bitch! You broke my cookies!" Another innocent young boy dresses up as a pirate and makes the rounds. He comes to the same man's house as before and rings the bell. The man answers the door and notices how well he has dressed up. "Well. What are you supposed to be?" the man asks. "A pirate!" the little boy announces. "Where is your buccaneer?" the man asks. "Under my bucken hat." says the little boy. %% A sweetheart is a bottle of wine; a wife is a wine bottle. %% 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?" %% A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of. -- Burt Bacharach %% A system tends to grow in terms of complexity rather than of simplification, until the resulting unreliability becomes intolerable. -- Tom Gibb %% A systems programmer named Sprotic Found his software intensely erotic. In jealous distress He wiped his OS. It's possible that he's psychotic. %% A taboo is someone else's rule about what you may or may not do with your own body. -- Solomon Short %% A talented fuckstress, Miss Chisholm, Was renowned for her fine paroxysm. While the man detumesced She still spent on with zest, Her rapture sheer anachronism. %% 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. %% A tall, dark stranger will have more fun than you. %% A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself. -- Jessamyn West %% A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself. -- Jessamyn West (Irony is when you buy a suit with two pair of pants, and then burn a hole in the coat.) %% A taste to remember me by... -- Wesley to Salia, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8 %% A tautology is a thing which is tautological. %% A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say. -- Michael Winner, British film director %% A team playing baseball in Dallas Called the umpire blind out of malice. While this worthy had fits The team made eight hits And a girl in the bleachers named Alice. %% A technique is a trick that works. -- Gian-Carlo Rota %% A teenage protester named Lil Cried, "Those watergate spies make me ill First they bugged our martinis, Our bras and bikinis, And now they are bugging the pill." %% A tenured full Professor is to a Dean as a dog is to a hydrant. %% A terminal with red-shift capability requires an extremely fast modem. %% A theory is better than its explanation. -- H. P. Woodward %% A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% A thing not worth doing is worth not doing well. %% A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever. -- Keats %% A three foot black rod with a rusty star on an end lies nearby. %% A thrice-married gal from L.A. Said, "My hymen's intact to this day, 'Cause my first (a shrink) talked of it, The voyeur only gawked at it, And my most recent man's a gourmet." %% A thrill a day keeps the chills away. %% A tidy young lady of Streator Dearly loved to nibble a peter. She always would say, "I prefer it this way. I think it is very much neater." %% A tied-up sack. No blame, no praise. %% A time would come when Men should be able to stretch out their Eyes ... they should see the Planets like our Earth. -- Christopher Wren %% A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards. -- Jean Paul Richter %% A timid young woman named Jane Found parties a terrible strain; With movements uncertain She'd hide in a curtain And make sounds like a rabbit in pain. -- Edward Gorey %% A tin of smoked eel is a wonderful find. %% A tired young trollop of Nome Was worn out from her toes to her dome. Eight miners came screwing, But she said, "Nothing doing; One of you has to go home!" %% A toad-eater's an imp I don't admire. -- Dr. Woolcott %% A toast to the kisses you've snatched and vice-versa. %% A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" -- find out how he feels about astrology. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A transistor protected by a fast acting fuse will protect the fuse by blowing first. -- David Ellis %% A translated sentence from a Russian chess book: A lot of water has been passed under the bridge since this variation has been played. %% A trap door in the ceiling opens and a rock falls on your head! %% A trap door opens up under you! %% A trapper named Francois Lefebrve Once captured and buggered a beabrve. The result of this fuck Was a three titted duck, A canoe, and an Irish retriebrve. %% A traveling salesman knocked on the door to a farmhouse and when the farmer answered he said, "My car broke down and I was wondering if I could use your phone?" So the farmer shot him. %% A traveling salesman was driving past a farm when he saw a pig with three wooden legs executing a magnificent series of backflips and cartwheels. Intrigued, he drove up to the farmhouse, where he found an old farmer sitting in the yard watching the pig. "That's quite a pig you have there, sir" said the salesman. "Sure is, son," the farmer replied. "Why, two years ago, my daughter was swimming in the lake and bumped her head and damned near drowned, but that pig swam out and dragged her back to shore." "Amazing!" the salesman exclaimed. "And that's not the only thing. Last fall I was cuttin' wood up on the north forty when a tree fell on me. Pinned me to the ground, it did. That pig run up and wiggled underneath that tree and lifted it off of me. Saved my life." "Fantastic! the salesman said. But tell me, how come the pig has three wooden legs?" The farmer stared at the newcomer in amazement. "Mister, when you got an amazin' pig like that, you don't eat him all at once." %% A traveller was passing through a small town when he came upon a funeral procession. "Who died?" he asked a nearby local. "I'm not sure," replied the local, "but I think its the one in the coffin." %% A tree is best measured when it is down. %% A tremendous effort on your part has caused the troll significant injury. %% A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene triangle. %% A truck backed through my windshield into my wife's face. %% A truck driver was hauling 23 penguins to the city zoo. His truck broke down on the way and the penguins soon began to heat up. In desperation, he flagged down another trucker and said "I'll give you 50 dollars if you take these penguins to the zoo for me." The other trucker agreed, loaded up the penguins and took off. Hours later the truck was finally repaired and the driver pulled into the loading dock at the zoo. But he discovered the penguins had not been delivered and he became very worried. He began to drive around town searching for the other trucker. Finally he saw him walking downtown with 23 penguins waddling after him. He ran up to him and said "You were supposed to take these penguins to the zoo!" The other trucker replied " Well I did, but I had some money left over so I thought I'd take em to the movies." %% A trucker pulls over to the side of the highway after 22 straight hours of driving, locks the doors and settles down for a few hours sleep. About an hour later there's a knock on his window. The driver opens his eyes grudgingly to see a biker. The biker is asking "Hey man, do you got the time?" to which the driver yells back "No! Sorry!" and settles back to sleep. An hour later there's another knock on the window and a different biker. "S'cuse me, do you have the time?" "No, Dammit!" and back to sleep again. After the third time the driver makes up a sign that says 'I don't have the time' and pastes it on his window. Sure enough, an hour later there's a knock on his window. "WADDYA WANT?!?" the driver screams. "No hassle man, just thought you'd like to know it's 10:30." %% A true adman writes the prose and cons. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist. -- Edward Abbey %% A true friend will see you through when others see that you are through. %% A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon. -- Edward Abbey %% A truly advanced planet wouldn't use force. They wouldn't come here in strange alien forms. -- Gary Seven, "Assignment Earth," stardate unknown %% A truly great man will neither trample on a worm nor sneak to an emperor. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn. %% A trusted friend will outlive you. %% A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the Lies you can invent. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% A tutor who tooted a flute Tried to tutor two tutors to toot Said the two to the tutor: "Is it harder to toot or To tutor two tutors to toot" %% A two-handed sword usually misses. %% A two-timing husband is one who's pleased to make his wife's acquaintances. %% A typical quimmty old hag who spread these vile ruperts was Mrs. Weatherby -- a widow by her first husbands. -- John Lennon %% A unicorn can be tamed only by a fair maiden. %% A university is a place where men of principle outnumber men of honor. -- Ernest May %% A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. -- John Ciardi %% A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. -- Tennessee Williams %% A valiant attempt. %% A vasectomy means never having to say you're sorry. %% A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children. -- David Brenner %% A venerable old Jewish gentleman was day-dreaming while sunning himself on a bench on the boardwalk at Alantic City. His reverie was disturbed when another man approached and asked,"Can I join you?" "What's the matter, maybe I'm, coming apart??" %% A vengeful technician named Schmitz Caused a disk drive to go on the fritz. He covered the platter With bats' fecal matter. Now it's seek time is really the pits. %% A verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when its all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% A verbal contract isn't worth the paper its printed on. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% 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. %% A very odd pair are the Pitts: His balls are as large as her tits, Her tits are as large As an invasion barge-- Neither knows how the other cohabits. %% A very sad poet was Jenny Her limericks weren't worth a penny In technique they were sound Yet somehow she found Whenever she tried to write any She always wrote one line too many. -- Douglas Hofstadter, "Metamagical Themas" %% A very sensible people. For example Mintakan women precede their mates. It's a signal to other women. "This man is taken, get your own?" Not precisely. More like if you want his services, I'm the on you have to negotiate with. "What kind of services?" All kinds. "They are a sensible race." -- Troi and Riker, "Who Watches the Watchers?", stardate 43173.5 %% A violent man will die a violent death. -- Lao Tsu %% A virgin is chaste. %% A virginal is a harpsichord that has never been plucked. %% A virtuous abstinence from the joys of pederasty comes most easily to those who have no taste for it. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% A virtuous life is its own punishment. %% A virtuous maiden named Nora Viewed sexual sinning with horror. But a bit of love play Was indulged in today And who knows what she'll think by tomorrow. %% A visit to a fresh place will bring strange work. %% A visit to a strange place will bring fresh work. %% A visit to the Zoo is very educational; you meet interesting animals. %% A visitor to one of the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska, broke his glasses. He was told by his guide that he couldn't get the glasses repaired until he returned to a city in Alaska. "You mean there aren't any optometrists on the island?" said the man. "If you see one," replied the guide, "it will just be an optical Aleutian. %% A vivid and creative mind characterizes you. %% A vivid and creative mind characterizes you. Too bad you can't keep your mind on the down to earth things. %% A vivid and creative mind is foreign to you. %% A volcano gnome seems to walk straight out of the wall and says, "I have a very busy appointment schedule and little time to waste on computer hacks, but for a very small fee, I'll show you how to logoff. %% A volcano gnome seems to walk straight out of the wall and says, "I have a very busy appointment schedule and little time to waste on trespassers, but for a very small fee, I'll show you the way out." You notice that the gnome is nervously glancing at his watch. %% A volunteer would blindfold his/herself (I will use "him" globally from here to save keystrokes--feminists, please forgive) and lay down on the floor, face up. The rest of the party would surround him, without speaking, and proceed to caress his body. Articles of clothing would be removed piece by piece, with long delays in between during which the crowd would just return to touching. The goal was to get the subject as fully aroused as possible, without touching their genitals and without any body contact except for hands. LOTS of hands. The rule of no speaking was intended to protect people's anonymity so they would participate more freely. After several minutes of blissful torture, the group would reach a silent consensus that the poor soul had had enough, and would proceed to turn up the heat. Hands would stray, briefly at first, toward his genitals, then with increasing frequency as time passed. Toward "the end," each group member who wished to would take their turn trying to bring the maximum pleasure to the subject. The result was, more often than not, an explosive orgasm, but some simply asked to stop before that, which was their right as laid out in advance. %% A waist is a terrible thing to mind. -- Solomon Short %% A waiter brings the customer the steak he ordered with his thumb over the meat. "Are you crazy?" yelled the customer, "with your hand on my steak?" "What," answers the waiter, "you want it to fall on the floor again?" %% A wall is faintly visible to your south. %% A wall is visible at the east edge of your vision. %% A wand of vibration might bring the whole cave crashing about your ears. %% A wanton young lady from Wimley Reproached for not acting quite primly Said, "Heavens above! I know sex isn't love, But it's such an entrancing facsimile." %% A waste is a terrible thing to mind. -- Custodians of Love Canal %% A watched clock never boils. %% A wave of vulgar, filthy and suggestive music has unundated the land. Nothing but ragtime prevails, and the cake-walk with its obscene posturings, its lewd gestures... Our children, our young men and women, are continually exposed to its contiguity, to the monotonous attrition of this vulgarizing music. It is artistically and morally depressing and should be suppressed by press and pulpit. -- Musical Courier, 1899 %% A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones. -- Chesterfield %% 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. %% A wedding is a funeral where a man smells his own flowers. %% A wedding ring is like a tourniquet; it cuts off your circulation. %% A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous. %% A well known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have just told is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!" -- Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time" %% A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physics, or divinity, to be overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes, and gives employment to all its professors. -- Addison %% A well-bred dog generally bows to strangers. %% A well-endowed fellow from Ortening Prepared for an evening of sportening, With a boy from a disco, Till he lubed up with Crisco, And discovered, alas, it was shortening! %% A well-governed appetite is a great part of liberty. -- Seneca %% A well-known friend is a treasure. %% A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges. A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant. Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum. Software rots if not used. These are great mysteries. -- The Tao of Programming %% A well-written Life is almost as rare as well-spent one. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% 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. %% A white lie is aversion of the truth. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% A whore with a face like a hound Complained that her sales were down, Till a lover named Michael Bought her a cycle, And she peddled it all over town. %% A wicked book cannot repent. %% A wicked stone cutter named Cary Drilled holes in divine statuary. With eyes full of malice He pulled out his phallus, And buggered a stone Virgin Mary. ESCHATOLOGICAL PROBLEM %% A wide-bottomed girl named Trasket Had a hole as big as a basket. A spot, as a bride, In it now, you could hide, And include with your luggage your mascot. %% A wide-eyed, innocent UNICORN, poised delicately in a MEADOW filled with LILACS, LOLLIPOPS & small CHILDREN at the HUSH of twilight?? %% A widow is more sought after than an old maid of the same age. -- Addison %% A widow who fancied a man some Was diddled three times in a hansome. When she clamored for more Her young man became sore And exclaimed "My name's Simpson not Samson." %% A widow whose singular vice Was to keep her late husband on ice Said, "It's been hard since I lost him -- I'll never defrost him! Cold comfort, but cheap at the price." %% A wink lasts only 3/10 of a second. %% A winner goes through a problem; A loser goes around, but never past, it. %% A winner isn't nearly as afraid of losing as a loser is secretly afraid of winning. %% A winner makes commitments; a loser makes promises. %% A winner says "Let's find out"; a loser says, "Nobody knows." %% A winner works harder than a loser and has more time; a loser is always too busy to do what is necessary. %% A wise man can see more from a mountain top than a fool can from the bottom of a well. %% A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. %% A wise man first determines what is within his control; all else is then irrelevant. -- Epictetus %% A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends. -- Baltasar Gracian %% A wise man knows everything, but a shrewd man knows everyone. %% A wise man who stands firm is a statesman, a foolish man who stands firm is a catastrophe. %% A wise man would no sooner appoint a contractor to a position of trust that a President would ask Taiwan to guard the mainland. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion. -- Chinese proverb %% A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% A wiser young lady named Dawes Looks forward to Christmas because She was taught last December By a store Santa's member That a pussy is meant to have Claus. %% A wit's a feather, and a chief's a god; An honest man is the noblest work of God. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% A withered poplar puts forth flowers. An older woman takes a husband. No blame. No praise. %% A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. %% A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% A witty writer, K. Kraus in the Vienna "Fackel", has as it were, expressed this truth paradoxically in the cynical saying: "Coitus is merely an unsatisfactory substitute for onanism!" -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), [attempting to explain why masturbation is "by no means harmless"] %% A wizard cannot do everything; a fact most magicians are reticent to admit, let alone discuss with prospective clients. Still, the fact remains that there are certain objects, and people, that are, for one reason or another, completely immune to any direct magical spell. It is for this group of beings that the magician learns the subtleties of using indirect spells. It also does no harm, in dealing with these matters, to carry a large club near your person at all times. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VIII %% A woman and her little girl were visiting the grave of the little girl's grandmother. On their way through the cemetery back to the car, the little girl asked, "Mommy, do they ever bury two people in the same grave?" "Of course not, dear." replied the mother, "Why would you think that?" "The tombstone back there said 'Here lies a lawyer and an honest man.'" %% A woman can never be too rich or too thin. %% A woman employs sincerity only when every other form of deception has failed. -- Scott %% A woman forgives the audacity of which her beauty has prompted us to be guilty. -- LeSage %% A woman from South Philadelphia Once found herself left on the shelfia. No one wanted her wares But she muttered, "Who cares?" And cheerfully played with herselfia. %% A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far. -- Fannie Hurst %% A woman is laying on a gurney out in the hall prior to going to surgery. As she lays there, a man in white coat comes by, lifts up the sheet, and then leaves. This happens a second time. The third time this happens she say "Doctor, am I going into surgery soon?" The man replied, "Don't ask me lady. I'm just a painter!" %% A woman is like a dresser ... some man always goin' through her drawers. -- Blind Lemon Pledge %% A woman is like your shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows. -- Chamfort %% A woman lived between two neighbors, one of whom had a pet rabbit, the other of whom had a dog. One evening, the dog brought the pet rabbit home, a bit bloody, very dirty, and quite dead. Naturally, the dog owner was horrified and, possessing the standard ethics of the age, decided against forthrightness. Thus, poor Peter was duly washed in the laundry tub and given a good fur-fluffing with a hairdryer. Later that evening, he was surreptitiously replaced in his outdoor cage, sitting contentedly in the straw... The next evening, the rabbit owner related a tale to the central neighbor, aware of what the dog owner had done, which severely tested her composure: The strangest thing happened -- yesterday, our rabbit died and the kids and I buried him in the yard and marked his grave with a little stone. This morning, the kids went out and found his body in the locked cage, all clean and fluffy! %% A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% A woman met a man walking along the street wearing only one shoe. "Just lost a shoe?" she asked. He answered, "Nope, just found one." %% A woman most gorgeously stacked Thought screwing a glorious act. So, for finding a niche For those who were rich, She was diamonded, minked, Cadillacked. %% A woman must be a cute, cuddly, naive little thing--tender, sweet, and stupid. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% A woman never forgets the man she could have had; a man, the woman he couldn't. %% A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride -- for the opening or the shutting of a door. -- Stendhal %% A woman physician has made the statement that smoking is neither physically defective nor morally degrading, and that nicotine, even when indulged to in excess, is less harmful than excessive petting." -- Purdue Exponent (Jan 16, 1925) %% A woman should have compassion. -- Kirk, "Catspaw," stardate 3018.2 %% A woman takes off her claim to respect along with her garments. -- Herodotus %% A woman was applying for a new position as a maid. When asked why she left her last place of employment, she replied, "They paid good wages, but it was the most ridiculous place I have ever worked. Last night they had several guests over, and they said that they were going to play a game called 'bridge'. But just as I was about to bring in the refreshments, I heard a man say to a lady, 'Take your hand off my trick.' Well, I almost dropped the refreshments right then and there. Then I heard another man say to a lady, 'Lay down and let's see what you have.' Another man said, 'Well, I have strength but no length.' Just then a woman said, 'You forced me and jumped me twice when you didn't have strength enough for one raise.' Another woman was talking about protecting her honor. Well, I just got my hat and coat, and as I was leaving, I heard one of those men say, 'Well, guess I'll have to leave now since this is the last rubber.' If they think that this woman is going to put up with such things going on right underneath her nose, they had better think again. %% A woman was going to marry one of those guys that want a virgin. Since she was not, she went to a doctor to reconstruct her hymen. The doctor told her that will cost around $500, but there is an another way that will cost only $50. The woman agreed to try the cheap way, payed the money, and the doctor "worked" on her for several minutes. After the "first night" the woman came back to the doctor and told him that it was perfect. The pain, the blood, everything was there. And she asked him how he did it. "I tied your pubic hair" he answered. %% A woman was in confession and said "Oh Father, I slept with a different man every night last week." The priest replied, "Your penance will be to say 7 Hail Mary's and to suck on two lemons." The woman said, "I understand the significance of the 7 Hail Mary's but what's with the lemons?" "That's to get the smile off of your face!" %% A woman went to her doctor for a followup visit after the doctor had prescribed testosterone (a male hormone) for her. She was a little worried about some of the side effects she was experiencing. "Doctor, the hormones you've been giving me have really helped, but I'm afraid that you're giving me too much. I've started growing hair in places that I've never grown hair before." The doctor reassured her. "A little hair growth is a perfectly normal side effect of testosterone. Just where has this hair appeared?" "On my balls." %% A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without love, without virtue, without sex. -- Balzac %% A woman who lived in St. Paul Had breasts undeniably small Her husband growled, "Dear, Why not burn your brassiere? It's fulfilling no function at all." %% A woman who lived near Cape Fear Would always most carefully steer Past men whom she saw, But was brought to the floor, By a well-timed attack from the rear. %% A woman who lived on Antigua Once said to her mate, "What a pig you are!" He answered, "My queen, Is it manner you mean? Or do you refer to my figure?" %% A woman who once faked a lettera Reference by which she could gettera Job much improved Regretted her move When they asker her to show her et cetera. %% A woman who reached ninety-nine Said she always felt perfectly fine Thanks to helpings of semen From rugged old he-men Who were not too far gone in decline. %% A woman who wanted to see, If she stood up, how far she could pee, Had pardon to beg, When it ran down her leg, And formed icicles off her left knee. %% A woman will sometimes devote all her life to the development of one husband who can't cook and will. %% A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. %% A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Therefore, a man without a woman is like a bicycle without a fish. %% A woman's a woman until the day she dies, but a man's only a man as long as he can. -- Moms Mabley %% A woman's appearance depends upon two things: the clothes she wears and the time she gives to her toilet... Against the first we bring the charge of ostentation, against the second of harlotry. -- Tertullian (180?-230?) %% A woman's life is a history of the affections. -- Washington Irving %% A woman's place is in the house. And the senate. %% A woman's place is in the mall. %% A woman's place is under the covers. %% A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner. -- Edward Abbey %% A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. -- Jane Austen %% A woman, like a good piece of music, should have a solid end. -- F. Shubert %% A women is like a piano, if she's not upright she's grand. %% A wonderful bird is the pelican. His mouth can hold more than his belican. He can take in his beak Enough food for a week. I'm darned if I know how the helican. %% A wonderful tribe are the Sweenies, Renowned for the length of their peenies. The hair on their balls Sweeps the floors of their halls, But they don't look at women, the meanies. %% A wood-fetish busboy named Gable Is rapid, is thorough, is able; But when everything's cleared, He gives way to the weird, As he lovingly busses each table. %% A wop bop alu bop, a wop bam boom! %% A word is worth 1/1000 of a picture. %% A word to the wise is enough. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% A word to the wise is unnecessary. %% A work of art is never finished, only abandoned. %% A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive shortwave facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals. -- Robert M. Hutchins %% A world worth leaving is seldom worth returning to. %% A worn-out young husband named Lehr Her daily his wife's plaintive prayer: "Slip on a sheath, quick, Then slip your big dick Between these lips covered with hair." %% A worried young man from Stamboul Founds lots of red spots on his tool. Said the doctor, a cynic, "Get out of my clinic; Just wipe off the lipstick, you fool!" %% A would-be disciple came to Nasrudin's hut on the mountain-side. Knowing that every action of such an enlightened one is significant, the seeker watched the teacher closely. "Why do you blow on your hands?" "To warm myself in the cold." Later, Nasrudin poured bowls of hot soup for himself and the newcomer, and blew on his own. "Why are doing that, Master?" "To cool the soup." Unable to trust a man who uses the same process to arrive at two different results -- hot and cold -- the disciple departed. %% A yawn is a silent shout. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. %% A yellow lower garment brings supreme good fortune. %% A young Australian sheep farmer on his first trip to the big city is in the apartment of a prostitute. While she is off changing into something "more comfortable" he moves all the furniture against the walls, and places all fragile objects on the floor behind the furniture. When she comes out, she asks him why he did that. His response: "Well, if you're anything like those bl**ding 'roos!" %% A young Juliet of St. Louis On a balcony stood acting screwy. Her Romeo climbed, But he wasn't well timed, And half-way up, off he went -- blooey! %% A young New York housewife was shocked by some of the language used by her daughter. When asked about it, the daughter said she had learned it from a small girl she played with in the park. The next day, the mother sought out the little girl as she played in the park. "Are you the little girl who uses bad words?" "Who told you?" "A little bird," answered the mother. "Well, I like that!" exclaimed the small girl. "And I've been feeding the little bastards, too!" %% A young bride and groom of Australia Remarked as they joined genitalia : "Though the system seems odd, We are thankful that God Developed the genus Mammalia." %% A young fellow discovered through Freud That although of penis devoid, He could practice coitus By eating a foetus, And his parents were quite overjoyed. %% A young fellow received much acclaim For his skill at the sexual game. A real Juggernaut He easily brought Three girls to the peak ere he came. %% A young lady friend of mine just swallowed a razor blade... She performed a tonsillectomy, an appendectomy, a hysterectomy, three circumcisions, and cut off the finger of a casual friend. %% A young lady sat by the sea, Just as proper as proper could be. A young fellow goosed her, And roughly seduced her, So she thanked him and went home to tea. %% A young lady who lived by the Usk Subsisted each day on a rusk; She ate the first bite Before it was light, And the last crumb sometime after dusk. -- Edward Gorey %% A young maiden from France was no prude, She decided to dive in the nude, But her buddy, behind, Went out of his mind, When he noticed where she was tattooed. %% A young man by a girl was desired To give her the thrills she required, But he died of old age Ere his cock could assuage The volcanic desire it inspired. %% A young man from a lofty sierra Found sex both a puzzle and terror. But he met with a lass In a similar pass And they both learned--by trial and error. %% A young man from the banks of the Po Found his cock had elongated so, That when he'd pee It was never he But only his neighbors who'd know. %% A young man grew increasingly peaky In a house where the hinges were squeaky, The ferns curled up brown, The ceilings flaked down, And all of the faucets were leaky. -- Edward Gorey %% A young man in trying to convince his young lady friend to stay the evening. "No, no, no," she says. "First of all, I'm a virgin. Secondly, my mother wouldn't permit it. And thirdly, it gives me a headache." %% A young man looks up to and respects his teachers. -- Seneca %% A young man maintained that his trigger Was so big that there weren't any bigger. But this long and thick pud Was so heavy it could Scarcely lift up its head. It lacked vigor. %% A young man of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll While bent over plucking a dingle Had the whole of Eisteddfod Taking turns at his pod While they sang some impossible jingle. %% A young man of acumen and daring, Who'd amassed a great fortune in herring, Was left quite alone When it soon became known That their use at his board was unsparing. -- Edward Gorey %% A young man who enjoyed the society Of girls to the point of satiety Sometimes had a half a mind To leave them behind And jerk himself off for variety. %% A young man with passions quite gingery Tore a hole in his sister's best lingerie. He slapped her behind And made up his mind To add incest to insult and injury. %% A young man wrote to Mozart and said: Q: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any suggestions as to how to get started." A: "A symphony is a very complex musical form, perhaps you should begin with some simple lieder and work your way up to a symphony." Q: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old." A: "But I never asked anybody how." %% A young math teacher named Paul Had a hexagonal ball The square of its weight And his pecker plus eight Is his phone number, give him a call. %% A young polo-player of Berkeley Made love to his sweetheart beserkly. In the midst of each chukker He would break off and fuck her Horizontally, laterally and verkeley. %% A young teacher from far-off Bombay Turned down a request for a lay Nicely couched in a note, Since the fellow who wrote Had spelled "intercoarse" with an "a." %% A young violinist from Rio Was seducing a woman named Cleo. As she took down her panties She said, "No andantes; I want this allegro con brio!" %% A young violinist named Biddle Played exceedingly well on the fiddle. Yet 'twixt women and art 'Twas the girls won his heart Hands down and hands up--and hands middle. %% A young wife in the outskirts of Reims Preferred frigging to going to mass. Said her husband, "Take Jacques, Or any young cock, For I cannot live up to your ass." %% A young woman came into a doctor's office, and upon removing her blouse, the doctor noticed that she had a large, red 'Y' on the middle of her chest. When asked why it was there, she responded "Well, my boyfriend just got started at Yale, and he's so proud of the fact, that he refuses to take off his sweater even when we make love, so that's how I got it." "Hmmmmm" says the doctor, and they continue with the examination. A while later, another young woman comes into the office, and sure enough, she has the same type of marking, but this time it's an 'H'. When asked where it came from, she reponds "Well, by boyfriend just entered Harvard, and he's so proud..." etc. Some time after that, yet another young woman enters the office, and this time the doctor finds a big red 'M' on her chest. The doctor says, "Don't tell me. You have a boyfriend who just entered Michigan, right?" "No," says the young lady, "I don't have a boyfriend and I don't know anyone who goes to Michigan. I do have a girlfriend who goes to Wisconsin, but why do you ask?" %% A young woman from South Carolina Placed fiddle strings 'cross her vagina. With the proper-sized cocks What was sex became Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. %% A young woman from old Montreal Reminisced once concerning her fall, Saying, "He was so quick, And his prick was so slick, That I just never felt it at all. %% A young woman got married at Chester, Her mother she kissed her and blessed her. Says she, "You're in luck, He's a stunning good fuck, For I've had him myself down in Leicester." %% A younger person will soon take your job. %% A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% A) Socrates was a man. B) All men are mortal. C) All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. -- Woody Allen, "Love and Death" %% A-Z affectionately, 1 to 10 alphabetically, from here to eternity without in betweens, still looking for a custom fit in an off-the-rack world, sales talk from sales assistants when all i want to do is lower your resistance, no rhythm in cymbals no tempo in drums, love's on arrival, she comes when she comes, right on the target but wide of the mark... %% A. Running a project in this office is like mating elephants--it takes a great deal of time and effort to get on top of things; B. The whole affair is always accompanied by a great deal of noise and confusion, the culmination of which is heralded by loud trumpeting; C. After which, nothing comes of the effort for two years. %% A.A.A.A.A.: An organization for drunks who drive %% A.I. hackers do it with robots. %% AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH! %% AAAEEEYYYAAAAAEEEEEYAAAAAA -- Johnny Weissmuller %% AAH! The fuel light is on! We're running out of fuel! We'll all die!! Oh wait, that's the intercom light. -- The Far Side %% ABC. It's easy as 123. All simple as Doe Rey Me, ABC, 123 ... %% ABEND: [ABnormal END] /ah'bend/, /*-bend'/ n. Abnormal termination (of software); {crash}; {lossage}. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by {code grinder}s. Usually capitalized, but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called `abend' because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ACCEPTANCE TESTING: An unsuccessful attempt to find bugs. %% ACCOUNTANTS are good with figures. %% ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! DAS COMPUTENMACHINE IST NICHT FUR GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABBEN! IST EASY SNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWEN FUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT PITZENSPARKEN! IST NICHT FUR GEWERKEN BY DAS DUMBKOPFEN! DAS RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS HANTS IN DAS POCKETS, RELAXEN UND VATCH DAS BLINKENLIGHTS! %% ACK: /ak/ interj. 1. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream *Yo!*). An appropriate response to {ping} or {ENQ}. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point. 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (see {NAK}). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now". There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull in {talk mode} to see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of course {NAK} (sense 2), i.e., "I'm not here"). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ACTORS do it on cue. %% ADA: Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in Computing. Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA awareness. -- Datamation (January 15, 1984) %% ADULTERY: Putting yourself in someone else's position. %% ADVANCED DESIGN: copy writer doesn't understand it %% ADVENT: /ad'vent/ n. The prototypical computer adventure game, first implemented on the {PDP-10} by Will Crowther as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods. Now better known as Adventure, but the {{TOPS-10}} operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also {vadding}. This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style now expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The `magic words' {xyzzy} and {plugh} also derive from this game. Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a `Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ADVERTISERS use the "new, improved" method. %% AFJ: {} n. Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke". Elaborate April Fool's hoaxes are a hallowed tradition on USENET and Internet; see {kremvax} for an example. In fact, April Fool's Day is the *only* seasonal holiday marked by customary observances on the hacker networks. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% AI hackers do it robotically. %% AI koans: /A-I koh'anz/ pl.n. A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included under "{A Selection of AI Koans}" in {appendix A}). See also {ha ha only serious}, {mu}, and {{Humor, Hacker}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% AI-complete: /A-I k*m-pleet'/ [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with `NP-complete' (see {NP-})] adj. Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard. Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1991) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and `intelligence' they seem to require. See also {gedanken}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% AI: /A-I/ n. Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% AIDS is Nature's way of telling you to stop buggering about. %% AIDS: /aydz/ n. Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a {glob} pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple), this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafe {SEX}. See {virus}, {worm}, {Trojan horse}, {virgin}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% AIDX: n. /aydkz/ n. Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of UNIX, AIX, especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series. A victim of the dreaded "hybridism" disease, this attempt to combine the two main currents of the UNIX stream ({BSD} and {USG UNIX}) became a {monstrosity} to haunt system administrators' dreams. For example, if new accounts are created while many users are logged on, the load average jumps quickly over 20 due to silly implementation of the user databases. For a quite similar disease, compare {HP-SUX}. Also, compare {terminak}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% AIR: A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% ALASKA: A prelude to "No." %% ALGOL 60 -- An Austin Mini. Boy, that's a small car. %% ALGOL 68 -- An Austin Martin. An impressive car, but not just anyone can drive it. %% ALGORITHM: Trendy dance for hip programmers. %% ALIEN SAUCER MANUFACTURES RACE OF DESTRUCTIVE SUPER-ROSENS %% ALL NEW: Parts not interchangeable with previous design %% ALL: petroleum. "They found all on mah land!" -- Texan Dictionary %% ALT ALT to you too! %% AM Disc Jockeys do it with Modulated Amplitude. %% AMAND'S LAW OF MANAGEMENT: Everyone is always someplace else. %% AMAZING ANCIENT SYRIAN MONOLITH CURES SEXUAL FRIGIDITY %% AMBIGUITY: Telling the truth when you don't mean to. %% AMBITION: An ant crawling up an elephant's leg with rape on his mind. %% AMBULANCE DRIVERS come quicker. %% AMERICA'S CUP FACT: Most of the people obsessed with the America's cup are trendy jerks who hadn't even heard of it a year ago. -- Dennis Miller %% AMOEBIT: Amoeba/rabbit cross; it can multiply and divide at the same time. %% AN EXPOSTULATION (Against too many writers of science fiction) Why did you lure us on like this, Light-year on light-year, through the abyss, Building (as though we cared for size!) Empires that cover galaxies, If at journey's end we find The same old stuff we left behind, Well-worn Tellurian stories of Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love, Whose setting might as well have been The Bronx, Montmartre, or Bethnel Green? Why should I leave this green floored cell, Roofed with blue air, in which we dwell, Unless, outside its guarded gates, Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits, Strangeness that moves us more than fear, Beauty that stabs with tingling spear, Or Wonder, laying on one's heart That finger tip at which we start As if some thought too swift and shy For some reason's grasp had just gone by? -- C. S. Lewis %% ANALYSTS PANIC: Prime numbers missing from IEEE floating point? -- "National Computer Science Enquirer" %% ANARCHY RULES!!!! ... errr ... wait a minute :} Why can't you be a nonconformist like everyone else?!?!? %% ANDROPHOBIA: Fear of men. %% ANGEL'S LAW OF HOME IMPROVEMENT: If you cut one inch off a board that is one inch too long, it will be one inch too short. %% ANGLE BRACKETS (primarily MIT) n. Either of the characters "<" and ">". See BROKET. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% ANGORA'S AXIOM: No matter how well you perform your job, a superior will attempt to modify the results. %% ANN JILLIAN'S HAIR makes LONI ANDERSON'S HAIR look like RICARDO MONTALBAN'S HAIR! %% ANSI does it in the standard way %% ANTHONY'S LAW OF FORCE: Don't force it, get a bigger hammer. %% ANTIBIOTICS, NUTRA-SWEET and MILK DUDS!! %% AOS (aus (East coast) ay-ahs (West coast)) [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] v. To increase the amount of something. "Aos the campfire." Usage: considered silly. %% AOS: 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay-os/ (West Coast) [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] vt.,obs. To increase the amount of something. "AOS the campfire." Usage: considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by {bump}. See {SOS}. 2. A {{Multics}}-derived OS supported at one time by Data General. This was pronounced /A-O-S/ or /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS system administrator's manual (`How to Load and Generate your AOS System') was created, issued a part number, and circulated as photocopy folklore. It was called `How to Goad and Levitate your CHAOS System'. 3. Algebraic Operating System, in reference to those calculators which use infix instead of postfix (reverse Polish) notation. Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a {PDP-10} instruction that took any memory location in the computer and added 1 to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask, does the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'? Ah, here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction if the result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if the result was Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped if the result was Not 0; AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always; and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to skip, so it never skipped. For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the next instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant `do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the {JRST} (Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster and so was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of assembler programming. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% APHASIA: Loss of speech in social scientists when asked at parties, "But of what use is your research?" %% APL -- A double-decker bus. Its takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time. But, it drives only in reverse gear, and is instrumented in Greek. %% APL hackers do it in the quad. %% APL hackers take all they want. %% APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% APL is a natural extension of assembler language programming; ...and is best for educational purposes. -- Alan J. Perlis %% APL is a write only language: You can write programs in it; but try and read them! %% APL is a write-only language. I can write programs in APL, but I can't read any of them. -- Roy Keir %% APL programmers do it with stile %% APPENDIX: A portion of a book, for which nobody yet has discovered any use. %% APPOINTMENT BOOK: The reference of last resort when trying to duck undesired invitations ("Gee, the soonest I can pencil you in is December, 2004"), or when trying to figure out what the hell it was you did during the past year. %% APRIL 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. %% AQUARIUS (Jan.20 - Feb.18) You are the type of person who never has enough money to do what you want. Don't expect things to get any better today, either. As a matter of fact they might get worse. Intensify your relationship with your bank and any friends you have who might be able to lend you a few bucks. %% ARCHAEOLOGISTS CLAIM SEX-CHANGE DINOSAURS INVENTED ORAL SEX %% ARCHAEOLOGISTS like it old. %% ARCHDUKE FERDINAND FOUND ALIVE; FIRST WORLD WAR A MISTAKE %% ARCHITECTS have great plans. %% ARCHITECTS, ENGINEERS AND CONTRACTORS; Their Education An Architect starts out knowing very little about anything and is educated to know less and less about more things such that he ends up knowing nothing about everything. An Engineer starts out knowing very little about anything and is educated to know more and more about less and less so that she ends up knowing everything about nothing. A Contractor starts out knowing everything about everything but ends up knowing nothing about anything primarily due to his association with architects and engineers. %% ARE: sixty minutes. "Ah'll meet yew thar in about a are!" -- Texan Dictionary %% ARG n. Abbreviation for "argument" (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% ARIES (Mar.21 - Apr.19) You are a wonderfully interesting, honest, hard-working person and you should make many new friends, but you won't because you've got a mean streak in you a mile wide. %% ARISTOTLE'S DICTUM: One should always prefer the probable impossible to the improbable possible. %% ARITHMETIC: An obscure art no longer practiced in the world's developed countries. %% ARKANSAS: Where the men are men, so are the women and the sheep run scared. %% ARN: a metallic element. "Mah muscle is as strong as arn!" -- Texan Dictionary %% ARNOLD'S ADDENDUM: Everything causes cancer in rats. %% ARPA is unenthusiastic about your work. %% ARTIFACT: Something only an art major would know. %% ARTIFACT: The only true fact in an experiment. %% ARTISTS are exhibitionists. %% ASCII : Ancient deity of telecomputing. Rumored to bestow vast volumes of data upon supplicants. Hence the saying "ASCII and ye shall receive". %% ASCII - a Chinese question -- Data communications glossary %% ASCII a stupid question, you get an EBCDIC answer. %% ASCII art: n. The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly `|', `-', `/', `\', and `+'). Also known as `character graphics' or `ASCII graphics'; see also {boxology}. Here is a serious example: o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O L )||( | | | C U A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T C N )||( | | | | P E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--)|--+-o U )||( | | | GND T o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+ A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit feeding a capacitor input filter circuit -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ASCII art: n. The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly `|', `-', `/', `\', and `+'). Also known as `character graphics' or `ASCII graphics'; see also {boxology}. Here is a serious example: o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O L )||( | | | C U A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T C N )||( | | | | P E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--)|--+-o U )||( | | | GND T o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+ A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit feeding a capacitor input filter circuit Figure 1. And here are some very silly examples: |\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___ | | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \ | | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \ | (o)(o) U / \ C _) (__) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/ | ,___| (oo) \/ \/ | / \/-------\ U (__) /____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo ) / \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\ Figure 2. There is an important subgenre of humorous ASCII art that takes advantage of the names of the various characters to tell a pun-based joke. +--------------------------------------------------------+ | ^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | +--------------------------------------------------------+ " A Bee in the Carrot Patch " Figure 3. Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are reproduced in Figure 2; here are three more: (__) (__) (__) (\/) ($$) (**) /-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/ / | 666 || / |=====|| / | || * ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----|| ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love Figure 4. %% ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI. %% ASCII:: [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] /as'kee/ n. The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. Uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version of ASCII) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters --- a major {win} --- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S and the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See {{EBCDIC}} to understand how. Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names --- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for {bang}, {excl}, {open}, {ques}, {semi}, {shriek}, {splat}, {twiddle}, and {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ASCII:: [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] /as'kee/ n. The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. Uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version of ASCII) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters --- a major {win} --- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S and the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See {{EBCDIC}} to understand how. Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names --- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for {bang}, {excl}, {open}, {ques}, {semi}, {shriek}, {splat}, {twiddle}, and {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. This list derives from revision 2.3 of the USENET ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by {INTERCAL}. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information. ! Common: {bang}; pling; excl; shriek; . Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; [spark-spot]; soldier. " Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch; ; ; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime. # Common: ; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; {crunch}; hex; [mesh]; octothorpe. Rare: flash; crosshatch; grid; pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; {splat}. $ Common: dollar; . Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money]. % Common: percent; ; mod; grapes. Rare: [double-oh-seven]. & Common: ; amper; and. Rare: address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from `sh(1)'); pretzel; amp. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?] ' Common: single quote; quote; . Rare: prime; glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; ; . () Common: left/right paren; left/right parenthesis; left/right; paren/thesis; open/close paren; open/close; open/close parenthesis; left/right banana. Rare: so/al-ready; lparen/rparen; ; open/close round bracket, parenthisey/unparenthisey; [wax/wane]; left/right ear. * Common: star; [{splat}]; . Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see {glob}); {Nathan Hale}. + Common: ; add. Rare: cross; [intersection]. , Common: . Rare: ; [tail]. - Common: dash; ; . Rare: [worm]; option; dak; bithorpe. . Common: dot; point; ; . Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot]. / Common: slash; stroke; ; forward slash. Rare: diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat]. : Common: . Rare: dots; [two-spot]. ; Common: ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong. <> Common: ; left/right angle bracket; bra/ket; left/right broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); [angle/right angle]. = Common: ; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh]. ? Common: query; ; {ques}. Rare: whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback. @ Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; . V Rare: [book]. [] Common: left/right square bracket; ; bracket/unbracket; left/right bracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back]. \ Common: backslash; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; ; reversed virgule; [backslat]. ^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare: chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal). _ Common: ; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; [flatworm]. ` Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; ; quasiquote. {} Common: open/close brace; left/right brace; left/right squiggly; left/right squiggly bracket/brace; left/right curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; left/right squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. | Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: ; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike]. ~ Common: ; squiggle; {twiddle}; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)]. The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; {{Commonwealth Hackish}} has its own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace `#'; thus Britishers sometimes call `#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a `#' suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters. The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare {angle brackets}). Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The `#', `$', `>', and `&' characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, `#' in many assembler-programming cultures, `$' in the 6502 world, `>' at Texas Instruments, and `&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also {splat}. The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set; this is a a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a *smaller* subset common to all those in use. %% ASCII: The control code for all beginning programmers and those who would become computer literate. Etymologically, the term has come down as a contraction of the often-repeated phrase "ascii and you shall receive." -- Robb Russon %% ASHes to ASHes, DOS to DOS. %% ASK ME I'm shy %% ASSEMBLY LINE WORKERS do it over and over. %% AST: past tense of the verb, to ask. "Who ast yew?" -- Texan Dictionary %% ASTRONOMERS do it with Uranus %% AT EASE, Lieutenant! -- Riker to Worf, "Where Silence Has Lease", stardate 42193.6 %% AT&T does it in Long Lines. %% ATLANTA: An entire city surrounded by an airport. %% ATT Bell Labs is a trademark of UNIX. -- Calton Pu %% ATTORNEYS make better motions. %% AUCTION: A gyp off the old block. %% AUDITORS like to examine figures. %% AUTOMAGICALLY adv. Automatically, but in a way which, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), I don't feel like explaining to you. Example: Some programs which produce XGP output files spool them automagically. %% AVAX - A low-flying VAX with radar. %% AZTEC SLIME GOD IMPREGNATES HORRIFIED WORSHIPERS %% Abandon all hope ye who have entered cyberspace. %% Abandon all hope, ye who enter here %% Abandon all hope, ye who exit here %% Abandon all hope, ye who press ENTER here. %% Abandon hope, all ye who here. %% Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy. %% Abasement, n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an employer. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Abe meets his frind (friend) Isaac on the street. Isaac: Abe, why are you looking so sad? Abe: It's my son. I sent him off to college, and now he has come back home, all full of Gentile ideas. Where did I go wrong? Isaac: Funny you should mention it! My son, too, has come home from college, with his head all messed up, filled with Gentile ideas...There is but one course open to us. We will ask the Rabbi. So they go to the Synagogue, and obtain an audience with the Rabbi. Both: Rabbi, our two sons, whom we have raised to be devout followers of the Law, have come home from college, full of Gentile ideas. What can we do about it? Rabbi Bernstein: Funny you should mention it! My son also has come back from college, with all sorts of Gentile ideas. I assure you my friends, this problem is beyond human solution. We must go into the place of worship and pray. The three go in and spread their hands in supplication to the Lord. No sooner have they articulated their common lament than the lights go out, the building is filled with cloud and smoke,and a thunderous voice answers them FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION IT....... %% Aberdeen was so small that when the family with the car went on vacation, the gas station and drive-in theatre had to close. %% Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short. -- John Henry Newman %% Ability is of little account without opportunity. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% Ability wins us the esteem of the true men; luck that of the people. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Abley's Explanation: Marriage is the only union that cannot be organized. Both sides think they are management. %% Aboard the good ship Venus, The cabin boy, the captain's joy, The mast it was a penis, A cunning little nipper, Her figurehead They filled his ass, A whore in bed, With broken glass, Good grief you should have seen us! And circumcised the skipper. The first mate's name was Higgins, The captain's daughter Mabel, And Higgins was a biggins, They screwed when they were able, Once round the deck, They nailed her tits, Twice up the mast, Those nasty shits, And the rest was used for riggins'! Right to the captain's table. The engineer's name was Carter, The second mate's name was Andy, And Carter was a farter, By God, he was a dandy, When the wind wouldn't blow, They broke his cock, And the ship couldn't go, With chunks of rock, Carter the farter would start her! For conking in the brandy! %% Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State. -- Edward Abbey %% Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born. -- Ronald Reagan %% About all some men accomplish in life is to send a son to Harvard. %% About the campaign in Detroit to "Stamp out the Beatles," John Lennon said: "We have a campaign to stamp out Detroit!" %% About the only thing on a farm that has an easy time is the dog. %% About the only thing we have left that actually discriminates in favor of the plain people is the stork. -- Kin Hubbard %% About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends. -- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) %% About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% About you stretches the beach of Ebosskil. The sand is unnaturally white, reflecting its strange origins in an act of magic. The sand continues up a hill to the west. There are signs of ruins visible to the northwest and southwest. You cannot cross the broken terrain to the north and south. %% Above all else - sky. %% Above all things, reverence yourself. %% Above all, beware of Zeal! %% Above fire; below, the lake: The image of Opposition. Thus amid all fellowship The superior man retains his individuality. %% Above the lovers struggle in dark corners, desperate as the night moves on. %% Above you is a grating locked with a skull-and-crossbones lock. %% Above you is a grating. %% Above you is an open grating with sunlight pouring in. %% Abroad in the world today is a monstrous falsehood, a consummate fabrication, to which all social agencies have loaned themselves and into which most men, women, and children have been seduced ... "the Eleventh Commandment"; for such, indeed, has become the injunction: You Must Adjust. -- Robert M. Lindner (1915-1956) %% Abruptness is eloquence in parting, when spinning out the time is but the weaving of new sorrow. -- Sir John Suckling %% Abscond: To be unexpectedly called away to the bedside of a dying relative and miss the return train. %% Absence and death are the same -- only that in death there is no suffering. -- Walter S. Landor %% Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Absence in love is like water upon fire; a little quickens, but much extinguishes it. -- Hannah More %% Absence is to love what wind is to fire. It extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great. %% Absence makes the heart forget. %% Absence makes the heart go wander. %% Absence makes the heart grow fonder. -- Sextus Aurelius %% Absence makes the heart grow frantic. %% Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. %% Absence of occupation is not rest A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd. -- Cowper %% Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it. %% Absent, adj.: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed; slandered. %% Absentee, n.: A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove himself from the sphere of exaction. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder. -- Hugh Drummond %% Absolute freedom is being able to do what you please without considering anyone except the except the wife and kids, the company and the boss, neighbors and friends, the police and government, the doctor and the church. %% Absolute: Independent, irresponsible. An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins. Not many absolute monarchies are left, most of them having been replaced by limited monarchies, where the sovereign's power for evil (and for good) is greatly curtailed, and by republics, which are governed by chance. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Absolutely no foolish horseplay allowed. %% Absolutely-Non-Switching Amplifier : Following the boom of Non-switching amplifiers in the late 70's and early 80's, there hasn't been too much activities in the area of dealing with switching noises in class B amplifiers. Recently, Japanese consumer electronic giant Sikzjit has introduced a new line of amplifiers that they claim are superior to all other amplifiers currently in the market. These amplifiers are so good that they name the line Absolutely-Non- Switching, referring not only to their class A performance with class B efficiency, but also to the life time warranty that comes with each and every amplifier bearing that name. The warranty not only gives you specific legal rights varied from state to state, but also gives them the right to burn your house and sell your kids if you ever decide to switch to another amplifier. %% Absolutum obsoletum. (If it works, it's out of date.) -- Stafford Beer %% Abstain from wine, women and song; mostly song. %% Abstainer: A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Abstaining is favorable both to the head and to the pocket. -- Horace Greeley (1811-1872) %% Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Abundance has success. The king attains abundance. Be not sad. Be like the sun at midday. %% Abuse is the weapon of the vulgar. -- Samuel Griswold Goodrich %% Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. -- John Adams (1735-1826) %% Abuse: the bitter clamour of two evil tongues. -- William Shakespeare %% Academe: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy: A modern school where football is taught. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low. -- Wallace Sayre %% Academicians care, that's who. %% Academy: A modern school where football is taught. Institute: An archaic school where football in not taught. %% Accent on helpful side of your nature. Drain the moat. %% Accept people for what they are -- completely unacceptable. %% Accident, n.: A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better. -- Foolish Dictionary %% Accidents can happen. %% Accidents cause History. If Sigismund Unbuckle had taken a walk in 1426 and met Wat Tyler, the Peasant's Revolt would never have happened and the motor car would not have been invented until 2026, which would have meant that all the oil could have been used for lamps, thus saving the electric light bulb and the whale, and nobody would have caught Moby Dick or Billy Budd. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Accomplice: One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. This view of the attorney's position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a sufficient fee for assenting. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% According to Arkansas law, Section 4761, Pope's Digest: "No person shall be permitted under any pretext whatever, to come nearer than fifty feet of any door or window of any polling room, from the opening of the polls until the completion of the count and the certification of the returns." %% According to Kentucky state law, every person must take a bath at least once a year. %% According to Prof. TAA of MIT Tech, the rapidly changing magnetic fields in the room are so intense as to cause you to be electrocuted. I really don't know, but in any event, something has killed you. %% According to Prof. TAA of MIT Tech, the rapidly changing magnetic fields in the room are so intense as to fry all the delicate innards of the robot. I really don't know, but in any event, smoke is coming out of its ears, and it has stopped moving. %% According to a judicial decision in New York, "A railway company which negligently throws a passenger from a crowded car on a trestle is held liable for injury to a relative who, in going to his rescue, falls through the trestle." %% According to a recent government publication ... A billion seconds ago Harry Truman was president. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ. A billion hours ago man had not yet walked on earth. A billion dollars ago was late yesterday at the U.S. Treasury... %% According to all the latest reports, there was no truth in any of the earlier reports. %% According to experts, the oyster In its shell - a crustacean cloister - May frequently be Either he or a she Or both, if it should be its choice ter. %% According to my best recollection, I don't remember. -- Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo %% According to the Rand McNally Places-Rated Almanac, the best place to live in America is the city of Pittsburgh. The city of New York came in twenty-fifth. Here in New York we really don't care too much. Because we know that we could beat up their city anytime. -- David Letterman %% According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum". I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces. -- Edward Abbey %% According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless. %% According to the obituary notices, a mean and unimportant person never dies. %% Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Accordion, n.: A bagpipe with pleats. %% Accountability: The mother of caution. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Accountants do it for profit. %% Accuracy and clarity of statement are mutually exclusive. -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) %% Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty. -- Charles Simmons %% Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction. -- Adlai E. Stevenson %% Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood. -- Tyron Edwards %% Accuracy, n.: The vice of being right %% Accurate fortune tellers should be shot %% Accurate reckoning -- the entrance into the knowledge of all existing things and all obscure secrets. -- Ahmes the Scribe (17th cent. B.C.) %% Accurst ambition, how dearly I have bought you. -- John Dryden (1631-1700) %% Accuse, and so shall it be committed. %% Accuse: To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged them. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Achievement, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Achilles' Biological Findings: (1) If a child looks like his father, that's heredity. If he looks like a neighbor, that's environment. (2) A lot of time has been wasted arguing over what came first -- the chicken or the egg. It was undoubtedly the rooster. %% Acid -- better living through chemistry. %% Acid absorbs 47 times it's weight in excess Reality. %% Acoustic Modem : A modem jury rigged from spare electronic parts and a wooden staff normally used to play billiards. %% Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Act natural. %% Act now and receive a set of Ginsu steak knives, absolutely free! %% Act upon your impulses, but pray that they may be directed by God. -- Emerson Tennent %% Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action to all eternity. -- Lavater %% Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing. %% Action is eloquence. -- William Shakespeare %% Action is the proper fruit of knowledge. -- Thomas Fuller %% Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends. -- Jawaharlal Nehru %% Actions are the insipid reflections of our motives. %% Actions of the last age are like almanacs of the last age. -- Sir Thomas Denham %% Actions speak louder than words -- though not so often. %% Actions speak louder than words. %% Actor: "I'm a smash hit. Why, yesterday during the last act, I had everyone glued in their seats!" Oliver Herford: "Wonderful! Wonderful! Clever of you to think of it!" %% Actor: So what do you do for a living? Doris: I work for a company that makes deceptively shallow serving dishes for Chinese restaurants. -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" %% Actor: Boris Karloff - Real name: William Henry Pratt %% Actor: Cary Grant - Real name: Archibald Leach %% Actor: Edward G. Robinson - Real name: Emmanual Goldenburg %% Actor: Gene Wilder - Real name: Gerald Silberman %% Actor: John Wayne - Real name: Marion Morrison %% Actor: Kirk Douglas - Real name: Issur Danielovitch %% Actor: Richard Burton - Real name: Richard Jenkins Jr. %% Actor: Roy Rogers - Real name: Leonard Slye %% Actor: Woddy Allen - Real name: Allen Stewart Konigsberg %% Actors are the only honest hypocrites. -- Hazlitt %% Actors do it in the limelight. %% Actors do it on camera. %% Actors stand on the side of the camera where the passage of time usually hurts. Whereas directors stay on the side where it may help. -- Alfred Hitchcock %% Actors will happen even in the best-regulated families. %% Actors: Bores to themselves, to others caviare. -- Phaedrus %% Actresses will happen in the best regulated families. -- Oliver Herford (1863-1935) %% Actual war is a very messy business. Very, very messy business. -- Kirk, "A Taste of Armageddon," stardate 3193.0 %% Actually, my goal is to have a sandwich named after me. %% Actually, the probability is 100% that the elevator will be going in the right direction. Proof by induction: N=1. Trivialy true, since both you and the elevator only have one floor to go to. Assume true for N, prove for N+1: If you are on any of the first N floors, then it is true by the induction hypothesis. If you are on the N+1st floor, then both you and the elevator have only one choice, namely down. Therefore, it is true for all N+1 floors. QED. %% Actually, what I'd like is a little toy spaceship!! %% Acupuncturists do it with a small prick. %% Ad astra per aspera. (To the stars by aspiration.) %% Ad in newspaper : Ray. Get in touch with me as quickly as possible. Bring 3 rings - engagement, wedding, teething. Have news for you. Mary. %% Ada -- An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes and automatic transmission are all standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for the generals, it's good enough for you. Manufacturing delays due to difficulties reading the design specification are starting to clear up. %% Ada is the 400-pound gorilla of programming languages. %% Ada was invented because Vogon poetry wasn't deadly enough. %% Ada:: n. A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description is "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, {elephantine} bulk. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Adam Had 'em. (On the antiquity of microbes. claimed as the shortest poem.) %% Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething. %% Adam was but human -- this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson" %% Adam's Law: (1) Women don't know what they want; they don't like what they have got. (2) Men know very well what they want; having got it, they begin to lose interest. %% Adapt. Enjoy. Survive. %% Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) %% Adaptive Equalization - busing -- Data communications glossary %% Add in some more bells and whistles. %% Add in some more bugs. %% Add one little bit on the end... Think of 'potato,' how's it spelled? You're right phonetically, but what else...? There ya go...alright! -- Vice President Dan Quayle correcting a student's correct spelling of the word 'potatoe' during a spelling bee at an elementary school in Trenton %% Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit. [Add little to little and there will be a big pile.] -- OVID %% Adding manpower to a late project is like getting nine women pregnant in hopes of obtaining a baby in one month. %% Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Adler's Distinction: Language is all that separates us from the lower animals, and from the bureaucrats. %% Administration maintains the status quo. -- Thomas L. Martin %% Administration: An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Admirable, they died at their posts. -- Worf, "Booby Trap", stardate 43205.6 %% Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object. -- Joseph Addison %% Admiration is the daughter of innocence. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Admit it! You have no idea who I am! %% Admittedly, there are a lot of things that are better than sex, and a lot more that are worse; but there's nothing quite like it... %% Adolescence: The stage between puberty and adultery. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Adolf Hitler was having terrible nightmares, and so he decided to go to a fortune teller hoping that the woman could find the source of his problem. "I am sorry but I am unable to help you solve your dreams" said the fortune teller, "but I do know that you will die on a Jewish holiday." "And which holiday will this be?" he asked. "It does not matter." she replied. "Any day that you die will be a Jewish Holiday." %% Adopted kids are such a pain -- you have to teach them how to look like you. -- Gilda Radner %% Adore, v.: To venerate expectantly. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Adult, n.: One old enough to know better. %% Adults die young. %% Adults. -- Wesley, "The Battle", stardate 41723.9 %% Advancement in position. %% Adventure is dedicated to "albino". It was written by two very bored students of orange coast college, with a "few" ideas contributed by david willis, scott adams, and alexis adams. Some minor phrasing assistance was provided by peter gruenbeck and richard rapier; some major phrasing assistance came from justin & steve of csu fullerton, and from willie crowther, don woods, and gary palter, who started it all at m.i.t. %% Adventure is not outside a man; it is within. -- David Grayson %% Adversity borrows its sharpest sting from our impatience. -- Bishop Horne %% Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Adversity is the first path to truth. -- Lord Byron %% Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. -- Victer Hugo (1802-1885) %% Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy. -- William Shakespeare %% Advertisement for donkey rides in Thailand: Would you like to ride on your own ass? %% Advertisement in the Eagle, newspaper of the American University: "ACCURATELY YOURS Professional Word Processing Company. Open 24 hours every day." New Yorker comment: "Maybe you need a little rest." %% Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Advertising Rule: In writing a patent-medicine advertisement, first convince the reader that he has the disease he is reading about; secondly, that it is curable. %% Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission. -- Fred Allen %% Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) %% Advertising is selling by telling. -- Gary B. Wright %% Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths. %% Advertising is the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the flank that keeps our economy surging forward. -- Robert W. Sarnoff %% Advertising is the life of trade. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% Advertising is the most fun of anything you can do with your clothes on. -- Mary Wells [advertising executive] %% Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. -- George Orwell (1903-1950) %% Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. -- Stephen Butler Leacock %% Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve their economic status. -- Ralph S. Butler %% Advice from an old carpenter: Measure twice and saw once. %% Advice is a dangerous gift; be cautious about giving and receiving it. %% Advice is like castor oil, easy enough to give but dreadful to take. -- Josh Billings %% Advice is like mushrooms; if you aren't careful, you will get a lot of B.S. %% Advice is like snow; the softer it falls the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mud. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer and wish we didn't. -- Erica Mann Jong %% Advice to young men: Be ascetic, and if you can't be ascetic, then at least be asceptic. %% Advice: the smallest current coin. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Advise is seldom welcome, and those who need it the most, like it the least. -- Lord Chesterfield %% Advise to a young lawyer: When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff. %% Advise well before you begin, and when you have maturely considered, then act with promptitude. -- Sallust %% Affairs with Nymphs are often very expensive. %% Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles; but the magnifying of the one is like looking through a telescope at heavenly objects; that of the other, like enlarging monsters with a microscope. -- Leigh Hunt %% Affixed to the east wall of the castle near the corner is a large bronze plaque, set at approximately waist height. The plaque is securely attached to the castle wall with heavy rivets. %% Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites. -- Christian Nestell Bovee %% Afraid of Mimics? Try to wear a ring of true seeing. %% Afraid of falling piercers? Wear a helmet! %% After 21 years they can't kill the Doctor now! %% After 40 its patch, patch, patch %% After Bart has been beat up by the bully, his family walks by and Lisa puts a cupcake on his forehead ... Bully: "Hey! They even have food at this thing! Here's one for the road ..." -- "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% After Completion. Success in small matters. Perseverance furthers. At the beginning good fortune, At the end disorder. %% After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. -- Freeman Dyson %% After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement. -- Norman Thomas %% After I run your program, let's make love like crazed weasels, OK? %% After [Benjamin] Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks like a stone. -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" %% After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. %% After a few boring years, socially meaningful rock 'n' roll died out. It was replaced by disco, which offers no guidance to any form of life more advanced than the lichen family. -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly Do" %% After a month at sea, you finally arrive at a sandy beach. All ashore who's going ashore . . . %% After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn. %% After a raise in salary you will have less money at the end of each month than you had before. -- Dr. R. F. Gumperson %% After a time, you may find that 'having' is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as 'wanting.' It is not logical, but it is often true. -- Spock, "Amok Time," stardate 3372.7 %% After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul, And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning and company doesn't mean security, And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts and presents aren't promises, And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes open, with the grace of an adult, not the grief of a child, And you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much. So plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure... that you really are strong, And you really do have worth. %% After a year in therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, 'Maybe life isn't for everyone'. -- Larry Brown %% After adding two weeks to the schedule for unexpected delays, add two more for the unexpected, unexpected delays. %% After all my erstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it was not love, Just because it perished? -- Edna St. Vincent Millay %% After all my time here, I've yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn't become still more complicated. -- Poul Anderson [on doing research] %% After all, I am a liberal myself. %% After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), on Shakespeare %% After all, financiers just own things, while a skilled person with a job he loves has much, much more. -- David Brin, "Earth" %% After all, it is only the mediocre who are always at their best. -- Jean Giraudoux %% After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi. -- P. J. O'Rourke %% After all, what was MEDEA? Just another child custody case. -- Frank Pierson %% After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted. %% After an evening at the theatre and several nightcaps at an intimate little bistro, the young man whispered to his date, "How do you feel about making love to men?" "That's MY business," she snapped. "Ah," he said. "A professional." %% After being asked by a waitress if he wanted his pizza cut into four slices or eight: "Better make it four. I don't think I can eat eight pieces." -- Yogi Berra %% After being killed in a tragic auto accident, Fathers Tom and Mike were met at Heaven's gate by St. Peter. St. Peter walked up to them and said, "Hello, fathers. Since both of you have been such devoted servants, for a short time only, you may return to Earth in any form of your choosing. St Peter turned to Father Tom and asked, "What form would you like, Father Tom?" "I have always wanted to soar like an eagle above the mountains in the bright sunlight," replied Father Tom. "It is done," said St Peter, and Father Tom found himself soaring above the mountains. St. Peter then turned to Father Mike and asked, "What would you like to return as, Father Mike?" Father Mike hesitated for a moment and then, looking rather embarrassed, replied, "Well, I'd like to return as a stud." "Are you sure?" asked St. Peter? "Yes, sir, I am," Mike said. "Then it is done," stated St. Peter, and Father Mike spent the winter in Minneapolis in a snow tire. %% After cocktails in the Oak Room, the graying millionaire took the blond, attractive, wholesome, winning young woman up to his suite. They chatted for a while, and then kissed on the couch. A little fondling, some feeling and petting ... to which the young lady lent herself shyly ... and then they were in the wide, cool bed, naked together. They chatted more, established a communion, a rapport the older man considered remarkably gratifying. The girl seemed sympatico, innocent, good. "Yes, that was it," he thought, "essentially good. Why, she could be my own daughter." He smiled into the young girl's deep blue eyes. "Tell me," he asked, his hand on her breast, "What's a nice girl like you doing in a hotel like this?" "Oh, about $2000 a week, with tips." %% After fifteen minutes, I wanted to marry her, and after thirty minutes I completely gave up the idea of stealing her purse. -- Woody Allen, "Take the Money and Run" %% After finally breaking away from their reception, the couple was finally starting their honeymoon. As the groom took off his shirt, his bride noticed "NIKE" tattooed in big letters across this chest. "You see," he explained, "I used to put my sponsor's name on my jersey when I ran in marathons, but the ink would smear when I started to sweat. So I had it tattooed on." Then, he took off his pants, and she noticed "PUMA" emblazened down each leg. "Yes," he answered, "they were one of my sponsors, too." After she undressed, he removed his undershorts before climbing in bed. Tattooed down the length of his penis, in big red letters, is "AIDS". "Now wait just a minute!" his wife exclaimed. "How come you never told me!" "No, you misunderstand." he said. "In a minute, it will say ADIDAS!" %% After half a day in a beauty salon, she still hasn't been worked on -- they're still busy giving her an estimate. %% After ingesting a small amount of the controlled substance, the teenager began climbing the walls screaming, "Look at me! I'm a graham cracker. Watch my arm crumble away!" %% After large expenditures of federal, state, and county funds; after much confusion generated by detours and road blocks; after greatly annoying the surrounding population with noise, dust, and fumes, the previously existing traffic jam is relocated by one half-mile. -- Alan Deitz %% After living in New York, you trust nobody, but you believe everything. Just in case. %% After painstaking and careful analysis of a sample, you are always told that it is the wrong sample and doesn't apply to the problem. %% After repeatedly warding off her date's amorous advances during the evening, the pretty young thing decided to put her foot down: "See here," she shouted indignantly. "This is positively the last time I'm going to tell you `no'." "Splendid!" exclaimed her date. "Now we can start making some progress." %% After rushing into a drugstore, the nervous young man was obviously embarrassed when a prim thirty-ish woman asked if she could serve him. "N-no," he stammered, "I'd like to see the druggist." "I'm the druggist", she replied cheerfully. "Oh.. well, uh, it's nothing important," he said, and turned to leave. "Young man," said the woman, "my sister and I have been running this drugstore for nearly ten years. There is nothing you can tell us that will embarrass us. "Well, all right," he said. "I have this awful sexual hunger that nothing will appease. No matter how many times I make love, I still want to make love again and again. Is there anything you can give me for it?" "Just a moment," said the woman, "I'll have to discuss this with my sister." A few minutes later, she returned. "The best we can do," she said, "is room and board and a half-interest in the business." %% After several years of marriage, Debbie's husband, Mike, died suddenly. According to his wishes, Debbie had his body cremated and placed the remains in a small urn. Several weeks later, Debbie came home wearing a full-length mink coat and an eight-carat diamond ring. She went into the living room, removed the urn from the mantel and carefully tapped Mike's ashes into a small dish on the coffee table. "Mike, my beloved Mike," she began,"I wish to talk to you. Mike, do you remember, for several years you promised me a mink coat? Well, here it is, Mike. do you like it? "And, Mike," she continued, "do you remember, for several years you promised me a diamond ring? Yes? You remember? Here it is, Mike. Do you like it? "Well," Debbie exclaimed, puffing Mike's ashes into the air, "there's that blow job I was promising you." %% After spending a forbidden night on the town, two young nuns were trying to sneak through the fence surrounding their Convent. "You know," giggled one as she held the wire apart for the other to crawl through, "I feel like a Marine." "So do I," the other nun sighed, "but where are we going to find one at three in the morning?" %% After the correction has been found to be in error, it will be impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation. %% After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box. -- Italian proverb %% 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 the party was over, he just sort of lay there, grazing on the carpet. %% After the troll's lightning-fast attack, you note the absence of your heart and kidneys. %% After they make styrofoam, what do they ship it in? -- Steven Wright %% After this was written there appeared a remarkable posthumous memoir that throws some doubt on Millikan's leading role in these experiments. Harvey Fletcher (1884-1981), who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, at Millikan's suggestion worked on the measurement of electronic charge for his doctoral thesis, and co-authored some of the early papers on this subject with Millikan. Fletcher left a manuscript with a friend with instructions that it be published after his death; the manuscript was published in Physics Today, June 1982, page 43. In it, Fletcher claims that he was the first to do the experiment with oil drops, was the first to measure charges on single droplets, and may have been the first to suggest the use of oil. According to Fletcher, he had expected to be co-authored with Millikan on the crucial first article announcing the measurement of the electronic charge, but was talked out of this by Millikan. -- Steven Weinberg, "The Discovery of Subatomic Particles" Robert Millikan is generally credited with making the first really precise measurement of the charge on an electron and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923. %% After two or three weeks of this madness, you begin to feel As One with the man who said, "No news is good news." In twenty-eight papers, only the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of any interest... but even then the interest items are usually buried deep around paragraph 16 on the jump (or "Cont. on ...") page... The Post will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa. The Star will say the same thing, and the Journal will say nothing at all. But the Times might have enough room on the jump page to include a line or so that says something like: "When he finished his speech, Muskie burst into tears and seized his campaign manager by the side of the neck. They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by an oriental woman who seemed to be in control." Now that's good journalism. Totally objective; very active and straight to the point. -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72" %% After winning the decathlon, Jim Thorpe was told by the King of Sweden, "You are the world's greatest athlete." Thorpe replied, "Thanks, King." %% After winning the pennant one year, Casey Stengel commented, "I couldn'ta done it without my players." %% After wisdom comes wit. -- Evan Esar %% After your lover has gone you will still have PEANUT BUTTER! %% Afternoon very favorable for romance. Try a single person for a change. %% Afternoon, n.: That part of the day we spend worrying about how we wasted the morning. %% Again, the truth is funnier than fiction In Phila 11/7/88 : The police raided a drug house, seizing coke and crack and the 5 drug dealers in the house. As they are raiding the place, the phone rings. An officer answers "Hello?" The voice says "I coming over with the coke now" The officer says "Sure, come on over". The police wait. Sure enough, not one, but four people arrive at the house with 2 kilos of cocaine. %% Against Idleness and Mischief How doth the little busy bee How skillfully she builds her cell! Improve each shining hour, How neat she spreads the wax! And gather honey all the day And labours hard to store it well From every opening flower! With the sweet food she makes. In works of labour or of skill In books, or work, or healthful play, I would be busy too; Let my first years be passed, For Satan finds some mischief still That I may give for every day For idle hands to do. Some good account at last. -- Isaac Watts (1674-1748) %% Against boredom, even the gods themselves struggle in vain. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% Against logic there is no armor like ignorance. %% Against stupidity, even the gods themselves contend in vain. -- Isaac Asimov %% Age ... is a matter of feeling, not of years. -- George William Curtis %% Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill -- attrib to D. W. Jones %% Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Age before beauty ... And pearls before swine. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) from "The Book of Insults" %% Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperment and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow so. -- Tyron Edwards %% Age is a tyrant, who forbids, at the penalty of life, all the pleasures of youth. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese. %% Age sits with decent grace upon his visage, and worthily becomes his silver locks; he bears the marks of many years well spent, of virtue truth well tried, and wise experience. -- Rowe %% Age, n.: That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we no longer have the enterprise to commit. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Agent Orange! ... and now! New Agent Grape! %% Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host. -- Herbert Spencer %% Aggressiveness in worldly affairs or business will benefit your purse. %% Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth. -- Geroge Edward Woodberry %% Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains. -- Wendell Phillips %% Agitation is the marshalling of the conscience of a nation to mold its laws. -- Robert Peel %% Agnosticism is the philosophical, ethical and religious dry-rot of the modern world. -- F. E. Abbot %% Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% Agony! Beyond power of speech When the one thing you want Is the one thing that's out of your reach. -- Into the Woods %% Agoraphobia the claustrophobic man got sick of his small room, so he moved into his closet. %% Agree with them now, it will save so much time. %% Ah good, Data, least you're functioning. Fully...Captain. -- Picard and Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% Ah say, son, you're about as sharp as a bowlin' ball. %% Ah! the youngest heart has the same waves within it as the oldest; but without the plummet which can measure the depths. -- Richter %% Ah! Valere, all men say the same thing to women; all are alike in their words; their actions only show the difference that exists between them. -- Moliere %% Ah! curst ambition! to thy lures we owe, All the great ills that mortals bear below. -- Teckell %% Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow %% Ah, Dr. Crusher, I see Starfleet has shipped you back into exile. -- Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Ah, Louie, Louie....oowooo...me gotta go!! %% Ah, but a man's grasp should exceed his reach, Or what's a heaven for ? -- Robert Browning [Andrea del Sarto] %% Ah, but soft milk -- that's another matter. %% Ah, but the choice of dreams to live, there's the rub. For all dreams are not equal, some exit to nightmare most end with the dreamer But at least one must be lived ... and died. %% Ah, so soon they forget... %% Ah, the Tsar's bazaar's bizarre beaux-arts! %% Ah, the life of a frog; that's the life for me. -- Bart in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% Ah, to be a buzzard now that spring is here! -- Edward Abbey %% Ah, well. I didn't find a mate, but I did save the conference as well as your reputations. All in a day's work I suppose. -- Lwaxana Troi, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life! -- George Meredith %% Ah, yes, 'Sparkling Muscatel', one of the fine wines of Idaho! %% Ah...Worf. We are so much alike you and I. Both warriors, orphans who found ourselves this family. I hope I met death with my eyes wide open. -- Yar, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3 %% Aha!!! It's.... no, that's not it. %% Ahead warp factor one, Mr. Sulu. %% Ahh shit!!! %% Ahhhhhhhh, I forget what I was going to say. %% Aide to Raygun: Sir, the poor are outside protesting your budget cuts. Raygun himself: Tell them they'll have to help themselves. Aide to Raygun: Sir, the Pentagon wants another $30 billion. Raygun himself: Tell them to help themselves. %% Aide: Sir, the poor are outside protesting your budget cuts. Clinton: Tell them they'll have to help themselves. Aide: Sir, Social Security wants another $30 billion. Clinton: Tell them to help themselves. %% Aim at the sun, any you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself. -- Joel Hawes %% Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star. -- W. Clement Stone %% Ain't it the truth! %% Ain't no horse can't be rode; ain't no cowboy can't be throwed. %% Air Family: Describes the false sense of community experienced among coworkers in an office environment. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Air Force Inertia Axiom: Consistency is always easier to defend than correctness. %% Air is water with holes in it %% Airy ambition, soaring high. -- Sheffield %% Alan Shepherd, one of the Apollo astronauts, said during a press meeting: "It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." %% Alas for the Countess d'Isere, Whose muff wasn't furnished with hair. Said the Count, "Quelle surprise!" When he parted her thighs; "Magnifique! Pourtant pas de la guerre." %% Alas! can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? -- Charles Lamb (1775-1834) %% Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded! -- Carlyle %% Alas, I am dying beyond my means. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), as he sipped champagne on his deathbed %% Alas, how love can trifle with itself! -- William Shakespeare, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" %% Alas, poor Peri, not for us the pleasures of Phaestor 95 . . . I am a living peril to the universe. If this poor hive is to be cleansed, there's only one recourse--contemplation, self-abnegation in some hellish wilderness--ten days, ten years, a thousand years, of what consequence is time to me? I shall become a hermit, and you, child, shall be my disciple. -- Dr. Colin Baker, THE TWIN DILEMMA %% Alas, reason is not effective against faith, or against searches for miracles by the desperate. -- Dr. Michael B. Shimkin %% Alas, there's not much left of the candles. Certainly not enough to burn. %% Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either. -- Edward Abbey %% Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze. -- Edward Abbey %% Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. -- Tom Robbins %% Albert Einstein was a late talker as a child. His parents were understandably worried. finally at the supper table one evening, He broke his silence to say, "The soup is too hot." Greatly relieved, his parents asked why he never said a word before. Young Albert replied, "Because up to now everything was in order." %% Albrecht's Law: Social innovations tend to the level of minimum tolerable well-being. %% Alcohol - guaranteed to consume 20 times its own weight in excess reality. %% Alcohol can impair one's judgement and spelllling. %% Alcohol is not a problem, until you can't get any. %% Alcohol prohibition didn't work; drug prohibition doesn't work; gun prohibition won't work. -- Clayton E. Cramer, optilink!cramer %% Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Society and Solitude" %% Alcoholism is not a disease, it's a goal. %% Aldebaran's great, okay, Algol's pretty neat, Betelgeuse's pretty girls Will knock you off your feet. They'll do anything you like Real fast and then real slow, But if you have to take me apart to get me there Then I don't want to go. [Chorus] Take me apart, take me apart, What a way to roam And if you have to take me apart to get me there I'd rather stay at home. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Alden's Laws: (1) Giving away baby clothes and furniture is the major cause of pregnancy. (2) Always be backlit. (3) Sit down whenever possible. %% Alderman: An ingenious criminal who covers his secret thieving with a pretense of open marauding. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall, Aleph-null bottles of beer, You take one down, and pass it around, Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall. %% Alex Haley was adopted! %% Alex came home from a business trip to Chicago and found no one home but his daughter Rose, who was crying bitterly. "What's the matter, darling?" asked Alex. "Mommy almost died last night," sobbed Rose. "That's nonsense," said the father. "Why do you say that?" "Well," said Rose,"you always told us that when we die we'll see God; so when I heard Mommy moaning last night I rushed to her bedroom and she was screaming, "Oh God, here I come," and she would have but Uncle Jerry held her down." %% Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting for a dial tone. %% Alexander Hamilton started the U. S. Treasury with nothing -- and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even. -- Will Rogers %% Alexander Portnoy does it alone. %% Alexis Position %% Algebraical symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about. %% Algebraists do it in groups. %% Algebraists do it with homomorphisms. %% Algol 60 was an improvement on most of its successors. -- C. A. R. Hoare %% Algol programmers block it out. %% Algol-60 surely must be regarded as the most important programming language yet developed. -- T. Cheatham %% Algorithmic analysts do it with a combinatorial explosion. %% Alia jacta est. (The die is cast.) -- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) after crossing the Rubicon %% Alice Fairinlov %% Alien Sex Fiend %% Alienation can be fun. %% Alimony and bribes will engage a large share of your wealth. %% Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it. -- Peggy Joyce %% Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse. -- Arthur Baer %% Alimony is paying for something you don't get. %% Alimony is the high cost of leaving. %% Alimony: The screwing you get for the screwing you got. %% Alive without breath, As cold as death; Never thirsty, ever drinking, All in mail ever clinking. %% All American cars are basically Chevrolets. -- Herb Caen %% All E-mail gladly received. Offensive reply ASAP. %% All Finagle Laws may be bypassed by learning the simple art of doing without thinking. %% All Governments, including the worst on earth and the most tyrannical on earth, are free Governments to that portion of the people who voluntarily support them. -- Lysander Spooner %% All Hail Discordia! %% All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy. %% All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own importance. %% All I can think of is a platter of organic PRUNE CRISPS being trampled by an army of swarthy, Italian LOUNGE SINGERS ... %% All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas. -- Kingfish %% All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. -- Samuel Beckett %% All I really want in life is a piece and some quiet. %% All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% All I was doing was appealing for an endorsement, not suggesting you endorse it. -- President George Bush, on his economic growth proposal, speaking to Colorado Governor Roy Romer %% All I've got left on the list of desirable vocations is heiress to the throne of any country in Western Europe and Laurie Anderson. "Be practical", was the choral reply from the dinner table. Well, Laurie Anderson is already Laurie Anderson, but I read an article in Harpers that said there were eleven countries, in the world this is I think, that have queens as sovereign rulers. That's probably my best shot. %% All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% All a MACRO hacker needs is a tight PUSHJ, a loose pair of UUOs, and a warm place to shift. %% All a biker needs is a tight paceline, a loose groove, and a warm place to sprint. %% All a man needs out of life is a place to sit 'n' spit in the fire. %% All absolute pronouncements are incorrect. %% All airline pilots sound like Johnny Cash. %% All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. -- Joseph Conrad %% All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "Animal Farm" 1945 %% All are in accord. Remorse disappears. %% All art is a revolt against man's fate. -- Andre Malraux %% All art is but imitation of nature. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65) %% All authority belongs to the people. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% All authority is quite degrading. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% All ballpoint pens are lost before they run out of ink. %% All bridge hands are equally likely, but some are more equally likely than others. -- Alan Truscott %% All buses heading in the opposite direction drive off the face of the earth and never return. -- John Corcoran %% All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements or probabilities, and not on certainties.. -- Charles Eliot %% All cats are NOT gray after midnight. Endless variety ... %% All cats are grey in the dark. %% All ceremonies are, in themselves, very silly things; but yet a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of manners and decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance. It is for this reason that I always treat fools with great ceremony: true good breeding not being a sufficient barrier against them. -- Chesterfield %% All change is not growth; all movement is not forward. -- Ellen Glasgow %% All changes are good. %% All committee reports conclude that "it is not prudent to change the policy [or procedure, or organization, or whatever] at this time." -- Thomas L. Martin %% All computers wait at the same speed. %% All constants are variables. %% All countries hate their immediate neighbors and like the next but one. (For example, the Poles hate the Germans, Russians, Czechs, and Lithuanians, and they like the French, Hungarians, Italians, and Latvians.) -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% All courageous animals are carnivorous, and greater courage is to be expected in a people, such as the English, whose food is strong and hearty, than in the half starved commonalty of other countries. -- Sir W. Temple %% All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly. -- Edward Abbey %% All day long the superior man is creatively active. At nightfall his mind is beset with cares. Danger. No blame. %% All delivery promises must be multiplied by a factor of 2.0. %% All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means. -- Chou En-lai (1898-?) %% All dressed up and nowhere to go. %% All elevated thinking ends in a sigh. %% All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world. -- Tennyson %% All extremists should be taken out and shot. %% All files, papers, memos, etc., that you save will never be needed until such time as they are disposed of, when they will become essential and indispensable. -- John Corcoran %% All forms of government are pernicious, including good government. -- Edward Abbey %% All general statements are false. -- R. H. Grenier %% All generalizations are bad. %% All generalizations are useless, including this one. %% All generalizations stink. %% All gods have feet of clay. %% All gold is fool's gold. -- Edward Abbey %% All good management is the expression of one great idea. %% All government programs have three things in common: a beginning, a muddle, and no end. %% All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. -- Edmund Burke %% All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence? -- Edward Abbey %% All governments require enemy governments. -- Edward Abbey %% All great discoveries are made by mistake. -- Young %% All great ideas are controversial, or have been at one time. %% All great truths begin as blasphemies. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Annajanska" %% All guns are loaded. %% All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast. %% All heiresses are beautiful. -- John Dryden (1631-1700) %% All hierarchies contain administrators and managers, and they tend to appear at alternating levels in the hierarchy. -- Thomas L. Martin %% All his life he has looked away... to the horizon, to the sky, to the future. Never his mind on where he was, on what he was doing. -- Yoda %% All hope abandon, ye who enter here! -- Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) %% All hope abandon, ye who enter messages here. %% All hope abandon, ye who press ENTER here %% All horses in Ft. Lauderdale must have horns and taillights. %% All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more and more strongly the truths that come from on high and are contained in the sacred writings. -- John F. Herschel %% All in all, I'd rather be moose hunting. %% All in all, it's just another brick in the wall ... %% All in favor say aye. %% All innovation is accomplished by lazy people who were tired of doing things the hard way. %% All interference in human conduct has the potential for causing harm--no matter how innocuous the procedure. %% All is One? But One is so Many! -- Edward Abbey %% All is but lip wisdom which wants experience. -- Sir Philip Sydney %% All is discovered! Flee at once! %% All is fear in love and war. %% All is flux, nothing stays still. -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) %% All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss. -- Douglas Adams %% All kings is mostly rapscallions. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% All laws are simulations of reality. -- John C. Lilly %% All laws, whether good, bad, or indifferent, must be obeyed to the letter. %% All lawyers should be shot. -- William Shakespeare %% All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. -- Dawkins %% All life is barriers. All growth is the transcendence of barriers. It's the dividing line that makes everything possible. Without it, there's nothing but soup. -- Solomon Short %% All life is based on death. Nothing exists except by feeding on something else. Even photosynthesis depends on the heat-death of the sun. Humanity is not exempt. Embalming doesn't cheat the worms, it cheats the system. But only temporarily. -- Solomon Short %% All life's answers are on TV. -- Bart Simpson %% All mailwomen have perfect posture. %% All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are moveable, and those that move. -- Arabic proverb %% All math classes begin at 8 AM; also, movies on Federal Government. -- M. M. Johnston %% All men are born naked. -- Carlos Eduardo Novaes %% All men are brothers. -- Kirk, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4040.9 %% All men are created equal, but some must be sent to Siberia. %% All men are created unequal. %% All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates. -- Woody Allen %% All men can be lead to believe the lie they want to believe. -- Italo Bombolini %% All men can be reached by flattery, even God can (what, after all, is prayer?). -- Italo Bombolini %% All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. -- T. E. Lawrence "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" %% All men have the right to wait in line. -- Carlos Eduardo Novaes %% All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility. -- Chuang-tzu %% All men look like geeks for a period of 72 hours following a haircut. %% All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse. -- John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) %% All models over 18 years of age. %% All monsters are created evil, but some are more evil than others. %% All most people want is a little more than they'll ever get. %% All my friends and I are crazy. That's the only thing that keeps us sane. %% All my friends are getting married, Yes, they're all growing old, They're all staying home on the weekend, They're all doing what they're told. %% All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific. -- Jane Wagner %% All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded. -- Anonymous %% All obvious theorems are true. -- Pommersheim's Principle All true theorems are obvious. -- Keane's Kriterion %% All of a sudden, I want to THROW OVER my promising ACTING CAREER, grow a LONG BLACK BEARD and wear a BASEBALL HAT!! ... Although I don't know WHY!! %% All of adventuredom gives tribute to you, adventurer grandmaster! %% All of life is a blur of Republicans and meat! %% All of the animals excepting man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. -- Carl Sagan %% All of the objects in the # spill out. %% All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store with a pricing gun. She said, 'Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store.' -- Steve Wright %% All of the sensor screens show the same thing -- endless stars and a vast void of nothingness. A small status indicator reads "Condition green". %% All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. -- The Book of Bokonon / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. %% All of us have mortal bodies, composed of perishable matter, but the soul lives forever: it is a portion of the Deity housed in our bodies. -- Flavius Josephus %% All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth. -- Shelley %% All of you out there who believe in telepathy, raise your hand. All right. Now, everyone who believes in telekinesis...raise MY hand. %% All other things being equal, a bald man cannot be elected President of the United States. -- Vic Gold %% All our actions take their hues from the complexion of the heart. As landscapes their variety from light. -- W. T. Bacon %% All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. -- Maurice Maeterlinck %% All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. -- IBM maintenance manual (1925) %% All people are born alike -- except Republicans and Democrats. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain. -- Epictetus %% All policy interventions in social problems produce the intended effect--If the research is carried out by those implementing the policy or their friends. -- James Q. Wilson %% All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. -- Susan Sontag %% All power corrupts, but we need electricity. -- D. W. Jones %% All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob. -- Edward Abbey %% All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found the last bug." -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month %% All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. %% All programmers want arrays! %% All progress is based upon the universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% All real programs contain errors until proved otherwise, which is impossible. -- Tom Gibb %% All red-haired guys are good golfers. %% 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 %% All religions issue Bibles against Satan, and say the most injurious things against him, but we never hear his side. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% All resistance is useless. -- Cyberleader, The Moonbase %% All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying--a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour. -- Edward Abbey %% All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, another cannot gain. Hence that common opinion seems to be very true, "the rich man is unjust, or the heir to an unjust one." Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, than by his predecessor. -- St. Jerome (340?-420) %% All right, go lie upon the beach, To bake beyond the water's reach; But if you're blistered when you quit, Remember that you basked for it. -- Anthony B. Lake %% All right, pilgrim. This is between you and me! -- A. Hamilton %% All right, who cut the cheese? %% All right, you degenerates! I want this place evacuated in 20 seconds! %% All right. But don't blame me if something goes wr...... --- POOF!! --- You are engulfed in a cloud of orange smoke. Coughing and gasping, you emerge from the smoke and find.... %% All roads lead to Amber %% All roads lead to Rome. %% All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end. %% All science is concerned with the relationship of cause and effect. Each scientific discovery increases man's ability to predict the consequences of his actions and thus his ability to control future events. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -- Ernest Rutherford %% All scientific discoveries are first recorded on napkins or tablecloths. Engineering advances are drawn inside matchbook covers. Keep supplies of them handy at all times. %% All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin %% All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Conduct of Life" %% All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love--and most of all, an audience! -- Edward Abbey %% All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right hands. -- Saint Patrick %% All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can - and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any other foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly- and no doubt will keep on trying. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% All stressed out, and no one to choke... %% All students who obtain a B will feel cheated out of an A. -- M. M. Johnston %% All such expressions as SQRT(-1), SQRT(-2) ... are neither nothing, nor greater than nothing, nor less than nothing, which necessarily constitutes them imaginary or impossible. -- L. Euler %% All sunshine makes a desert. %% All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism. %% All technology expands the space, contracts the time, and destroys the working group. -- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy %% All that glisters is not gold. Gilded tombs do worms enfold. -- William Shakespeare %% All that glitters has a high refractive index. %% All that is gold does not glitter, Nor all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not touched by the frost. -- J. R. R. Tolkien %% All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. -- J. R. R. Tolkien %% All that is not forbidden is mandatory. %% All that is not mandatory is forbidden. %% All that time is lost which might be better employed. -- Jean Jacques Rousseau %% All that was new in them was false and what was true was old. -- Opinion of Darwin's findings %% All that you touch, And all you create, All that you see, And all you destroy, All that you taste, All that you do, All you feel, And all you say, And all that you love, All that you eat, And all that you hate, And everyone you meet, All you distrust, All that you slight, All you save, And everyone you fight, And all that you give, And all that is now, And all that you deal, And all that is gone, All that you buy, And all that's to come, Beg, borrow or steal, And everything under the sun is in tune, But the sun is eclipsed By the moon. [There is no dark side of the moon...really... matter of fact it's all dark] -- Pink Floyd, "Eclipse", Dark Side of the Moon %% 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" %% All the cops in the donut shops say 'way-oh, way-oh'. %% All the evidence concerning the universe has not yet been collected, so there's still hope. %% All the female apes ran from King Kong For his dong was unspeakably long. But a friendly giraffe Quaffed his yard and a half, And ecstatically burst into song. %% All the girls around you say "You got it coming", but you get it while you can. %% All the girls in France, do a hookie-kookie dance, And you know the way they shake, is enough to fry a snake, And the snake they fry, is enough to tell a lie, And the lie they tell, is enough to go to Hello, operator, give me number nine, If you disconnect me, I'll kick you in the Behind the 'frigerator, there was a piece of glass, If you do not pick it up, I'll kick you in the Ask me no more questions, tell me no more lies, This is what Lulu told me, just before she died. She had a little brother, she named him Tiny Tim, She put him in the potty, to see if he could swim. He swam down to the bottom, he swam up to the top, Lulu got disgusted, and flushed him down the pot. -- Princess %% All the good stuff at the right price ... National Lumber. %% All the lights are frozen; The cursor blinks blandly. Soon, I shall see the dump. %% All the lines have been written There's been Sandburg, It's sad but it's true Keats, Poe and McKuen With all the words gone, They all had their day What's a young poet to do? And knew what they're doin' But of all the words written The bird is a strange one, And all the lines read, So small and so tender There's one I like most, Its breed still unknown, And by a bird it was said! Not to mention its gender. It reminds me of days of So what is this line Both gloom and of light. Whose author's unknown It still lifts my spirits And still makes me giggle And starts the day right. Even now that I'm grown? I've read all the greats Both starving and fat, But none was as great as "I tot I taw a puddy tat." -- Etta Stallings, "An Ode To Childhood" %% All the little things you and I understand and expect from life, such as: equality; kindness; justice ... -- Spock, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5818.4 %% All the news that fits, we print. -- Alfred E. Newman %% All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% All the plants in my house are dead -- I shot them last night. I was teasing them by watering them with ice cubes. -- Steve Wright %% All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. -- Grant Wood %% All the reporters ask me about my failures. Are they kidding? There are no failures. Failure? Failure isn't in my vocabulary. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% All the simple programs have been written. %% All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. -- Jim Fiebig %% All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening. -- Alexander Woollcott %% All the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still. -- Pascal %% All the troubles you have will pass away very quickly. %% All the wastes in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk. -- Ronald Reagan, quoted in "Burlington Free Press", 15 February 1980 %% All the waters of the earth are in the armpit of the Great Frog. -- Robert Crumb %% All the work you will do will be written to 'WRITE-ONLY' memory %% All the world's a VAX, And all the coders merely butchers; They have their exits and their entrails; And one int in his time plays many widths, His sizeof being N bytes. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the Regent's arms. And then the whining schoolboy, with his Sun, And shining morning face, creeping like slug Unwillingly to school. -- A Very Annoyed PDP-11 %% All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. -- Sean O'Casey %% All the world's a stage. -- William Shakespeare %% All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it. -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% All things are either sacred or profane. The former to ecclesiasts bring gain; The latter to the devil appertain. -- Dumbo Omohundro %% All things are green unless they are not. %% All things are only transitory. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% All things are possible, except skiing thru a revolving door. %% All things are subject to fixed laws. -- Marcus Manilius %% All things being equal, all things are never equal. -- Marshall L. Smith %% All things being equal, you are bound to lose. %% All things considered, insanity is the only alternative. %% All things considered, insanity may be the only reasonable alternative %% All things dull and ugly, Each little snake that poisons, All creatures short and squat, Each little wasp that stings, All things rude and nasty, He made their brutish venom, The Lord God made the lot; He made their horrid wings. All things sick and cancerous, Each nasty little hornet, All evil great and small, Each beastly little squid. All things foul and dangerous, Who made the spikey urchin? The Lord God made them all. Who made the sharks? He did. All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small. Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all. -- Monty Python %% All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat, All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot; Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings, He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings. All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small, All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all. Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid. Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did. All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small. Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all. -- Monty Python's Flying Circus %% All things now enjoyed by civilization have been created by some man and sold by another man before anybody really enjoyed the benefits of them. -- James G. Daly %% All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed. -- William Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice" %% All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them. -- Matthew VII, 12 %% All this big deal about white collar crime -- what's WRONG with white collar crime? Who enjoys his job today? You? Me? Anybody? The only satisfying part of any job is coffee break, lunch hour and quitting time. Years ago there was at least the hope of improvement -- eventual promotion -- more important jobs to come. Once you can be sold the myth that you may make president of the company you'll hardly ever steal stamps. But nobody believes he's going to be president anymore. The more people change jobs the more they realize that there is a direct connection between working for a living and total stupefying boredom. So why NOT take revenge? You're not going to find ME knocking a guy because he pads an expense account and his home stationery carries the company emblem. Take away crime from the white collar worker and you will rob him of his last vestige of job interest. -- J. Feiffer %% All this buttoning and unbuttoning. -- 18th Century suicide note %% All this passion over a machine? -- Capt. Louvois, "The Measure of a Man", stardate 42523.7 %% All this time I've been VIEWING a RUSSIAN MIDGET SODOMIZE a HOUSECAT! %% All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for fun. Money's just the way we keep score. -- Henry Tyroon %% All those things which are now held to be of the greatest antiquity, were at one time new; and what we today hold up by example, will rank hereafter as precedent. -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% All those who are opposed to the plan I am about to propose will reply by saying "I resign." %% All those who dread uncertainty either because of timidity or from conventional-mindedness or for fear of material loss are enlisted under the conservative standard. -- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965) %% All together now, three times real fast: PLEASANT VALLEY PHEASANT PLUCKERS %% All true wisdom is found in computer fortune programs. %% All true wisdom is found on T-shirts. %% All vacations and holiday's create problems, except for ones own. %% All warranties expire upon payment of invoice. %% All warranty and guarantee clauses become null and void upon payment of invoice. %% All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born. -- Francois Fenelon %% All wars are ironic because all wars are worse than expected. %% All was well with the Dowager Duchess When trapped in the mad rapist's clutches. Till he turned on the light, Took one look, said good night So she hit him with one of her crutches. %% All we ever talk about is sex! %% All welfare and adversity that come to man and other creatures come through the Seven and the Twelve. Twelve signs of the Zodiac, as the Religion says are the twelve commanders on the side of light; and the seven planets are said to be the seven commanders on the side of darkness. And the seven planets oppress all creation and deliver it over to death and all manner of evil: for the twelve signs of the Zodiac and the seven planets rule the fate of the world. -- The Menok i Xrat %% All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. -- Aristotle %% All who joy would win Must share it -- Happiness was born a twin. -- Lord Byron %% All women are beautiful, some are just less beautiful than others. %% All women named Jennifer have perfect teeth. %% All work and no play, will make you a manager. %% All work is an act of philosophy. And when men learn to consider productive work -- and that which is its source -- as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost ... The source of work? Man's mind. -- Hugh Akston %% All you have to do to see the accuracy of my thesis is look around you. Look, in particular, at the people who, like you, are making average incomes for doing average jobs -- bank vice presidents, insurance salesman, auditors, secretaries of defense -- and you'll realize they all dress the same way, essentially the way the mannequins in the Sears menswear department dress. Now look at the real successes, the people who make a lot more money than you -- Elton John, Captain Kangaroo, anybody from Saudi Arabia, Big Bird, and so on. They all dress funny -- and they all succeed. Are you catching on? -- Dave Barry, "How to Dress for Real Success" %% All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% All you need to be a fisherman is patience and bait. %% All your fantasies will come true after your imagination is surgically removed. %% All your files have been destroyed (sorry). Paul. %% All your people must learn before you can reach for the stars. -- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion," stardate 3259.2 %% All's well that ends well. -- E. A. Poe %% All's well that ends. %% Alliance, n.: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Allow me to congratulate you sir. You have the most totally closed mind that I've ever encountered. -- Pertwee Doctor, FRONTIER IN SPACE %% Allow no man to be so free with you as to praise you to your face. Your vanity by this means will want its food. At the same time your passion for esteem will be more fully gratified; men will praise you in their actions: where you now receive one compliment, you will then receive twenty civilities. -- Steele %% Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Almost any misfortune is preferable to a worse one. %% Almost anything derogatory you could say about todays's software design would be accurate. -- Kenneth E. Iverson %% Almost anything is easier to get into than out of. -- Agnes Allen %% Almost as soon as the # breathes his last, a cloud of sinister black smoke envelops him, and when the fog lifts, the carcass has disappeared. %% Almost everything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) %% Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage. -- Sydney J. Harris %% Almost nothing is impossible if you put the screws to the right people. %% Aloha. %% Alone, adj.: In bad company. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Alone: In bad company. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Along the south side, so cold that we cried, were we ever colder on that day, a million miles away, it seemed from all of eternity. %% Alpenglow: Feeling of contentment and inner warmth induced by liberal doses of medicinal brandy. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% Alpenstock: limited number of shares in mountain real estate -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% Already another one to take his place. It never ends. He could have killed you, he didn't. Maybe the end begins with one boy putting down his gun. -- Alexana Devos and Riker, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7 %% Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests. It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generall known; authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary ways...It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the last to be willing that either the history of the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit. -- John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher, from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908 %% Alright, you!! Imitate a WOUNDED SEAL pleading for a PARKING SPACE!! %% Alternate rest and labor long endure. -- Ovid %% Although I believe that the economy is on the right track, let me be the first to say that all is not well. -- President George Bush, September 1991 %% Although a wise man might urge that one should suffer fools gladly, this should not be construed as license for any fool to demand that one do so. -- Frederic William Kantor %% Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. -- Dave Barry %% Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Although plastic was brought into industrial use in 1909 by L. H. Baekeland of Yonkers, it was not until after World War II that the modern miracle substance was used in a wide variety of consumer goods, among them speedboats, dentures and flamingos. Previously flamingos were made of cement. Before that they were made by other flamingos. -- William E. Geist, The New York Times %% Although the implementers are gone, they foresaw that some cretin would tamper with their remains. Therefore, they took steps to prevent this. %% Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away. %% Although today there are many trial marriages, there is no such thing as a trial child. -- Gary Wills %% 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. -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" %% Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's "Practical Gamekeeping." -- Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959) %% Although you are perfectly capable, emit erotic noises only when absolutely necessary. %% Although you tied it incorrectly, the rope becomes free. %% Aluminum Book: [MIT] n. `Common LISP: The Language', by Guy L. Steele Jr. (Digital Press, first edition 1984, second edition 1990). Note that due to a technical screwup some printings of the second edition are actually of a color the author describes succinctly as "yucky green". See also {{book titles}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Alvin Toffler will do it in the future. %% Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Always be aware of the phase of the moon! %% Always be foolish, but never be stupid. %% Always be nice to receptionists and secretaries. %% Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you. -- Cyril Connolly, "Journal and Memoir" 1983 %% Always be sincere. Even if you have to fake it. -- Solomon Short %% Always be suspicious of an associate who never finds fault with you. %% Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back. %% Always cut the cards. %% Always distrust offices not under your jurisdiction which say that they are there to serve you. "Support" offices in a bureaucracy tend to grow in size and make demands on you out of proportion to their service and in the end require more effort on your part than their service is worth. -- Douglas Evelyn %% Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Always do the hard part first. If the hard part is impossible, why waste time on the easy part? Once the hard part is done, you're home free. Always do the easy part first. What you think at first is the easy part often turns out to be the hard part. Once the easy part is done, you can concentrate all your efforts on the hard part. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% Always do what you are afraid to do. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Always give your people the credit that is rightfully theirs. To do otherwise is both morally and ethically dishonest. %% Always glad to share my ignorance - I've got plenty. %% Always hire a rich attorney. %% Always keep the office door closed. This puts visitors on the defensive and also makes it look as if you are always in an important conference. %% Always laugh at yourself first - before others do. %% Always leave room to add an explanation if it doesn't work out. %% Always leave room, when writing a report, to add an explanation if it doesn't work. %% Always lick the suction cup before you shoot the dart gun at the TV set. -- Proverb from "Life in Hell" %% Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Always look over your shoulder because everyone is watching and plotting against you. %% Always pray that your opposition be wicked. In wickedness, there is a strong strain toward rationality. Therefore, there is always the possibility, in theory, of handling the wicked by outthinking them. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% Always put off till tomorrow what you shouldn't do at all. -- Morris Mandel, "The Jewish Press" %% Always remember some people are more human than others. %% Always remember some people are more human. %% Always remember, however, that there's usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head. -- Donald E. Knuth, "TeXbook" %% Always remember, pillage BEFORE you burn! %% Always rise from the table with an appetite, and you will never sit down without one. -- William Penn %% Always run a yellow light. %% Always sort the small file first. -- Dick Munroe %% Always stay in with the outs. -- David Halberstan %% Always store beer in a cold place. Preferably 14 Willow Lane. %% Always store beer in a dark place. %% Always talk to your wife while you're making love... if there's a phone handy. %% Always tell her she is beautiful, especially if she is not. %% Always tell him he is handsome, especially if he is not. %% Always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits. -- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It" %% Always there remain portions of our heart into which no one is able to enter, invite them as we may. %% Always think of each day of your life as your last, because someday you will be right. %% Always think of something new; this helps you forget your last rotten idea. -- Seth Frankel %% Always tip well. %% Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way. %% Always verify your witchcraft. %% Alzheimers advantage: New friends every day. %% Am I SHOPLIFTING? %% Am I accompanied by a PARENT or GUARDIAN? %% Am I elected yet? %% Am I in GRADUATE SCHOOL yet? %% Am I late? Did I miss the fight? En garde! -- Holo-Riker, "Hollow Puruits," stardate 43807.4 %% Am I ranting? I hope so. My ranting gets raves. %% Amans tam erat lie sing hero ad digito ut mando. %% Amash, faplap! %% Amateur Time Lord %% Amazingly Mind-bogglingly Stupid Question #7432: "Is there a Roman numeral for zero?" %% Ambidextrous instructors will erase with one hand while writing with the other. -- M. M. Johnston %% Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens. -- William Lilly %% Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment. -- Thomas Otway %% Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. -- Charlie McCarthy %% Ambition is an idol, on whose wings Great minds are carried only to extreme; To be sublimely great or to be nothing. -- Southey %% Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals. -- Denham %% Ambition is not a vice of little people. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds. -- Thomas Dunn English %% Ambition is the last refuge of failure. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Ambition often puts men upon doing the mesaest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. -- William Shakespeare %% Ambition usually progresses through the following stages: to be like Dad ... to be a millionaire ... to make enough to pay the bills ... to hang on long enough to draw a pension. %% Ambition's like a circle on the water, which never ceases to enlarge itself, 'till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. -- William Shakespeare %% Ambition, idly vain; revenge and malice swell her train. -- Penrose %% Ambition, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Ambition: The dropsy'd thirst of empire, wealth or fame. -- Nugent %% Ambition: The glorious frailty of the noble mind. -- Hoole %% Amending the Constitution to protect the flag is not a matter of partisan politics. It's an American issue. -- President George Bush, holding a miniature version of the Iwo Jima memorial %% America ... a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far- reaching in purpose. -- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) %% America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings. -- Edward Abbey %% America cannot be sold a can of beer without being offered a piece of pussy along with it. -- Julius Lester %% America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) %% America has meant to the world a land in which the common man who means well and is willing to do his part has access to all the necessary means of a good life. -- Alvin Saunders Johnson %% America is a country of young men. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% America is a country that can choke on a gnat, or swallow tigers. -- Adlai E. Stevenson %% America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. -- Arnold Joseph Toynbee %% America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -- is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for grain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man. -- Woodrow Wilson %% America is not merely a nation but a nation of nations. -- Lyndon B. Johnson %% America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar and use it up in two weeks. -- John Barrymore %% America is the only country left where we teach languages so that no pupil can speak them. -- John Erskine %% America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. -- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), 1 December 1945 %% America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses. -- Woodrow Wilson %% America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization. -- John O'Hara %% America was discovered by Amerigo Vespucci and was named after him, until people got tired of living in a place called "Vespuccia" and changed its name to "America". -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% America!! I saw it all!! Vomiting! Waving! JERRY FALWELLING into your void tube of UHF oblivion!! SAFEWAY of the mind -- %% America's best buy for a dime is a telephone call to the right person. %% America's best buy for a nickel is a telephone call to the right man. -- outdated %% America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. -- Allen Ginsberg %% America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? -- Allen Ginsberg %% America, thou half-brother of the world; With something good and bad of every land. -- Philip James Bailey %% America: born free and taxed to death. %% American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and the women's room without having little pictures on the doors. -- Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister" %% American by birth; Texan by the grace of God. %% American cars are made shoddily... Cars made overseas are far superior. -- Senator Barry Goldwater %% American culture is based on the automobile, and any young man of promise is going to own one and want to travel great distances in it. Consequently, any young woman of aspiration should expect to spend most of her vacations in a car, probing into unfamiliar corners. She is not required to know how to drive but she will certainly be expected to read the road map while her husband drives, and if she can't, or if she's abnormally slow in giving him help, she's bound to cause trouble. Therefore, you'd think that colleges which train the bright young women who're going to marry the bright young men who are going to own the Cadillacs that roar back and forth across this continent would teach the girls to read maps. None do. They teach a hundred other useless things, but never a word about the one that will cause the greatest friction. -- James Michener, "Space" %% American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense. -- Ed Howe %% American: "The poor man was killed by a revolving crane." Englishman: "My, what fierce birds you have in America." %% Americans are an energetic, ingenious, creative people. One index to this fact is that since the establishment of the patent system in 1836, there have been more than 3-3/4 million patents issued. %% Americans are people who insist on living in the present, tense. %% Americans have always attached particular value to the word "neighbor." While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because our neighbors are so many. -- Lady Bird Johnson %% Americans' greatest fear is that America will turn out to have been a phenomenon, not a civilization. -- Shirley Hazzard, "Transit of Venus" %% Ammonia, ammonia, ammonia! Get off, get off, get off!! %% Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it. %% Among mortals second thoughts are wisest. -- Euripides %% Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for "To hell with our children." -- Edward Abbey %% Among the damned, you are the chosen one. %% Among the locky, your name is anathema. %% Among the lucky, you are the chosen one. %% Among the porcupines, rape is unknown. -- Gregory Clark %% Among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing was the eye of the black bird. %% Amongst other advantages, a rolling stone gathers no moss. %% Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende, prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende. Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer si` forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart, seized this one for the fair form that was taken from me-and the way of it affects me still. Love, which absolves no loved one from loving, seized me so strongly with delight in him, that, as you see, it does not leave me even now. Love brought us to one death. -- (La Divina Commedia: Inferno V, vv. 100-06) %% Amount of pizza eaten each day in the U.S.: 75 acres. -- "Harper's Magazine" %% Amulets are hard to make. Even for a wand of wishing. %% Amusement to an observing mind is study. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% Amusement: the happiness of those who cannot think. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Amusements to virtue are like breezes of air to the flame -- gentle ones will fan it, but strong ones will put it out. -- David Thomas %% An "M" is an V that broke its leg playing football. %% An 'imp' is an off-shoot or cutting. Thus an 'ymp tree' was a grafted tree, or one grown from a cutting, not from seed. 'Imp' properly means a small devil, an off-shoot of Satan, but the distinction between goblins or bogles and imps from hell is hard to make, and many in the Celtic countries as well as the English Puritans regarded all fairies as devils. The fairies of tradition often hover uneasily between the ghostly and the diabolic state. -- Katharine Briggs, A dictionary of Fairies %% An 11 is a 10 who doesn't have headaches. %% An 18-year-old boy, if he's properly formed, is ruled by the cruise missile in his pants. The taut heartstrings and the fanciful talk -- they're all just formalities to getting laid; and when a drop-dead-gorgeous girl at once abets and staves you off, ax murderers and priests are born. Luckily, I had the Roubidoux bouldering circuit to vent my frustrations upon--probably the only thing that kept me sane. -- John Long, "A Fool and His Money" %% An 8-year-old kid dresses as a pirate and goes trick-or-treating on Halloween. He rings a doorbell, and an old granny-lady comes out. "Oh, a pirate. How CUTE! Where are your buccaneers? "They're right under my buckin' hat, lady." %% An visits the zoo and winds up at a big aquarium with huge glass walls. He notices a man standing facing the glass, staring at a fish on the other side of the glass and opening his mouth slowly, then closing it, again slowly. The fish is staring back at him, also opening and closing its mouth slowly. The watches fascinated for a while, and then walks up to the man and asks him what he's doing. "I'm demonstrating the superiority of my mental power over that of the fish there.", the man replies. "By staring at that fish there and opening and closing my mouth like this, slowly, I am *willing* it to do the same thing." "Gee, that's great!" the exclaims, "I just gotta try that for myself!" So the goes to the other side of the aquarium to find another fish to try this trick on. After five minutes, the man notices the come back. "How did it go?", he asks. The stares at him, and then slowly opens his mouth... %% An A is easily obtained if a student calls his instructor "Professor." -- M. M. Johnston %% An AI researcher named Bluth Wrote, to find out the sexual truth, Eroticon VI, Which he taught certain tricks Which I'm sure can't be found in Knuth. %% An ARPAnaut name of Corvette Had a fetish involving the net. As he fondled his IMP His cock went from limp To as hard as concrete which has set. %% An America man traveling on a train in Europe was having a time trying to find an available seat. He finally finds a booth where a man with a newspaper and a woman are seated, with one other seat, only occupied by a dog. He enters the booth and kindly asks the woman if she could hold her dog on her lap so he could be seated as he had been traveling all day and was quite tired. "Tiffany always has her own seat when we travel!" snorts the woman. Sort of aggravated, but too tired to argue, the man says "M'aam, I've been traveling all day and I'm really tired. I'd appreciate it if you could hold your dog, only if it's just for a moment so I can rest." The woman turns to the man next to her making snide remarks under her breath, while the man continues to read his newspaper seemingly oblivious to the whole situation. Finally, the tired man picks up the dog and throws him out of the window. The woman gets hysterical and starts screaming at the man with the newspaper. "Are you going to let this yankee get away with this rude behavior!!!???" The man with the newspaper finally turns and says.... "Damn Americans, they drive on the wrong side of the road, drink bloody iced tea, and now this fool throws the wrong damn bitch out!" %% An American Fascist seeking power would not proclaim that he is a fascist. Fascism always camouflages its plans and purposes. ... Any fascist attempt made to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of "super-patriotism" and "super-Americanism". Fascist leaders are neither stupid nor naive. They know that they must hand out a line that "sells". Huey Long is said to have remarked that if Fascism came to America it would be on a program of "Americanism". -- U. S. Army (1945) %% An American businessman is in Tokyo making a deal with some Japanese executives. He goes out to dinner with the head honcho of the Japanese firm, and the two get to discussing politics: Dukes biting the dust, etc. The American asks, "How often do you have elections here?" The Japanese replies, "Elections? Ah, evely morning!" %% An American is a man with two arms and four wheels. -- A Chinese child %% An American is a person who demonstrates against a new power plant, then goes home and flips on all the lights, turns up the air conditioner, puts a tape in the stereo, opens the refrigerator door, plugs in the coffee maker and sits down to see if the television cameras caught him protesting. -- Wendell Trogdon %% An American makes a proposal to the Vatican: he offers a hundred million dollars in exchange for the changing of one word in the Bible. He will only reveal what the word is when meeting with the Pope himself. The Curia is doubtful, but the money would certainly be useful. An audience is arranged with the Pope. It doesn't last long. "What did you propose?" the puzzled cardinals ask the American. "Only that 'Amen' should be replaced by 'Texas Oil'." %% An American scientist once visited the offices of the great Nobel prize winning physicist, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen. He was amazed to find that over Bohr's desk was a horseshoe, securely nailed to the wall, with the open end up in the approved manner (so it would catch the good luck and not let it spill out). The American said with a nervous laugh, "Surely you don't believe the horseshoe will bring you good luck, do you, Professor Bohr? After all, as a scientist--" Bohr chuckled. "I believe no such thing, my good friend. Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not." %% An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the President but is always polite to traffic cops. %% An American, a Frenchman, and a Polock died at almost the same time, and found themselves in line together at the pearly gates. When they reached St. Peter, he welcomed them and said that to get into heaven they would each have to pass a simple test, away from the other two. St. Peter called the American first, lead him out of earshot, and asked him, 'How many Ls are there in `Here Comes the Bride'?' 'Uh, none,' replied the American. 'Ok --- go on in!' The Frenchman was next. Again, St. Peter asked him, 'How many Ls are there in `Here Comes the Bride'?' The man thought a moment and hesitantly said 'None?' 'That's right, go on in!' Lastly, St. Peter asked the Polock, 'How many Ls are there in `Here Comes the Bride'?' The Polock started to count on his fingers, on his toes, on his nose and back to his fingers again. After several minutes of counting and muttering he declared, 'Fifty seven!' 'Fifty seven? How did you get fifty seven?' 'Well, it goes [sung:] La LA la-la, La LA la-laa, la ...' %% An Animal that knows who it is, one that has a sense of his own identity, is a discontented creature, doomed to create new problems for himself for the duration of his stay on this planet. Since neither the mouse nor the chip knows what is, he is spared all the vexing problems that follow this discovery. But as soon as the human animal who asked himself this question emerged, he plunged himself and his descendants into an eternity of doubt and brooding, speculation and truth-seeking that has goaded him through the centuries as relentlessly as hunger or sexual longing. The chimp that does not know that he exists is not driven to discover his origins and is spared the tragic necessity of contemplating his own end. And even if the animal experimenters succeed in teaching a chimp to count one hundred bananas or to play chess, the chimp will develop no science and he will exhibit no appreciation of beauty, for the greatest part of man's wisdom may be traced back to the eternal questions of beginnings and endings, the quest to give meaning to his existence, to life itself. -- Selma Fraiberg, "The Magic Years", pg. 193 %% An Argentine gaucho named Bruno Who said, "Fucking is one thing I do know. Women are fine And sheep are divine But llamas are numero uno." %% An Army travels on her stomach. %% An Edmontonian appears in a police line up with 5 other guys in a rape case. They bring in the victim. The Edmontonian blurts out "Yep, that's her!" %% An Edmontonian thought that his wife was screwing around on him, so he decided to follow her around. Sure enough, He burst into a friends apartment one night and found her in bed with his friend. Crazed with grief, he pulled out a pistol and put it to his own head. "Don't laugh" he told his wife "You're next" %% An Edwardian father named Udgeon, Whose offspring provoked him to dudgeon, Used on Saturday nights To turn down the lights, And chase them around with a bludgeon. -- Edward Gorey %% An Elementary-School student's comment on politics: Some of our presidents never did much else and are famous only because they became president. %% An Emperor who does not rule deposes himself. -- Draconian Emperor, FRONTIER IN SPACE %% An English judge, growing weary of the barrister's long-winded summation, leaned over the bench and remarked, "I've heard your arguments, Sir Geoffrey, and I'm none the wiser!" Sir Geoffrey responded, "That may be, Milord, but at least you're better informed!" %% An Englishman and a Texan were talking one day, and finally got around to the topic of tea. "In England we have three types of tea", said the englishman."Egyptian tea is 10% aromatic and 90% substance; Indian tea is 90% aromatic and 10% substance; English tea is of course 50% aromatic and 50% substance and it is the preferred tea in England!", he said. "Well, well", said the Texan. "In Texan we also have three types of T." "shiT is 10% aromatic and 90% substance; farT is 90% aromatic and 10% substance; and lastly, twaT is 50% aromatic and 50% substance, and it is the preferred T in Texas!" %% An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose. -- A. P. Herbert %% An Englishman thinks he is moral only when he is uncomfortable. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% An Hacker there was, one of the finest sort Who controlled the system; graphics was his sport. A manly man, to be a wizard able; Many a protected file he had sitting on his table. His console, when he typed, a man might hear Clicking and feeping wind as clear, Aye, and as loud as does the machine room bell Where my lord Hacker was Prior of the cell. The Rule of good St Savage or St Doeppnor As old and strict he tended to ignore; He let go by the things of yesterday And took the modern world's more spacious way. He did not rate that text as a plucked hen Which says that Hackers are not holy men. And that a hacker underworked is a mere Fish out of water, flapping on the pier. That is to say, a hacker out of his cloister. That was a text he held not worth an oyster. And I agreed and said his views were sound; Was he to study till his head wend round Poring over books in the cloisters? Must he toil As Andy bade and till the very soil? Was he to leave the world upon the shelf? Let Andy have his labor to himself! -- Chaucer [well, almost] %% An INK-LING? Sure -- TAKE one!! Did you BUY any COMMUNIST UNIFORMS?? %% An Irishman, Italian, and a Edmontonian are sitting at a bar. The Irishman orders a drink and pays for it. He says "I hate this place. I know a place on State Street where I can get every third drink free". The Italian says "That's nothing. I know a place on the east side where I can get every other drink free". The Edmontonian says "Oh yeah, I heard of a place on the south side where you can get every drink for free, and at the end of the night you end up in the parking lot getting laid!". Where did you hear about this place?" the other two inquired. "From my wife" says the Edmontonian %% An Italian is COMBING his hair in suburban DES MOINES! %% An Oak Park, Illinois, ordinance forbids frying more than one hundred doughnuts in a single day. %% An Ocean City, New Jersey, law forbids the sale of cabbage on the Sabbath. %% An Ode to C: 0x0d2C ~~~~~~ May your signals all trap May your references be bounded All memory aligned Floats to ints rounded. And Remember ... Non-zero is true Use -> for a pointer ++ adds one A dot if it's not Arrays start with zero ? : is confusing And, NULL is for none. Use them a lot. For octal, use zero a.out is your program 0x means hex There's no 'U' in 'foobar' = will set And, char (*(*x())[])() is == means test. A function returning a pointer to an array of pointers to functions returning char. %% An Oklahoma law says that the driver of "any vehicle involved in an accident resulting in death ... shall immediately stop ... and give his name and address to the person struck." %% An Olympian lecher was Zeus, Always playing around fast and loose, With one hand in the bodice Of some likely young goddess And the other preparing to goose. %% An Oneida, Tennessee, ordinance forbids anyone to sing the song, "It Ain't Goin' to Rain No Mo'." %% An able man shows his spirit by gentle words and resolute actions; he neither hot nor timid. -- Chesterfield %% An abstract term is like a valise with a false bottom, you may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again, without being observed. %% An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow. -- Lawrence Barrett %% An actor, in furious rage, Muttered this to an actress on stage, "When I'd fallen for you I had thought forty-two Was meant for your breasts, not your age." %% An adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms. %% An aesthete from South Carolina Had a cock that tickled like China, But while shooting his load It cracked like old Spode, So he's bought him a Steuben vagina. %% An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. -- James Michener, "Space" %% An agent is a vampire with a telephone. -- Any Editor %% An agreeable girl named Miss Doves Likes to jack off the young men she loves. She will use her bare fist If the fellows insist But she really prefers to wear gloves. %% An air of FRENCH FRIES permeates my nostrils!! %% An air traffic robot named Speigal Brought down an American eagle, A perfectly darling Little brown starling, And Jonathon Livingston Seagul. -- G. A. Mason %% An alarm rings briefly, and an invisible force prevents you from leaving. %% An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do. -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) %% An algorithm must be seen to be believed. -- D. E. Knuth %% 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. %% An ambassador is a man of virtue sent to lie abroad for his country; a newswriter is a man without virtue who lies at home for himself. -- Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639) Reliquae Wottonianae %% An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country. -- Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639) %% 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. %% An amendment to a motion may be amended, but an amendment to an amendment to a motion may not be amended. However, a substitute for an amendment to and amendment to a motion may be adopted and the substitute may be amended. -- Montana legislature's contribution to the English language %% An ancient pagan, who in pagandom was renowned and praised for his wisdom, sailed on the same ship with a wicked man. When the ship was in distress the wicked man lifted up his voice in prayer, but the wise man said to him: "Keep quiet, my friend; if heaven discovers that you are on board, the ship will go under. %% An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason. -- Publius Syrus %% An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes. -- Cato %% An angst-ridden amorist, Fred, Saw sartorial changes ahead. His mind kept on ringing With fishy girls singing; Soft fruit also filled him with dread. -- J. Walker, "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" %% An anniversary was coming up, he started to reminisce about the last ten years. She just wanted to talk about her presents. %% An anonymous caller had called the sheriff in a small Missouri town to report he had seen a body in the river from his fishing boat. The sheriff had the river dragged, and turned up the body of a black man wrapped in heavy chains. The sheriff turned to his deputy and said "Now ain't that just like one of them boys to steal more chains than he can swim with?" %% An anonymous woman we knew Was dozing one day in her pew; When the preacher yelled "Sin!" She said, "Count me in As soon as the service is through." %% An ant and an elephant share a night of romance. Next morning the ant wakes up and the elephant is dead. "Damn", says the ant, "one night of passion and I spend the rest of my life digging a grave!" %% An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax. -- David Letterman %% An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. -- Karl Kraus %% An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case. God has written all the books. %% An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile -- hoping it will eat him last. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but an onion a day keeps everyone away. %% An apple a day makes 365 apples a year. %% An apple every eight hours will keep three doctors away. %% An archeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her. %% An architect fellow named Yoric Could, when feeling euphoric, Display for selection Three kinds of erection -- Corinthian, ionic, and doric. %% An ardent young man named Magruder Once wooed a girl nude in Bermuda. She thought it quite lewd To be wooed in the nude, But magruder was shrewder, he screwed her. %% An army must set forth in proper order. If the order is not good, misfortune threatens. %% 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. %% An arrow shoots out at you! %% An article in the Spring 1990 issue of Arlo Guthrie's Rolling Blunder Review describing the risks of reading RBR, concludes with the flawlessly logical sentences: "In other words, if our readers understand that they do not understand what they are reading then they must possess an understanding which is superior to the meaning which caused that misunderstanding. "Only a sense of humor stands between pain and pleasure. Nothing worth reading can be read." %% An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plane can discuss horticulture. -- Jean Cocteau %% An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it. %% An artist who lived in Australia Once painted his ass like a Dahlia. The drawing was fine, The colour - devine, The scent - ah, that was a failia. %% An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune in which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% An astronomer fellow named Mark Was sure it would be a great lark To have a girl eye The stars in the sky And see what came up in the dark. %% An astronomer's swift limousine Went through a red light in Racine He was going so fast That the light which he passed Was Dopplered right up into green. %% An atheist is but a mad, ridiculous derider of piety, but a hypocrite makes a sober jest of God and religion; he finds it easier to be upon his knees than to rise to a good action. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% An athiest is a man who has no invisible means of support. -- Fulton J. Sheen %% An athiest is one hopes the Lord will do nothing to disturb his disbelief. -- Franklin P. Jones %% An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways. %% An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato or a, not too French, french bean must excite your languid spleen. For, if you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or lily in your medieval hand, every one will say, as you walk your flowery way; "If this young man is content, with a vegetable love which would certainly not content me. Why, what a very pure young man this pure young man must be!" -- William S. Gilbert (1836-1911), "Patience" [The subject of the humour is, of course, Oscar Wilde] %% An attorney was defending his client against a charge of first-degree murder. "Your Honor, my client is accused of stuff his lover's mutilated body into a suitcase and heading for the Mexican border. Just north of Tijuana a cop spotted her hand sticking out of the suitcase. Now, I would like to stress that my client is *___not* a murderer. A sloppy packer, maybe... %% An author owned an asterisk And kept it in his den Where he wrote tales which had large sales Of erring maids and men, And always, when he reached the point Where carping censors lurk, He called upon the asterisk To do his dirty work! %% An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know. %% An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% An avocado-tone refrigerator would look good on your resume. %% An axe stroke makes a deep wound in your leg. %% An eager inventor named Jones Was reduced to loud sobbing and moans. He'd devised x-ray glasses To study clothed lasses But all he could see were their bones. %% An eager young hacker named Gus Once buggered a VAX Unibus. The hardware went bad, But not the young lad (Except for the toupee and truss). %% An eager young hacker named Gus Once buggered a VAX Unibus. The hardware went bad, But not the young lad He didn't expect all that fuss! %% An earthquake is Mother Nature's "silent" pager going off. %% An easily understood, workable falsehood is more useful than a complex, incomprehensible truth. %% An economist is a chap who, when asked for his social security number, gives an estimate. -- K. M. Reese, "Newscripts", Chemical & Engineering News (26 Jun 89), p. 64 %% An economist is a man who would marry Farrah Fawcett for her money. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% An economist is an expert who can tell you tomorrow why his prediction of yesterday didn't come true today. %% An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's. -- Will Rogers %% An eerie glow emanates from a small orb floating in mid-air. %% An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible. %% An efficient worker is a danger to himself and others. %% An egg has the shortest sex-life of all: if gets laid once; it gets eaten once. It also has to come in a box with 11 others, and the only person who will sit on its face is its mother. %% An egg without salt is like a kiss from a beardless man. %% An egghead is one who stand firmly on both feet, in mid-air, on both sides of an issue. -- Homer Ferguson %% An egotist thinks he's in the groove when he's in a rut. %% An elderly man stands in line for hours at a Warsaw meat store (meat is severely rationed). When the butcher comes out at the end of the day and announces that there is no meat left, the man flies into a rage. "What is this?" he shouts. "I fought against the Nazis, I worked hard all my life, I've been a loyal citizen, and now you tell me I can't even buy a piece of meat? This rotten system stinks!" Suddenly a thuggish man in a black leather coat sidles up and murmurs "Take it easy, comrade. Remember what would have happened if you had made an outburst like that only a few years ago" -- and he points an imaginary gun to this head and pulls the trigger. The old man goes home, and his wife says, "So they're out of meat again?" "It's worse than that," he replies. "They're out of bullets." %% An elderly woman opened her refrigerator one day and found a little bunny rabbit sitting inside. "What do you think you're doing in my refrigerator?" she demanded. "This is a Westinghouse, isn't it?" replied the rabbit. "Yeah; so what?" "I'm just westing." %% An elderly woman walks into a large furniture store and is approached by a much younger salesman. "May I help you, mam", asks the young man. "Yes", replies the old lady, "I'd like a sexual sofa". The man is taken aback. "You mean a sectional sofa", the young man suggests. "Sectional schmectional", says the old lady, "all I want is an occasional piece in the living room". %% An elephant is a mouse with an operating system. %% An elven cloak is always the height of fashion. %% An elven cloak protects against magic. %% An employer was asked to write a recommendation for a worker who was leaving and was not known for putting out a great deal of effort while on the job. Since the employer did not want to lie and make this person better than he was, he thought a while before writing anything. Finally, he found just the right words: "You would indeed be fortunate to get this person to work for you." %% An empty bag cannot win in New York. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% An empty man is full of himself. -- Edward Abbey %% An encounter with a beautiful woman is good medicine for the well organized logical mind -- a little jolt never hurt. Note that the anarchists have been saying this for years about the A-bomb and civilization. -- Encyclopadia Apocryphia %% An engineer is someone who does list processing in FORTRAN. %% An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny. %% An envious girl named McMeanus Was jealous of her lover's big penis. It was small consolation That the rest of the nation Of women were with her in weeness. %% An epicece Gnome of Zurich, wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a safety deposit box materializes in the room. "You seem to have forgotten to deposit your valuables," he says, tapping the lid of the box impatiently. "We don't usually allow customers to use the boxes here, but we can make this ONE exception, I suppose..." He looks askance at you over his wire-rimmed bifocals. %% An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. -- E. P. Whipple %% An equal opportunity employer. %% An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted. -- Arthur Miller %% An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. %% An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains. -- Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881) %% An erudite fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool. %% An evil mind is a great comfort. %% An evil, at its birth, is easily crushed, but it grows and strengthens by endurance. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper. %% An example is not proof. %% An example of animal breeding is the farmer who mated a bull that gave a great deal of milk with a bull with good meat. %% An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch He wears a Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Golfer Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote excellence: "The Rolex Hyperion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and discriminating handcraftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by hand. Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold. No watch parts or anything. Just a great big chunk on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the individual who is very secure. Who doesn't need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near as successful as he is now. Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and they'll see his Rolex Hyperion. Hahahahahahahahaha." -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence" %% An exception TESTS a rule; it NEVER proves it. -- Edmund C. Berkeley %% An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie; for an excuse is a lie guarded. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% An executive has the job of hiring his own secretary, and phones an employment agency to arrange the setting up of several interviews. Our executive takes the first applicant out to lunch, and following a good meal, excuses himself to use the washroom. As he stands up, our clever executive, "accidently" drops a $50 bill on the floor in sight of the secretary-applicant, and pretends not to notice. When he returns, the first applicant hands him the $50 explaining that he dropped it, etc... The next day, the executive is lunching with the second applicant. He makes the same end-of-lunch excuse, "accidently" drops the $50, goes to the washroom, and when he returns there is no more $50, and the applicant says nothing. The third day, The executive lunches with the third applicant, and repeats his "test" and again, when he returns, again, no $50, and nothing is said by the secretary-applicant. Later that afternoon, the executive gets a phone call from the second applicant who explains that she DID pick up the $50, and she invested the money, and that a profit of $22 was made on the investment. She tells the executive that she will be dropping the $72 off at the executive's office later that day... So... WHO GOT THE JOB? The one with the biggest tits! %% An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides. -- John H. Patterson %% An executive is a person who is always annoying the hired help by asking them to do things. %% An executive will always return to work from lunch early if no one takes him. %% An exotic journey in downtown Newark is in your future. %% 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 " %% An experiment is reproducible until another laboratory tries to repeat it. -- Dr. Alexander Kohn %% An expert at kissin' and dallyin' Had a prick quite like that of a stallion. His success would be cosmic But for shortcomings osmic For he reeked very strongly of scallion. %% An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) %% An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. -- Gerald Weinberg %% An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing. %% An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less. -- Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947) %% An expert is someone who can take something you already knew and make it sound confusing. %% An extraordinary haste to discharge an obligation is a sort of ingratitude. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. %% An eye in a blue face Saw an eye in a green face. "That eye is like this eye" Said the first eye, "But in low place, Not in high place." %% An eye like Mars, to threaten and command. -- William Shakespeare %% An honest God's the noblest work of man. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. -- Simon Cameron (1799-1889) %% An honest tale speeds best being plainly told. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI" %% An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible. -- Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann" %% An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it. %% An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% An idea, like a ghost (according to the common notion of a ghost) must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself. -- Charles Dickens %% An idle mind is worth two in the bush. %% An ignorant maid of Durango Wasn't told where to make a man's wang go, But she garnered this knowledge Her first night in college With a sigh you could play as a tango. %% An immense mirror is hanging against one wall, and stretches to the other end of the room, where various other sundry objects can be glimpsed dimly in the distance. %% 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. %% An impotent Scot named MacDougall Had to husband his sperm and be frugal. He was gathering semen To gender a he-man, By screwing his wife through a bugle. %% An incautious young woman named Venn Was seen with the wrong sort of men; She vanished one day, But the following May Her legs were retrieved from a fen. -- Edward Gorey %% An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men who must be watched. -- Brodrig %% An indefatigable woman named Bavel Had often occasion to travel; On the way she would sit And furiously knit, And on the way back she'd unravel. -- Edward Gorey %% An industrious young obstetrician Conceived his financial position To depend upon beauty And husbandly duty Plus determined and endless coition. %% An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather. -- Washington Irving %% An inexorable upward movement leads administrators to higher salaries and narrower spans of control. -- David Riesman %% An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured. -- Konrad Adenauer %% An ingenious young man in South Bend Made a synthetic ass for a friend, But the friend shortly found Its construction unsound, It was simply a bother -- no end. %% An inherited treasure awaits you. %% An innocent hooker named Agnes Was reduced to mere tatters and ragness Because the poor sweet Kept on working a street That was laden with queers and with fagness. %% An innocent maiden named Herridge Was cruelly tricked ito marriage; When she later found out What her spouse was about, She threw herself under a carriage. -- Edward Gorey %% An inquisitive virgin named Dora Asked the man who started to bore 'er : "Do you mean birds and bees Go through antics like these, To supply us our fauna and flora?" %% An insatiable damsel named Bridget Was likely to mutter and fidget Whenever some jerk Couldn't manage to work Up a quick enough rise to the rigid. %% An intelligent Russian once remarked to us, 'Every country has its own constitution; ours is absolutism moderated by assassination.' -- Georg Herbert %% An interesting idea, but... %% An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my vehicle, and vanished. %% An invisible force field repels you with violet sparks flying. %% An irate young lady named Booker Told her husband, "You beast, I'm no hooker! If you want it queer ways, Go to whores for your lays!" So he packed up his tool and forsook 'er. %% An iron horse, with a flaxen tail, The faster that the horse does run, The shorter does his tail become. Needle and thread. %% An it harms none, do what thou will. -- Wiccan Credo %% An oath is a recognizance to heaven, binding us over in the courts above, to plead to the indictment of our crimes, that those who 'scape this world should suffer there. -- Sothern %% An object at rest will always be in the wrong place. -- David Gerrold %% An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction. -- David Gerrold %% An object never serves the same function as its image- or its name. -- Rene Magritte %% An object will fall so as to do the most damage. %% An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% An octagenerian Jew To his wife remained steadfastly true. This was not from compunction, But due to dysfunction Of his spermatic glands -- nuts to you. %% An old car that served you so well will continue to serve you until you have just put four new tires under it and then will fall apart. -- Erma Bombeck %% An old chinese man is having trouble seeing, so he goes to the eye doctor, after the examination the eye doctor says, "You have Cataracts". The old chinese man thinks for a moment, then says "No, No, I drive Rincon Continental!" %% An old couple just at Shrovetide Were having a piece -- when he died. The wife for a week Sat tight on his peak, And bounced up and down as she cried. %% An old electronic designer Had designs on a minor named Dinah. He couldn't carry them out For his prick was too stout, And too small was the minor's vagina. %% An old gentleman's crotchets and quibblings Were a terrible trial to his siblings, But he was not removed Till one day it was proved That the bell-ropes were damp with his dribblings. -- Edward Gorey %% An old lady is rocking away the last of her days on her front porch, reflecting on her long life, when all of a sudden a fairy god mother appears in front of her and informs her that she can have any three wishes she wants. "Well," says the old lady, "I guess I would like to be really rich." *** POOF *** her rocking chair turned to solid gold. "And, gee, I guess I wouldn't mind being a young beautiful princess." *** POOF *** she turns into a young beautiful woman. "Your third wish?", asked the fairy godmother. Just then the old woman's cat walks across the porch in front of them "Can you change him into a handsome prince?", she asks. *** POOF *** there before her stands a young man more handsome than she she had ever imagined possible. With a smile that makes her knees weak, he then saunters across the porch and whispers in her ear, "Aren't you sorry you had me neutered?" %% An old leather bag, bulging with coins, is here. %% An old maid who had a pet ape Lived in fear of perpetual rape. His red, hairy phallus So filled her with malice That she sealed up her snatch with Scotch tape. %% An old man and his wife were driving down the road. The man was sitting on the left, where the driver usually sits, and his wife was sitting on the right, where the passenger customarily sits. As they drove along, the wife started reminiscing, saying, "You know, we don't sit close together any more, the way we did when we were young. We never cuddle up these days." The man turns to her, sniffs, and says, "I ain't moved." %% An old man at the Folies Bergere Had a jock, a most wondrous affair: It snipped off a twat-curl From each new chorus girl, And he had a wig made of the hair. %% An old man is lying on his deathbed with all his children, grandchildren and his older great-grandchildren all around, teary-eyed at the approaching finale of a very long and productive life. The old man in is a terminal coma, and the doctors have confirmed that the waiting will be over within the next twenty-four hours. Suddenly, the old man opens his eyes and croaks: "I must be dreaming of heaven. I smell your grandmother's strudel." "No, grandfather, you are not dreaming. Grandmother is baking strudel now." "I know I will never have another taste of her delicious strudel after this one. Could you please go down and get me a sliver?" the old man begs with what is left of his final breath. One of the grandchildren is immediately dispatched to honor the old man's last request. After a long time, he returns empty-handed. "Did you bring me one last piece of your grandmother's delicious strudel?" the old man plaintively queries? "I'm very sorry, grandfather, but she says it's for the funeral." %% An old man of Texas named Tanners Was notorious for his bad manners. When he noticed the start Of an imminent fart, He'd announce it with bullhorns and banners. %% An old spinster was asked what she liked most in men. "Appearance," she replied "and the sooner the better". %% An old woman is riding a crowded bus and has to stand with her heavy packages. Finally, someone in front of her gives up a seat and so she grabs it. "Thank God," she says. A man in the seat behind her says "Ecxuse me comrade, but this is an athiest society. You should say 'Thank Stalin,' not 'Thank God.'" "Of course you are right," the old woman says. "Thank Stalin." She is silent for a moment, then says: "Comrade, I have just had a terrible thought: What shall we say when Stalin dies?" The man behind her replies "In that case I think we can say 'Thank God.'" %% An older lady is mugged and having no cash on hand she asks her attacker if he will take a check. The mugger agrees, so she calmly asks who she should make the check out to. Not thinking clearly, the mugger gives the old lady his real name. The man is arrested in his home several hours later with the check still in his wallet. %% An operating system is considered to have "crashed" when it halts itself without being asked to. The reason for the halt is often unknown. -- Sperry 5000 Operators Guide %% An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true. %% An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience. -- Donald R. Perry Marquis (1878-1937), "archy and mehitabel", 1927 %% An optimist is a man who looks forward to marriage. A pessimist is a married optimist. %% An optimist is a person who goes to the window every morning and says, "Good morning, God!" The pessimist goes to the window every morning and says, "Good god, morning!" %% An optimist is a person who says, "This is the best of all possible worlds." A pessimist is a person who replies, "Yes, that's so." %% An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. %% An order that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood. %% An ordinance on the books in Flowery Branch, Georgia, reads: "Be it ordained, and it is hereby ordained, by the Mayor and Council of the Town ... that on and after this date it shall be unlawful for any person or persons to holler snake within the city limits of said town." %% An organist playing in York Had a prick that could hold a small fork, And between obbligatos He'd munch at tomatoes, To keep up his strength while at work. %% An orgasmic young sex star named Sue Was a hit as she writhed to a screw. Her climatic fame spread With an ad blitz that said: Coming soon at a theater near you! %% An original idea can never emerge from a committee in the original. -- Charles P. Boyle %% An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction. -- Booker %% An ounce of clear truth is worth a pound of obfuscation. %% An ounce of emotion is equal to a ton of facts. -- John Junor %% An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition. -- Michael Korda %% An ounce of performance is worth more than a pound of preachment. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of purge. %% An ounce of security is worth a pound of defense. %% An ounce of vanity can ruin a ton of merit. %% An outrageous young lady named Kyle Likes to flirt in a whimsical style: She'll depanty, it's said, And then stand on her head To display her most quimsical smile. %% An oyster is a fish built like a nut. %% An ugly carpet will last forever. -- Erma Bombeck %% An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. -- Van Roy %% An uncertain young woman named Fern Was so great she had lovers to burn. She got into bed With both Johnnie and Fred And didn't know which way to turn. %% An unconscious troll is sprawled on the floor. All passages out of the room are open. %% An unemployed court jester is no one's fool. %% An unexpectedly easy-to-handle sequence of events will be immediately followed by an equally long sequence of trouble. -- Charles Phelps %% An uptight young lady named Breerley Who valued her morals too dearly Had sex, so I hear, Only once every year, And she strained her vagina severely. %% Analog - hors d'oeuvre, usually made with cheese and covered with crushed nuts. Served at all staff parties. %% Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it. -- E. B. Waite %% Anananay: what happens when you start spelling "banana" and don't stop. %% Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. -- Edward Abbey %% Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. -- Edward Abbey %% Anarchists do it revoltingly. %% Anarchists unite! %% Anarchy - It's not a law, it's just a good idea. %% Anarchy is against the law. %% Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no government at all. %% Anarchy means ignoring things that really piss you off! %% Anarchy works. Italy has proved it for a thousand years. -- Edward Abbey %% Anatidaephobia: The fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. %% Ancient Chinese Curse: May all your wishes be granted. %% Ancient Chinese Curse: May you live in interesting times. %% Ancient Chinese Curse: May your life be filled with experiences. %% And Abner said to Joab, "Let the young men come forward and play before us." Joab answered "Yes, let them." So they came up one by one, and took their places, twelve for Benjamin and Ishbosheth and twelve from David's men. Each man seized his opponent by the head and thrust his sword into his side; and thus they fell together. -- Samuel 2,2,14-16 %% And Bezel saideth unto Sham: `Sham,' he saideth, `Thou shalt goest unto the town of Begorrah, and there thou shalt fetcheth unto thine bosom 35 talents, and also shalt thou fetcheth a like number of cubits, provideth that they are nice and fresh.' -- Dave Barry, "Getting Religion" %% And God said: E = +mv} - Ze}/r ...and there *WAS* light! %% And I alone am returned to wag the tail. %% And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. %% And I remember I'd, I remember back then I'd, I'd drive all night, I swore I'd drive all night, just to buy you some shoes, and to taste, and to taste your tender charm. %% And I suppose the little things are harder to get used to than the big ones. The big ones you get used to, you make up your mind to them. The little things come along unexpectedly, when you aren't thinking about them, aren't braced against them. -- Marion Zimmer Bradley, "The Forbidden Tower" %% And I will instruct you on Enterprise etiquette. -- Worf to Mendon, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% And I'll do you one better if you've got the nerve, I'll race you all the way to deadman's curve. %% And ITT begat Hostess, and Hostess begat Morton, and Morton begat Stuckey's and Stuckey's begat Beatrice, and Beatrice begat Little Debbie. And Beatrice did leave Little Debbie with Hostess and go forth into the wastelands looking for a good spot at a truck stop. And Beatrice then did go a few miles north from the wastelands and did settle in Nebraska, never to return to Norman, Oklahoma. (Endust 12, 7-10) %% And Moby Dick for king! %% And Now, the number one Cryptic Statement or Part of This Complete Breakfast: %% And St. Atilla raised the hand grenade on high saying "Oh Lord, bless this Thy Holy Hand Grenade that with it Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits, in Thy mercy," and the Lord did grin and the people did feast on lambs, and sloths, and carp, and orang-outangs, and breakfast cereals, and.... -- Book of Armaments 2:9 %% And a joke - but the punch line is a visual thing, so follow the instructions while looking in the mirror to really get it (and it may be offensive, so be forewarned)... There was a woman on the subway, sitting across from an old wino. She was wearing a skirt, and was sitting in a most un-ladylike fashion (leaning back, legs open). She notices the wino staring up her skirt with a very interested look on his face. She gets upset, crosses her legs, and says "There, you dirty old man, what do you see now?" He looks up and goes [put index fingers at opposite sides of your mouth, and push them past each other, pushing your upper lip to one side, and your lower lip to the other - if you don't have a mirror handy, just imagine what it looks like]. %% And after all this time to find we're just like all the rest. %% And after you do all that work: An in-house IRS study revealed in February that the agency loses two million tax returns and related documents annually. One employee said that when preparing for audits, he routinely requests taxpayers' files from the state agencies because they are more likely to have the documents. %% And all I wanna know is why, you lied ... little girl on the backstreets. %% And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks with the one word, "unless." Whatever THAT meant, well, I just couldn't guess. That was long, long ago, and each day since that day, I've worried and worried and worried away. Through the years as my buildings have fallen apart, I've worried about it with all of my heart. "BUT," says the Oncler, "now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear! UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better - it's not. So...CATCH!" cries the Oncler. He lets something fall. "It's a truffula seed. It's the last one of all! "You're in charge of the last of the truffula seeds. And truffula trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new truffula - treat it with care. Give it clean water and feed it fresh air. Grow a forest - protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back!" %% And as we stand on the edge of darkness Let our chant fill the void That others may know In the land of the night The ship of the sun Is drawn by The grateful dead. -- Tibetan "Book of the Dead," ca. 4000 B.C. %% And as we wind on down the road, our shadow's taller than our soul. %% And can you teach me to how to dance real slow. %% And caught us running burned and blind, chasing something in the night. %% And did those feet, in ancient times, Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the Holy Lamb of God In England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon these crowded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spears! O clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire! I shall not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword rest in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827), "Jerusalem" %% And do you believe in rock and roll and music to save your mortal soul. %% And do you not think that each of you women is an Eve? The judgement of God upon your sex endures today; and with it invariably endures your position of criminal at the bar of justice. -- Tertullian (180?-230?), second-century Christian writer, misogynist %% And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. %% And earnest young woman in Thrace Said, "Darling, that's not the right place!" So he gave her a thwack, And did on her back, What he couldn't have done face to face. %% And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. -- Kahlil Gibran %% And every spring, a new graduating class enters the workforce. Some have a well-rounded view of operating systems, but for many there is only Unix. -- Gord Campbell, InfoAge editorial, Nov 84 %% And fear breeds hatred, your majesty. Fear is the greatest enemy of them all, for fear leads us to war. -- 3rd Doctor, FRONTIER IN SPACE %% And for just one look from your sad eyes, you had such pretty sad eyes. %% And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat. %% And furthermore, my bowling average is unimpeachable!!! %% And he climbed with the lad up the Eiffelberg Tower. "This," cried the Mayor, "is your town's darkest hour! the time for all Whos who have blood that is red to come to the aid of their country!" he said. "We've GOT to make noises in greater amounts! So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!" Thus he spoke as he climbed. When they got to the top, the lad cleared his throat and he shouted out, "YOPP!" And that Yopp. . . That one last small, extra Yopp put it over! Finally, at last! From the speck on that clover their voices were heard! They rang out clear and clean. And they elephant smiled. "Do you see what I mean?. . . " They've proved they ARE persons, no matter how small. And their whole world was saved by the smallest of All!" "How true! Yes, how true," said the big kangaroo. "And, from now on, you know what I'm planning to do?. . . From now on, I'm going to protect them with you!" And the young kangaroo in her pouch said,. . . ME TOO! From the sun in the summer. From rain when it's fall-ish, I'm going to protect them. No matter how small-ish!" -- Dr. Seuss "Horton Hears a Who" %% And he disappeared in a puff of logic. %% And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do mote essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% And he had a job, and he wore a hat, and he brought home the bacon so that noone knew. %% And here I stand; judge, my masters. -- William Shakespeare %% And here I wait so patiently Waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of Going thru all of these things twice -- Dylan, "Memphis Blues Again" %% And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: E G O -- Equality 7-2521 %% And here, poor fool, with all my lore I stand no wiser than before. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% And how can this be? For he IS the Kumquat Haagen %% And if I said a year ago that these [social] programs weren't working, perhaps I have been vindicated. -- President George Bush, on how Lyndon Johnson was to blame for the LA riots %% And if he runs away, he won't be hard to catch. -- Bart about the greyhound, Santa's Little Helper, Homer brought home in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" %% And if one bad cluster should accidentally fail... %% And if sometime, somewhere, someone asketh thee, "Who kilt thee?," tell them it 'twas the Doones of Bagworthy! %% And if there is promise of a storm, if you want change in your life, walk in to it. If you get on the other side, you will be different. And if you want change in your life and you are avoiding the trouble, you can forget it. %% And if you believe that, I've got a great used car to show you. %% And if you believe that, I've got some land down in Florida... %% And in the cool of the night, they reach for a moment and try to make an honest stand, but they wind up wounded and not even dead, tonight in jungleland. %% And in the master's chambers, they gather for the feast. They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast. -- Don Henley %% And in the sky, a 1500 pound ox appeared over my head, as a halo might. Oh well. Crunch. %% And in the streets the children sang, the lovers cried and the poets dreamed, but not a word was spoken the church bells all were broken. %% And it does matter. An honest man or woman is an honest man or woman more because he or she is honest in the small, everyday things that "don't matter" individually, but which make up a well-lived life, than because of some single great temptation that was passed. A person who is concerned about individual rights or about individual dignity makes his or her difference not because of any sweeping great statement or action, but because of the accretion of small, individually seemingly insignificant acts that spread that dignity and confirm those rights through every action they take. It matters because every action you take, and every action I take is an expression of the human spirit. -- William Oliver (oliver@uncmed.med.unc.edu) %% And let me tell you, the people that I met, whether it was in Honduras or Jamaica, obviously, Panama, just people on the street, not one time did I get a negative response about the United States. As a matter of fact, I didn't even get a, you know, a real thumbs down or the raspberries as you drove by, a better reception, quite frankly, in a couple of cities there than you might even get in --- here at home. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% And let me the canakin clink, clink; and let me the canakin clink. A soldier's a man; O, man's life's but a span, Why then, let a soldier drink. %% And microbrain. Growl for me. Let me know you still care. -- Q to Worf, "Q-Who?", stardate 42761.3 %% And miles to go before I sleep. %% And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: 'I' -- Equality 7-2521 %% And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. -- I Corinthians %% And now for something completely different. %% And now for something completely else... %% And now for something completely the same... %% And now for something ruder... %% And now for the weather, which is every bit as yucky as the news. %% And now your toner's toney, Disk blocks aplenty And your paper near pure white, Await your laser drawn lines, The smudges on your soul are gone Your intricate fonts, And your output's clean as light.. Your pictures and signs. We've labored with your father, Your amputative absence The venerable XGP, Has made the Ten dumb, But his slow artistic hand, Without you, Dover, Lacks your clean velocity. We're system untounged- Theses and papers DRAW Plots and TEXage And code in a queue Have been biding their time, Dover, oh Dover, With LISP code and programs, We've been waiting for you. And this crufty rhyme. Dover, oh Dover, Dover, oh Dover, arisen from dead. We welcome you back, Dover, oh Dover, awoken from bed. Though still you may jam, Dover, oh Dover, welcome back to the Lab. You're on the right track. Dover, oh Dover, we've missed your clean hand... %% And now, a personal request, sir. Permission to clean up the bridge. -- Lt. Worf to Picard about Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% And now, let's get right to tonight's feature presentation of 'Bambi vs. Godzilla' %% And now, the Bing Crosby show, brought to you by the makers of Ex-Lax. ...a brief pause, and then Bing !! %% And of course, No soap, radio. %% And oftentimes, excusing of a fault, Doth make a fault the worse by the excuse; As patches set upon a little breach, Discredit more in hiding of the fault, Than did the fault before it was so patch'd. -- William Shakespeare %% And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode. %% And on the seventh day, while He was resting, He created snack cakes. And He saw that they looked good, and He did bite into one, at which time he realized that they tasted like something that had been sitting on a shelf wrapped in cheap plastic for decades. He had too much goop on His fingers to blast them into the void from which they had come, and therefore He drove them out until they had left the Promised Land and were stuck in a cheap, tacky display on the end of the aisle. (Haagendasz 3, 12-15) %% And one day we will master the art of karate and we will rise up and make the buggers eyes water. %% And remember, let's do it to them before they do it to us. %% And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline, can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal or political motive. -- Sir Henry Hallett Dalt %% And so I will live to see another sunset. -- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld" %% And so it was, later, as the miller told his tale, that her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale -- Procol Harum %% And so we plow along, as the fly said to the ox. %% And so, men, we can see that human skin is an even more complex and fascinating organ than we thought it was, and if we want to keep it looking good, we have to care for it as though it were our own. One approach is to undergo a painful surgical procedure wherein your skin is turned inside-out, so the young cells are on the outside, but then of course you have the unpleasant side effect that your insides gradually fill up with dead old cells and you explode. So this procedure is pretty much limited to top Hollywood stars for whom youthful beauty is a career necessity, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles. -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face" %% And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963), Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961 %% And that's the way it is... -- Walter Cronkite %% And the Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was FOUNDED by religious nuts with guns! -- P. J. O'Rourke %% And the French medical anatomist Etienne Serres really did argue that black males are primitive because the distance between their navel and penis remains small (relative to body height) throughout life, while white children begin with a small separation but increase it during growth -- the rising belly button as a mark of progress. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Racism and Recapitulation" %% And the bed smelled like a fish market. "The catch of the day," he cried. %% And the crowd was stilled. One elderly man, wondering at the sudden silence, turned to the Child and asked him to repeat what he had said. Wide-eyed, the Child raised his voice and said once again, "Why, the Emperor has no clothes! He is naked!" -- "The Emperor's New Clothes" %% And the cry issues forth: WHAT DO YOU KNOW!! %% And the days dwindle down to a precious few... %% And the kids around here look just like shadows, always quiet, holding hands. %% And the magic rat drove his street machine over the Jersey state line. %% And the northern lights commenced to glow. And she said, with a tear in her eye, "Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow." -- Frank Zappa, "The Story of Nanook and the Fur Trapper" %% And the poets downtown don't write nothing at all, they stand back and let it all be %% And the road warrior, that was the last we saw of him. %% And the silence came surging softly backwards When the plunging hooves were gone... -- Walter de La Mare, "The Listeners" %% And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. %% And then I got rescued by this bowl! -- Jo, PLANET OF THE DALEKS %% And then it goes... BOOOOOMMMM!!! %% And then there were the three cats on the ferry in the Seine in Paris. When an accident happened, the paper reported it as: Un, deux, trois cats sank. %% And then there's the story that's fraught With disaster -- of balls that got caught, When a chap took a crap In the woods, and a trap Underneath... Oh, I can't bear the thought! %% And then, they brought out the 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what it was. %% And there he was, reigning supreme at number two. %% And there's a crowd of young boys, they're fooling around in the corner. Joking, dressed in their best brown baggies and their platform soles. They don't give a damn about any trumpet-playing band; it ain't what they call rock and roll. -- Dire Straits %% And these small projections? An android alarm clock. Is that amusing? -- Dr. Crusher and Data, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4 %% And they shamelessly clothe their females. Inviting others to unclothe them. The very depth of perversion. -- Ferengi to Portal, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% And this is a table ma'am. What in essence it consists of is a horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical columnar supports, which we call legs. The tables in this laboratory, ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the world. -- Michael Frayn, "The Tin Men" %% And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God. %% And this too shall pass away. %% And those fascinating results come thick and fast in this course: "There are 9 results in there - it looks like it's going to be tedious, and indeed it is." %% And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight...Then he [the Lord!] said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith. -- Ezek. 4:12-15 (KJV) %% And though all cry down self, none means his ownself in a literal sense. -- Butler %% And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. -- William Shakespeare %% And to all you virgins out there.....Thanks for nothing %% And tomorrow will be like today, only more so. -- Isaiah 56:12 [NSV] %% And virtue is her own reward. -- Prior %% And we heard him exclaim As he started to roam: `I'm a hologram, kids, please don't try this at home!' -- Bob Violence Howie Chaykin's little animated 3-dimensional darling %% And what accomplished villains these old engineers were! What diabolical ways to sabotage they found! Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, of the People's Commissariat of Railroads ... would hold forth for hours on end about the economic problems involved in the construction of socialism, and he loved to give advice. One such pernicious piece of advice was to increase the size of freight trains and not worry about heavier than average loads. The GPU exposed van Meck, and he was shot: his objective had been to wear out rails and roadbeds, freight cars and locomotives, so as to leave the Republic without railroads in case of foreign military intervention! When, not long afterward, the new People's Commissar of Railroads ordered that average loads should be increased, and even doubled and tripled them, the malicious engineers who protested became known as limiters ... they were rightly shot for their lack of faith in the possibilities of socialist transport. -- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago" %% And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? %% And what is fame, that flutt'ring noisy sound, But the cold lie of universal vogue? -- H. Smith %% And what is your bureau doing about bonsai? -- Harrison Chase, SEEDS OF DOOM %% And what would you do if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I command that you be happy in the world. As long as you live.' What would you do then? -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" %% And when Hostess saw that Little Debbie had taken Hostess' own snack cake and named it a Ding-Dong, then Hostess saw that Little Debbie was no longer pure of heart and had in fact been looking in the dirty magazines by the checkout counter. And Hostess said unto Little Debbie, 'Go forth from my house, and thou shalt wander the earth until thou dost find a place where men with beer bellies drive old pickups with Easy-Rider rifle racks in them, and there thou shalt dwell forever, or until a Twinkie decomposeth, whichever cometh first.' And Little Debbie left the house of Hostess, grumbling something unintelligible about telling the American Medical Association what cholesterol does. And when Little Debbie found a city wherein all manner of men called her Baby and Sweetie, she did build a dwelling and sell her Honeybuns to all those that would pay her. (Endust 21, 4-12) %% And where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury. -- William Shakespeare %% And which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit to his life's span? -- Matthew 6:27 %% And while we're about it, who is this terrible Zodin? -- Peri, ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN %% And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet been man enough to know its value. -- Charles Dickens %% And yet, seasons must be taken with a grain of salt, for they too have a sense of humor, as does history. Corn stalks comedy, comedy stalks tragedy, and this too is historic. And yet, still, when corn meets tragedy face to face, we have politics. -- Dalglish, Larsen and Sutherland, "Root Crops and Ground Cover" %% And you don't resent it? The VISOR or being blind? Since they are both part of me and I really like who I am, why should I resent them? -- Scholar and Geordi, "Loud as a Whisper", stardate 42477.2 %% And you may ask yourself "Am I right? ... Am I wrong?" And you may say to yourself "MY GOD! ... WHAT HAVE I DONE?" -- The Talking Heads %% And, and, and, and, but, but, but, but" -- Yechiam Yemini, 14 September 83 %% And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. %% And, no, I don't know what they will do to you if you contact them. %% And, the driver compresses EVERYTHING, not just EXE & COM %% And.....What ever became of Sweet Jane? She's lost her sparkle, you see she isn't the same. Livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine All a friend can say is "Ain't it a shame?" %% Andrea's Admonition: Never bestow profanity upon a driver who has wronged you. If you think his window is closed and he can't hear you, it isn't and he can. %% Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes. Galileo: No, unhappy the land that _____needs heroes. -- Bertolt Brecht, "Life of Galileo" %% Andrew's Canoeing Postulate: No matter which direction you start, it's always against the wind coming back. %% Andy wants a job as a signalman on the railways. He is told to meet the inspector at the signal box. The inspector puts this question to him: "What would you do if you realized that 2 trains were heading for each other on the same track?" Andy says,"I would switch the points for one of the trains." "What if the lever broke?" asked the inspector. "Then I'd dash down out of the signal box," said Andy,"and I'd use the manual lever over there." "What if that had been struck by lightning?" "Then," Andy continues,"I'd run back into the signal box and phone the next signal box." "What if the phone was engaged?" "Well in that case," persevered Andy,"I'd rush down out of the box and use the public emergency phone at the level crossing up there." "What if that was vandalized?" "Oh well then I'd run into the village and get my uncle Silas." This puzzles the inspector, so he asks, "Why would you do that?" Came the answer, "Because he's never seen a train crash." %% Anergy-State: Any state of condition of the Universe, or any portion of it, which requires the expenditure of human effort or ingenuity to bring it into line with human desires, needs, or pleasures. -- Dr. John Gall %% Aneroid Barometer: Meteorological instrument which sailors often use to confirm the onset of bad weather. Its readings, together with heavy rain, severe rolling, high winds, dark skies, and a deep cloud cover, indicate the presence of a storm. -- from "Sailing" by Henry Beard and Roy Mckie %% Anesthetists do it painlessly. %% Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy. -- Tom Lehrer %% Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding -- Mahatma Ghandi %% Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance. -- H. G. Bohn %% Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Anger is a relative state. -- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3615.4 %% Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp's nest. %% Anger is blood, pour'd and perplexed into a froth. -- Davenant %% Anger is momentary madness. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Anger is seldom without argument but seldom with a good one. -- Halifax %% Anger kills as surely as the other vices. %% Angular momentum makes the world go round. %% Animalens Inc. of Wellesley, Mass., markets red contact lenses for chickens (at 20 cents a pair), pointing to medical studies showing that chickens seeing red during the day are happier and eat less food. A spokesman said the lenses will improve world egg-laying productivity by $600 million a year. %% Animals LIKE earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanic activity. %% Animals can be driven crazy by putting too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Animals feed; man eats. Only the man of intellect and judgement knows how to eat. -- Antheime Brillat-Savarin %% Animators do it 24 times a second %% Ankh if you love Isis. %% Annabelle turned beet-red in the face At having been raped. Such disgrace Yet although it was terrible It was not quite unbearable. She had taken her pill just in case. %% Annex Canada now! We need the room, and who's going to stop us? -- A Tom Neff .signature %% Annoyed to be left unarmed in such an obviously dangerous neighborhood, the thief slips off into the shadows. %% Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war? -- William A. Turnbow %% Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Another Armenia, Belgium...the weak innocents who always seem to be located on a natural invasion route. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3198.4 %% Another case of Cherry Coke down the programming hatch! %% Another day, another death. Another sorrow, another breath. -- From "No Remorse" by Metallica %% Another day, another dollar. -- Vincent J. Fuller [defense lawyer for John Hinckley, upon Hinckley's acquittal] %% Another day, another ray of hope. %% Another dream that failed. There's nothing sadder. -- Kirk, "This side of Paradise," stardate 3417.3 %% Another fine product from Bastards Inc. %% Another gin and tonic, please. %% Another goal is to establish a relationship "in which it is OK for everybody to do their best. There are an awful lot of people in management who really don't want subordinates to do their best, because it gets to be very threatening. But we have found that both internally and with outside designers if we are willing to have this kind of relationship and if we're willing to be vulnerable to what will come out of it, we get really good work." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% Another good night not to sleep in a eucalyptus tree. %% Another greeting card category consists of those persons who send out photographs of their families every year. In the same mail that brought the greetings from Marcia and Philip, my friend found such a conversation piece. "My God, Lida is enormous!" she exclaimed. I don't know why women want to record each year, for two or three hundred people to see, the ravages wrought upon them, their mates, and their progeny by the artillery of time, but between five and seven per cent of Christmas cards, at a rough estimate, are family groups, and even the most charitable recipient studies them for little signs of dissolution or derangement. Nothing cheers a woman more, I am afraid, than the proof that another woman is letting herself go, or has lost control of her figure, or is clearly driving her husband crazy, or is obviously drinking more than is good for her, or still doesn't know what to wear. Middle-aged husbands in such photographs are often described as looking "young enough to be her son," but they don't always escape so easily, and a couple opening envelopes in the season of mercy and good will sometimes handle a male friend or acquaintance rather sharply. "Good Lord!" the wife will say. "Frank looks like a sex-crazed shotgun slayer, doesn't he?" "Not to me," the husband may reply. "to me he looks more like a Wilkes-Barre dentist who is being sought by the police in connection with the disappearance of a choir singer." -- James Thurber (1894-1961), "Merry Christmas" %% Another megabytes the dust. %% Another nun joke!!! You see, three nuns were walking down the street, when suddenly this flasher jumped out in front of them and opened his trench coat, exposing his all to the sisters. Well, two of the nuns had strokes right there, but the third nun wouldn't touch it. %% Another one bites the dust. %% Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *___and* fresher breath. -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly Do" %% Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone. -- Pyrrhus %% Another toy that helped destroy the elder race of man? ...forget about your silly whim; it doesn't fit the plan. -- Rush %% Another war...must it always be so? How many comrades have we lost in this way?... Obedience. Duty. Death, and more death... -- Romulan Commander, "Balance of Terror," stardate 1709.2 %% Another young feminist, Florence, Held all the male sex in abhorrence. She'd take men to bed And screw them till dead And then she'd collect the insurance. %% Another young poet in China Had a feeling for rhythm much fina. His limericks tend To come to an end Quite suddenly. %% Another young woman named Clare Would walk around perfectly bare, Saying, "All that I show Are my publics, you know, For my privates are covered with hair." %% Answer just what your heart prompts you. %% Answers price list: Answers......................................... $1.00 Answers (requiring thought)..................... $2.00 Answers (correct)............................... $3.00 Dumb looks ..................................... FREE! %% Answers: $1 * Correct answers: $5 * Dumb looks: Free! * %% Ant Boy calmly prepares to execute his new friend ant-style... by PINCHING OFF HIS HEAD! -- Ant Boy %% Anthony's Law of the Workshop: Any tool, when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner. The Corollary to Anthony's Law of the Workshop: On its way to the corner, any dropped tool will always first strike your toes. Flucard's Corollary: Anything dropped in the bathroom falls in the toilet. %% Anthony's Law of the Workshop: Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop. Corollary: On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike your toes. %% Anti-Gravity Device : David Almosder has seen the result of his 35 years effort of building an anti-gravity device. Now he's planning on spending the next 35 years fingering out why the device doesn't work very well up side down. %% Anti-Sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Anti-Semites -- another name for "failures." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% Anti-Victim Device (AVD): A small fashion accessory worn on an otherwise conservative outfit which announces to the world that one still has a spark of individuality burning inside: 1940s retro ties and earrings (on men), feminist buttons, noserings (women), and now almost completely extinct teeny weeny rattail haircut (both sexes). -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Anti-trust laws should be approached with exactly that attitude %% Anticipated events never live up to expectations. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% Anticipation of problems is half the battle. And the only way to anticipate is to think. %% Antidisestablishmentarianism! %% Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times (ten, actually), trying to get it just right. He failed. -- Edward Abbey %% Antonym, n.: The opposite of the word you're trying to think of. %% Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television. -- Lewis Thomas %% Ants would starve in your house if ants would come into it. %% Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. -- Arthur Somers Roche %% Anxiety is fear of one's self. -- Wilhelm Stekel %% Anxiety is interest paid on trouble before it is due. -- Dean Inge %% Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. -- Soren Kierkegaard %% Anxiety, n.: The first time you can't do it a second time. Panic, n.: The second time you can't do it the first time. %% Any argument worth making within the bureaucracy must be capable of being expressed in a single declarative sentence that is obviously true once stated. -- John McNaughton %% Any associated supporting element maximizes the probability of project success, yet minimizes cost and time required for the subjective decomposition criteria. Similarly, the interrelation of system and/or subsystem technologies presents extremely interesting challenges to anticipated fourth-generation equipment. Evidently, the incorporation of additional program constraints cannot be overemphasized when taking into account the subsystem compatibility testing. We can see, in retrospect, the use of hierarchical structures relating to resource ownership and allocation adds overriding performance constraints to the concept of program robustness. Specifically, the effectiveness of marginal isoquant analysis mandates operations-level consideration of the differentiation between requirements definition and object coordination. Notably, a large portion of interface coordination communication presents extremely interesting challenges to the not insignificant implementation limitations. Simply stated, the use of hierarchical structures relating to resource ownership and allocation cannot be overemphasized when taking into account assumptions that represent more than one interface. It is further assumed that any associated supporting element may only become apparent when we explicitly design the preliminary qualification limit. Without going into the technical details, a correct and consistent dual description of an abstract interface is not free to define the principles of effective resource management. Interestingly enough, the characterization of specific criteria recognizes other systems' importance and the necessity for overall program marketability. -- Doublespeak, A nifty computer program %% Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power. -- Joseph M. McCabe (1867-1957) %% Any bus that can be the wrong bus will be the wrong bus. All others are out of service or full. -- John Corcoran %% Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an ART. -- Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle %% Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) [Having the facts is hard. --ed] %% Any closet is a walk-in closet if you try hard enough. -- Steve Connelly %% Any college that would take your son he should be too proud to go to. -- Erma Bombeck %% Any coward can fight a battle when he is sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat. -- George Eliot %% Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die? -- Charles Lindbergh %% Any discovery is more likely to be exploited by the wicked than applied by the virtuous. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a representation of contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a representation of anything -- except a show to be ignored by anyone capable of sitting upright in a chair and chewing gum simultaneously. -- Richard Schickel %% Any error in any calculation will be in the direction of most harm. %% Any error that can creep into a calculation, will. Also, it will always be in the direction that will cause the most damage to the calculation. -- M. M. Johnston %% Any excuse will serve a tyrant. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by a thousand arguments. -- Nathaniel Emmons %% Any father who thinks he's all important should remind himself that this country honors fathers only one day a year while pickles get a whole week. %% Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do. -- Dale Carnegie %% Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to sell it. %% Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a person of some sense to know how to lie well. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902), "Notebooks" 1912 %% Any fully matured science of ecology will have to grapple with the fact that from the ecological point of view, man is one of those animals which is in danger from its too successful participation in the struggle for existence. -- Joseph Wood Krutch %% Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. -- Hedy Lamarr %% Any girl who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is obviously setting her standards too high. %% Any given program costs more and takes longer. %% Any given program will expand to fill available memory. %% Any given program, when running correctly, is obsolete. %% Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare--most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome." -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off the fence." I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true. -- Solomon Short %% Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in. -- Edward Abbey %% Any improbable event which would create maximum confusion if it did occur, will occur. -- H. S. Kindler %% Any inanimate object, regardless of its composition or configuration, may be expected to perform at any time in a totally unexpected manner for reasons that are either totally obscure or completely mysterious. -- Dr. Fyodor Flap %% Any instrument when dropped will roll into the least accessible corner. %% Any intelligent consumer knows what a warranty means. It means that whatever happens isn't covered. %% Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one. -- Sam Rayburn %% Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode. -- Dr. John Gall %% Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment- the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. -- Jorge Luis Borges %% Any man can prove he has good judgement by saying you have. %% Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth -- that requires a heroism which is transcendent. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% Any man that can write, may answer a letter. -- William Shakespeare %% Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad. -- Leo Rosten [on W. C. Fields] %% Any man who hates dogs and loves whiskey can't be all bad. -- W. C. Fields %% Any map or chart on which the town of Lima, Ohio, is not prominently figured is banned from sale in that town. %% Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat. -- Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London %% Any mind that is capable of a real sorrow is capable of good. %% Any more than three shakes is fun. %% Any movement in history which attempts to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary. -- Josef Broz Tito (1892-1980) %% Any of the cookies beginning with 'Button:' are available as calligraphic buttons in various colors from the following address for $1.50 each. Quantity discounts are available. Nancy Lebovitz 400 Wollaston Ave. C6 Newark, DE 19711 Late hot flash! Some of the buttons may be out of print - they would then be available as custom ones at $2.50 each. It seems to be best to write and ask first. %% Any ol' port in a storm. %% Any one can be great with money. With money, greatness is not a talent but an obligation. The trick is to be great without money. -- Italo Bombolini %% Any opposing views may simply go to hell. %% Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones -- you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the draught. -- Dwight W. Morrow (1873-1931) %% Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. -- Sydney J. Harris %% Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist. -- Alvin Dark %% Any plumbing pipes you choose to replace during renovation will prove to be in excellent condition; those you decide to leave in place will be rotten. -- Lew Phelps %% Any president should have the right to shoot at least two people a year without explanation. -- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) [discussing the press] %% Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Any program that calls itself an OS (e.g. "MSDOS") isn't one. -- Geoff Collyer %% Any program which runs right is obsolete. %% Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. %% Any race that doesn't use all its potential will always stop short of its possibilities. -- Jose Torres %% Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited. %% Any relationship between AT&T and science fiction is purely coincidental as is any relationship between my views and theirs. %% Any renovation project on an old house will cost twice as much and take three times as long as originally estimated. -- Lew Phelps %% 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.) %% Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. %% Any road followed to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain. -- Bene Gesserit proverb %% Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a larger object. %% Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% Any sort of violence done from hate of something or someone will only have detrimental effects - on you! -- Xavier R. Quinton %% Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient to exactly the point of most pressure. -- Milt Barber %% Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring. -- Hilaire Belloc %% Any sufficiently advanced bug becomes a feature. %% Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. -- Rich Kulawiec %% Any sufficiently advanced feature is indistinguishable from a bug. Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. -- Rich Kulawiec %% Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. -- Andy Finkel, computer guy %% Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962 %% Any system must be designed to withstand the worst possible set of circumstances. %% Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable. -- Tom Gibb %% Any team can win if they are better. %% Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. %% Any theorem in mathematical analysis can be fitted onto an arbitrarily small piece of paper if you are sufficiently obscure. %% Any theory can be made to fit any facts by means of appropriate additional assumptions. -- Robert E. Schenk %% Any tool dropped while repairing an automobile will roll under the car to the vehicle's exact geographic center. %% Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) %% Any typographical error will occur in the place in which it will do the most damage. %% Any vacuum cleaner would sooner take the nap off a rug than remove white threads from a dark rug. %% Any wire cut to length will be too short. %% Any woman is a volume if one knows how to read her. %% Any woman that you become extremely attracted to will tell you that you are the best friend that a woman could ever have. %% Any young man with good health and a poor appetite can save up money. -- J. M. Baily %% Anybody can become angry -- that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way -- that is not within everybody's power and is not easy. -- Aristotle %% Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry. -- George Ade (1866-1944) %% Anybody has a right to evade taxes if he can get away with it. No citizen has a moral obligation to assist in maintaining the government. %% Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another. -- 7th Doctor, GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY %% Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office. -- David Broder %% Anybody who doesn't cut his speed at the sight of a police car is probably parked. %% Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned -- I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination. -- Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa Book" %% Anybody with money to burn will easily find someone to tend the fire. %% Anyone who uses the phrase `As easy as taking candy from a baby' has never taken candy from a baby. "A real friend is someone who takes a winter vacation on a sun-drenched beach, and doesn't send a card." -- Farmer's Almanac %% Anyone can ba a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man. -- Leonard Sidney Woolf %% Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment. -- Robert Benchley %% Anyone can hate. it costs to love. -- John Williamson %% Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. -- Publilius Syrus %% Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none. %% Anyone can suck a toothpick!! %% Anyone entrusted with power will abuse it if not also animated with the love of truth and virtue, no matter whether he be a prince, or one of the people. -- Jean de la Fontaine %% Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it. -- Alvin Toffler %% Anyone who can walk to the welfare office can walk to work. -- Al Capp, in "Esquire", 1970 %% Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat." -- Robert A. Heinlein %% Anyone who does not look out for number one first, last, and always is a sucker. %% Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy. -- John Dewey (1859-1953) %% Anyone who has ever raised rabbits will appreciate the humor/dilemma implied: Q. how many rabbits does it take to fill a Volkswagon? A. two. %% Anyone who has had a bull by the tail knows five or six more things than someone who hasn't. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Anyone who hates Dogs and Kids Can't be All Bad. -- W. C. Fields %% Anyone who hates children and dogs can't be all bad. -- W. C. Fields %% Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries, knows nothing about grapes. -- Philippus Paracelsus %% Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation. -- Edward R. Murrow %% Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included). -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people. -- Eleanor Roosevelt %% Anyone who says he isn't going to resign, four times, definitely will. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Anyone who uses the phrase "easy as taking candy from a baby" has never tried taking candy from a baby. -- Robin Hood %% Anythin's better than your yammerin'. -- Hawke, DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN %% Anything anybody can say about America is true. -- Emmett Grogan %% Anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough. %% Anything cut to length will be too short. %% Anything free is worth what you pay for it. %% Anything good is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. %% Anything hit with a big enough hammer will fall apart. -- Robert A. Jackson %% Anything is better than Julius. I think that is why Ceasar got assassinated. I took the name of Groucho because I always look solemn, I guess. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Anything is good and useful if it's made of chocolate. %% Anything is good if it's made of chocolate. %% Anything is impossible, if you don't attempt it. %% Anything is possible, but nothing is easy. -- Bill Gray %% Anything is possible, unless it's not. %% Anything labeled "NEW" and/or "IMPROVED" isn't. The label means the price went up. The label "ALL NEW", "COMPLETELY NEW", or "GREAT NEW" means the price went way up. %% Anything left over today will be needed tomorrow to pay an unexpected bill. -- Betty Canary %% Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well. -- G. Bell %% Anything scarce is valuable; praise for example! %% Anything that begins well ends badly. Anything that begins badly ends worse. %% Anything that happens enough times to irritate you will happen at least once more. %% Anything that is good and useful is made of chocolate. %% Anything that satisfies its external specifications, no matter how inefficient it is, is a success; don't argue with it. %% Anything worth doing is worth delegating. %% Anything worth doing is worth doing for a profit. -- Tericius %% Anything worth doing is worth doing for money. -- Solomon Short %% Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. You can do better the next time. %% Anything worth doing is worth overdoing %% Anything you can do I can do better; anything I can do YOU can do better; anything I can do I can do better; anything IBM does will cost more money. %% Anything you still can't cope with is your own problem. -- Becki Tants %% Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen. %% Anything, no matter how bad, will sound good if played back at at very high level for a short time. -- John Culshaw %% Anytime things appear to be going better, you've overlooked something. %% Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. I know it; I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy. -- J. D. Salinger, "Catcher in the Rye" %% Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile. -- Edward Abbey %% Apathy can only be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things; first, an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite plan for carrying that ideal into practice. -- Arnold Toynbee %% Apathy is a sort of living oblivion. -- Horace Greeley (1811-1872) %% Aphorism, n.: A concise, clever statement. Afterism, n.: A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late. -- James Alexander Thom %% Aphorism: A concise, clever statement. %% Apl programmers do it in a line. %% Apologies, Captain. I seem to have reached an odd functional impass. I am stuck. -- Data, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger's next movie is going to be about the lives of the world's great composers. The movie has Steven Seagal set to play Beethoven, Jean-Claude Van Damme will be Mozart, and when Arnie got wind of the project, he said... "I'll be Bach" %% Apparently IBM is not IBM compatible. -- Andy Tanenbaum %% Apparently heard at a public lecture by the famous C. Northcote Parkinson at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras: Government's handling of a difficult matter by appointing a Commission of Enquiry is just like a person going to the toilet -- there is a sitting, a report, and then the matter is dropped. %% Apparently one section of the shuttle was discovered washed up on the coast of Florida. It was a small box that contained a piece of paper. The paper read: I will not go to full throttle. I will not go to full throttle. I will not go to full throttle. I will not go to full throttle. (repeated, one hundred times.) %% Apparently, July is National Hot Dog Month. If this is true, I imagine there must also be National Hot Dog Awards. I can just imagine this. Someone opens an envelope, looks at the contents and says: "And the Wiener is . . . Oscar Mayer!" %% Apparently, two very rare minks were missing from the mink farm: a Hungarian mink and a Czech mink. It was clear that the randy little animals had escaped by chewing a hole in the wall of their enclosure. Well, the value of these two breedable minks being well up in the thousands of dollars, the hunters and hounds went out after them. Tracking the minks turned out to be easy: new-fallen snow showed clear paw-prints for several miles through the woods, and then into a cave. The hunters approached the cave with some caution, and sure enough, the cave turned out to be inhabited by bears. No cubs yet, this early in the winter, but a big male and a medium female adult were clearly in residence. To the hunters' dismay, the tracks of the minks lead right up the bears themselves and *disappeared*! Well, even as furs, these rare mink were worth some real money, so hunters shot the bears and began the unpleasant task of dissection. They soon found the Hungarian mink in the female's stomach. "Well," they said, "that makes it pretty clear:" "The Czech's in the male!" Sorry. %% Appearance *versus* reality? Appearance *is* reality, God damn it! -- Edward Abbey %% Appearances are all, my son. Appearances are all. %% Appearances deceive and this one maxim is a standing rule: Men are not what they seem. -- Harvard %% Appearances often are deceiving. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones. -- Colton %% Apple - Typically a device used to seduce men. Usually equipped with display screens and/or worms. %% Apple n. A popular computer (made by Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, Calif.) with a refreshing nonnumeric, nonacronymic appleation. I gave my love an Apple, that had no core; I gave my love a building, that had no floor; I wrote my love a program, that had no end; I gave my love an upgrade. with no cryin'. How can there be an Apple, that has no core? How can there be a building, that has no floor? How can there be a program, that has no end? How can there be an upgrade, with no cryin'? An Apple's MOS memory don't use no core! A building that's perfect, it has no flaw! A program with GOTOs, it has no end! I lied about the upgrade, with no cryin'! %% Apple owners do it with mice! %% Apples Have Spiritual Powers, Say Insane Engineers. %% Apply only to affected area. %% Approach has supreme success. Perseverance furthers. When the eight month comes, There will be misfortune. %% Approved for veterans. %% Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources. -- Ronald W. Reagan, quoted in "Sierra", 10 September 1980 %% April 13 -- True Anecdote: In National League baseball action, the Atlanta Braves' Dion James hits a ball that would have been caught easily, except that in midair it strikes and kills a dove. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% April 14 -- In Colorado, Gary Hart declares his candidacy for the presidential nomination, making the official announcement while standing in front of a dramatic backdrop of soaring mountains, towering pine trees, and four Miami Herald reporters disguised as rhododendrons. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% April 22 -- Crack U.S. counter-intelligence agents in Moscow begin to suspect that the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow, constructed by Soviet labor, might be bugged, when one of them sneezes in the ambassador's office and six chairs say, "Gesundheit." -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% April 26 -- Jack Kemp announces that he is running for president, pledging that, if elected, he will deepen his voice. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% April 3 -- In the Persian Gulf, Iranians attack the Islip garbage barge, but are driven off by courageous flies. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% April 30 -- Following a lengthy and dramatic trial, a confused New Jersey jury awards custody of a 3-month-old boy to a 6-week-old girl. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% April is the cruelest month... -- Thomas Stearns Eliot %% Apu (Kwik-E-Mart clerk): "Haven't I seen you on TV somewhere before?" Homer: "Nah, you have me confused with Fred Flintstone." -- "Homer's Night Out", from The Simpsons %% Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote "The Golden Ass". -- Edward Abbey %% Aquadextrous, adj.: Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Aquarius (Jan 21 - Feb 19) : Carol Channing, Jimmy Durante, Jack Palance, Jimmy Hoffa, Vanessa Redgrave, Humphery Bogart, Gene Hackman, Farrah Fawcett %% Arbitrary systems, pl.n.: Systems about which nothing general can be said, save "nothing general can be said." %% Archaeologists make the best husbands. The older you get, the more they're interested. -- Agatha Christie %% Archaeologists will date any old thing. %% Architectural Indigestion: The almost obsessive need to live in a 'cool' architectural environment. Frequently related objects of fetish include framed black-and-white art photography (Diane Arbus a favorite); simplistic pine furniture; matte black high-tech items such as TVs, stereos, and telephones; low-wattage ambient lighting; a lamp, a chair, or table that alludes to the 1950s; cut flowers with complex names. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Architecture is not a business, not a career, but a crusade and a consecration to a joy that justifies the existence of the earth. -- Henry Cameron %% Architecture is the printing press of all ages, and gives a history of the state in which it was conducted. -- Lady Morgan %% Architecture: Whatever we choose to implement. -- FMS Project Leader %% Are eleven thousand people worth fifty billion? Is the love of a woman worth the destruction of an entire species? -- Kevin, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people. -- Edward Abbey %% Are there those in the land of the brave Who can tell me how I should behave When I am disgraced Because I erased A file I intended to save? %% Are they taking DDT? -- Vice President Dan Quayle asking doctors at a Manhattan AIDS clinic about their treatments of choice. (NY Post, early May 92) %% Are we THERE yet? %% Are we THERE yet? My MIND is a SUBMARINE!! %% Are we controlled by secret forces? %% Are we having fun now? %% Are we having fun yet? %% Are we live or on tape? %% Are we lovers or just friends in bed? %% Are we not men? %% Are we on STRIKE yet? %% Are we running light with overbyte? %% Are ya right ? -- Prof. D. Ingo %% Are you a Romulan? -- Kareen to Worf, "The Schizoid Man", stardate 42437.5 %% Are you a foul flea, or just a scummy snake? %% Are you a good witch or a bad witch? %% Are you a man or a mouse? Come on, squeak up! %% Are you a offering a solution, or are you just another part of the problem? %% Are you a slob, or just a rectum? %% Are you a turtle? %% Are you adjusting to your new environment Commander? I find the constraints a bit difficult to conform to. Just a while ago I had to stop myself from killing Commander Riker. -- Troi and Kurn, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% Are you certain quantum mechanics is a science? %% Are you enjoying yourself? %% Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to use earplugs? -- From The Goon Show %% Are you having fun yet? %% Are you kidding me? You must be kidding me! %% Are you making this up as you go along? %% Are you mentally here at Pizza Hut?? %% Are you out of your mind? %% Are you selling NYLON OIL WELLS?? If so, we can use TWO DOZEN!! %% Are you still an ALCOHOLIC? %% Are you stoned or just stupid? %% Are you sure it isn't time for another colorful metaphor? -- Spock, "The Voyage Home," stardate 8390 %% Are you sure the back door is locked? %% Are you sure you won't change your mind? Is there something wrong with the one I have? -- Gillian & Spock, "The Voyage Home," stardate 8390 %% Are you telling me that's a pussy cat? Yes, I suppose you could call it that. -- Yar and Worf about a Klingon Targ, "Where No One Has Gone Before", stardate 41263.1 %% Are you the same person you were ten years ago? twenty? %% Are you trying to catch the bird? %% Are you trying to explore beyond the plover room? %% Are you trying to get into the cave? %% Are you trying to somehow deal with the snake? %% Are you wearing clean underwear? %% Are you wearing underwear? %% Are your glasses mended with a strip of masking tape right over your nose? Do you put pennies in the slots in your penny loafers? Do you wish you worked for IBM where everyone wore the same kind of charcoal grey suit? Does your bow-tie flash "hey you kid" in red neon at parties? Do you think pizza before noon is unhealthy? Do you use the "greasy kid's stuff" to stick down your cowlick? Do you wear a "nerd-pack" in your shirt pocket to keep the dozen or so pencils from marking the cloth? Do you think Mary Jane is somebody's name? Is illegal fishing is something only a daring criminal would do? Is Batman your hero? Superman? Green Lantern? The Shadow? Do you think girls who kiss on the first date are loose? Rate yourself on the nerd-o-matic scale. (1 point for each YES answer) 0-2 -- You are really hip, a real cool cat, a hoopy frood. 3-5 -- There is hope for you yet. 6-7 -- Uh-oh, trouble in River City. 8-10 -- Your immortal soul is in peril. 11+ -- Does suicide seem attractive? %% Aren't you forgetting something? %% Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did? %% Aren't you glad you're not getting all the government you pay for now? %% Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. -- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul %% Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Arguments seem futile to me, for behind every argument I have ever heard lies the astounding ignorance of someone. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) %% Arguments with furniture are rarely productive. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% Aries (Mar 21 - Apr 19) : Heb Alpert, Richard Chamberlain, Marlon Brando, Doris Day, Bette Davis, Marsha Mason, James Garner, Elizabeth Montgomery %% Aristocracy is always cruel. -- Wendell Phillips %% Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse %% Arithmetical proofs of theorems that do not have arithmetical bases prove nothing. -- G. O. Ashley %% Arlo Guthrie does it on his Motorcycle. %% Arm the Unemployed %% Armadillo: To provide weapons to a Spanish pickle %% Armadillos do it avec l'amour (Fr., "despite their armour"). %% Armanism: After Georgio Armani: an obsession with mimicking the seamless and (more importantly) *controlled* ethos of Italian couture. Lake Japanese Minimalism, Armanism reflects a profound inner need for control. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Armies aren't known for neatness. -- Solomon Short %% Armor's Axiom: Virtue is the failure to achieve vice. %% Armstrong's Collection Law: If the check is truly in the mail, it is surely made out to someone else. %% 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. %% Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long? -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% Around here, progress is made on alternate Tuesdays. %% Around you lie the ruins of what was obviously once an enormous castle. The remains have so degenerated that they blend uniformly into the forbidding rocks to the north. The beach is visible to the southeast, and the ground slopes uphill to the south. Another castle (this one still standing) is visible to the west. %% Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here." -- Muad'dib %% Arrgh! %% Arriving home, they learned that Glenn and Edna Catwomb had been slain by maniacs. -- Beatiful Stories for Ugly Children %% Arriving with a large box of paper at a local recycling depot, I was reprimanded for not separating the paper of color from the white trash. %% Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent. %% Arson - our daughter's brother. %% Art is I; science is we. -- Claude Bernard %% Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. -- Andre Gide %% Art is a form of catharsis. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Art is a jealous mistress. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Wealth" %% Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth. -- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) %% Art is almost always a political statement -- and politics is almost always an art. -- Solomon Short %% Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more human world. -- Andre Maurois %% Art is anything you can get away with. -- Marshall McLuhan %% Art is either plagiarism or revolution. -- Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) %% Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. -- Amy Lowell %% Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. -- Twyla Tharp %% Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. -- Theodore Dreiser %% Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death. %% Art isn't something you marry, it's something you rape. -- Edgar Degas (1834-1900) %% Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. -- Gilbert K. Chesterson (1874-1936) %% Art, science, philosophy, religion--each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience. -- Edward Abbey %% Artery: The study of paintings. %% Arthritic bureaucracies don't tame new frontiers. -- Paul A. Gigot, WSJ, on NASA %% Arthur C. Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas: Every revolutionary idea - in Science, Politics, Art or whatever - evokes three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the three phrases: 1. "It is impossible - Don't waste my time." 2. "It is possible, but not worth doing." 3. "I said it was a good idea all along." %% Arthur and Ford opened their eyes and looked about in considerable surprise. "Good God," said Arthur, "it looks just like the sea front at Southend." "Hell, I'm relieved to hear you say that," said Ford. "Why?" "Because I thought I must be going mad." "Perhaps you are. Perhaps you only thought I said it." Ford thought about this. "Well, did you say it or didn't you?" he asked. "I think so," said Arthur. "Well, perhaps we're both going mad." "Yes," said Arthur, "we'd be mad, all things considered, to think this was Southend." "Well, do you think this is Southend?" "Oh yes." "So do I." "Therefore we must be mad." "Nice day for it." "Yes," said a passing maniac. "Who was that?" asked Arthur. "I don't know. Just someone." "Ah." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Arthur and his wife Muriel were sitting in their Vauxhall Viva eating their ice cream cornets. Suddenly two enormous black birds started to flap around on the bonnet of the car. Arthur got out and placed his cornet on the bonnet, instantly causing the birds to calm down. "Well, I've never seen that before," said Muriel. "Oh,it's just a case of stilling two birds with one's cone." -- Steve Wickham %% Arthur was sitting outside his local pub one day, enjoying a quiet pint and generally feeling good about himself, when a Nun suddenly appears at his table and starts decrying the evils of drink. "You should be ashamed of yourself young man! Drinking is a Sin! Alcohol is the blood of the devil!" Now Arthur gets pretty annoyed about this, and goes on the offensive. "How do _you_ know Sister?" "My Mother Superior told me so" "But have you ever had a drink yourself? How can you be sure that what you are saying is right?" "Don't be ridiculous - of course I have never taken alcohol myself" "Then let me buy you a drink, - if you still believe afterwards that it is evil I will give up drink for life" "How could I, a Nun, sit outside this public house drinking?!" "I'll get the barman to put it in a teacup for you, them no-one will know" The Nun reluctantly agrees, so Arthur goes inside to the bar. "Another pint for me, and a triple vodka on the rocks", then he lowers his voice and says to the barman ".. and could you put the vodka in a teacup?" "Oh no! It's not that bl**dy Nun again is it?" %% Arthur's Laws of Love: (1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you remind them of someone else. (2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will be delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool of yourself in person. %% Arthur's Laws of Love: Art is your fate; don't debate. %% Article the Third: Where a crime of the kidneys has been committed, the accused should enjoy the right to a speedy diaper change. Public announcements and guided tours of the aforementioned are not necessary. Article the Fourth: The decision to eat strained lamb or not should be with the "feedee" and not the "feeder". Blowing the strained lamb into the feeder's face should be accepted as an opinion, not as a declaration of war. Article the Fifth: Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize, whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved. -- Erma Bombeck, "A Baby's Bill of Rights" %% Artificial Intelligence is neither -- it consists of quite natural people programming computers to do dumb things. %% Artificial Intelligence is too much of one and not enough of the other. %% Artificial food is expensive. Nothing makes steak as efficiently as a cow. -- Solomon Short %% Artificial insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull. %% Artistic ventures highlighted. Rob a museum. %% Artists do it in the buff. %% As Gen. de Gaulle occasionally acknowledges America to be the daughter of Europe, so I am pleased to come to Yale, the daughter of Harvard. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% As I approached the intersection a stop sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign has ever appeared before. I was unable to stop in time to avoid the accident. %% As I argued in "Beloved Son", a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions -- to anything -- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are surprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind. -- Steve Allen, comdeian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of Conviction", edited by Philip Berman %% As I grow older and older And totter towards the tomb I find that I care less and less Who goes to bed with whom. -- Dorothy L. Sayers %% As I slide down the bannister of life, I see you as a splinter in my ass!! %% As I was going across London Bridge, I met Sister Sally Ann, She was drunk, and I was sober, So I kicked her over. An empty bottle of whiskey %% As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, How many were going to St. Ives? One, myself %% As I was going up Punch Card Hill, Feeling worse and worser, There I met a C.R.T. And it drop't me a cursor. C.R.T., C.R.T., Phosphors light on you! If I had fifty hours a day I'd spend them all at you. -- Uncle Colonel's Cursory Rhymes %% As I was passing Project MAC, I met a Quux with seven hacks. Every hack had seven bugs; Every bug had seven manifestations; Every manifestation had seven symptoms. Symptoms, manifestations, bugs, and hacks, How many losses at Project MAC? %% As I went down the country road, I met old Granny Green, I ate her meat, and sucked her blood, and threw her skin away. A watermelon %% As I went under the new telegraph-wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the lattice-work of this life of ours. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% As Lisa hugged me, I started humming the theme song from the State Farm Insurance TV commercial. This is not because I am in any way a slave to television -- it had to do instead with a strategy I had concocted for torturing Lisa on her wedding day. What I planned to do was to plant the State Farm Insurance jingle subliminally in Lisa's mind, until she retched. The State Farm Insurance jingle had an almost satanic sticking power. Lisa wouldn't be able to hum or even think about anything else but the State Farm Insurance jingle for weeks. Soon she would suffer a terrific nervous breakdown -- the Big NB, as Lisa called it -- and spend the rest of her life spiking volleyballs off the roof of a mental hospital. "Like a good neighbor," I hummed softly, "State Farm is there." Lisa didn't seem to notice, but I could tell I had done some first-rate subliminal damage, since she hummed the last two words along with me. I had planted the first seed. -- Peter J. Smith, from "Make Believe Ballrooms" %% As Mark Twain said, "I love Wagner--if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!" -- Edward Abbey %% As President I have to go vacuum my coin collection! %% As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such things as a free variable." %% As Zeus said to Narcissus, "Watch yourself." %% As a Valentine message, young Bonnet, Having failed at composing a sonnet, Drew his girlfriend a card That the censors have barred -- Both a heart and a hard-on are on it! %% As a Vulcan you will study it [Romulan society]. As a human, you would find ways to appreciate it. -- Romulan Commander, "The Enterprise Incident," stardate 5027.3 %% As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing. %% As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is *action*. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth. -- Edward Abbey %% As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? -- Proverbs 26:11 %% As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% As a goatherd learns his trade by goat, so a writer learns his trade by wrote. %% As a king he approaches his family. Fear not. Good fortune. %% As a little silvery circular ripple, set in motion by the falling pebble, expands from its inch of radius to the whole compass of a pool, so there is not a child--not an infant Moses--placed, however softly, in his bulrush ark upon the sea of time, whose existence does not stir a ripple, gyrating outward and on, until it shall have moved across and spanned the whole ocean of God's eternity, stirring even the river of life, and the fountains at which the angels drink. -- Elihu Burritt %% As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food. -- Dr. I. Watts %% As a man of more than average caution, I have never felt absolutely secure until Evans and Novak have spoken. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% As a matter of cold fact, a lot of people have no use for you because they can't use you. %% As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create. -- Spock, "The Wrath of Khan," stardate 8130.3 %% As a matter of fact, I didn't understand it all. Only thing I know is that it looked good. -- Vice President Dan Quayle after being briefed on Space Station Freedom by NASA %% As a matter of fact, I do own the road. %% As a matter of fact, no, I don't have a life. %% As a member of the world conspiracy, you control your own future. %% As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children. -- Anita Bryant, 1977 %% As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that this mesh of a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a net because it is made up of a series of interconnected meshes, and each mesh has its place and responsibility in relation to other meshes. -- Buddha %% As a professional humorist, I often get letters from readers who are interested in the basic nature of humor. "What kind of a sick perverted disgusting person are you," these letters typically ask, "that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?" ... -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny" %% As a rule I only study things that suggest music to me... Recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me. -- Gustav Holst %% As a rule, go with state-of-the-art technology (but don't be first). -- Larry Long %% As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly. -- Lew Wallace %% As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher. -- Bill Moyers, interviews on "Fresh Air", 1991 %% As androids go, you're in a class by yourself. -- Dr. Pulaski to Data, "Unnatural Selection", stardate 42494 %% As any magician will tell you -- Myth Direction is the secret of a successful steal. -- D. Henning %% As between the skulking and furtive poacher, who hunts for the sake of meat, and the honest gentleman shooter, who kills for the pleasure of sport, I find the former a higher type of humanity. -- Edward Abbey %% As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so good breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men equal. -- Steele %% As charity covers a multitude of sins before God, so does politeness before men. -- Chesterfield %% As crazy as hauling timber into the woods. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest blabbers. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% As engineers, we try to provide for the future, but our crystal balls are notoriously cloudy and our ability to predict market trends is marginal at best. %% As every thread of gold is valuable, so is every minute of time. -- Mason %% As expected, the victorious candidate in a particularly dirty recent political campaign, won by a mudslide. %% As far as I can see, the greater amount of education which a part of the working class has employed for some years past, is an evil. It is dangerous because it makes them independent. -- J. Geddes (1865) [British glassworks owner] %% As far as that goes... %% As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error. -- Weisert %% As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. -- William Shakespeare, "King Lear" %% As for the basic assumptions about individuality and self, this is the core of what I like about cyberpunk. And it's the core of what I like about certain pre-gibson neophile techie SF writers that certain folks here like to put down. Not everyone makes the same assumptions. I haven't lost my mind... it's backed up on tape. -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% As for the women, though we scorn and flout 'em, We may live with, but cannot live without 'em. -- Frederic Reynolds %% As for weirdness, the guy who's the tops Is a kinky old butcher named Pops. Since he thinks it's effete To be beating his meat, What he's into is licking his chops. %% As fresh as morning dew distill'd on flowers. -- William Shakespeare %% As good almost kill a man, as kill a good book; who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself. -- Milton %% As hard as you try, the book cannot be closed. %% As he came in his chubby choirboy, Father Burke said, "There's no greater joy! If no sodomy levens And possible heavens, Existence will merely annoy." %% As in certain cults it is possible to kill a process if you know its true name. -- Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie %% As it happens, most hackers (particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants) like tea at least as well as coffee --- so it is not that big a problem. 2. See {time T} (also {since time T equals minus infinity}). 3. [techspeak] In transaction-processing circles, an abbreviation for the noun `transaction'. 4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of {tee}. %% As long as I am mayor of this city [Jersey City, New Jersey] the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist". You never hear a real American talk like that. -- Mayor Frank Hague (1896-1956) %% As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything. -- Beaumarchais %% As long as I eat, I live But when I drink, I die What am I? Fire %% As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure. -- John Dewey (1859-1953) %% As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters. -- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) %% As long as men are free to ask what they must -- free to say what they think -- free to think what they will -- freedom can never be lost and science can never regress. -- J. Robert Oppenheimer %% As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. -- Dick Cavett, in "Playboy", 1971 %% As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? %% As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for later. %% As long as there have been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. -- Carl Sagan %% As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try making it round this time. -- Mike Dennison %% As long as you've lit one candle, you're allowed to curse the darkness. %% As long as your ass is pointed at the ground, don't fuck with me. %% As near as I can tell you're not any crazier than the average asshole on the street -- Ken Kesey via R. P. McMurphy "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" %% As of 1992, they'll be called European Economic Community fries. -- Rod Schmidt %% As of next Friday, you will be flushed in favor of CONNIVER. Please go away. %% As of next Thursday, TOPS-10 will be flushed in favor of TENEX. Please update your programs. %% As of next Thursday, TOPS-20 will be flushed in favor of ITS. Please update your programs. %% As of next Thursday, UNIX will be flushed in favor of TOPS-10. Please update your programs. %% As of next Tuesday, C will be flushed in favor of COBOL. Please update your programs. %% As of next Tuesday, LISP will be flushed in favor of MUDDLE. Please update your programs. %% As of next Tuesday, all terminal input will be line-at-a-time. Please update your programs. %% As of next Wednesday, CLU will be flushed in favor of SNOBOL. Please update your programs. %% As of next tuesday, LISP will be flushed in favor of COBOL. Please update your programs. %% As of next tuesday, SAIL will be flushed in favor of COBOL. Please update your programs. %% As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code. %% As of today, LISP will be flushed in favor of COBOL. Please update your programs. %% As one gets older, one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on. -- Noel Coward %% 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. %% As promised, she's all yours, sir. All systems automated and ready. A chimpanzee and two trainees could run her. -- Scotty, "The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% As riches and favor forsake a man, we discover him to be a fool, but nobody could find it out in his prosperity. -- Jean de La Bruyere %% As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of demand. %% As seen on TV. %% As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them. -- Louis Bromfield %% As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss. -- Prof. Noam Chomsky %% As soon as the stewardess serves the coffee, the airline rencounters turbulence. %% As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949 %% As soon as you cannot keep anything from a man, you love him. %% As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women and clergymen. -- Rev. Sydney Smith %% As the axe entered the forest, the trees said, 'The handle is one of us. ' %% As the breeches-buoy swing towards the rocks, Its occupant cried, "Save my socks! I could not bear the loss, For with scarlet silk floss My mama has embroidered their clocks." -- Edward Gorey %% As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% As the dimensions of the tree are not always regulated by the size of the seed, so the consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. -- Colton %% As the economy gets better, everything else gets worse. -- Art Buchwald %% As the expected time of birth drew near, the mother-to-be asked her obstetrician, "Will my husband be permitted to stay with me during my delivery?" "Certainly," the doctor answered. "The father should always be present at the moment of birth." "That wouldn't be a good idea," the woman remarked. "He and my husband don't get along." %% As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has itself no character of enmity against the law, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, ... -- Article 11, Treaty of Peace and Friendship between The United States and ... Tripoli of Barbary. %% As the knife approaches its victim, your mind is submerged by an overmastering will. Slowly, your hand turns, until the rusty blade is an inch from your neck. The knife seems almost to sing as it savagely cuts your throat. %% As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it: 'tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room. -- Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) %% As the last syllable of your spell fades into silence, darkness envelops you, and the earth shakes. Then all is quiet. %% As the old motto of my Jr. High: We will find a way or make one." -- Robert E. Peary %% As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. -- Woody Allen %% As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% As the robot reaches for sphere, an iron cage falls from the ceiling. The robot attempts to fend it off but is trapped below it. Alas, the robot short circuits in his vain attempt to escape and crushes the sphere beneath him as he falls to the floor. %% As the sword of the best-tempered metal is the most flexible; so the truly generous are most pliant and courteous in their behavior to their inferiors. -- Fuller %% As the system comes up, the component builders will from time to time appear, bearing hot new versions of their pieces -- faster, smaller, more complete, or putatively less buggy. The replacement of a working component by a new version requires the same systematic testing procedure that adding a new component does, although it should require less time, for more complete and efficient test cases will usually be available. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" %% As the thief dies, the power of his magic decreases, and his treasures reappear: A #. %% As the three wise men approached the manger to present their gifts, one of them tripped, stubbed his toe, and exclaimed, "Jesus Christ!!". Mary looked over to Joseph and said, "Oh, Joeseph! I like that so much better than Irving Shwartz!" %% As the timber is fitted to the socket, a white sail abruptly appears on it. %% As the tone echoes through the air, the sorcerer appears in a cloud of purple smoke. He says, "Congratulations! You've obtained a perfect score!" He gestures with his hand, and a crowd of cheering munchkins carry you off to sign autographs. * * * The end * * * %% As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there is always a future in Computer Maintenance. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata" %% As the troll contacts the murky black waters of the river it is almost immediately destroyed. %% As the warp engines are engaged, the entire ship shudders and groans. The lights dim and flare again suddenly, as the ship re-emerges into normal space, thousands of light-years away. %% As the white panel slides shut, a tiny drawer pops out of the side of the box. The contents of the drawer fall on the ground, and the drawer slides shut just as quickly. %% As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue. -- Richard E. Burton %% As to Jesus of Nazareth...I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel. %% As tourists inspected the apse An ominous series of raps Came from under the altar, Which caused some to falter And others to shriek and collapse. -- Edward Gorey %% As two consular clerks in Madras Fished, hidden in deep shore-grass, "What a marvelous pole," Said she, "but control Your sinkers -- they're banging my ass." %% As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases. -- Edward Abbey %% As we anarchists say: "There's no government like no government." -- D'Arcy J. M. Cain (darcy@druid) %% As we know, the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution. -- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3615.4 %% As well look for a needle in a bottle of hay. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% As with liberty, the price of leanness is eternal vigilance. -- Gene Brown %% As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate. -- Sandra Boynton, "Chocolate: The Consuming Passion" %% As you are old and reverend, you should be wise. -- William Shakespeare %% As you are, so shall you wish. As you wish, so shall it be. %% As you attempt to move, the light becomes so bright that you are blinded momentarily and can't go on. %% As you enter the mine a rather burly man approaches you and exclaims, "Great to see someone else stumble into this God (sic) forsaken hole. I came here 12 years ago and lost my boat. This mine has the greatest gem hordes ever encountered. There will easily be enough for both of us but first I have 12 years of exploring to show you. I am not quite as eccentric as I seem but its been so long since I have had anyone to talk to. Come on and I will show you what there is to see here". He leaves by a door to the southeast. There is another door to the northeast and the entrance behind you to the west. %% As you enter, your compass starts spinning wildly. %% As you face the side opposite the entrance, two short sides of carved and polished wood are to your left and right. The left panel is mahogany, the right pine. The wall you face is red on its left half and black on its right. On the entrance side, the wall is white opposite the red part of the wall it faces, and yellow opposite the black section. The painted walls are at least twice the length of the unpainted ones. The ceiling is painted blue. %% As you finish this maneuver the scene in front of you appears to waver slightly. %% As you hit the water you slowly realize that you are undergoing a most drastic change. It appears that the water was perhaps a bit more caustic than you initially anticipated. You watch in agony as the flesh is stripped from your bones. %% As you humans say, I'm all ears! -- Ferengi, "The Battle", stardate 41723.9 %% As you know, I planned a trip out there for some time, so it fits in very nicely. -- President George Bush, on his trip to LA after the riots %% As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight. [In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the Wright Brothers. They were watching birds one day, trying to figure out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on Wilbur. "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual organs!" You should have seen their original design.] As a result, birds are very, very difficult to arouse sexually. You almost never see an aroused bird. So when they want to reproduce, birds fly up and stand on telephone lines, where they monitor telephone conversations with their feet. When they find a conversation in which people are talking dirty, they grip the line very tightly until they are both highly aroused, at which point the female gets pregnant. -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know" %% As you know, death is my bread and danger my butter. No, danger is my bread and death is my butter. No, danger is my, death is, no, no wait, sorry, death and danger are my various breads and various butters. -- Woody Allen, "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" %% As you leave, the door swings shut. %% As you look on, the troll manages to munge himself with an astounding display of ineptitude. %% As you move, the light about you changes color abruptly. %% As you pick up the rusty knife, your sword gives a single pulse of blinding blue light. %% As you pronounce the formula on it, the scroll disappears. %% As you pull the lever, your view of the surroundings quickly disintegrates. when your vision returns, you find that you're no longer where you used to be. %% As you reach for the sphere, an iron cage falls from the ceiling to entrap you. To make matters worse, poisonous gas starts coming into the room. %% As you reach for the web, a venomous spider appears. Unable to pull your hand away in time, the spider promptly, but politely, bites you. The venom takes affect quickly causing your lips to turn plaid along with your complexion. You become dazed, and in your stupor you fall from the limbs of the tree. Snap! Your head falls off and rolls all over the ground. The instant before you croak, you hear the whoosh of a vacuum being filled by the air surrounding your head. Worse yet, the spider is suing you for damages. %% As you step gingerly onto the bridge, it creaks and sways dangerously. very slowly, you make it across. %% As you try, your hand seems to go through it. %% As you wish, so be it. %% As...the sovereign has no further need for my services this evening, she suggested I might spend some time with you. "What a charming suggestion." She...appreciates the...affection you show me. "Was I that obvious?" Yes. "Well, I've already dined. Maybe you know a good Acamarian dessert recipe." Does that not please you? Tell me what you want William, I will do anything you wish. "Wait a minute." I don't understand? Don't you want me to give you pleasure? "Not as a servant. I told you I prefer equals." Even in the matters of love? "Especially in matters of love." -- Yuta and Riker, "The Vengeance Factor", stardate 43421.9 %% Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, If God won't have you, the devil must. %% Ashes to ashes, dust to dust If you don't take it out and use it its going to rust. -- highlander %% Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all. -- Bernard Levin, in "Daily Mail", 1964 %% Ask a silly person, get a silly answer %% Ask a toad what is beauty?...a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% Ask a wizard for help. %% Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard). -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% Ask me if I care. %% Ask not for whom the tolls. %% Ask not for whom the Bell tolls, and you will pay only the station-to-station rate. -- Howard Kandel %% Ask not for whom the bell tolls -- -- Muhammad Ali %% Ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls ... if thou art in the bathtub, it tolls for thee. %% Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country's been doing to you. -- Avengers %% Ask not what's inside your head, but what your head's inside of. -- J. J. Gibson %% Ask of friends only what is honorable. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Ask the expert! %% Ask the person next to you. %% Ask your boss to reconsider -- it's so difficult to take "Go to hell" for an answer. %% Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. -- John Stuart Mill %% Asked a supplicant priest of the pontiff, "Do I sin if I do what I want, if I screw a young nun In the eastertide sun?" His holiness murmured, "Gut yontiff." %% Asked by reporters about his upcoming marriage to a forty-two-year-old woman, director Roman Polanski told reporters, `The way I look at it, she's the equivalent of three fourteen-year-olds.' -- David Letterman %% Asking a Republican Senate and Democratic House to make a law is like trying to fry a single egg in two pans. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% Asking about monsters may be very useful. %% Asking when [Saddam Hussein] will be overthrown is like asking when the economy's coming back. -- An aide to President Bush %% Ass, grass or gas... nobody rides for free! %% Ass, n.: The masculine of "lass". %% Assassination has never changed the history of the world. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Rejected Statement" %% Assassins do it from behind %% Assembler -- A Formula I race car. Very fast, but difficult to drive and expensive to maintain. %% Assembly language experience is [important] for the maturity and understanding of how computers work that it provides -- D. Gries %% Associate : Its to caustic for film. Goldwyn : To hell with the cost, if it's a good story, I'll make it. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Associate with well-mannered persons and your manners will improve. %% Associate with well-mannered persons and your manners will improve. Run with decent folk and your own decent instincts will be strengthened. Keep the company of bums and you will become a bum. Hang around with rich people and you will end by picking up the check and dying broke. -- Stanley Walker %% Assume nothing. %% Assumptions are the termites of relationships. %% Astrology Law: It's always the wrong time of the month. -- Rozanne Weissman %% Astrology is a crock. Fortune cookies, on the other hand, are usually right. %% Astrology is a disease, not a science. %% Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway. -- James J. Kilpatrick, Universal Press Syndicate %% Astrology... just a bunch of Taurus. %% Astronomers See Death Star Thirty Eight Light-Years Away, And Coming Our Way. %% Astronomers do it all night long. %% Astronomers do it in the dark. %% Asynch: A place to wash dishes. Bisynch: Farewell to the dish washing place. -- Data communications glossary %% Asynchronous inputs are at the root of our race problems. -- D. Winker and F. Prosser %% At 49, Layton Kor is a phenomenon. Strong as an ox, quick on the trail, and fast on rock, Kor stills bursts with an impatient restlessness. With little difficulty I can picture him 20 years ago--truly he must have been an unstoppable force. Backing off a climb just wasn't an option; human failure (never his own) or failure because of the weather, those terms of defeat he could occasionally accept. -- "The book of KOR", by Ed Webster, 20th Anniversary issue of Climbing %% At 50 everyone has the face he deserves. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "Journals", 1949 %% At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats. -- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985 %% At Vassar, sex isn't injurious, Though of love we are never penurious. Thanks to vulcanized aids, Though we may die old maids, At least we shall never die curious. %% At West Point, the cadets had been full of bravado...But bravado was grounded in ignorance; true courage was possible only after one gained the visceral comprehension that death was the potential price of valor. -- Rick Atkinson, "The Long Grey Line" %% At a Budapest zoo: Please do not feed the animals. If you have any suitable food, give it to the guard on duty. %% At a bargain sale, the only suit or dress that you like best and that fits is the one not on sale. %% At a blood bank: "Donate now! Don't let us be caught with our pints down!". %% At a bullfight, Jose made his bid. When the maiden agreed, he was rid Of all inhibitions And, despite the conditions, As the crowd yelled "Ole!" Jose did. %% At a contest for farting in Butte One lady's exertion was cute : It won the diploma For fetid aroma, And three judges were felled by the brute. %% At a dance, a girl from Connecticut Showed an absolute absence of etiquette Letting all comers press Through the skirt of her dress And wiping the mess with her petticoat. %% At a party, a snobbish gentleman is trying to impress her. "I just can't bear fools" he says. To this comes an instant reply "obviously your mother did". %% At a recent meeting in Snowmass, Colorado, a participant from Los Angeles fainted from hyperoxygenation, and we had to hold his head under the exhaust of a bus until he revived. %% At a resort, a fellow walks up to an older fellow who is sitting in the sun, sipping iced tea. Younger guy says - "Hey, you gonna just sit around all day? How about it if you join me for a round of golf". "Nah", the older fellow replies, "tried it once, didn't like it". "Well then," younger fellow asks "how about a swim? It might be just as refreshing as your iced tea there." "Nah", the older fellow responds, "tried it once, didn't like it. But if you're game for tennis, my son will be here soon and is usually up for a game or two - you might want to play with him." Younger fellow replies: "Your only child I presume?" %% At all times there must be at least 12 men named Johnson in the NBA. %% At any given moment, a society contains a certain amount of accumulated and accruing aggressiveness. If more than twenty-one years elapse without this aggressiveness being directed outward, in a popular war against other countries, it turns inward, in social unrest, civil disturbances, and political disruption. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% At any given moment, an arrow must be either where it is or where it is not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest. -- Zeno's paradox of the moving (still?) arrow %% At any given time, there are move horses' posteriors in the world than horses. %% At any level of traffic, any delay is intolerable. -- Barry Bruce-Briggs %% At any one time, thousands of borough councilmen, school board members, attorneys, and businessmen--as well as congressmen, senators, and governors --are all dreaming of the White House, but few, if any of them, will make it. -- Mark B. Cohen %% At any public relations luncheon, the quality of the food is inversely related to the quality of the information. -- Earl Ubell %% At any time, at any place, our snipers can drop you. Have a nice day. %% At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore. -- Kahlil Gibran %% At every trifle scorn to take offense, That always shows great pride or little sense. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% At first I was uncertain, but now I'm not so sure. -- Heisenberg %% At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it. -- G. L. Glegg, The Design of Design %% At her annual checkup, the attractive young woman is told by the doctor that it's necessary to take her temperature rectally. She agrees and bends over the examining table, but a few seconds later says indignantly, "Doctor, that's NOT my rectum!" "Madam," says the doctor, "that's not my thermometer!" Just then, the woman's husband, hearing her voice, comes into the room. "Just what the hell is going on here?" he demands. "I'm taking your wife's temperature," the doctor cooly replies. "Okay, doc, you know best," says the husband as he picks a scalpel off the doctor's desk, "but when that thing comes out, it better have numbers on it!" %% At least they're EXPERIENCED incompetents %% At least we'll be away from all this openness. No, this is too strange for us. We are creatures of outer space. Soon, we will be safe in the comforting closeness of walls. -- Rojan the Kelvan, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4657.5 %% At night we go down to the river and into the river we dive. %% At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines. %% At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer. -- Marshall Lumsden %% At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. -- John Keats (1795-1821) %% At participating locations only. %% At recent trade talks the American representative offered to sell sophisticated American telephone technology to the soviets. American : "And in the United States, anyone can pick up any phone and dial 9-1-1. This will record the call and connect them with the police." Soviet : "In the Soviet Union we don't require that you dial anything." From the New York Times, 11/7/89: %% At some point in your life, you will meet someone who saw Wayne Newton in Las Vegas. %% At some point, every faculty would certainly lynch its dean -- if it could only agree on a date. %% At some time in the life cycle of virtually every organization, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out. -- Richard H. Brien %% At the Academy Awards Dinners all the actors and actresses in Hollywood gather around to see what someone else thinks about their acting besides their press agents. -- Bob Hope %% At the Villa Nemetia the sleepers Are disturbed by a phantom in weepers; It beats all night long A dirge on a gong As it staggers about in the creepers. -- Edward Gorey %% At the all-you-can-eat barbecue, you have to pay the regular dinner price if you eat less than you can. -- Rod Schmidt %% At the back of the roadhouse they've got some bungalows... and that's for the people who like to go down slow... let it roll, baby, roll ... all night long. -- Jim Morrison %% At the base of all these aristocratic races the predator is not to be mistaken, the splendorous blond beast, avidly rampant for plunder and victory. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% At the bottom of a good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion. -- Edwin Hubbel Chapin %% At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein %% At the dissolution He hurries to that which supports him. Remorse disappears. %% At the end of all civilization Is the planet Terminus's location. There's a girl there whose feat, Without stone or concrete, Nonetheless, was to lay the Foundation. %% At the end of the chain is a basket. %% At the end of the rainbow is a pot of gold. %% At the end of your life there'll be a good rest, and no further activities are scheduled. %% At the foot of the mountain, the lake: The image of Decrease. Thus the superior man controls his anger And restrains his instincts. %% At the foot of the mountain, thunder: The image of Providing Nourishment. Thus the superior man is careful of his words And temperate in eating and drinking. %% At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track. -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987 %% At the hospital, a doctor is training an intern on how to announce bad news to the patients. The doctor tells the intern ``This man in 305 is going to die in six months. Go in and tell him.'' The intern boldly walk into the room and up to the man and tells him ``You're gonna die!'' The man has a heart attack and dies on the spot. The doctor quickly takes the intern aside and cautions him ``You were much too abrupt in announcing the news to that man. You've got to take it easy, work your way up to the subject. Now this man in 310 has but a week to live. Go in and tell him, but gently now!'' The intern goes softly into the room, humming to himself, cheerily opens the drapes to let the sun in, walks up to the man and tells him ``Good morning! What a wonderful day, no? Say... Guess who's going to die soon?'' %% At the moment Japan declared war A sailor was fucking a whore. He said, "After this poke `Long and hard' ain't no joke; This means months 'til I get back ashore." %% At the store yesterday, I came upon a giant glass jar of maraschino cherries that had broken on the floor. As the clerk appeared with a mop, I said, "Looks like the end of a month of sundaes." %% At the tail in retreat. This is dangerous. One must not wish to undertake anything. %% At the well hole one shoots fishes. The jug is broken and leaks. %% At the working-man's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter! nor will the bailiff or the constable enter; for industry pays debts, but despair increaseth them. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% At these prices I'm not surprised. %% At these prices, I lose money-- but I make it up in volume. -- Peter G. Alaquon %% At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool. -- Menander %% At times it is wiser to remain silent and be considered a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment. -- Grattan %% At whist drives and strawberry teas Fan would giggle and show off her knees; But when she was alone She'd drink eau de cologne, And weep from a sense of unease. -- Edward Gorey %% At work, the authority of a person is inversely proportional to the number of pens that person is carrying. %% At your feet all the water of the stream splashes into a 2-inch slit in the rock. Downstream the streambed is bare rock. %% At your feet is a small pit breathing traces of white mist. An east passage ends here except for a small crack leading on. %% At your service! %% Atheism - a non-prophet organization with no invisible means of support %% Atheism is a non-prophet organization. %% Atheism is rather in the life than in the heart of man. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Atheism is the result of ignorance and pride; of strong sense and feeble reasons; of good eating and ill-living. It is the plague of society, the corrupter of manners, and the underminer of property. -- Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) %% Atheist = Deity Disadvantaged. %% Atheist's Manifesto: "Kill 'em all, and let nobody sort 'em out." %% Athletic fields and golf courses excepted, the out-of-doors wears an evil aspect, dominated as it is by insects and the brainless proliferation of vegetable forms. -- John Updike (from "A month of Sundays") %% Atlanta had a couple inches of snow on the ground for the federal holiday on January 20. Now, snow is a wonderful thing for holidays like Christmas, but there's just something not right about a white MLK's Birthday. %% Atlanta law forbids diaper service trucks from having horns that play "Rock-A-Bye-Baby." %% Atlanta makes it against the law to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp. %% Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Atoms are made up of electrons and protons (protons are also nothing). Fifty billion electrons placed side by side in a straight line would stretch across the period at the end of this sentence. Protons are heavier but take up less space. Such an idea is incapable of being absorbed by the human mind. -- John Lardner and Thomas Sugrue %% Atta-boy! %% Atta-boy! Atsababy! %% Attack long worms from the rear - that is so much safer! %% Attacking a dead # is pointless. %% Attacking the Guardians is about as futile as attacking a stone wall. Unfortunately for you, your futile blow attracts their attention, and they manage to dispatch you effortlessly. %% Attacking the snake both doesn't work and is very dangerous. %% Attacking without a weapon is suicide. %% Attempt to be seen with important people. %% Attempted assassinations are the accidents of kings, just as falling chimneys are the accidents of masons. If we must weep, let us weep for the masons. -- Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) %% Attendants at a service station in Eunice, Louisiana, handed more than $100 to a naked man who claimed to have a gun in his pocket. %% Attention K-Mart shoppers! %% Attention all decks, all divisions, effective immediately, I have handed over control of this vessel to Acting Captain Wesley Crusher. Thank you Captain Picard, thank you. And with that order dawns a brave new day for the Enterprise. -- Picard and Wesley, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% Attention to detail is the watchword for gleaning information from an unsuspecting witness. -- Inspector Cleuseau %% Attitudes are more important than facts. -- Karl Menninger %% Attractive bisexual young woman seeks same for high mellow times. %% Audacity, and again audacity, and always audacity. -- Georges Jacques Danton %% Auditors are the people who go in after the war is lost and bayonet the wounded. %% August 10 -- The U.S. space probe Meanderer II, after a journey of six years and many millions of miles, passes within 400 miles of the surface of Neptune, sending back dramatic color photographs of a Delta Air Lines jet. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% August 22 -- Rumors circulate that Gary Hart will re-enter the presidential race. Johnny Carson places his writers on Full Red Alert. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% August 25 -- In what is hailed as a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court decides, by a 7-2 vote, that you cannot count three oranges as one item in the Express Checkout Lane "unless they are all in the same package." -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% August 27 -- Georgia Senator Sam Nunn announces that he doesn't want to be president. Cuomo challenges him to a debate. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% August 28 -- In the Persian Gulf, tensions mount as a U.S. gunboat engages in a scuffle with actor Sean Penn. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% August 3 -- Political activist Donna Rice, in her continuing effort to avoid publicity, sells her story to ABC television. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% August 6 -- As "Ollie-mania" continues to sweep the country, one of the most popular video-arcade games in the country is a new one called -- this is true -- "Contra." The way it works is, there are are two soldiers on the screen, and when you put in a quarter, it never gets to them. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% Augustine's Law Number I: The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number II: If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number III: There are no lazy veteran lion hunters. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number IV: If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number IX: Acronyms and abbreviations should be used to the maximum extent possible to make trivial ideas profound...........Q.E.D. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number L: The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as a chimpanzee's and one-tenth as long as a human's -- but four times as long as the official's who created it. %% Augustine's Law Number LI: By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number LII: People working in the private sector should try to save money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number V: One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number VI: A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number VII: Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number VIII: The most unsuccessful four years in the education of a cost-estimator is fifth grade arithmetic. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number X: Bulls do not win bull fights; people do. People do not win people fights; lawyers do. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XI: If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done. If the Earth could be made to rotate twenty times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XII: It costs a lot to build bad products. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XIII: There are many highly successful businesses in the United States. There are also many highly paid executives. The policy is not to intermingle the two. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XIV: After the year 2015, there will be no airplane crashes. There will be no takeoffs either, because electronics will occupy 100 percent of every airplane's weight. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XIX: Although most products will soon be too costly to purchase, there will be a thriving market in the sale of books on how to fix them. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XL: Most projects start out slowly -- and then sort of taper off. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLI: The more one produces, the less one gets. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLII: Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLIII: Hardware works best when it matters the least. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLIV: Aircraft flight in the 21st century will always be in a westerly direction, preferably supersonic, crossing time zones to provide the additional hours needed to fix the broken electronics. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLIX: Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLV: One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLVI: A billion saved is a billion earned. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLVII: Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XLVIII: The more time you spend talking about what you have been doing, the less time you have to spend doing what you have been talking about. Eventually, you spend more and more time talking about less and less until finally you spend all your time talking about nothing. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XV: The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XVI: In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XVII: Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics;i.e., it always increases. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XVIII: It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XX: In any given year, Congress will appropriate the amount of funding approved the prior year plus three-fourths of whatever change the administration requests -- minus 4-percent tax. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXI: It's easy to get a loan unless you need it. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXII: If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXIII: Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXIV: The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an established project is accelerating it, which is itself the most costly action known to man. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXIX: Executives who do not produce successful results hold on to their jobs only about five years. Those who produce effective results hang on about half a decade. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXV: A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXVI: If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXVII: Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the lack of rank. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXVIII: It is better to be the reorganizer than the reorganizee. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXX: By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXI: The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXII: Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold -- your problems into their gold. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXIII: Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXIV: The process of competitively selecting contractors to perform work is based on a system of rewards and penalties, all distributed randomly. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXIX: Never promise to complete any project within six months of the end of the year -- in either direction. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXV: The weaker the data available upon which to base one's conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXVI: The thickness of the proposal required to win a multimillion dollar contract is about one millimeter per million dollars. If all the proposals conforming to this standard were piled on top of each other at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, it would probably be a good idea. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXVII: Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustine's Law Number XXXVIII: The early bird gets the worm. The early worm...gets eaten. -- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta %% Augustus, for splashing his soup, Was put for the night on the stoop; In the morning he'd not Repented a jot, And next day he was dead of the croup. -- Edward Gorey %% Aunt Patty: "Nothing dear, I'm just trashing your father." Lisa: "Well, I wish you wouldn't because, aside from the fact that he has the same frailties as all human beings, he's the only father I have therefore he is my model of manhood and my estimation of him will govern my prospects of my adult relationships. So, I hope you bear in mind that any knock at him is a knock at me and I am far too young to defend myself against such onsluaghts." Aunt Patty: "Uh, huh. Go watch your cartoon show, dear." -- "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", from The Simpsons %% Auntie Em! Auntie Em! %% Auntie Em- Hate you- Hate Kansas- Taking the dog -- Dorothy %% Auntie Histamine %% Auribus teneo lupum. (I hold a wolf by the ears.) %% Australia's a lovely land It's full of bonza blokes, Sheilas, beer and no-one's queer Except in Pommie jokes. Australians are lovely chaps They're God's own chosen race. If they ever see a fairy Pom They'll smash him in the face. Australians like dressing up In skirts and having fun And that's all we were doing When the Vice Squad came along. -- Monty Python %% Australia, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Australian Student Struck By Lightning For The Sixteenth Time. %% Australians do it down under. %% Authentic, adj. Indubitably true, in somebody's opinion. %% Author's Note: "This is a scurvy tune ..." %% Authoritarian socialism has failed almost everywhere, but you will find not a single Marxist who will say it has failed because it was wrong or impractical. He will say is has failed because nobody went far enough with it. So failure never proves that a myth is wrong. -- Jean-Francois Revel %% Authority and liberty are two incompatible ideas.... Liberty diminishes in proportion as man progresses and becomes civilized. -- Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) %% Authority forgets a dying king. -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson %% Authority intoxicates, And makes mere sots of magistrates. The fumes of it invade the brain, And make men giddy, proud and vain; By this the fool commands the wise The noble with the base complies. The sot assumes the rule of wit, And cowards make the base submit. -- Butler %% Authority is a poor substitute for leadership. -- John Luther %% Authority is no stronger than the man who wields it. -- Dolores E. McGuire %% Authority tends to assign jobs to those least able to do them. -- Richard C. Cornuelle %% Authority without wisdom is like a heavy ax without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. -- Anne Bradstreet %% Authorization for a project will be granted only when none of the authorizers can be blamed if the project fails but when all of the authorizers can claim credit if it succeeds. %% Authors (and perhaps columnists) eventually rise to the top of whatever depths they were once able to plumb. -- Stanley Kaufman %% Auto Answer : What the author of this column should do when informed that a COMPUTE! editor is calling to find out where in blazes this month's column is. %% Auto mechanics do it under hoods, using oil and grease. %% Autobiography is the history of motorcars. %% Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that one over again, too. Who decides? -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Automatic calling unit - teenager with a telephone -- Data communications glossary %% Automobile, n.: A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down pedestrians. %% Autopsy is a dying practice. %% Availability of manuscripts in a given subject area is inversely proportional to the need for books in that area. %% Available May 1st - Version 1.0 may ship to dealers August 1st. %% Available soon - Should be out within a year. %% Avarice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the read the nearer we approach to our journey's end. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Avarice increases with the increasing pile of gold. -- Juvenal %% Avarice is always poor, but poor by her own fault. -- Johnson %% Avarice is always poor. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Avarice is the vice of declining years. -- George Bancroft %% Avarice: generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Avec! %% Avert misunderstanding by calm, poise, and a .44 magnum. %% Avert misunderstanding by calm, poise, and balance. %% Avoid GOTOs completely if you can keep the program readable. %% Avoid Quiet and Placid persons unless you are in Need of Sleep. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata" %% Avoid The Noid. %% Avoid any enterprise which will require new clothes. %% Avoid contact with skin. %% Avoid emus for the rest of the week. %% Avoid fried foods which angry up the blood. -- Satchel Paige %% Avoid gunfire in the bathroom tonight. %% Avoid him. He's a Commie. %% Avoid insincere people. %% Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry (nota bene: Circumstances can force your hand. So think ahead!) -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Avoid penguins. %% Avoid reality at all costs. %% Avoid revolution or expect to get shot. Mother and I will grieve, but we will gladly buy a dinner for the National Guardsman who shot you. -- Dr. Paul Williamson, father of a Kent State student %% Avoid running at all times. -- Satchel Paige %% Avoid strange women and temporary variables. %% Avoid temporary variables. %% Avoid the Fortran arithmetic IF. %% Avoid the Mu Shu Pork. %% Avoid the chicken salad. %% Avoid the end-of-the-year rush. Fail your exams now. %% Avoid unnecessary branches. %% Avoiding the thief's stiletto, you stumble to the floor, dropping your #. %% Awright, which one of you hid my PENIS ENVY? %% B-) message from Batman !!! %% B.C.- [thinking] "Do you believe in ESP?" Peter - [thinking] "Do you believe in ESP?" B.C. & Peter - [aloud] "No." %% B4 I4Q, RU/18 QT 3.14 %% B: Well, I'll tell you. I just got myself a paramour. A: A paramour??? At your age??? B: Sure. Why not at my age? A: Well, what did your wife say? B: My wife? Why should she care how I cut the grass? %% BABY BORN IN AQUARIUM! %% BABYSITTERS charge by the hour. %% BACHELOR: A guy who is footloose and fiancee-free. %% BACKWARD CONDITIONING: Putting saliva in a dog's mouth in an attempt to make a bell ring. %% BAD CRAZINESS, MAN!!! %% BAD: /B-A-D/ [IBM: acronym, `Broken As Designed'] adj. Said of a program that is {bogus} because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of bugginess. See {working as designed}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BAILEY'S BUREAUCRATIC RULE: Massive expenditures obscure the evidence of bad judgement. %% BAILIFFS always come to order. %% BAKER'S LAW: You never want the one you can afford. %% BAKERS knead it daily. %% BALANCES'S LAW OF RELATIVITY: The length of a minute is determined by which side of the bathroom door you are on. %% BALLISTOPHOBIA: Fear of bullets; OTOPHOBIA: Fear of opening one's eyes. PECCATOPHOBIA: Fear of sinning. TAPHEPHOBIA: Fear of being buried alive. SITOPHOBIA: Fear of food. TRICHOPHOBIA: Fear of hair. VESTIPHOBIA: Fear of clothing. %% BALTIMORE: A wharf-rat stealing Diogenes' lamp. %% BAND MEMBERS play all night. %% BANES: a type of food. "Ah love pinto banes!" -- Texan Dictionary %% BANG n. Common alternate name for EXCL (q.v.), especially at CMU. See SHRIEK. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BARBARA STANWYCK makes me nervous!! %% BARBERS do it with shear pleasure. %% BARF [from the "layman" slang, meaning "vomit"] 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. v. Choke, as on input. May mean to give an error message. "The function `=' compares two fixnums or two flonums, and barfs on anything else." 3. BARFULOUS, BARFUCIOUS: adj. Said of something which would make anyone barf, if only for aesthetic reasons. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BARKER'S LAW FOR CIVIL SERVANTS: Start slow and taper off. %% BARNARD'S LAW OF CORRESPONDANCE: Important letters which contain no errors will develop errors in the mail. Corresponding errors will show up in the duplicate while the Boss is reading it. %% BARRY ... That was the most HEART-WARMING rendition of "I DID IT MY WAY" I've ever heard!! %% BARTENDERS do it on the rocks. %% BASEBALL PLAYERS make it to first base. %% BASIC -- A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch the car as soon as you can afford a new one. %% BASIC LAW OF EXAMS: The more you study for an exam, the less sure you are which answer they want. %% BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'. %% BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing. -- Seymour Papert %% BASIC is your friend. %% BASIC: n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like {Pascal}) of the bad things that happen when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10--20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will bite him/her later if he/she tries to hack in a real language. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BASKETBALL PLAYERS score more often. %% BAUD - lady of the evening -- Data communications glossary %% BBS : Tall tales of telecomputing told by insects that produce honey. %% BBS: /B-B-S/ [abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] n. An electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into {topic group}s. Thousands of local BBS systems are in operation throughout the U.S., typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of USENET and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tend to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the hacker culture, but they serve a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise be unable to exchange code at all. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BE ALERT! - What this country needs are more lerts. %% BE ALERT!!!! (The world needs more lerts ...) %% BEAN: a living person. "He's a right nice human bean!" -- Texan Dictionary %% BEAR: an alcoholic beverage. "Yew ever taste light bear?" -- Texan Dictionary %% BEAT ME, BITE ME, WHIP ME, FUCK ME!!! %% BEEF STROGANOFF: A bull masturbating. %% BEEKEEPERS like to eat their honey. %% BEER BREWERS do it with more hops. %% BEER DRINKERS get more head. %% BELA LUGOSI is my co-pilot.. %% BELIEF: Something you do not believe. %% BELL'S REVERSE LAW: Taking a bath is a certain way to make the phone ring. %% BELLS AND WHISTLES n. Unnecessary but useful (or amusing) features of a program. "Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add some bells and whistles." Nobody seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a whistle. %% BEST non sequitur FOR 1988: "Let's cut through the demagoguery. America is #1." -- George Bush %% BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: The single girl's motto. %% BEWARE! People acting under the influence of human nature. %% BFI: /B-F-I/ n. See {brute force and ignorance}. Also encountered in the variants `BFMI', `brute force and *massive* ignorance' and `BFBI' `brute force and bloody ignorance'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI-BI- %% BICYCLISTS do it with 10 speeds. %% BIFF: /bif/ [USENET] n. The most famous {pseudo}, and the prototypical {newbie}. Articles from BIFF are characterized by all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, `cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ HE"S A K00L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of {talk mode} abbreviations, a long {sig block} (sometimes even a {doubled sig}), and unbounded na"ivet'e. BIFF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. BIFF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However, {BITNET} seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that BIFF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by BIFF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address: BIFF@BIT.NET. [1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that BIFF was originally created by Joe Talmadge , also the author of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible". The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who posted BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted for the amusement of the net at large. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BIGNUMS [from Macsyma] n. 1. In backgammon, large numbers on the dice. 2. Multiple-precision (sometimes infinitely extendible) integers and, through analogy, any very large numbers. 3. EL CAMINO BIGNUM: El Camino Real, a street through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended (and still appears in places) all the way to Mexico City. It was termed "El Camino Double Precision" when someone noted it was a very long street, and then "El Camino Bignum" when it was pointed out that it was hundreds of miles long. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BIN [short for BINARY; used as a second file name on ITS] 1. n. BINARY. 2. BIN FILE: A file containing the BIN for a program. Usage: used at MIT, which runs on ITS. The equivalent term at Stanford is DMP (pronounced "dump") FILE. Other names used include SAV ("save") FILE (DEC and Tenex), SHR ("share") and LOW FILES (DEC), and EXE ("ex'ee") FILE (DEC and Twenex). Also in this category are the input files to the various flavors of linking loaders (LOADER, LINK-10, STINK), called REL FILES. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BINARY n. The object code for a program. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BIT BUCKET n. 1. A receptacle used to hold the runoff from the computer's shift registers. 2. Mythical destination of deleted files, GC'ed memory, and other no-longer-accessible data. 3. The physical device associated with "NUL:". -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BIT n. 1. The unit of information; the amount of information obtained by asking a yes-or-no question. "Bits" is often used simply to mean information, as in "Give me bits about DPL replicators". 2. [By extension from "interrupt bits" on a computer] A reminder that something should be done or talked about eventually. Upon seeing someone that you haven't talked to for a while, it's common for one or both to say, "I have a bit set for you." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BITBLT (bit'blit) 1. v. To perform a complex operation on a large block of bits, usually involving the bits being displayed on a bitmapped raster screen. See BLT. 2. n. The operation itself. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BITNET: /bit'net/ [acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] n. Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see {network, the}). The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs and VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicate using 80-character {{EBCDIC}} card images (see {eighty-column mind}); thus, they tend to mangle the headers and text of third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/{RFC}-822 world with annoying regularity. BITNET is also notorious as the apparent home of {BIFF}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BLETCH [from German "brechen", to vomit (?)] 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. BLETCHEROUS: adj. Disgusting in design or function. "This keyboard is bletcherous!" Usage: slightly comic. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BLISS is ignorance. %% BLOB: [acronym, Binary Large OBject] n. Used by database people to refer to any random large block of bits which needs to be stored in a database, such as a picture or sound file. The essential point about a BLOB is that it's an object you can't interpret within the database itself. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BLT (blit, very rarely belt) [based on the PDP-10 block transfer instruction; confusing to users of the PDP-11] 1. v. To transfer a large contiguous package of information from one place to another. 2. THE BIG BLT: n. Shuffling operation on the PDP-10 under some operating systems that consumes a significant amount of computer time. 3. (usually pronounced B-L-T) n. Sandwich containing bacon, lettuce, and tomato. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BLT: /B-L-T/, /bl*t/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt. Synonym for {blit}. This is the original form of {blit} and the ancestor of {bitblt}. It referred to any large bit-field copy or move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation done on pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to as `The Big BLT'). The jargon usage has outlasted the {PDP-10} BLock Transfer instruction from which {BLT} derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic {BLT} almost always means `Branch if Less Than zero'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BNF: /B-N-F/ n. 1. [techspeak] Acronym for `Backus-Naur Form', a metasyntactic notation used to specify the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. Widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere, so that it must usually be learned by osmosis from other hackers. Consider this BNF for a U.S. postal address: ::= ::= | "." ::= [] | ::= [] ::= "," This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part followed by a last name followed by an optional `jr-part' (Jr., Sr., or dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the case of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment specifier, followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of a town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line." Note that many things (such as the format of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left unspecified. These are presumed to be obvious from context or detailed somewhere nearby. See also {parse}. 2. The term is also used loosely for any number of variants and extensions, possibly containing some or all of the {regexp} wildcards such as `*' or `+'. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the Algol-60 report; it uses `[]', which was introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I definition but is now universally recognized. 3. In {{science-fiction fandom}}, BNF means `Big-Name Fan' (someone famous or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions; this confused the hacker contingent terribly. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BOF: /B-O-F/ or /bof/ n. Abbreviation for the phrase "Birds Of a Feather" (flocking together), an informal discussion group and/or bull session scheduled on a conference program. It is not clear where or when this term originated, but it is now associated with the USENIX conferences for UNIX techies and was already established there by 1984. It was used earlier than that at DECUS conferences, and is reported to have been common at SHARE meetings as far back as the early 1960s. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BOGOSITY n. The degree to which something is BOGUS (q.v.). At CMU, bogosity is measured with a bogometer; typical use: in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say, "My bogometer just triggered." The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat (uL). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BOGUS (WPI, Yale, Stanford) adj. 1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus." 2. Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program." 3. False. "Your arguments are bogus." 4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus." 5. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas." (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of RANDOM.) [Etymological note from Lehman/Reid at CMU: "Bogus" was originally used (in this sense) at Princeton, in the late 60's. It was used not particularly in the CS department, but all over campus. It came to Yale, where one of us (Lehman) was an undergraduate, and (we assume) elsewhere through the efforts of Princeton alumni who brought the word with them from their alma mater. In the Yale case, the alumnus is Michael Shamos, who was a graduate student at Yale and is now a faculty member here. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized (e.g., autobogophobia: the fear of becoming bogotified).] -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BOHICA: Bend over, here it comes again. %% BOO! We changed Coke again! BLEAH! BLEAH! %% BOOB'S LAW: (from MURPHY'S LAW): You always find something the last place you look. %% BOOKKEEPERS do it with double entry %% BOREDOM: n: The state of being bored. THE: adv: 3 : beyond all others. STATE: n: 1b2: a condition of abnormal tension or excitement. OF: prep: 10 : used as a function word to indicate the position in time of an action or occurrence. BEING: n: 2 : something that actually exists. BORED: vt: 1 : to weary with ennui or tedium. ENNUI: n: a feeling of weariness. TEDIUM: n: Tiresome because of length or dullness. Therefore, BOREDOM actually means: Far beyond all other things, there exists a condition of abnormal tension or excitement that at this exact time or because of this exact position in the existance of all things, there is something that actually exists that has brought forth a great tendency to be very weary due to a feeling of weariness or because of a dullness that is present at this moment in time. %% BOSSES delegate the task to others. %% BOUNCE (Stanford) v. To play volleyball. "Bounce, bounce! Stop wasting time on the computer and get out to the court!" -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BOVE'S THEOREM The remaining work to finish in order to reach your goal increases as the deadline approaches. %% BOWLERS have bigger balls. %% BPI - a 1960's term used to describe unmentionable parts of the anatomy, as in 'you bet your bpi'. %% BQS: /B-Q-S/ adj. Syn. {Berkeley Quality Software}. %% BRAIN(3) UNIX Programmer's Manual BRAIN(3) NAME braindump, braincat, braincmp, brainlen - brain operations SYNOPSIS #include void braindump(b1, b2) brain b1, b2; void braincat(b1, b2) brain b1, b2; int braincmp(b1, b2, s) brain b1, b2; subject s; long brainlen(b1); brain b1; DESCRIPTION These functions work on null-terminated brains. They do not check for overflow of the receiving brain. braindump copies brain b2 to b1, stopping after the null axon has been moved. braincat appends a copy of brain b1 to the end of brain b2. braincmp compares its arguments and returns an integer greater than, equal to, or less than 0, according as knowledge about subject s in brain b1 is objectively greater than, equal to, or less than that in b2. brainlen returns the number of usable, non-null axons in b1. BUGS We tried to write a brainndump but you just can't shut some people up. SEE ALSO return_of_the_living_dead(1) return_of_the_living_dead(2) scanners(1) - effects of overflow brain-a-matic(4) - Ronco device driver %% BRAIN-DAMAGED [generalization of "Honeywell Brain Damage" (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Multics] adj. Obviously wrong; cretinous; demented. There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BREAK v. 1. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the system broke the TELNET server." 2. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may be examined for debugging purposes. The place where it stops is a BREAKPOINT. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BREAKTHROUGH: we finally figured out a way to sell it %% BRICKLAYERS lay all day. %% BRIDGE PLAYERS try to get a rubber. %% BRIEFCASE: A trial where the jury gets together and forms a lynching party. %% BRITT'S GREEN THUMB LAW: The life expectancy of a house plant varies inversely with it's price, and directly with it's ugliness. %% BROKEE: Someone who buys stocks on the advice of a broker. %% BROKET [by analogy with "bracket": a "broken bracket"] (primarily Stanford) n. Either of the characters "<" and ">". (At MIT, and apparently in The Real World (q.v.) as well, these are usually called ANGLE BRACKETS.) -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BRS: /B-R-S/ n. Syn. {Big Red Switch}. This abbreviation is fairly common on-line. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BRUNETTE BUSH: The dark side of the moon. %% BS: You remind me of a man. B: What man? BS: The man with the power. B: What power? BS: The power of voodoo. B: Voodoo? BS: You do. B: Do what? BS: Remind me of a man. B: What man? BS: The man with the power... -- Cary Grant, "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" %% BSD: /B-S-D/ n. [abbreviation for `Berkeley System Distribution'] a family of {{UNIX}} versions for the DEC {VAX} and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at {Berzerkeley} starting around 1980, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the UNIX world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986, and are still widely popular. See {{UNIX}}, {USG UNIX}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BUAF: // [abbreviation, from the alt.fan.warlord] n. Big Ugly ASCII Font --- a special form of {ASCII art}. Various programs exist for rendering text strings into block, bloob, and pseudo-script fonts in cells between four and six character cells on a side; this is smaller than the letters generated by older {banner} (sense 2) programs. These are sometimes used to render one's name in a {sig block}, and are critically referred to as `BUAF's. See {warlording}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BUAG: // [abbreviation, from the alt.fan.warlord] n. Big Ugly ASCII Graphic. Pejorative term for ugly {ASCII ART}, especially as found in {sig block}s. For some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in the least imaginative {sig block}s. See {warlording}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BUCKANEERS: What's under your buccanhat. -- [This is without a doubt the worst joke in the fortune collection. Ed.] %% BUCKY BITS (primarily Stanford) n. The bits produced by the CTRL and META shift keys on a Stanford (or Knight) keyboard. Rumor has it that the idea for extra bits for characters came from Niklaus Wirth, and that his nickname was `Bucky'. DOUBLE BUCKY: adj. Using both the CTRL and META keys. "The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BUG [from telephone terminology, "bugs in a telephone cable", blamed for noisy lines] n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program. See FEATURE. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BUG [from telephone terminology, "bugs in a telephone cable", blamed for noisy lines; however, Jean Sammet has repeatedly been heard to claim that the use of the term in CS comes from a story concerning actual bugs found wedged in an early malfunctioning computer] n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program. (People can have bugs too (even winners) as in "PHW is a super winner, but he has some bugs.") See FEATURE. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BUG: An elusive creature living in a program that makes it incorrect. The activity of "debugging", or removing bugs from a program, ends when people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed. -- Datamation (January 15, 1984) %% BUGS: A son of a glitch. %% BULLWINKLE: "You just leave that to my pal. He's the brains of the outfit." GENERAL: "What does that make YOU?" BULLWINKLE: "What else? An executive..." -- Jay Ward %% BUM 1. v. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions." 2. n. A small change to an algorithm to make it more efficient. Usage: somewhat rare. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BUM 1. v. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. The object of the verb is usually what was removed ("I managed to bum three more instructions.") but can be the program being changed ("I bummed the inner loop down to seven microseconds.") 2. n. A small change to an algorithm to make it more efficient. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BUREAUCRACY - You have two cows. The government takes both, shoots one and pours the milk down the drain. %% BUREAUCRACY: a method for transforming energy into solid waste. %% BUS DRIVERS come early and pull out on time. %% BUS ERROR - core dump %% BUSINESS CAREER WORKSHOPS Money Can Make You Rich Tawkin' Good: How to Improve Your Spitch and Get a More Betterer Payn' Job I Made $100 in Real Estate Career Opportunities in Iran Under-Achiever's Guide to'Very Small Business Opportunities Filler Phrases for Thesis Writers Tax Shelters for the Indigent Looters Guide to American Cities %% BUTCHERS have better meat. %% BUZZ v. To run in a very tight loop, perhaps without guarantee of getting out. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% BWQ: /B-W-Q/ [IBM: abbreviation, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to {bogosity}. See {TLA}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% BYC (Born General Features: Usually very similar to RX's and/or Fornies Yesterday in appearance; Face always peaceful, albeit glazed; Cross Christian) on necklace, pin, bracelet, or earrings mandatory; Bible always within reach; Optional literary pamphlets. 'Jesus Freak' 'Holy Roller' Behavior Summary: BYC's are highly insecure individuals who adopt Christianity as a means of identity and self- justification. This means that they feel everything they do is 'Right' because they are, after all, the 'Chosen Few.' It also means they are incapable of inhaling without a holy stamp of approval. BYC's are prepared to flash a bible verse to back up their position while refusing to accept any verse that weakens it. BYC's are extremely dogmatic and know no shame. %% Ba DOOM. -- Bob Dickson %% Babies are such a nice way to start people. -- Don Herold %% Babies do it in their pants. %% Babies don't need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach... it pisses me off! I'll go over to a little baby and say, "What are you doing here? You haven't worked a day in your life!" -- Steve Wright %% Baby On Board. %% Baby carriage bumper sticker: ``POO-POO HAPPENS!'' -- Bob Irwin, birwin@ficc.ferranti.com %% Baby needs a new pair of shoes. -- Data, "The Royale", stardate 42625.4 %% Baby's heads have no hair, Old men's heads are just as bare; Between the cradle and the grave, Lies a haircut and a shave. %% Baby's heads have no hair, Old men's heads are just as bare; Between the cradle and the grave, Lies a haircut and a shave. Back to a simpler time of skins and stones! When things go wrong -- the answer's in the stars Or evil spells or reading chicken bones Or sacrifices to all gods but Mars. -- Jack Kirwan %% Baby... -- The Late Elvis Presley %% Babylon, Babylonnnnnn, Babylon Babylon try to kill the rasta Bung down Babylon, Bung down Babylon Babylon goin down in flames, goin down in flames Armagideon, Armagideon Babylon burning, burning, burning You who did not choose the side of peace and one love Burn, Burn, Burn Armagideon time is coming Zion is only for the Rastaman Living ital is the only way Praise the most high, Rasta Far I Ever living, Ever feeling Emperor Haile Selassie I PRAISE JAH %% Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Bach did it with the organ. %% Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect. -- Nicolas Chamfort %% Back in '80 or '81 the workers were rioting in Gdansk and there were fears that the Soviets would invade Poland to put down the demonstrations. Foreign correspondents were curious as to just what the Poles would do if they were invaded. They asked, "What will you do if the East Germans invade from the West and the Soviets invade from the East? Who will you fight first?" To which the Poles replied, "Why, we will fight the Germans first. Business before pleasure." %% Back in the Dark Ages, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation occupied a place of glory in the eyes of the young. The FBI under John Edgar Hoover was an organization to be held up as a goal for young men of sufficient "patriotism, valor, fidelity, and abilities." Now then, see what has happened! In addition to its various other transgressions, such as the Randy Weaver disaster in Idaho, the FBI has now come out for the disarmament of the American people, and has issued an official press release totally exonerating the Bureau for any sort of transgression in the Waco atrocity. I do not suppose there is anyone who has not seen the Linda Thompson tape of the action of the Federal ninja at Waco. The attempt to clear the Feds of any sort of misdemeanor in that episode completely destroys the credibility of the Bureau. Lo how the mighty are fallen! -- Jeff Cooper %% Back in the bad old days when I was working in a fast food joint... There was one female type person on the night crew. A very attractive young lady with a penchant for wearing mini-skirts. Needless to say, we did not object to this in the least. In fact, we used to let her wipe down the tables up front, instead of slopping the french fryers and such. Admittedly one of our reasons was that in order to wipe down the tables she had to lean far over them and stretch. Generally facing away from the counter. This was when we learned that she tended to wear panties that matched her nail polish. No kidding! She came in one day with black nail polish with silver speckles, and it turned out that she was wearing black panties with silver spangles. Another day, she came in wearing pink nail polish on one hand, and blue on the other. The panties were blue on one cheek, and pink on the other. But ... one evening ... great anticipation ... When would she EVER go out and wipe the tables ??? ... She came in to work, and she was wearing no nail polish! She never did tables that night, and we never knew. I suspect we were set up. %% Back in the days of old Adam The grass served as mattress for madam, And they spent the whole day On the sex that today They would bounce on box springs, if they had 'em. %% Back in the early days of Nissan, before "Human Engineering", even before they came up with the name Nissan. Yes, back when they were known as Datsun. They were attempting to break into the American market when the most popular vehicle of the year was the Buick Roadmaster. The people at Datsun decided to win the American people over with service and quality. The first years model had only one snag, a cog in the drive train was not made to the proper precision. After 800 miles, it would cause the transmission to drop. They had several hundred models at dealers in Chicago that all needed replacement parts right away. So the execs in Japan, after executing the engineers and all the managers in between, had the new cogs made and sent out on a specially chartered cargo jet. The jet was on its way to Chicago, when it hit some turbulence. The turbulence was so great that the crate of cogs went flying against the door, shattered the crate, knocked the door open and fell out near Cedar Rapids Iowa. On the ground, a farmer and his son were putting the cows in the barn when they looked out and saw the cogs spewing forth from the sky. The son proclaimed, "Look Dad, it's raining datsun cogs!". %% Back in the good ole days in Texas, when stagecoaches and the like was popular, there were three people in a stagecoach one day: a true red-blooded born-and-raised Texas gentleman, a tenderfoot city-slicker from back East, and a beautiful and well-endowed Texas lady. The city-slicker kept eyeing the lady, and finally he leaned forward and said, "Lady, I'll give you $10 for a blow job." The Texas gentleman looked appalled, pulled out his pistol, and killed the city-slicker on the spot. The lady gasped and said, "Thank you, suh, for defendin' mah honor!" Whereupon the Texan holstered his gun and said, "Your honor, hell! No tenderfoot is gonna raise the price of women in Texas!" %% Back in the twentieth century, the H-bomb was the ultimate weapon, their doomsday machine. And we used something like it to destroy another doomsday machine. Probably the first time such a weapon has ever been used for constructive purposes. -- Kirk, "The Doomsday Machine," stardate 4202.9 %% Back of every achievement is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law. -- Brooks Hays %% Back off or I'll turn your little man into a torch. I promise him exquisite pain. -- Lore, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4 %% Back off, hair ball. %% Back to a simpler time of skins and stones! When things go wrong -- the answers in the stars Or evil spells or reading chicken bones Or sacrifices to all gods but Mars. -- Jack Kirwan %% Back when I was a boy, it was 40 miles to everywhere, uphill both ways and it was always snowing. %% Back when I was a boy, we had to carve our own ICs out of wood! %% Back when I was attending the University of Utah, The Daily Utah Chronicle ran a joke ad for a debate between Phil Donahue and Whiskers the Lamb. Over 30 people showed up. (what they were expecting, God only knows.) %% Back-seat driving is a form of duel control. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% Back: That part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate in your adversity. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Backbite: To speak of a man as you find him, when he can't find you. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Backed up the system lately? %% Backup - The duplicate copy of crucial data that no one bothered to make. %% Bad Thing: [from the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody `1066 And All That'] n. Something that can't possibly result in improvement of the subject. This term is always capitalized, as in "Replacing all of the 9600-baud modems with bicycle couriers would be a Bad Thing". Oppose {Good Thing}. British correspondents confirm that {Bad Thing} and {Good Thing} (and prob. therefore {Right Thing} and {Wrong Thing}) come from the book referenced in the etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good Kings but Bad Things. This has apparently created a mainstream idiom on the British side of the pond. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first or second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood. -- St. Augustine %% Bad day to drive off a cliff. %% Bad dog! Bad dog! %% Bad free count %% Bad law is more likely to be supplemented than repealed. -- Dalin B. Oaks %% Bad luck is universal. Don't take it personally. -- Solomon Short %% Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live. -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% Bad money drives out good. -- Sir Thomas Gresham %% Bad news about the two lighthouse keepers -- their marriage is on the rocks. %% Bad news does not improve with age. -- Jody Powell %% Bad news drives good news out of the media. -- Lee Loevinger %% Bad news travels fast. %% Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. -- George Jean Nathan %% Bad spellers of the world, untie. %% Bad taste is timeless. -- Solomon Short %% Bad temper gets most folks into lots of trouble. Pride manages to keep them in it. %% Bad weather always looks worse through a window. %% Badness comes in waves. %% Bag your face! %% Bagbiter: 1. n.; Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. 2. adj.: Failing hardware or software. "This bagbiting system won't let me get out of spacewar." Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of "biting the bag". Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPER, CHOMPING. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% Bagdikian's Observation: Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" on a ukelele. %% Bait: A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Baker's First Law of Federal Geometry: A block grant is a solid mass of money surrounded on all sides by governors. %% Bakers do it for the dough. %% Bald, n: hairing impaired %% Bald: follicularly challenged. %% Baldness is a kind of failure. Wish I'd made the greyed. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% Baldwin's Corollary to Schmidt's Law: If it isn't broken, don't fix it. %% Ballet dancers do it on tip-toe. %% Balls Law: The angle of the dangle is directly proportional to the heat of the meat provided that the thrusts of the busts are constant. %% Baltimore, n.: Where the women wear turtleneck sweaters to hide their flea collars. %% Bambi could never have been a mother if her hart hadn't been in the right place. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% Bambification: The mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing borgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare. %% Banacek's Eighteenth Polish Proverb: The hippo has no sting, but the wise man would rather be sat upon by the bee. %% Banana pickers do it in bunches. %% Bandini: Good shit. %% Bands that Belong Together Beach Boys and UB40 Fine Young Cannibals and Missing Persons Guess Who and Who Kansas and Toto Madonna and Super Tramp Milli Vanilli and The Pretenders Styx and Stones %% Banectomy, n.: The removal of bruises on a banana. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Banish Evil from the world? Nonsense! Encourage it, foster it, sponsor it. The world owes Evil a debt beyond imagination. Think! Without greed ambition falters. Without vanity art becomes idle musing. Without cruelty benevolence lapses to passivity. Superstition has shamed man into self-reliance and, without stupidity, where would be the savor of superior understanding? -- Magnus Ridolf %% Bank error in your favor. Collect $200. %% Bankers do it for money, but there is a penalty for early withdrawal. %% Bankers do it with interest (penalty for early withdrawal). %% Bankers do it with interest. %% Bankers' Hours: That part of the day when it is too hot to play golf. %% Banner seen in Warsaw: Long live the radiant friendship between the peoples of Poland and the Soviet Union! %% Bar Chart - A list of places to go when it's Miller time. %% Bar magnets have north and south poles, horseshoe magnets have east and west poles. %% Barach's Rule: An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own physician. %% Barb Y.R. Fence %% Barbara's Rules of Bitter Experience: (1) When you empty a drawer for his clothes and a shelf for his toiletries, the relationship ends. (2) When you finally buy pretty stationary to continue the correspondence, he stops writing. %% Barbara: "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Ryan: "You know, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard." %% Barbers do it with Bryll Cream. %% Barbers do it with scissors. %% Barbers in Waterloo, Nebraska, are forbidden by law to eat onions between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. %% Barbie says, Take quaaludes in gin and go to a disco right away! But Ken says, WOO-WOO!! No credit at "Mr. Liquor"!! %% Barclaycard - Its trendy to be in debt. %% Bare feet magnetize sharp metal objects so they always point upward from the floor--especially in the dark. -- Al Ross %% Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of Dodge, drinking warm beer, outside in the alley. %% Barf! %% Barfucius say: A good memory does not equal an airsickness bag in an Electrolux. %% Bargain: anything the customer thinks the store is losing money on. -- Kin Hubbard %% Barium: What you do when CPR fails. %% Barker's Proof: Proofreading is more effective after publication. %% Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Barr's Hypothesis: Familiarity breeds content. %% Bart has a singular penis For his wife who is built like a Venus. He awoke with a fright Last Saturday night: "Hey! Something is coming between us!" %% Bart: "But, Dad, you're giving in to mob mentality." Homer: "No, I'm not. I'm hopping on the band wagon. Now come on son, get with the winning team." -- "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% Bart: "Is it okay if the balloons say 'Happy Birthday' on them?" Herman: "Err, I'd rather they say 'Death From Above', but I guess that'll do." -- "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% Bart: "Turkey farm." Lisa: "Nope." Bart: "Skunks." Lisa: "Nope." Bart: "Slaughter house.." Lisa: "Nope." Marge: "What are you doing back there?" Lisa: "We're playing 'What's That Odor'?" Maggie: "*SUCK* *SUCK*" Bart: "Dad's feet?" Homer: "BART!" Lisa: "You win, Bart!" Homer: "LISA!" -- "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% Bart: "I think this guy's a little crazy." Grandpa: "General Patton was a little crazy. This guy's totally out of his mind! We can't fail!" -- "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% Bart: "Sir, did you lose your arm in the war?" Herman (?): "Well, let's just say that the next time your teacher tells you not to stick your arm out the bus window, you DO IT!" -- "Bart the General", from The Simpsons %% Bart: "You gotta help me! These two guys work me night and day. They don't feed me. They make me sleep on the floor. They put anti-freeze in the wine and they gave my red hat to the donkey!" French policeman: "Anti-freeze in the wine?! That is a very serious crime!" -- English subtitles in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% Barth's Distinction: There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't. %% BartleMUD: /bar'tl-muhd/ n. Any of the MUDs derived from the original MUD game by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw (see {MUD}). BartleMUDs are noted for their (usually slightly offbeat) humor, dry but friendly syntax, and lack of adjectives in object descriptions, so a player is likely to come across `brand172', for instance (see {brand brand brand}). Bartle has taken a bad rap in some MUDding circles for supposedly originating this term, but (like the story that MUD is a trademark) this appears to be a myth; he uses `MUD1'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Bartz's Law of Hokey Horsepuckery: The more ridiculous a belief system, the higher the probability of its success. -- Wayne R. Bartz %% Baruch's Observation: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. %% Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers. -- Tom Lehrer %% Baseball Players do it with their bats. %% Baseball is a skilled game. It's America's game -- it, and high taxes. -- Will Rogers %% Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game. -- Edward Abbey %% Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero. -- Edward Abbey %% Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? (1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. (2) Advising the President. (3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin." -- David Letterman %% Basic Definitions of Science: If it's green or wiggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics. %% Basic is a high level languish. %% Basic is a high level languish. APL is a high level anguish. %% Basic, n.: A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company. %% Bassists do it with their fingers %% Bassoonists have long ones. %% Bat1: "Hey! Did you hear there's a guano shortage? Bat2: "No shit?" %% Bathquake, n.: The violent quake that rattles the entire house when the water faucet is turned on to a certain point. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Bathroom graffiti: "For a good time, call 911." %% Batman does it with Robin. %% Batman loves Robin. %% Batteries not included. %% Battery: Electrochemical storage device capable of lighting an incandescent lamp of a wattage about equal to that of a refrigerator bulb for a period of 15 minutes after having been charged for 2 hours. -- from "Sailing" by Henry Beard and Roy Mckie %% Battling inanimate objects is pointless. %% Be a better psychiatrist and the world will beat a psychopath to your door. %% Be a defensive driver. Buy a Tiger M31. %% Be advanced telepath. Open communication of data from control central to all terminal stations. Control demands periodic reports from all terminals. Repeat. Use coded frequencies. Secure all telecasts. Full alert. %% Be affectionate to one who adores you. %% Be alert! America needs more lerts. %% Be alert, we need all the lerts we can get. %% Be always displeased with what thou art, if you desirest to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest. But if thou have enough thou perishest. Always add, always walk, always proceed. Neither stand still, nor go back, nor deviate. -- St. Augustine %% Be as perfect as you can, for that is all you can do. -- Brigham Young %% 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" %% Be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds. -- Homer %% Be braver -- you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. %% Be calm in arguing, for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy. %% Be careful how you get yourself involved with persons or situations that can't bear inspection. %% Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours. -- James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name" 1961 %% Be careful what you wish for, you may get it. -- Uhura, "The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% Be careful when a loop exits to the same place from side and bottom. %% Be careful when eating bananas. Monsters might slip on the peels. %% Be careful when eating salmon - your fingers might become greasy. %% Be careful when the moon is its its last quarter. %% Be careful when throwing a boomerang - you might hit the back of your head. %% Be careful when you bite into your hamburger. -- Derek Bok %% Be careful whilst playing under the anvil tree. %% Be careful who you step on on the way up; you never know who you'll pass on the way down. %% Be careful! Is it classified? %% Be careful! New moon tonight. %% Be cautious in your daily affairs. %% Be cheerful while you are alive. -- Phathotep (24th Century B.C.) %% Be circumspect in your liaisons with women. It is better to be seen at the opera with a man than at mass with a woman. -- DeMaintenon %% Be commonplace and creeping, and you will be a success. -- Pierre de Beaumarchais (1732-1799) %% Be concise in your writing and talking, especially when giving instructions to others. %% Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% Be courteous. Have genuine consideration for other people's feelings, wishes and situations. %% Be different, act normal. %% Be different: conform. %% Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess. -- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) %% Be ever vigilant, keep your bodies clean and pure, and you will have a strength that is heaven-sent. -- Gene Hansen, Miss. Committee %% Be firm, fly low and stay cool.... -- Duke, from Doonesbury %% Be free and open and breezy! Enjoy! Things won't get any better so get used to it. %% Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. -- Genesis 1:28 %% Be generous. Remember that it is the productivity of others that makes possible your executive position. %% Be good and you will be lonesome. %% Be happy. It is a way of being wise. %% Be incredibly nice to someone today. %% Be incredibly nice to someone tomorrow. %% Be independent. Insult a rich relative today. %% Be it ever so vile, there's no place like home. -- Edward Abbey %% Be it our wealth, our jobs, or even our homes; nothing is safe while the legislature is in session. %% Be just and fear not: Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's, thy God's, and truth's. -- William Shakespeare %% Be kind to animals. Take a bitch to dinner. %% Be kind to your inferiors, if you can find any. %% Be like Elton John - Get behind the boys at Watford every week %% Be like a duck -- keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil under water. %% Be more sympathetic. %% Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it; nor at any time in the extremities of it. -- Lavater %% Be nice to people on the way up because you'll meet them on your way down. -- Wilson Mizner %% Be nice to someone. %% Be nice to your friends; if it weren't for them, you would be a total stranger. %% Be not anxious about what you have, but about what you are. -- Pope St. Gregory I %% Be not diverted from your duty by any idle reflections the silly world may make upon you, for their censures are not in your power, and consequently should not be any part of your concern. -- Epictetus %% Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Be of good cheer: We'll live to piss on the graves of our enemies. -- Edward Abbey %% Be open to other people--they may enrich your dream. %% Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you. -- Ovid %% Be patient with those who are slower than you, for they make you look better. %% Be pleasant no matter how much it hurts. -- Kirk, "Elaan of Troyius," stardate 4372.5 %% Be prepared to accept sacrifices. Vestal virgins aren't all that bad. %% Be prepared to go mad with fixed rule and method. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Be prepared... that's the Boy Scout's solemn creed. Be prepared... to be clean in word and deed. Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice, Unless you get a good percentage of her price ... -- Tom Lehrer %% Be quiet! Or disappear back where you came from. I can't disappear...any more than you could win a beauty contest. -- Worf and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Be realistic: Plan for a miracle. -- "Bumper Snickers" %% Be security conscious -- National defense is at stake. %% Be security conscious -- because 80 percent of people are caused by accident. %% Be seeing you ... %% Be self-reliant and your success is assured. %% Be self-reliant and your success is assured. Unless you're incompetent. %% Be slow of tongue and quick of eye. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% Be sober and temperate, and you will be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Be sociable. Speak to the person next to you in the unemployment line tomorrow. %% Be stiff! %% Be sure each item is properly endorsed. %% Be sure to evaluate the bird-hand/bush ratio. %% Be sure to obtain meteorological information before leaving on vacation. %% Be sure to save your money; you never know when it might be worth something again. %% Be tactful; overlook not your own opportunity. %% Be thankful that you don't live in Upland. %% Be the first to go unless you think. %% Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. -- William Shakespeare %% Be tolerant of those who disagree with you -- after all, they have a right to their ridiculous opinions. %% Be valiant, but not too venturous. Let thy attire be comely, but not costly. -- John Lyly %% Be very quiet, we're hunting Wabbits! %% Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error. Where one has been saved by a true estimation of another's weakness, thousands have been destroyed by false appreciation of their own strength. -- Charles C. Colton %% Be vewwy, vewwy quiet ... I'm hunting wabbits ... heh, heh, heh, heh. %% Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Be where you are, and go where you're going. %% Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go down upon your wrath. -- Ephesians iv, 26 %% Be yourself--it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it %% Be-bop-a-lou-la, she's my baby! %% Bea U.T.S. Skindeep %% Beam me out of here, Scotty; I appear to be trapped in a computer. %% Beam me up, Scotty! %% Beam me up, Scotty, the elevators don't work %% Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life here. -- James Tiberius Kirk %% Beam me up, Scotty. There's no Artificial Intelligence down here. %% Bean shooters are prohibited in Arkansas. %% Beards more than two and a half feet long are forbidden by law in Altoona, Pennsylvania. %% Bearing with the uncultured in gentleness, Fording the river with resolution, Not neglecting what is distant, Not regarding one's companions: Thus one may manage to walk in the middle. %% Beat the system. Unplug the computer. %% Beats as it sweeps as it cleans. %% Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, Waiting in a hot tureen! Who for such dainties would not stoop? Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish, Game, or any other dish? Who would not give all else for two pennyworth only of beautiful Soup? -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% Beautiful legs are sometimes without equal, but bow-legs are always without parallel. %% Beauty and harmony are as necessary to you as the very breath of life. %% Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused. -- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) %% Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance; but if it light well, it makes virtue shine and vice blush. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time. -- Marianne Moore %% Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Should the beholder have poor eyesight, he can ask the nearest person which girls look good. %% Beauty is not caused. It is. -- Emily Dickinson %% Beauty is one of the rare things which do not lead to doubt of God. -- Jean Anouilh %% Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense. -- Kin Hubbard %% Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through. -- Edward Abbey %% Beauty is power; a smile is its sword. -- Charles Reade %% Beauty is the answer. %% Beauty is the first present nature gives to woman and the first it takes away. -- George Brossin Mere %% Beauty is transitory. Beauty survives. -- Spock and Kirk, "That Which Survives," stardate unknown %% Beauty may be skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone! -- Redd Foxx %% Beauty seldom recommends one woman to another. %% Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Conduct of Life", 1860 %% Beauty without virtue is like a flower without perfume. %% Beauty's tears are lovelier than her smile. -- Campbell %% Beauty: That power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Beauty: it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it you don't need to have anything else; and it you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have. -- James Matthew Barrie %% Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.' -- Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) %% Because I do, Because I do not hope, Because I do not hope to survive Injustice from the Palace, death from the air, Because I do, only do, I continue... -- Thomas S. Pynchon %% Because french cream won't soften them boots and french kisses will not melt that heart of stone. %% Because he was human, because he had goodness, Because he was moral they called him insane. Delusions of grandeur, visions of splendor, A manic depressive who walks in the rain. Cinderella Man, doing what you can, They can't understand what it means. Cinderella Man, hang on to your plans. Try as they might they cannot steal your dreams. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% Because it's nicer to be with someone than it is not to be with someone. %% Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing. -- Barrow %% Because of the age of the patient, speed was increased for fear of the patient going bad on the table. %% Because of the greatness of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability in the Middle East. -- Jimmy Carter, 31 December 1977 %% Because the wine remembers. %% Because these are ancient times as a result there are not enough wetbacks to do the work for us. So harvest the barley before you plant it - it is easier that way. %% Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. -- Henrik Tikkanen %% Beck's Motto: Functionality; All the Functionality; And nothing but the Functionality. %% Beckhap's Law: Beauty times brains equals a constant. %% Become one with the universe. %% Bedfellows make strange politicians. %% Beef Seeking Missiles : The Soviet Union has put a halt to the development of guiding missiles. Instant they're putting huge amount of resources into developing "beef seeking" missiles, as they call it. According to Gorbachev, " Why would we want to develop highly advanced guiding missiles when we can bomb put the whole US by programming all our missiles to land on hamburger joints?" %% Been Transferred Lately? %% Beep!  %% Beer & Pretzels -- Breakfast of Champions. %% Beer is better then women Reason 1. You can enjoy a beer any time of the month. %% Beer is better then women Reason 10. When you go to a bar, you can always pick up a beer. %% Beer is better then women Reason 11. Beer never has a headache. %% Beer is better then women Reason 12. After you have had a beer the bottle is still worth a dime. %% Beer is better then women Reason 13. A beer won't get upset if you come home with beer on your breath. %% Beer is better then women Reason 14. If you pour beer right, you'll get good head. %% Beer is better then women Reason 15. You can have more than one beer in a night and not feel guilty. %% Beer is better then women Reason 16. A beer always goes down easily. %% Beer is better then women Reason 17. You can share a beer with your friends. %% Beer is better then women Reason 18. You always know you are the first one to pop a beer. %% Beer is better then women Reason 19. Beer doesn't demand legality. %% Beer is better then women Reason 2. Beer stains wash out. %% Beer is better then women Reason 20. You can enjoy a beer in public. %% Beer is better then women Reason 21. A beer doesn't care when you come home. %% Beer is better then women Reason 22. A frigid beer is a good beer. %% Beer is better then women Reason 23. You don't have to wash a beer before it tastes good. %% Beer is better then women Reason 3. You don't have to wine and dine beer. %% Beer is better then women Reason 4. Your beer will wait patiently in the car while you play sports. %% Beer is better then women Reason 5. If your beer goes flat you can toss it. %% Beer is better then women Reason 6. Beer is never late. %% Beer is better then women Reason 7. Hangovers go away. %% Beer is better then women Reason 8. A beer doesn't get angry if you get another beer. %% Beer is better then women Reason 9. Beer labels come off without a fight. %% Bees are very busy souls They have no time for birth controls And that is why in times like these There are so many Sons of Bees. %% Beethoven can write music, thank God -- but he can do nothing else on earth. -- Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) %% Beethoven did it apassionately. %% Beethoven had a noted career. %% Beethoven was the first to do it with a full orchestra. %% Before (Dean) Stockwell's recent comeback via BLUE VELVET and MARRIED TO THE MOB, he had been selling real estate in Los Angeles. Do you think that's where he learned to lip-sync Roy Orbison songs? -- Prof. Fred Hopkins %% Before Completion. Success. But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing, Gets his tail in the water, There is nothing that would further. %% Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), "Cosmic Religion" %% Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. -- Lord Rochester %% Before I knew the best part of my life had come, it had gone. %% Before I wrote here, this was empty space. %% Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego. %% Before a party or a trip, if it can, it will let rip. %% Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need more. -- Addison H. Hallock %% Before completion, attack brings misfortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. %% Before destruction a man's heart is haughty, but humility goes before honour. -- Psalms 18:12 %% Before giving a blood transfusion, find out if the blood is affirmative or negative. %% Before my birth, I had a name, But soon as born I changed the same: And when I'm laid within the tomb, I shall my father's name assume; I changed my name three days together, Yet live but one in any weather. Today %% Before reaching the age of 30, you will have experienced the joy of spraining an ankle, the wonder of unemployment, the thrill of partial hair loss and the ecstasy of unrequited love. %% Before they made him, they broke the mold. %% Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers. -- Gene Wolfe, "The Claw of the Conciliator" %% Before you find your handsome prince, you've got to kiss a lot of frogs. %% Before you have sex you have to be elected to a high government position. -- Zippy the Pinhead %% Before you is the entrance to the tower which rises from the center of the courtyard. In every visible direction the courtyard extends onward. %% Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with; something better than political opportunist slamming hate horseshit in the public park. -- Charles Bukowski, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man", 1969 %% Before you slip into unconsciousness, I'd like to have another kiss... %% Begathon, n.: A multi-day event on public television, used to raise money so you won't have to watch commercials. -- Rich Hall, Sniglets %% Beggar to well-dressed businessman: "Could you spare $20.95 for a fifth of Chivas?" %% Beggars should be no choosers. -- John Heywood %% Begin the day with a friendly voice, a companion unobtrusive. Plays that song that's so elusive, and the magic music makes your morning move. -- Rush, "Spirit of Radio" %% Behave yourselves, gentlemen. -- Yar, "Symbiosis", stardate unknown %% Behavior is a mirror in which every one displays his image. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Behind all the political rhetoric being hurled at us from abroad, we are bringing home one unassailable fact -- [terrorism is] a crime by any civilized standard, committed against innocent people, away from the scene of political conflict, and must be dealt with as a crime. . . . [I]n our recognition of the nature of terrorism as a crime lies our best hope of dealing with it. . . . [L]et us use the tools that we have. Let us invoke the cooperation we have the right to expect around the world, and with that cooperation let us shrink the dark and dank areas of sanctuary until these cowardly marauders are held to answer as criminals in an open and public trial for the crimes they have committed, and receive the punishment they so richly deserve. -- William H. Webster, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 15 Oct 1985 %% Behind every argument is someone's ignorance. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) %% Behind every great man is a great computer. %% Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind. -- anonymous male chauvinist %% Behind every great man, there is a woman -- urging him on. -- Harry Mudd, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% Behind every successful man is a surprised woman. -- Maryon Pearson %% Behind every successful man you'll find a woman with nothing to wear. %% Behind every successful person is an ass. %% Behind you is a bronze door which seems to be #. %% Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth. -- James III, 5 %% Behold the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" -- which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and -- watch that basket!" -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Behold the unborn fetus and Weep salt tears crocodilian; All life is sacred (save, of course, An enemy civilian). %% Behold the warranty ... the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away. %% Being a BALD HERO is almost as FESTIVE as a TATTOOED KNOCKWURST. %% Being a frog isn't as bad as it seems. Whenever anything bugs them, they eat it. %% Being a mime means never having to say you're sorry %% Being a miner, as soon as you're too old and tired and sick and stupid to do your job properly, you have to go, where the very opposite applies with the judges. -- Beyond the Fringe %% Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealings with men. -- Conrad %% Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is merely a good excuse not to play football. -- Fran Lebowitz %% Being average is being the best of the worst, or the worst of the best. %% Being blind, you cannot read the formula on the scroll. %% Being confused, you mispronounce the magic words ... %% Being creative is a job. %% Being disintegrated makes me ve-ry an-gry! %% Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want. -- Irving Kristol %% Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance ... -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Being human does have certain advantages -- being able to appreciate the beauty of a flower, of a woman. -- Kirk, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4658.9 %% Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important. -- Eugene McCarthy %% Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. %% Being normal is driving me crazy. %% Being popular is important. Otherwise people might not like you. %% Being prepared brings good fortune. If there are secret designs, it is disquieting. %% Being right too soon is socially unacceptable %% Being schizophrenic is better than living alone. %% Being sexy is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it %% Being stoned on marijuana isn't very different from being stoned on gin. -- Ralph Nader %% Being ugly isn't illegal. Yet. %% Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet. -- Edward Abbey %% Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. -- Edward Abbey %% Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses.... -- Edward Abbey %% Believe 1% of what you see, and none of what you hear. %% Believe it or not. I always considered myself a moderate. "What changed your mind?" Being stationed here for six months. Watching the body count grow. The three assassination attempts on my life. "Well, that'll change your point of view." -- Alexana Devos and Riker, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7 %% Believe me, there's nothing tougher to overcome [than a sense of purpose], even among humans. -- McCoy, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% Believe not much them that seem to despise riches; for they despise them that despair of them; and none are worse when they come to them. Be not penny-wise; riches have wings, and sometimes they fly away of themselves, sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. -- William James %% Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. -- Andre Gide %% Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone. %% Bell Labs programmers do it with UNIX. %% Belladonna: In Italian, a beautiful lady. In English, a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Belsen was a gas -- Mr. J. Rotten %% Ben Dover and the Screamers %% Ben Johnson swears it was just his birth control pills. The Birth Control Pill joke refers to Angel Myers, a U.S. Olympic Athlete who was barred from the games by the USOC due to a positive steroid test. She claimed that it was her birth control pills, which contain some steroids. ] %% Ben, why didn't you tell me? -- Luke Skywalker %% Benchley's Distinction: There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not. -- Robert Benchley %% Benchley's travel distinction: In America there are two classes of travel: first class and with children. %% Bend over hard and SWEAR! %% Bend over, I'll drive. %% Beneath the city two hearts beat, slow midnight running through one night, so tender. %% Beneath this stone a virgin lies, For her life held no terrors. A virgin born, a virgin died: No hits, no runs, no errors. %% Beneath this stone lies Murphy, They buried him today, He lived the life of Riley, While Riley was away. %% Benedict's Principle (formerly Murphy's Ninth Corollary): Nature always sides with the hidden flaw. %% Benjamin Franklin produced electricity by rubbing cats backwards. %% Bennett's Laws of Horticulture: (1) Houses are for people to live in. (2) Gardens are for plants to live in. (3) There is no such thing as a houseplant. %% Benny Hill: Would you like a peanut? Girl: No, thank you, I don't want to be under obligation. Benny Hill: You won't be under obligation for a peanut. It's not as if it were a chocolate bar or something. %% Benny Hill: the master of the single entendre. %% Benson's Dogma: ASCII is our god, and Unix is his profit. -- Gary Benson, inc@fluke.tc.com %% Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence -- Time Bandits %% Berkeley Quality Software: adj. (often abbreviated `BQS') Term used in a pejorative sense to refer to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation, has been tested on at least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts to use it. This term was frequently applied to early versions of the `dbx(1)' debugger. See also {Berzerkeley}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Bernard Shaw is an excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him either. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Berserkers do it without thinking %% Bershere's Formula for Failure: There are only two kinds of people who fail: those who listen to nobody... and those who listen to everybody. %% Berth: Any horizontal surface whose total area does not exceed one half of the surface area of an average person at rest, onto which at least one liter of some liquid seeps during any 12-hour period, and above which there are not less than 10 kilograms of improperly secured objects. -- from "Sailing" by Henry Beard and Roy Mckie %% Berzerkeley: /b*r-zer'klee/ [from `berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record label] n. Humorous distortion of `Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the {BSD} UNIX hackers. See {software bloat}, {Missed'em-five}, {Berkeley Quality Software}. Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported from as far back as the 1960s. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Beside the skeleton is a rusty knife. %% Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of ones native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% Besides the device, the box should contain: * Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say "WARNING" * A plastic packet containing four 5/17 inch pilfer grommets and two club-ended 6/93 inch boxcar prawns. YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram cable. IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: You IMMEDIATELY should turn to your spouse and say: "Margaret, you know why this country can't make a car that can get all the way through the drive-through at Burger King without a major transmission overhaul? Because nobody cares, that's why." WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret. -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!" %% Besides, resistance would be useless. -- Ivo's wife, State of Decay %% Best men are often moulded out of faults. -- William Shakespeare %% Best of all is never to have been born. Second best is to die soon. %% Best to leave town until this blows over. %% Best when told with a heavy Italian accent when the father speaks. An Italian boy has a life long dream to go to school in the United States and it finally comes true (good thing for this joke) when he is accepted to Columbia University in New York. After a couple of years at school his father comes to visit him in America. The boy is very excited to see his father and ask what he would like to do in America. The father says, "This is'a America. I'd a like'a to go'a to a baseball game." So they head on down to Yankee stadium and as it turns out it's oldtimers day. Roger Maris comes to bat and hits a long ball which is heading for the left field seats. The father stands up and yells, "RUN'A ROGER, RUN". Micky Mantle comes up next and hits a fly ball to deep right field. Again, the father stands up, and yells "RUN'A MICKEY, RUN". Next Joe Dimagio steps out to the plate. There pitcher throws ball one, ball two, ball three and walks him on four pitches. As Joe Dimagio starts to trot to first base the father stands up and shouts, "RUN'A JOE, RUN". "No", his son interrupts, "He has four balls, he walks". His father stand up again, "walk'a proud, Joe, walk'a proud." %% Beste's Principle: The more the name of the product promises, the less it delivers. %% Bet it all on 14. %% Bet you wonder how I knew about your plan to make me blue with some other guy that you knew before. Between both guys you know I love you more. It took me by surprise, I must say, when I found out yesterday. Don't you know I heard it through the grapevine. How much longer would you be mine? I heard it through the grapevine. Now I'm just about to lose my mind. -- Marvin Gaye %% Bets at the first were fool-traps where the wise Like spiders lay in ambush for the flies. -- Dryden %% Better Red than dead. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion. -- Edward Abbey %% Better a sister in a whorehouse than a brother on a Honda. %% Better be alone than in bad company. %% Better bend than break. %% Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad. -- Christina Rossetti %% Better dead than mellow. %% Better go home and hit your kids. They are just little monsters! %% Better go home and play with your kids. They are just little monsters! %% Better go home and work on that application for transfer. %% Better hope the life-inspector doesn't come around while you have your life in such a mess. %% Better hope you get what you want before you stop wanting it. %% Better late than before anybody has invited you. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Better late than never. -- Titus Livius (Livy) %% Better leave the dungeon, otherwise you might get hurt badly. %% Better living a beggar than buried an emperor. %% Better living through alchemy %% Better luck next time. %% Better safe than sorry. %% Better the prince of some inferior court, Than second, or less, in beatific light. -- Lucifer [Joost van den Vondel's Lucifer] %% Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. -- Edmund Burke %% Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children. -- Richard Henry Dana %% Better to die a thousand deaths than wound my honor. -- Addison %% Better to have loved a short girl, than never to have loved a tall. %% Better to kill time than have it kill you. -- karl %% Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. -- motto of the Christopher Society %% Better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a lamb. %% Better to sink beneath the shock Than to moulder piecemeal on the rock. -- Byron %% Better to throw it out -- than throw it in. -- Skinny Mitchell %% Better to use medicines at the outset than at the last moment. %% Better you than me. %% Between 1950 and 1952, a bored weatherman, stationed north of Hudson Bay, left a monument that neither government nor time can eradicate. Using a bulldozer abandoned by the Air Force, he spent two years and great effort pushing boulders into a single word. It can be seen from 10,000 feet, silhouetted against the snow. Government officials exchanged memos full of circumlocutions (no Latin equivalent exists) but failed to word an appropriation bill for the destruction of this cairn, that wouldn't alert the press and embarrass both Parliament and Party. It stands today, a monument to human spirit. If life exists on other planets, this may be the first message received from us. -- The Realist, November, 1964 %% Between amoebas and mankind There seems to be a mighty chasm But if you study both, you'll find Your body, and perhaps, your mind Is largely of this very kind Of animated protoplasm. -- Gerald Lynton Kaufman %% Between grand theft and a legal fee, there only stands a law degree. %% Between grief and nothing I will take grief. -- William Faulkner %% Between two evils, choose neither. Between two goods, choose both. -- Tyron Edwards %% Between your head and your heart, your head has got to win. %% Beverly, it is our obligation to escape. "He's prepared to kill you." An excellent reason to escape. -- Picard and Crusher, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7 %% Beware of Bigfoot! %% Beware of Doug. %% Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. -- Virgil %% Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein %% Beware of a dark-haired man with a loud tie. %% Beware of a short dark haired man wearing a loud tie. %% Beware of a tall black man with one blond shoe. %% Beware of a tall blond man with one black shoe. %% Beware of a tall dark man with a spoon up his nose. %% Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil. %% Beware of an envelope that ticks. %% Beware of an executive with a clean desk. %% Beware of attack cat. %% Beware of bogus parmbytes. %% Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Circles" %% Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth %% Beware of computerized fortune-tellers! %% Beware of dark rooms - they may be the Morgue. %% Beware of death rays! %% Beware of desperate steps! -- the darkest day Live till to-morrow, will have passed away. -- Cowper %% Beware of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, bear it that the opposer may beware of thee. -- William Shakespeare %% Beware of falling rocks, wear a helmet! %% Beware of friends who are false and deceitful. %% Beware of geeks bearing gifts. -- Solomon Short %% Beware of hungry dogs! %% Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Beware of low-flying butterflies. %% Beware of low-flying rocks. %% Beware of people who fall at your feet. They may be reaching for the corner of the rug. %% Beware of self-styled experts: an ex is a has-been, and a spurt is a drip under pressure. %% Beware of short waiters. %% Beware of the Quantum Ducks Quark! Quark! Quark! %% Beware of the Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. %% Beware of the man who has no enemies. -- Edward Abbey %% Beware of the man who knows the answer before he understands the question. %% Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. -- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle" %% Beware of the man whose god is in the skies. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Beware of the minotaur. He's very horny! %% Beware of the potion of Nitroglycerine - it's not for the weak of heart. %% Beware of wands of instant disaster. %% Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true. -- Edward Abbey %% Beware the Killer Rabbit! %% Beware the bore worms! %% Beware the eyes of Morphy. %% Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden (1631-1700) %% Beware the granfalloon. %% Beware the man who makes cream with his mouth; he winds up making butter with his nose. -- Babbaluche the cobbler %% Beware the new TTY code! %% Beware the one behind you. %% Beware the scurge of the Ice Queen! %% Beware the wench with scurvy in her bilge. %% Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you. -- Edward Abbey %% Beyond the 23-rd level lies a happy retirement in a room of your own. %% BiCapitalization: n. The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as {PostScript}, NeXT, {NeWS}, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many {marketroid} types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare {studlycaps}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Bibliography is my business. %% Bibliography is none of my business... %% Bibliography isn't my business, it's my hobby. %% Bibliography may not be my business, but all those years in grad school made it easy... %% Bicycle Law: All bicycles weigh 50 pounds: A 30-pound bicycle needs a 20-pound lock and chain. A 40-pound bicycle needs a 10-pound lock and chain. A 50-pound bicycle needs no lock and chain. %% Bicycle racers do it with at 90-110 rpm. %% Bicyclists do it with a cadence. %% Bicyclists do it with chains. %% Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Bierman's Laws of Contracts: (1) In any given document, you can't cover all the "what if's". (2) Lawyers stay in business resolving all the unresolved "what if's". (3) Every resolved "what if" creates two unresolved "what if's". %% Big Gray Wall: n. What faces a {VMS} user searching for documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a pallet, the documentation taking up around 15 feet of shelf space before the addition of layered products such as compilers, databases, multivendor networking, and programming tools. Recent (since VMS version 5) DEC documentation comes with gray binders; under VMS version 4 the binders were orange (`big orange wall'), and under version 3 they were blue. See {VMS}. Often contracted to `Gray Wall'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Big M, Little M, many mumbling mice Are making midnight music in the moonlight, Mighty nice! %% Big Red Switch: [IBM] n. The power switch on a computer, esp. the `Emergency Pull' switch on an IBM {mainframe} or the power switch on an IBM PC where it really is large and red. "This !@%$% {bitty box} is hung again; time to hit the Big Red Switch." Sources at IBM report that, in tune with the company's passion for {TLA}s, this is often abbreviated as `BRS' (this has also become established on FidoNet and in the PC {clone} world). It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power feed; the BRSes on more recent machines physically drop a block into place so that they can't be pushed back in. People get fired for pulling them, especially inappropriately (see also {molly-guard}). Compare {power cycle}, {three-finger salute}, {120 reset}; see also {scram switch}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Big Room, the: n. The extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all computer installations. "He can't come to the phone right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Big Toe: The pad of the male big toe applied to the clitoris or the vulva generally is a magnificent erotic instrument. The famous gentleman in erotic prints who is keeping six women occupied is using tongue,penis, both hands, and both big toes. Use the toe in mammary or armpit intercourse or any time you are astride her, or sit facing as she lies or sits. Make sure the nail isn't sharp. In a restaurant, in these days of tights one can surreptitiously remove a shoe and sock, reach over, and keep her in almost continuous orgasm with all four hands fully in view on the table top and no sign of contact-- A party trick which really rates as advanced sex. She has less scope, but can learn to masturbate him with her two big toes. The toes are definitely erogenic areas, and can be kissed, sucked, tickled, or tied with stimulating results. -- "The Joy of Sex" %% Big as a barn light as a feather, Yet sixty horses couldn't pull it. A barn's shadow %% Big book, big bore. -- Callimachus %% Big brother is watching you. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984", 1948 %% Big mac attack. %% Big people are those who make us feel bigger when we are with them. %% Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. -- Lewis F. Richardson %% Bigamist: A fog over Italy. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Bigamy is taking one too many. %% Bigger and faster is better. %% Biggest security gap - an open mouth. %% Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth. -- Edwin Hubbel Chapin %% Bigotry is hard to remove from a person. It wasn't reasoned in and it can't be reasoned out. %% Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost. -- Charles Caleb Colton %% Bilbo found that goblins hate sand, and that zombies could not see him. %% Bilbo's First Law: You cannot count friends that are all packed up in barrels. %% Bill Murray was interviewed today on NBC, regarding his new movie. At one point, Katie Couric (who was interviewing him) said something bogus just to look good. Murray responded with "This is NBC, you can say anything you want, it doesn't have to be real." (the day after the GM truck exploding fiasco) %% Bill and Jim were walking home from work. As they walked along, they discussed their wives' spending habits. "I don't understand how women can spend so much money," Bill exclaimed. "I mean, understand, she don't drink, and she's got her own pussy!" %% Bill the Cat Fan Club %% Bill the cat says "Just say Ack!" %% Bill was sitting by the death bed of his friend Bob. Bill: "We've been friends for 73 years. Could you do something for me?" Bob: "Yea...what (gasp)" Bill: "We've enjoyed baseball for years; could you tell me if there's baseball in heaven?" Bob: "Ok." A couple days after Bob's death. Bob: "Bill, this is Bob." Bill: "Is there there base ball in Heaven?" Bob: "I've got some good news and some bad news." "Which doo you want first?" Bill: "The good news." Bob: "There is baseball." Bill: "What's the bad news?" Bob: "You're pitching next Tuesday." %% Billy N. Dollars %% Billy: Mom, you know that vase you said was handed down from generation to generation? Mom: Yes? Billy: Well, this generation dropped it. %% Binary, adj.: Possessing the ability to have friends of both sexes. %% Bing's Rule: Don't try to stem the tide -- move the beach. %% Bingo, gas station, hamburger with a side order of airplane noise, and you'll be Gary, Indiana. -- Jessie in the movie "Greaser's Palace" %% Biochemistry expands so as to fill the space and time available for its completion and publication. -- R. T. Hersh %% Biology grows on you. %% Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division. -- 7.06 Lecturer %% Bipolar, adj.: Refers to someone who has homes in Nome, Alaska, and Buffalo, New York %% Birdie, birdie, in the sky, Why'd you do that in my eye? I won't fret, and I won't cry. I'm just glad that cows don't fly. %% Birds are entangled by their feet and men by their tongues. %% Birds do it, bees do it, even chimpanzees do it ... %% Birds have the right of way on Utah state highways. %% Birds of prey know they're cool. -- Far Side %% Birth is nothing where virtue is not. -- Moliere %% Birth is pain, Death is pain, Beauty is pain. The Final Conflict %% Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks; Birth, copulation and death. -- T. S. Elliot, Sweeney Agonistes (1932) %% Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Birth-control pills are habit forming. %% Bisexuality: It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night. -- Woody Allen %% Bismark's law: The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night. %% Bistromathics is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants. %% Bit - Similar to a nibble. Commonly eight nibbles to a mouthful. (See byte). %% Bit - twelve and a half cents -- Data communications glossary %% Bit rate - how often you are bitten -- Data communications glossary %% Bit: Twelve and a half cents. Bit rate: How often you are bitten. -- Data communications glossary %% Bit: A word used to describe computers, as in "Our son's computer cost quite a bit." %% Bitch, bitch, bitch -- That's all I ever hear, Ever since the dog ate the baby, "Get rida the dog, get rida the dog." %% Bites on dried gristly meat. Receives metal arrows. It furthers one to be mindful of difficulties And to be persevering. Good fortune. %% Bites on dried lean meat. Receives yellow gold. Perseveringly aware of danger. No blame. %% Bites on old dried meat And strikes on something poisonous. Slight humiliation. No blame. %% Bites through tender meat, So that his nose disappears. No blame. %% Biting Through has success. It is favorable to let justice be administered. %% Biz is better. %% Bizarre! %% Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic %% Bizoos, n.: The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a basketball. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Black Dens: Where Black Holes live; often unheated warehouses with Day'Glo spray painting, mutilated mannequins, Elvis references, dozens of overflowing ashtrays, broken mirror sculptures, and Velvet Underground music playing in the background. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Black Holes are Out of Sight %% Black Holes: An X Generation subgroup best known for their possession of almost entirely black wardrobes. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Black holes are where God is dividing by zero... %% Black holes suck. %% Black shiny mollies and bright colored guppies, Shy little angels as gentle as puppies, Swimming and diving with scarcely a swish, They were just some of my tropical fish. Then I got mantas that sting in the water, Deadly piranhas that itch for a slaughter, Savage male betas that bite with a squish, Now I have many less tropical fish. If you think that Fish are peaceful That's an empty wish. Just dump them together And leave them alone, And soon you will have -- no fish. -- To My Favorite Things %% Black we are and much admired, Men seek for us till they are tired, We tire the horses, but comfort man, Tell me this riddle, if you can. Lumps of coal %% Black within and red without, Four corner's round about. A chimney %% Blackout, heatwave, .44 caliber homicide, The bums drop dead and the dogs go mad in packs on the West Side, A young girl standing on a ledge, looks like another suicide, She wants to hit those bricks, 'cause the news at six got to stick to a deadline, While the millionaires hide in Beekman place, The bag ladies throw their bones in my face, I get attacked by a kid with stereo sound, I don't want to hear it but he won't turn it down... -- Billy Joel, "Glass Houses" %% Blame Saint Andreas - its all his fault. %% Blame it on the *-Property. %% Blank paper is God's way of saying it's not so easy to be God. %% Blank scrolls make more interesting reading. %% Blanking - Term used to describe non-working equipment ("That blanking...") %% Blast medicine anyway! We've learned to tie into every organ in the human body but one. The brain! The brain is what life is all about. -- McCoy, "The Menagerie," stardate 3012.4 %% Blasting requires dynamite. %% Blecch! Rotten food! %% Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Blessed Me, [A jibe at Jeff Hull] %% Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. %% Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% Blessed are the meek for they shall inhibit the earth. %% Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called the children of God. -- Matthew V, 9 %% Blessed are the pessimists, they make backups! %% Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt. %% Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels. %% Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. -- Poor Richard %% Blessed is he who expects no gratitude, for he shall not be disappointed. -- W. C. Bennett %% Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Blessed is he who has reached the point of no return and knows it, for he shall enjoy living. -- W. C. Bennett %% Blind? Eat a carrot! %% Blinding speed can compensate for a lot of deficiencies. -- David Nichols %% Bliss *IS* ignorance %% Blitzkrieg players do it in five minutes. %% Block Parity : One heck of a good time. %% Blood alone moves the wheels of history. -- Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) %% Blood and Guts. %% Blood flows down one leg and up the other. %% Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood ... there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them. -- Padraic Pearse %% Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier. %% Blood will tell, but it often tells too much. -- Don Marquis (1878-1937) %% Bloody hell, what's going on? %% Bloom's Seventh Law of Litigation: The judge's jokes are always funny. %% Blore's Razor: Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier. %% Blow it out your ass! %% Blow it out your ear. %% Blue Book: n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on the page-layout and graphics-control language {{PostScript}} (`PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook', Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, QA76.73.P67P68, ISBN 0-201-10179-3); the other three official guides are known as the {Green Book}, the {Red Book}, and the {White Book} (sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on Smalltalk: `Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation', David Robson, Addison-Wesley 1983, QA76.8.S635G64, ISBN 0-201-11371-63 (this is also associated with green and red books). 3. Any of the 1988 standards issued by the CCITT's ninth plenary assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also {{book titles}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Blue Glue: [IBM] n. IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly {losing} and {bletcherous} communications protocol widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better. The official IBM definition is "that which binds blue boxes together." See {fear and loathing}. It may not be irrelevant that {Blue Glue} is the trade name of a 3M product that is commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors common in {dinosaur pen}s. A correspondent at U. Minn. reports that the CS department there has about 80 bottles of the stuff hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done as `using the blue glue'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Blue paint today. %% Blue...blue...blue... I hope that isn't a stutter. -- Data and Picard, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% Blutarsky's Axiom: Nothing is impossible for the man who will not listen to reason. %% Bo Derek ruined my life! %% Bo Peep did it for the insurance. %% Board the windows, up your car insurance, and don't leave any booze in plain sight. It's St. Patrick's day in Chicago again. The legend has it that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. In fact, he was arrested for drunk driving. The snakes left because people kept throwing up on them. %% Boat: A hole in the water, surrounded by wood, into which one throws money. %% Bob Spreen Cadillac. Where the freeways meet in Downey. %% Bobby Knight told me this: 'There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense.' In other words a good offense wins. -- Vice President Dan Quayle comparing the offensive capabilities of the Warsaw Pact with the defensive system of NATO %% Body odor is the window to the soul. %% Bohica! %% Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/ [from quantum physics] n. A repeatable {bug}; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of {heisenbug}; see also {mandelbug}, {schroedinbug}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Boldness is a child of ignorance. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Boldness is a mask for fear, however great. -- Lucan %% Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences; whence it is bad in council though good in execution. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Boling's postulate: If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it. %% Bombs don't kill people, explosions kill people. %% Bondage, or as the French call it, ligottage, is the gentle art of tying up your sex partner --- not to overcome reluctance but to boost orgasm. It's one unscheduled sex technique which a lot of people find extremely exciting but are scared to try, and a venerable human resource for increasing sexual feeling, partly because it's a harmless expression of sexual aggression -- something we badly need, our culture being very uptight about it -- and more because of its physical affects: slow orgasm when unable to move is a mind-blowing experience for anyone not too frightened of their own aggressive self to try it. -- "The Joy of Sex" %% Bones: "The man's DEAD, Jim!" %% Boneyard n. Where you send Old Iron (q. v.) when it costs more to plug it in than to throw it away. -- IBM Jargon File %% Bonking with Barbie.. %% Bookkeeper: Mr. Goldwyn, our files are bulging with paperwork we no longer need. May I have your permission to destroy all records before 1945? Goldwyn: Certainly. Just be sure to keep a copy of everything. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Bookkeepers do it for the record. %% Books are burning In the main square, and I saw there The fire eating the text. Books are burning In the still air And you know where they burn books People are next. -- "Books Are Burning", XTC %% Books are like eggs--best when fresh. -- Edward Abbey %% Books are not men and yet they stay alive. -- Stephen Vincent Benet %% Books by Oolon Caluphid: Where God Went Wrong Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes Who Is the God Person Anyway? ...and the finale: Well, That About Wraps It Up For God %% Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. -- Samuel Paterson %% Booksellers never read scrolls; it might leave their shop unguarded. %% Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and longe-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Boot camp. Duluth, Minnesota. February. Six A.M. Six below zero. The Sergeant bellows "Outta those bunks! Birthday suit inspection! I want you (deleted) to fall in outside, NOW! Buck nekkid! Stand close enough to make the man in front of you smile! MOVE, YOU #@$&*s!" The barracks quickly empty, the men fall in and shiver at attention. The Sergeant hollers "LOOSEN RANKS!" The ranks separate a bit. The Captain approaches, carrying a swagger stick. With the stick, he swats one of the men across the chest. "Did that hurt, Mister?" the Captain demands. "No, SIR!" the recruit shouts. "Why not?" barks the Captain. "Because I'm a U.S. Marine, SIR!" The Captain nods, and moves on down the front rank a bit. He whacks another man across the butt. "Did that hurt, Mister?" "No, SIR!" "Why not?" "Because I'm a U.S. Marine, SIR!" Satisfied, the Captain continues on down the rank. He notices that one of the men is sporting a huge erection, and brings his stick down sharply on the proffered target. "Did that hurt, Mister?" "No, SIR!" "Why not?" "Because it belongs to the fellow behind me, SIR!" %% Booths for two or more. %% Booze is the answer. I don't remember the question. %% Bop ba-ba loo bop a bim bam boom. %% Bordeaux makes you think of mischief; Burgundy makes you tease; Champagne makes you. %% Borderline psychotic with hermit-like tendencys. %% Bore, n.: A guy who wraps up a two-minute idea in a two-hour vocabulary. -- Walter Winchell %% Bore, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Bore: A man who spends so much time talking about himself that you can't talk about yourself. -- Melville D. Landon %% Bored? Drive the speed limit... in your garage. %% Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Boren's First Law: When in doubt, mumble. %% Boren's Laws of Bureaucracy: 1. When in doubt, mumble. 2. When in trouble, delegate. 3. When in charge, ponder. -- James H. Boren %% Borkon's Observation: The farther a theater seat is from the aisle, the later the patron arrives. %% Born Again Pagan %% Born at the same time as the world Destined to live as long as the world And yet never five weeks old. What is it? Moon %% Born to run. %% Born to shop. %% Born to stream %% Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors. -- Rudyard Kipling %% Boss to employer: No, Baxter, you're not being replaced by a computer--only a silicon chip. -- Eli Stein %% Boss, n.: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages the words "boss" and "botch" were largely synonymous, except that boss, in addition to meaning "a supervisor of workers" also meant "an ornamental stud." %% Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar. -- O. W. Holmes %% Boston, n.: Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition. %% Boswell's Rule: Nothing gives a used car more miles per gallon than a salesman. %% Both marital problems are teenagers. %% Both of them [Breckenridge and Douglas, Lincoln's opponents] mean that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect, -- that there is no higher law than human interest and cupidity. -- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) %% Both thunder and lightning come: The image of Abundance. Thus the superior man decides lawsuits And carries out punishments. %% Boucher's Observation: He who blows his own horn always plays the music several octaves higher than originally written. %% Bound with cords and ropes, Shut in between thorn-hedged prison walls: For three years one does not find the way. Misfortune. %% Bounders get bound when they are caught bounding. -- Ralph Lewin %% Bow to no patron's insolence; rely On no frail hopes, in freedom live and die. -- Seneca %% Bower's Law: Talent goes where the action is. %% Bowie's Theorem: If an experiment works, you must be using the wrong equipment. %% Bowler's dinner -- spare ribs -- Raymond D. Love %% Bowlers do it in the alley. %% Bowlers do it with balls. %% Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl. -- Jack Woodford on plotting %% Boy! Eucalyptus! %% Boy, I sure wish that I could be in the 'Advanced Systems Development' group! %% Boy, am I glad it's only 1971... %% Boy, get your head out of the stars above, You get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love. Save your heart and let your body be enough, To get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love. Save your heart and let your body be enough, And get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love. -- Mac Macinelli, "Minimum Love" %% Boy, n.: A noise with dirt on it. %% Boy, that crayon sure did hurt! %% Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they? -- Vice President George Bush at Auschwitz, 1987 %% Boy: Of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% Boy:"I've got six marbles!" Girl:"I've got seven marbles!" Boy:"I've got eight pennies!" Girl:"I've got a dime!" Boy: (pulls down pants) "You don't have one of these do you?" Girl:"Well,no....But I've got one of these!" (lifts up skirt) "And with one of these I can get as many of those as I want!!!!" %% Boycott -- In 1880, Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was land agent in County Mayo, Ireland, for an absentee owner, the Earl of Erne. Though the harvest had been disastrous, Captain Boycott refused to reduce rents and attempted to evict any tenants who could not pay in full. As a result, he became the object of the earliest known effort to force an alteration of policy by concerted nonintercourse. His servants departed en masse. No one would sell him food. Life became so miserable for him that at last he gave up and returned to England. To boycott is "to combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion." -- Willard R. Espy, "O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun" %% Boycott meat - suck your thumb. %% Boylike contemplation. For an inferior man, no blame. For a superior man, humiliation. %% Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% Boys marry virgins... men marry women! %% Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. -- Kin Hubbard %% Boys, you have ALL been selected to LEAVE th' PLANET in 15 minutes!! %% Bozo is the Brotherhood of Zips and Others. Bozos are people who band together for fun and profit. They have no jobs. Anybody who goes on a tour is a Bozo. Why does a Bozo cross the street? Because there's a Bozo on the other side. It comes from the phrase vos otros, meaning others. They're the huge, fat, middle waist. The archetype is an Irish drunk clown with red hair and nose, and pale skin. Fields, William Bendix. Everybody tends to drift toward Bozoness. It has Oz in it. They mean well. They're straight-looking except they've got inflatable shoes. They like their comforts. The Bozos have learned to enjoy their free time, which is all the time. -- Firesign Theatre, "If Bees Lived Inside Your Head" %% Brace yourselves. We're about to try something that borders on the unique: an actually rather serious technical book which is not only (gasp) vehemently anti-Solemn, but also (shudder) takes sides. I tend to think of it as `Constructive Snottiness.' -- Mike Padlipsky, Foreword to "Elements of Networking Style" %% Bradley's Bromide: If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in. %% Brady's First Law of Problem Solving: When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger have handled this?" %% Bradyism: A multisibling sensibility derived from having grown up in large families. A rarity in those born after approximately 1965, symptoms of Bradyism include a facility for mind games, emotional withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a well-defined personal space. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Brain damage is all in your head. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% Brain dysfunction detected.... %% Brain fried -- Core dumped %% Brain off-line, please wait. %% Brain over - Insert coin %% Brain, n.: The apparatus with which we think that we think. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Brain, v. [as in "to brain"]: To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of error in an opponent. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Brain. Brain. What is brain? -- Kara the Eymorg, "Spock's Brain," stardate 5432.3 %% Brandy-and-water spoils two good things. -- Charles Lamb (1775-1834) %% Brave spirits are a balsam to themselves; there is a nobleness of mind that heals wounds beyond salves. -- Cartwright %% Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid. -- Franklin P. Jones %% Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Bread always falls butter-side down. If it doesn't, you buttered it on the wrong side. -- Solomon Short %% Bread and Circuits: The electronic era tendency to view party politics as corny - no longer relevant or meaningful or useful to modern societal issues, and in many cases dangerous. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Break a few rules. %% Break into jail and claim police brutality. %% Break the ties that bind. %% Break-through. One must resolutely make the matter known At the court of the king. It must be announced truthfully. Danger. It is necessary to notify one's own city. It does not further to resort to arms. It furthers one to undertake something. %% Breakfast sometime? Sure. Shall I call you or just nudge you? %% Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. %% Breaking something that's already broken is pointless. %% Breast Feeding should not be attempted by fathers with hairy chests, since they can make the baby sneeze and give it wind. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Breast size multiplied by IQ always equals 69 %% Breathes there a man with hide so tough Who says two sexes aren't enough. -- Samuel Goodman Hoffenstein (1890-1946) %% Breed is stronger than pasture. -- George Eliot %% Breeding rabbits is a hare raising experience. %% Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction. -- Hosea Ballou %% Brevity and superficiality are often concomitants. -- Amrom Katz %% Brevity is a great charm of eloquence. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Brevity is not only the soul of wit, but the soul of making oneself agreeable, and of getting on with people, and indeed of everything that makes life worth living. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Bricka bracka firecracka sis boom ba Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny rah rah rah! %% Bride, n.: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Bridge ahead. Pay troll. %% Bridge players do it with a partner. %% Bridge players do it with finesse. %% Bridget O'Flaherty McHugh Held venal traffic with a gnu. Mistaking fore for aft one morn Impaled herself upon its horn. Moral: Those who seek high ends should shun our furred and feathered friends. %% Brief descriptions. %% Brig: How nice to see you again, Doctor. Dr: It's Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. Brig: Brigadier now, I've gone up in the world. Jamie: Of course, the Yetis, we met you in the-- Brig: That's right, the criminy(?) in the underground. Must be four years ago now. Jamie: How long, it seems like only a couple of weeks ago! Doctor: I've told you over and over again, Jamie, time is relative. Brig: You still making a nonsense of it, Doctor, in your, what was it called, TARDIS? Doctor: Yes, we're still traveling, yes. Brig: Mrs. Travers told me all about it. It's, uh well, it's to say the least, an unbelievable machine. Doctor: Any more unbelievable than the Yetis? Brig: No, true. I'm not quite sure I'm as much of a skeptic as I was since that little escapade. %% Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% Bring out the Best Foods, and bring out the best. %% Bring out yer dead... %% Bring out your dead. -- Ian, DALEK INVASION OF EARTH %% Bring the whole family... but leave the kids at home! -- R. McDonald %% Bring us ... a shrubbery! %% Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon. %% Bringing your mate to a convention is like taking a game warden hunting. %% Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble, they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Britain has lowered the tax on chastity belts by about 60 cents each... [reclassifying them] as a safety device rather than... clothing -- NY Times %% Britannia waives the rules. %% British Israelites: The British Israelites believe the white Anglo-Saxons of Britain to be descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel deported by Sargon of Assyria on the fall of Sumeria in 721 B.C. ... They further believe that the future can be foretold by the measurements of the Great Pyramid, which probably means it will be big and yellow and in the hand of the Arabs. They also believe that if you sleep with your head under the pillow a fairy will come and take all your teeth. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Broad band - all girl orchestra -- Data communications glossary %% Broad-mindedness, n.: The result of flattening high-mindedness out. %% Brogan's Constant: People tend to congregate in the back of the church and the front of the bus. %% Broken Mirror Law: Everyone breaks more than the seven-year bad luck allotment to cover rotten luck throughout an entire lifetime. -- Rozanne Weissman %% Brontosaurus Principle: Organizations can grow faster than their brains can manage them in relation to their environment and to their own physiology: when this occurs, they are an endangered species. -- Thomas K. Connellan %% Brooke's Law: Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition. %% Brooks Atkinson described a Shubert play as "beautiful, if you are deaf and dumb." %% Brooks' Law of Prototypes: Plan to throw away, you will anyhow. Corollary: If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% Brooks's Law: prov. "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" --- a result of the fact that the advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of `The Mythical Man-Month' (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent early book on software engineering. The myth in question has been most tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his advice; too often, {management} does. See also {creationism}, {second-system effect}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Brother Giovanni Battista Orsengio was a monk who worked as a dentist. He kept every tooth he ever pulled - over 2,000,000. %% Brother Maynard, read from the Book of Armaments. %% Brotherhood is not just a Bible word. Out of comradeship can come and will come the happy life for all. -- Heywood Hale Broun (1888-1939) %% Brotherhood is the very price and condition of a man's survival. -- Carlos P. Romulo %% Brought to by the Society for the Extinction of Rainbows. %% Brought to you by the Ad Council. Wasting your time for no good reason. %% Brought to you by the people who made out of context a household word... %% Brown Spots on the Wall - by Who Flungdung. %% Bruce Sterling, on computers replacing drugs as a medium for altering consciousness and creating artificial realities: "In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late." %% Brush your teeth regularly; dental hygiene is important. %% Brutality, torture, murder. Very impressive resume, Mr. Hussein. I think you're just what the Los Angeles Police Department is looking for. -- (from a political cartoon) %% Bubble Memory, n.: A derogatory term, usually referring to a person's intelligence. See also "vacuum tube". %% Buck-passing usually turns out to be a boomerang. %% Buckboard - the price of lumber before inflation. %% Buena Suerte! %% Bug number 94 %% Bug off! %% Bug off, Banana Nose; Relieve mine eyes %% 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. %% 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. Fortunately, the second-to-last bug has just been fixed. -- Ray Simard %% Bugger me with a fish fork.. %% Bugs are Sons of Glitches! %% Bugs, like coathangers, breed if unobserved. %% Bugs, pl. n.: Small living things that small living boys throw on small living girls. %% Buick GN: "... If Darth Vader drove a Buick ..." -- Ken Mosher, ken_mosher@imd.sterling.com %% Buick GN: " ... tire smoke and turbo whine ..." -- Ken Mosher, ken_mosher@sterling.com %% Buick GN: "... I love the smell of burning rubber in the morning ..." -- Ken Mosher, ken_mosher@sterling.com %% Buick GN: "... groceries delivered ... in 11 seconds or less! ...." -- Ken Mosher, ken_mosher@sterling.com %% Buick GN: "... honest officer, it's only a little V6 ..." -- Ken Mosher, ken_mosher@sterling.com %% Buick GN: ".... can you say *BOOST*? I knew you could. .... " -- Ken Mosher, ken_mosher@imd.sterling.com %% Buick Grand National: A *BOOST* of Buick Performance -- Ken Mosher KEN_MOSHER@sterling.com %% Build a better mousetrap, the saying goes -- and with the brassiere, Yankee Ingenuity did exactly that. But their true stroke of genius was the new bait. The old fashioned mousetrap was loaded with cheese; nobody cares much about cheese, except mice. But when American Know-How reloaded the brassiere with tits, every heterosexual male in the country was hopelessly trapped. -- Alan Sherman, "The Rape of the A*P*E*" %% Build a system any fool can use, and only a fool will use it. %% Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. -- Christopher J. Shaw %% Building Contractors, not to be confused with homemakers %% Building translators is good clean fun. -- T. Cheatham %% Built for comfort, not for speed %% Bulkhead - hat size larger than 7-1/2. %% Bullets speak louder than reason. %% Bullshit Detector; when alarm sounds, please re-engage your brain. %% Bullshit makes the flowers grow and that's beautiful. %% Bumper snicker: Save Our Trees. Stop Printing Tax Forms ! %% Bumper sticker on a hearse: I'd rather be breathing %% Bumper sticker seen on a beat up hunk of large Detroit iron: SO MANY PEDESTRIANS SO LITTLE TIME %% Bumper sticker seen on a car driven by an attractive young lady: "You can't be the first but you could be the next!" %% Bumper sticker seen on a car in L.A.: WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA NOW GO HOME %% Bumper sticker seen on a foreign car: Recalls reduce traffic. Buy American. %% Bumper sticker: I'd rather be teleporting. %% Bumper sticker: If you are cold, hungry and out of work, eat a conservationist. %% Bumper sticker: All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture %% Bumper-Sticker: I've been sentenced to life on Earth. %% Bumper-sticker: "Indian driver - smoke signals only." %% Bungee Jumper? Catch you on the rebound. %% Bunker's Admonition: You cannot buy beer; you can only rent it. %% Bunsen Burner burning bright, On the lab bench of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful chemistry? In what distant reactions, Burnt the fire of thine actions? On what ring stands dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what structure, and what bonds, Could twist the sinews of thy electrons? And when thy heart began to beat, What reaction formed thy heat? What the test tube? What the mole? In what furnace was thy soul? What the funnel? What the flask? Dare its deadly ketones gasp? When the stars threw down their radiation And watered the world with their elation: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made Physics made thee? Bunsen Burner burning bright, On the lab bench of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful chemistry? %% Bureau Termination, Law of: When a government bureau is scheduled to be phased out, the number of employees in that bureau will double within 12 months after the decision is made. %% Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies -- Honore de Balzac %% Bureaucrat's Principle: Delay is the safest form of denial. %% Bureaucrat, n.: A person who cuts red tape sideways. -- J. McCabe %% Bureaucrat, n.: A politician who has tenure. %% Bureaucratic Cop-Out Number 1: You should have seen it when I got it! -- Marshall L. Smith %% Bureaucrats cut red tape, lengthwise %% Bureaucrats do not change the course of the ship of state. They merely adjust the compass. %% Burke's Postulates: Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about. Don't create a problem for which you do not have the answer. %% Burn baby, burn. %% Burn in Flames! %% Burn's Hog Weighing Method: (1) Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a sawhorse. (2) Put the hog on one end of the plank. (3) Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again perfectly balanced. (4) Carefully guess the weight of the rocks. -- Robert Burns %% Burnt Sienna. Thats the best thing that ever happened to Crayolas. -- Ken Weaver %% Bus drivers do it in transit. %% Bus error (Passengers dumped) %% Bus error -- driver executed. %% Bus masters do it with slaves. %% Bus schedules are arranged so your bus will arrive at the transfer point precisely one minute after the connecting bus has left. -- John Corcoran %% Bush Lite: Less Capital gains, More Domestic Policy. %% Bush and Gorbachev decided to get themselves frozen for a hundred years to see how the current political situation resolved itself. After the time was up they were thawed, and started to read newspapers to catch up on the situation. Gorbachev started to laugh. In response to Bush's question he said, "I see that the dollar is still getting weaker." Then Bush started to laugh. In response to Gorbachev's question of why, he said, "I read that there is renewed fighting on the German-Chinese border." %% Bush had two basic messages for Noriega: We are aware of your unscrupulous activities, and those don't bother us much. But you must... get firmly behind the contra effort. -- A colonel present at one meeting with George Bush and Manual Noriega %% Bush seems to be a bystander watching to see who Bush turns out to be. -- Conservative columnist George F. Will %% Bush skitters like a waterbug on the surface of things ... moving fast lest he linger so long that he is expected to show a mastery of, or even a real interest in, anything. -- Conservative columnist George F. Will %% Bush so loves the flag he wraps himself in it, like Linus. -- Conservative columnist George F. Will %% Bush wears a hat so he knows which end to wipe! %% Business - doing efficiently that which did not need doing at all. %% Business Graphics: Popular with managers who understand neither decimals, fractions, Roman numerals, nor PI but have more than a passing acquaintance with pies and bars. %% Business Week, October 17: Laura Newman's business is selling information on local real-estate transactions. But when she was working out of her home, people calling for information thought she was a flake. In the background they'd hear a baby crying or a TV blaring. Not very impressive. She solved the problem by playing a tape of typical office sounds: clacking typewriters, ringing phones, etc. It was so convincing that clients would apologize for calling at a busy time. %% Business computers - They can't sell it for anything else. The machine may have been designed for scientific and engineering computing, but after it was built, it was found to be too slow. IBM makes a good living building general purpose computers. %% Business is a combination of war and sport. -- Andre Maurois %% Business is a good game -- lots of competition and minimum of rules. You keep score with money. -- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari %% Business is like oil, it won't mix with anything but business. %% Business is like riding a bicycle -- either you keep moving or you fall down. %% Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach. -- Woodrow Wilson %% Business will be either better or worse. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% Business: busyness. -- Edward Abbey %% Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money. %% Businessmen do it in the black. %% Businessmen do it in the red. %% Busy souls have no time to be busybodies. -- Austin O'Malley %% But Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of some hypotheses, in which the premises lead to the result that the universe is many times greater than that now so called. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, that the Earth revolves about the Sun in the circumference of a circle, the Sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same center as the Sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the Earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of the sphere bears to its surface. -- Archimedes %% But Captain -- the engines can't take this much longer! %% But Henry, that isn't our baby! Shut up. It's a nicer carriage. %% But I am here! I am Dune! -- Noah, ARK IN SPACE %% But I don't like Spam!!!! %% But I find the old notions somehow appealing. Not that I want to go back to them--it is outrageous to have some outer authority tell you what is proper use and abuse of your own faculties, and it is ludicrous to hold reason higher than body or feeling. Still there is something true and profoundly sane about the belief that acts like murder or theft or assault violate the doer as well as the done to. We might even, if we thought this way, have less crime. The popular view of crime, as far as I can deduce it from the movies and television, is that it is a breaking of a rule by someone who thinks they can get away with that; implicitly, everyone would like to break the rule, but not everyone is arrogant enough to imagine they can get away with it. It therefore becomes very important for the rule upholders to bring such arrogance down. -- Marilyn French, "The Woman's Room" %% But I got out of my uniform for you, Data. -- Yar, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% But I gotta know how it feels, I wanna know if love is wild, baby I wanna know if love is real. %% But I have seen the science I worshiped and the airplane I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to serve. -- Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. %% But I warn you, if you get hurt, I'll put you on report, Captain. -- Riker, "Code of Honor", stardate 41235.25 %% But Officer, I stopped for the last one, and it was green! %% But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you? -- 2 Kings 18:27 (KJV) %% But an old age serene and bright, And lovely as a Lapland night, Shall lead thee to thy grave. -- Wordsworth %% But better to follow the shadow of the best than to remain content with the worst. %% But captain, the engines haven't been tested in warp drive! %% But don't you worry, its for a cause -- feeding global corporations paws. %% But first, are you experienced? -- Jimi Hendrix %% But for the lack of any untoward circumstances for this young secretary to notice, and the total non-involvement of Mr. Mellish in anything illegal, the full weight of the law would have insured that Ralph Aldis Mellish would have ended up like all who challenge the fundamental laws of our society: in an iron coffin with spikes on the inside! -- Monty Python "Matching Tie and Handkerchief" %% But for the moment, [Louis Wu] would steal a few hours' sleep . . . to match his other thefts. -- "The Ringworld Engineers" %% But has any little atom, While a-sittin' and a-splittin', Ever stopped to think or CARE That E = m c**2 ? %% But have you seen the yak? Great as a thundercloud, He stands in his might. Big? Sure. But he can't catch mice! %% But if a man happens to find himself ... he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life. %% But if you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study. -- Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), "Sketches from Cambridge" %% 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" %% But it does move! -- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) %% But it's real. And if it's real it can be affected... we may not be able to break it, but, I'll bet you credits to Navy Beans we can put a dent in it. -- deSalle, "Catspaw," stardate 3018.2 %% But look at the TEETH, man! %% But love is blind and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit. -- William Shakespeare %% But my little voice TOLD me to do it! %% But now I lost my money and I lost my wife and things don't seen to matter much to me now. %% But now you're back, well little girl I'm back too, and I been out and I've seen some things, yeah baby I've learned a thing or too about me and you. %% But officer, I was only trying to gain enough speed so I could coast to the nearest gas station. %% But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything whatever toward saving the human race from reciprocal suicide. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about. -- Hilaire Belloc, "The Microbe" %% But sex and drugs and rock & roll, why, they'd bring our blackest day. %% But since the shop has been robbed recently %% But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery -- go! -- Mark "The Bard" Twain (1835-1910) %% But soft, what light through yonder tagline breaks? %% But surely no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labor market, to ensure a supply of cheap labor. -- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) %% But the chances are that you will get nowhere with your spy scare. You have to have a bigger territory to work in. That's one of the advantages of being a government instead of just a private liar. -- Robert Benchley %% But the fire doesn't seem to harm you. %% But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again. This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases. -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" %% But the palindrome of Bolton is Notlob..it doesn't work, does it? -- Monty Python %% But then again, I like cold toilet seats. %% But then her face, So lovely, yet so arch, so full of mirth, The overflowings of an innocent heart. -- Rogers %% But these pills can't be habit forming; I've been taking them for years. %% But they caught us at the state line, burned our cars in one final hurt. %% But they went to MARS around 1953!! %% But they'll never mechanize me -- not me! Said Charlotte, the Louisville harlot. -- S. I. Hayakawa %% But wait, there's more! If you order by midnight tonight, we'll throw in a matching set of steak knives absolutely free!! ... Now how much would you pay? %% But was he mature enough last night at the lesbian masquerade? %% But we gotta get out of here, cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider. %% But we're still heading for the biggest bang in history. -- Sarah Jane Smith, REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN %% But we've only fondled the surface of that subject. -- Virginia Masters [of Master & Johnson] %% But what does it eat, where does it live, what does it spew out? %% But what if I'm a figment of my OWN imagination? %% But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else. -- Equality 7-2521 %% But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable computers? %% But you are one of us--you look like us, you sound like us. -- Barbara, AN UNEARTHLY CHILD %% But you did not need my urgency. %% But you don't cure bad art by locking it all up in one museum, you cure it by throwing tomatoes at bad artists. -- Barry Shein %% But you see, I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards -- and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no traditions. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one. -- Howard Roark %% But you shall not escape my iambics. -- Gaius Valerius Catullus %% But you who live on dreams, you are better pleased with the sophistical reasoning and frauds of talkers about great and uncertain matters than those who speak of certain and natural matters, not of such lofty nature. -- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), "The Codex on the Flight of Birds" %% But you're not all there. %% But, for my own part, it was Greek to me. -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" %% But, officer, he's not drunk, I just saw his fingers twitch! %% But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun! %% Butchers do it in the raw. %% Butthole Surfers, The %% Button: !GO HOM-9 %% Button: "Be yourself" is the worst advice you can give some people %% Button: #define sysop GOD #define reality NULL %% Button: 'Good Morning' is a contradiction in terms %% Button: +/- sqrt(4b^2) = To be or not to be %% Button: ...another smooth escape disguised as a dramatic exit %% Button: 186,000 mps - it's not the law, it's just a challenge %% Button: 2+2=5, for large values of two %% Button: 24-hour emergency backrub service %% Button: 2B | *2B = FF %% Button: 7 out of 10 fans use cats as their drug of choice %% Button: A Freudian slip may be revealing, but a Jungian slip is just a mythstake %% Button: A VAX is virtually a computer, but not quite %% Button: A cynic's work is never done %% Button: A dollar's a bad boss, and dying is a bad fear %% Button: A girl and her cat %% Button: A good slogan can stop analysis for fifty years. A great slogan can stop it forever. %% Button: A liberal is someone who will let you do anything so long as they're paid to help you do it %% Button: A morning without coffee is like something without something else %% Button: A mushroom cloud on the horizon, 24 empty missile tubes - now it's Miller time %% Button: A real friend isn't someone you use and throw away. A real friend is someone who you use again and again. %% Button: A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense %% Button: ADA is the COBOL of the 80s %% Button: Actors aren't quite human, but then again, who is? %% Button: After eight hundred years a Forth programmer you are, speak backward you will %% Button: All knowledge is contained in fandom %% Button: All life is a conjugation of the verb "to eat" %% Button: All that is gold does not glitter %% Button: All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts %% Button: Almost Conscious %% Button: American Non Sequitur society -- we don't make sense, but we do like pizza %% Button: Among animals, it's eat or be eaten. Among people it's define or be defined. %% Button: Anarcho-Capitalist for sale or rent %% Button: Anarcho-Paladin %% Button: Anarchy begins at home, but it doesn't have to end there %% Button: And what do I look like - the living? %% Button: Another case of too many scientists, not enough hunchbacks %% Button: Anti-paranoia is that eerie feeling that nothing is connected to anything else %% Button: Any excuse to wear a sword is a good excuse %% Button: Any interesting statistic is almost certainly a mistake %% Button: Any mental functions attempted in this area must be re-evaluated during a subsequent period. It has been discovered that standard logic works sideways in this area due to the influence of the occupant. %% Button: Any slogan simple enough to fit on a button is too simple to do any good %% Button: Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses %% Button: Any sufficiently high technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk %% Button: Any sufficiently low technology is indistinguishable from hard work %% Button: Anything not nailed down is a cat toy %% Button: Anything you say will be distorted and remixed and used against you %% Button: Apology Accepted %% Button: Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad or only pretending to be mad? %% Button: Are we undead - or what? %% Button: Are you sure it isn't time for a colorful metaphor? %% Button: Are you trying to develop a sense of humor or am I going deaf? %% Button: Artificial Intelligence %% Button: Artificial Intelligence? I'll be impressed when they invent artificial cunning. %% Button: Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity %% Button: Ask me - I'm interactive %% Button: Ask me - I'm shy %% Button: Ask me about my vow of silence %% Button: Assassins, Inc. - We aim to please %% Button: At least Congress doesn't make death worse every year %% Button: Authenticity Police - death to Spandex! %% Button: Avoid cliches like the plague %% Button: Avoid cliches like the plague - they're a dime a dozen %% Button: BFA: Branch to False Assumption %% Button: Back off, man - I'm a scientist %% Button: Back rubs - Given with pleasure, received with ecstasy %% Button: Bad taste is timeless %% Button: Badges? We don't need no stinking badges! %% Button: Balance the budget - declare politicians a game species %% Button: Banned from Argo %% Button: Barbarian %% Button: Bard %% Button: Be careful what you pretend to be - you just might become it %% Button: Beam me sideways, Scotty - I'm tired of the same old jokes %% Button: Beam me up, Scotty, this planet is infested with obnoxious Trekkies %% Button: Beauty and the Beast Bright Lights, Big Kitty %% Button: Beeblebrox for President - Two heads are better than one %% Button: Begone and never darken my towels again %% Button: Being a pain in the ass is a prerogative of the creative mind %% Button: Being weird isn't enough %% Button: Better dead than mellow - I love New York %% Button: Beware -- I'm armed and have pre-menstrual tension %% Button: Beware the Grin Reaper %% Button: Beware! The teddy bears of today still carry the vestigial claws of their ancestors %% Button: Bill the Cat & Opus in 1984 Why not the worst? %% Button: Blake's dead, Jim %% Button: Blank pieces of paper were invented to let you know how hard it is to be God %% Button: Boredom delendo est! %% Button: Born again virgin %% Button: Born to be cuddled %% Button: Born to shop %% Button: Born to shop (attrib to Jethro Tull) %% Button: Brain on vacation, body on autopilot %% Button: Bribe is such a... crass word %% Button: Bring me my broadsword and clear understanding %% Button: Bushydo - The way of the shrub. BONSAI! %% Button: Bwah-hah-hah! %% Button: By the time a rule is needed, it's already too late %% Button: By-product of the Infinite Improbability Drive %% Button: C'est la vie, C'est la guerre, Say no more %% Button: C'est la vie. C'est la guerre. Say no more. Say what? %% Button: COBOL is the next best thing to coding it in binary %% Button: COBOL sucks, Pascal bytes, and assembly is a bits! %% Button: Caffiend %% Button: Can I cook, or can I? %% Button: Can you imagine a roast aardvark without an apple in its mouth? It's like a martini without the egg %% Button: Card-carrying Temporal Anomaly %% Button: Carpe Diem - Make your lives extraordinary %% Button: Caution: Slower than light vehicle %% Button: Celestial Mechanic - inclined to be eccentric %% Button: Cerebus for Dictator %% Button: Child of a Looser God %% Button: Chopped cabbage - it's not just a good idea... it's THE SLAW %% Button: Cleric %% Button: Coffee is my only REAL friend %% Button: Cogito Ergo Spud - I think, therefore I yam %% Button: Cold milk, warm backrubs, hot baths... all temperature cheer %% Button: Con of the living dead %% Button: Conform, go crazy, become a lawyer %% Button: Conform, go crazy, become a writer or an artist, or stylishly fake it like the rest of Manhattan %% Button: Conventions - my job away from job %% Button: Couch Potato %% Button: Couch potatoes have brain tubers %% Button: Creature of the Night %% Button: Cthulhu cthucks, but does he cthwallow? %% Button: Cyberpagan %% Button: DNA - the ultimate machine language %% Button: DWARF Baruk Khazad! Khazad Aimenu! %% Button: Daddy would have gotten us Uzis %% Button: Dahling, don't be so third-level (Ben possesses) %% Button: Dain Bramaged %% Button: Damn I'm good %% Button: Darkovans do it in circles %% Button: Darth Vader for President - If you're tired of choosing the lesser of two evils %% Button: Deadly Ninja throwing button %% Button: Death before dishonor, but neither before breakfast %% Button: Death? Life? I never did understand Zen. %% Button: Decadence - more than just a way of life %% Button: Delight and amaze me! %% Button: Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch %% Button: Der Meisterscheimer of the Bavarian Illuminati (world's oldest and most successful secret conspiracy) %% Button: Desslok for Dictator %% Button: Deterministic Chaotic Physicist %% Button: Do it in the dirt with Indy! %% Button: Do not call up that which you cannot hang up on %% Button: Do not call up what you can't put down %% Button: Do not disturb. I had a hard enough time getting turbed in the first place. %% Button: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light %% Button: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup %% Button: Do or do not...There is no try %% Button: Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law, but then there is always chaos to consider %% Button: Do you know me with my clothes on? %% Button: Does anyone have any questions? Any answers? Anyone care for a mint? %% Button: Doing strange things in the name of art %% Button: Don't Feed the Dieters %% Button: Don't Panic! It's alright. Everything is going to be just fine. %% Button: Don't bother me. I've got my three miracle minimum. When the Pope signs my sainthood papers, I'm outta here! %% Button: Don't build more nukes - until we use the ones we have %% Button: Don't call me Tiny %% Button: Don't destroy the world in the first chapter - you'll find you need it later %% Button: Don't give me that intelligent life stuff - give me something I can blow up %% Button: Don't go to bed mad - stay up and fight %% Button: Don't just stand there -- buy something! %% Button: Don't mind me - I'll just bleed %% Button: Don't mock the insecure %% Button: Don't put off until tomorrow what you can get someone else to do today %% Button: Don't say yes until I've finished talking %% Button: Don't start comparing yourself to me. It'll just make you crazy. %% Button: Don't try to out-weird me - I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal %% Button: Downey/Rivera in '92 - wanna see soemthing REALLY scare? %% Button: Dragon Obedience School Dropout %% Button: Druid %% Button: Dungeoneers do it with imagination %% Button: Dyslexics have more fnu %% Button: E = mc^2 + 3d6 %% Button: Eagles soar but a weasel will never get sucked into a jet engine %% Button: Eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, hack whenever %% Button: Either I've been missing something or nothing has been going on %% Button: Eldrad Must Live! %% Button: Elf %% Button: Emmanuel doesn't pun...he Kant %% Button: End fannish elitism - Call it Sci-Fi %% Button: End rush-hour traffic now! Legalize vehicular weaponry. %% Button: Engaged in the passive overthrow of the U.S. government %% Button: English is bad Amslan %% Button: Entropy requires no maintenance %% Button: Ents do Bonsai charges %% Button: Erle Stanley Gardnerian - Initiate of the Mysteries %% Button: Escape From New York was a documentary! %% Button: Eternal nothingness is ok if you're dressed for it %% Button: Even Napoleon had his Watergate %% Button: Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter %% Button: Every line a straight line, every pause a song cue %% Button: Every program has at least one bug and one unnecessary instruction - therefore, every program can be reduced to one instruction that doesn't work %% Button: Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege %% Button: Everyone is looking at you staring at my tits %% Button: Everything I say can stand on its own two faces %% Button: Everything in the universe is packaging, big toys, or meat %% Button: Evil Geniuses for a better tomorrow %% Button: Evil Grin %% Button: Evil Grin (with picture of walking fish symbol) %% Button: Evolution in action %% Button: Evolution sounds ok, but I'd rather keep my options open %% Button: Evolution: Life's a niche and then you die %% Button: Excuse me while I change into something more formidable %% Button: Exhilarating, isn't it? %% Button: Fandom - not your ordinary elite %% Button: Fandom isn't a matter of life and death - it's much more important than that %% Button: Fantasy is a crutch for people who can't handle soap operas %% Button: Fascinating. My tricorder has gone completely ape-shit. %% Button: Feline Sapiens %% Button: Few things are more dangerous than a hobbit with low blood sugar %% Button: Fighter %% Button: First generation Trekkie 6609.8 %% Button: Flaming Heterosexual %% Button: Flat Mars Society %% Button: For God, for country, and for no apparent reason %% Button: For this I went to college? %% Button: For this problem, we'll have to call in our crack team of trained solipsists %% Button: Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names %% Button: Former Fetus for Choice %% Button: Fractals - what you see is what you wait for %% Button: Fun Guy from Yuggoth %% Button: GLORP?! %% Button: Gene Police: YOU!! Out of the pool! %% Button: Generic Button %% Button: Genetically perfect but morally crippled %% Button: Gerbil-jamming is safe - if you don't share gerbils %% Button: Get thee down. Be thou funky %% Button: Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I'll break the lever %% Button: Give me a straight line and I'll bend it for you %% Button: Global Village Idiot %% Button: Go Lemmings Go! (attrib to Tolkein) %% Button: Go ahead - the Surgeon General has determined that you only live once %% Button: Go on and try it. The worst you can do is make a fool of yourself in front of all your friends %% Button: God is love - but get it in writing %% Button: God is real unless declared integer %% Button: God made a few people perfect - the rest He created right-handed %% Button: God saw absolute truth lying in the street and picked it up. The Devil said, "Give it to me and I'll organize it for you." %% Button: God won't mind - she's part Irish %% Button: Good evening. I'm Barnabas Collins. Forgive me if I startled you. %% Button: Good managers believe in sharing credit with the one who did the work %% Button: Graduate of the Darth Vader School of Personnel Management %% Button: Graduate of the Han Solo School of Action Without Thought %% Button: Graduate of the Han Solo School of Asteroid Belt Navigation %% Button: Graduate of the Han Solo School of Hyperdrive Repair %% Button: Graduate of the Indiana Jones School of Swordplay %% Button: Graduate of the Mad Max School of Defensive Driving %% Button: Gravity isn't MY fault - I voted for velcro! %% Button: Gross anatomy - it isn't just for breakfast anymore %% Button: Guard the Mysteries - constantly reveal them %% Button: Hacking is a conversational black hole %% Button: Hackito Ergo Sum %% Button: Hackito Ergo Sum have with apple %% Button: Half the failures in life result from pulling in one's horse when it is leaping. %% Button: Half-elven space cadet %% Button: Han Solo lives - in my refrigerator %% Button: Hands off - I'm a conversation piece %% Button: Happiness is a Tardis with a working dematerialization circuit %% Button: Happiness is a positive cash flow. %% Button: Happy Booker %% Button: Harmless Ninja throwing button %% Button: Harrison Ford is a better idea %% Button: Have an Illuminated day! %% Button: Have an adequate day! (with picture of smiling eye in pyramid) %% Button: Have an affair. It'll help break up the monogamy %% Button: Have no fear - I never attack lesser beings %% Button: Have you Rolfed your cat today? %% Button: Have you changed your tofu water today? %% Button: Have you hugged a pervert today? %% Button: Have you hugged your Cabbage Patch Dalek today? %% Button: He's dead, Elliot %% Button: He's dead, Jean-Luc %% Button: He's dead, Jean-Luc have 1/2 %% Button: He's dead, Jim... You take his phaser, I'll get his wallet %% Button: Heaven doesn't want me, and Hell's afraid I'll take over %% Button: Hedonist for Hire - No job too easy %% Button: Hell I'm better %% Button: Hell's Ewoks %% Button: Hello. My name is Batman. You killed my father. Prepare to die. %% Button: Hi! I'll be your asshole for the evening. %% Button: High Voltage Electronics - life's a glitch, and then you fry %% Button: High entertainment threshold %% Button: History repeats itself, but each time the price goes up %% Button: Housework can kill you if you do it right %% Button: How the !*@%! did I get on the con committee? %% Button: Humor is emotional chaos recollected in tranquility %% Button: I am a bookaholic. If you are a decent person, you will sell me books at half price. %% Button: I am a buttonholic. If you are a decent person, you will not sell me another button. %% Button: I am a genius and should be exempt from shit %% Button: I am a genius and should be exempt from this sort of thing %% Button: I am a softwareholic. If you are a decent person, you will not sell me any more software. %% Button: I am different, I am alone and I'm an outcast... I bleed green! %% Button: I am not a happy camper %% Button: I am not a number! I am a free numeric variable! %% Button: I am not a number! I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. I am a free man! %% Button: I am not as forgiving as the Emperor is %% Button: I am not conceited -- I just can't stand mortals %% Button: I am one of the greatest liars in the English language - I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't know it wasn't true %% Button: I am sick and depraved - please feed me drugs and cookies %% Button: I am simply a human being, more or less %% Button: I am very flexible - I can put both feet in my mouth %% Button: I ask for so little, just let me rule you and you will have everything you want %% Button: I beat the Kobayashi Maru situation by using the Corbomite maneuver %% Button: I can't be late -- I just got here %% Button: I canna change the laws of physics, Captain, but I can find ye a loophole %% Button: I cried for the man who had no hair until I met the man who had no head %% Button: I didn't claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat veggies %% Button: I didn't say it was a GOOD joke %% Button: I didn't trip - I was caught in a sudden gust of gravity %% Button: I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them %% Button: I do so have a memory. It's in /usr. %% Button: I do whatever my Rice Crispies tell me to %% Button: I don't WANT to go somewhere where they cook the wine but not the fish %% Button: I don't care if I'm a lemming - I'm not going! %% Button: I don't delegate responsibility, I delegate blame %% Button: I don't do work, but I have a friend who does %% Button: I don't get mad -- I get odd %% Button: I don't have an attitude problem - it's supposed to be like this %% Button: I don't have an attitude, babe - I AM an attitude %% Button: I don't have ulcers -- I give them! %% Button: I don't know if we're having an argument; but if we are, I'm right! %% Button: I don't know why, but humans are quite my favorite species %% Button: I don't like spreading rumors, but what else can you do with them? %% Button: I don't like violence but I'm very good at it %% Button: I don't mean to make you feel guilty, but I would if I could %% Button: I don't mind being in touch with reality, as long as I don't have to live there %% Button: I don't mind being in touch with reality, so long as I don't have to pay the phone bill %% Button: I don't mind getting older. I just mind that I have aging children %% Button: I don't need you, y'know - I can be lonely all by myself %% Button: I don't purr - I don't beep - I ain't cute! %% Button: I don't remember volunteering for this "Ring" business %% Button: I don't see you, so don't pretend to be there %% Button: I don't stoop to conquer - I merely conquer %% Button: I don't suffer from insanity - I revel in it! %% Button: I don't want help, I want pity %% Button: I don't want to be a millionaire - just to live like one %% Button: I eat Ethiopian food with a fork and I'm proud! %% Button: I eat junk food to get it out of the house %% Button: I fight for what I believe in. I'm a mercenary, and what I believe in is money. %% Button: I finally got it all together - but then I forgot where I put it %% Button: I find your lack of faith disturbing %% Button: I found Jesus, and he said, "Tag, you're it!" %% Button: I get paid for thinking like this %% Button: I give good back %% Button: I grew up on Mt. Everest and everything's been downhill since %% Button: I had no shoes and wept. Then I met a man who had no feet. So I said, "Hey man, got any shoes you're not using?" %% Button: I have a firm grip on reality - by the throat %% Button: I have a mind like a steel sieve %% Button: I have a mind like a steel trap; whatever goes in gets crushed and mangled! %% Button: I have a talent for idleness which is tragically wasted by my working here %% Button: I have an understanding with my local police - I have them outgunned, but they have me outnumbered %% Button: I have no gun, but I can spit %% Button: I have no humility. It's a virtue, but I can live with it %% Button: I have no use for adventures - they're nasty disturbing uncomfortable things and make you late for dinner! %% Button: I have nothing against bigots personally, but if they move into a neighborhood, property values go down %% Button: I is a college graduate. %% Button: I is a college student. %% Button: I judge people by what is in their hearts - not by the color of their scales %% Button: I knew I had some reason for not killing you... Now what was it? %% Button: I know I'm a sick person - the question is whether it's charming or offensive %% Button: I know UNIX, ADA, FORTH, APL, PASCAL, C, FORTRAN, COBOL, SMALLTALK, LISP, and nineteen other high-tech words %% Button: I know it all. I just can't remember it simultaneously. %% Button: I like life - it's something to do %% Button: I like the idea of an ancient race - it makes a world feel so... lived in %% Button: I like to start the day off with a smile and get it over with early %% Button: I love it when a plan comes together %% Button: I love it when a pun comes together %% Button: I love lefties %% Button: I love you like a brother but business is business %% Button: I may be a craven little coward, but I'm a GREEDY craven little coward %% Button: I may have taught you everything you know, but I didn't teach you everything I know %% Button: I might as well exercise - I'm in a bad mood anyway %% Button: I practice parallel monogamy %% Button: I pray for boredom but it never comes %% Button: I prefer to remain anomalous %% Button: I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore %% Button: I regard mornings as a personal affront %% Button: I rub people the right way %% Button: I spend my life doing things I detest to make money I don't need to buy things I don't want to impress people I don't like %% Button: I support everyone's right to be an idiot. I may need it myself someday. %% Button: I think I am! I think I am! - the little engine that philosophized %% Button: I think, therefore I am, I think have 1/2/3 %% Button: I tried being reasonable once - I didn't like it %% Button: I used to be amused -- now I'm just bored %% Button: I used to be conceited -- but now I'm perfect %% Button: I used to have a drug problem, but now I make enough money %% Button: I used to have a fnord, but I traded it in on a Chnevy %% Button: I wanna have Vincent's kittens %% Button: I want a map of this conversation %% Button: I want it all! %% Button: I was born in Iowa, I just work in outer space %% Button: I was stupid, I was expendable, and here I am %% Button: I wasn't trained for this %% Button: I will defend to the death everyone's right to my opinion %% Button: I will never amount to anything in the galaxy while I retain my propensity for vulgar facetiousness %% Button: I will not be briefed or debriefed - my underwear is my own! %% Button: I will not eat oysters - I want my food dead - not sick, not wounded - dead %% Button: I wouldn't hurt a fly, but only because they taste funny %% Button: I wouldn't take a million dollars for any of my kids, but I wouldn't pay a dime for another one %% Button: I'd be agnostic if I cared that much %% Button: I'd do anything to make you happy, but you're asking too much %% Button: I'd like to have breakfast with you... should I call you or nudge you? %% Button: I'd lose my body if my brain weren't surrounded by it %% Button: I'd love to make up my mind, if only I could remember where I left it %% Button: I'll give you the shirt off my back, but when you return it, it had better be dry cleaned! %% Button: I'm Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan %% Button: I'm GREAT at immaturity - I've been practicing for decades %% Button: I'm a DM -- it's lonely at the top %% Button: I'm a GM -- it's lonely at the top %% Button: I'm a hacker -- I don't know the meaning of sleep %% Button: I'm a law unto myself - and I break it anyway! %% Button: I'm a misanthrope - what's your @#$&ing problem? %% Button: I'm a right-brain mind in a left-brain job %% Button: I'm a very dangerous fellow when I don't know what I'm doing %% Button: I'm an ARTIST - please feed my creditors %% Button: I'm an anarchist, especially about whatever someone _else_ is running %% Button: I'm fannish -- I don't know the meaning of sleep %% Button: I'm feeling argumentative. Please contradict me. %% Button: I'm feeling homicidal - say ANYTHING %% Button: I'm having a d'eja-vu experience - just like last time %% Button: I'm immortal. I'm bored. Let's party. %% Button: I'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore %% Button: I'm never late -- nothing starts without me! %% Button: I'm not a mercenary -- killing's more of a hobby with me %% Button: I'm not a short person - I'm a tall elf %% Button: I'm not bad... I'm just drawn that way %% Button: I'm not born again - my mother got it right the first time! %% Button: I'm not breaking the rules - I'm just testing their elasticity %% Button: I'm not irresponsible - I'm out of control! %% Button: I'm not on drugs -- I AM drugs %% Button: I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not gophering %% Button: I'm not worried about the bullet with my name on it... just the thousands out there marked 'Occupant' %% Button: I'm omnipotent - ask me how %% Button: I'm only a hypnotist, so this is only a suggestion %% Button: I'm out of bed and dressed. What more do you want? %% Button: I'm sorry, but a unicorn doesn't work like a mule %% Button: I'm the leader - which way did they go? %% Button: I'm the world's foremost authority on my own opinion %% Button: I've a Right to be Left! %% Button: I've abandoned my search for reality and am looking for a good fantasy. %% Button: I've been wrestling with reality for most of my life - I'm pleased to say I've won %% Button: I've got a bad feeling about this %% Button: I've got it all! %% Button: I've got nothing to say and I'll only say it once %% Button: I've had time since I joined the Doctor %% Button: I've turned my life around - I used to be miserable and depressed - now I'm depressed and miserable %% Button: If 'if' statements had no 'then' clauses, %% Button: If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates %% Button: If Murphy's Law were true, whenever you tried to take a breath, all the air would be on the other side of the room %% Button: If a program is useful, it must be changed -- If it's useless, it must be documented %% Button: If a system is of sufficient complexity, it will be built before it's designed, implemented before it's tested, and obsolete before it's debugged %% Button: If all else fails, lower your standards %% Button: If all else fails, read the directions %% Button: If at first you don't succeed, change the rules %% Button: If everything is everything, why can't I eat my shoes? %% Button: If guns are outlawed, can we use swords? %% Button: If guns are outlawed, how will conservatives win arguments? %% Button: If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy %% Button: If it doesn't work, use a bigger hammer. If it breaks, it needed fixing anyway. %% Button: If it has syntax, it isn't user friendly %% Button: If it's any of your business, it isn't really gossip %% Button: If it's not one thing, it's a BUNCH of things %% Button: If it's worth doing it's worth doing badly %% Button: If losing builds character, I have all the character I need %% Button: If olive oil comes from olives, and peanut oil comes from peanuts, where does baby oil come from? %% Button: If only there were some indication the universe was doing it on purpose %% Button: If people were required to know the law rather than to obey it, the government would be overthrown the next day %% Button: If pi were three, this sentence would look like this %% Button: If puns were deli meat, this would be the wurst %% Button: If silence could speak, I wonder what it would say %% Button: If someone asks you if you're a god, say yes! %% Button: If that which does not kill me makes me stronger, I must be Arnold Schwarzenegger by now %% Button: If the government _really_ wanted us to obey the law, they would tell us what it is %% Button: If the government doesn't trust the people, why doesn't it dissolve them and elect a new people? %% Button: If the universe is expanding, why can't I find a parking space? %% Button: If the wearer of this button shows any signs of depression, administer chocolate immediately! %% Button: If there is anything in the universe more important than my ego, I want it taken out and shot immediately %% Button: If they give you lined paper, write the other way! %% Button: If we're so smart and so creative, why aren't we happier than they are? %% Button: If words could speak, I wonder what they'd say %% Button: If you are in a car travelling at the speed of light in reverse and turn on the headlights, what happens? %% Button: If you aren't confused, then you don't understand the situation %% Button: If you can't dress weird, why dress at all? %% Button: If you could print all the money you wanted, and steal all the money you wanted, couldn't you manage to stay out of debt? %% Button: If you don't like the way I drive, get out of the Batmobile %% Button: If you don't like the way I drive, stay off the street... the sidewalk... the lawn... %% Button: If you don't make the rules, you don't have to keep them. If you do make the rules, you won't anyway. %% Button: If you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt. %% Button: If you know what you're doing, how long it will take, or what it will cost, it isn't research. %% Button: If you know what you're doing, it isn't research %% Button: If you love something, kill it. If it comes back, you belong to it. %% Button: If you think my fantasies are weird, you should see my life %% Button: If you think my life is weird, you should see my fantasies %% Button: If you torture the data enough, it will confess %% Button: If you want to take a picture, it'll cost you a fiver. If not, I'll break your camera. %% Button: If you're allergic to cats, stay away from me %% Button: If you're going to put a time machine into a car, you may as well do it with some style %% Button: Ignorance is bliss, but it'll never replace sex %% Button: Ignore previous button %% Button: Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. %% Button: Immoral Singularity - I dig black holes %% Button: Immortality's a bitch %% Button: Implementation is the fruitless struggle by the talented and underpaid to fulfill promises made by the rich and ignorant %% Button: Implementing systems is 95% boredom and 5% sheer terror %% Button: In all human affairs, the odds are 6 to 5 against %% Button: In science, it doesn't matter if you're wrong, as long as you're not stupid. In business, it doesn't matter if you're stupid, so long as you're not wrong. %% Button: In ten minutes, the Joker poison on your Batman memorabilia will be activated %% Button: In this world, it rains on the Just and the Unjust, but the Unjust have the Just's umbrella %% Button: In this world, you have to be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. I spent years being smart. I recommend pleasant. %% Button: In your heart you know it's flat! %% Button: Incest is best, and I consider the cat one of the family %% Button: Incompetence is better than no competence at all %% Button: Indecision is the basis of flexibility %% Button: Indulgences are Papal, too %% Button: Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac %% Button: Interfere? Of course we'll interfere. Always do what you're best at, I say. %% Button: Involuntary Polymorph - subject to change without notice %% Button: Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be? %% Button: Is the world full of smart people pretending or imbeciles who mean it? %% Button: It is against the growing of marijuana to respect laws %% Button: It is better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness %% Button: It is changed, isn't it? %% Button: It is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye if they are lightly greased %% Button: It is impossible to solve a problem with the consciousness that created it %% Button: It isn't a war on drugs - it's a war on people %% Button: It takes a lot of cheese to sharpen a sword %% Button: It takes all kinds of people to make a world, but did you ever think the percentages were wrong? %% Button: It was a painful divorce -- I lost the games! %% Button: It was only a SMALL thermonuclear device %% Button: It won't work - I told Orville that, I told Wilbur that, and I'm telling you now! %% Button: It's 10 AM - do you know where your shoes are? %% Button: It's against my programming to impersonate a Deity %% Button: It's an Elder Thing - you wouldn't understand %% Button: It's been a long week today %% Button: It's been lovely, but I have to scream now %% Button: It's chaos pure and simple %% Button: It's hard being an individualist all by yourself %% Button: It's hard to predict the future when they keep changing the past %% Button: It's just a very intense dream %% Button: It's nice to be modest, but it's stupid not to tell them %% Button: It's not cute being this easy %% Button: It's not easy being a cast iron bitch. It takes years of practice. Most people don't appreciate that. %% Button: It's not my FAULT %% Button: It's not the long fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom %% Button: It's not who wins or loses, it's who keeps score %% Button: It's practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry %% Button: It's slobbering time %% Button: Jabba's kind of scum -- fearless and inventive %% Button: Jedi Knight %% Button: Jesus saves, but the Mongol hoards %% Button: John Christian Falkenberg - He's efficient %% Button: Join the glaciologists for a nuclear winter now %% Button: Judge me by my size, you will? %% Button: Just Say Whoa - Stop suicidal cavalry charges - Remember the 600 %% Button: Just doing my bit to lower property values %% Button: Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Tatooine... Jawas II %% Button: Kamikaze Chemist %% Button: Keeping freedom safe from democracy %% Button: Kill them all -- God will know his own %% Button: Killing never solves anything, but it keeps people out of your hair while you think of what to do next %% Button: Kiss me - I'm telepathetic %% Button: Klingons need love, too (but don't tell anyone, it would spoil their image) %% Button: Kzinti Diplomatic Corps Let's do lunch %% Button: Laugh it up, fuzzball %% Button: League of Bloodthirsty Women -- Men's Auxiliary %% Button: Lefties are better lovers %% Button: Lefties have rights, too %% Button: Legalize prostitution -- keep politicians off the streets %% Button: Let's get some chaos into this confusion %% Button: Let's leave religion to the televangelists. After all, they're the professionals. %% Button: Lethargy in motion %% Button: Life - an invariably fatal condition spread by sexual contact %% Button: Life is a cabaret - dark, crowded, and full of Nazis %% Button: Life isn't always fair, but it shouldn't cheat that much %% Button: Life's a beach, and then you dry %% Button: Life's a magazine, taxation's a bitch! %% Button: Life's a virgin - bitches are too easy %% Button: Life's too short, but if you go fast enough, you can live it one-and-a-half times. %% Button: Life... don't talk to me about life %% Button: Light Sabers - A part of living %% Button: Light a candle, curse the glare %% Button: Listen to the Lord and Lady - call their children in the moonlight %% Button: Live Wild or Die! %% Button: Live long and prosper. It's logical. %% Button: Live now - procrastinate tomorrow! %% Button: Living well is the best revenge %% Button: Love may make the world go round, but lust is the axis on which it revolves %% Button: Love means never having to say, "Put down that meat cleaver" %% Button: Luminous beings we are - not this crude matter %% Button: Magic User %% Button: Maintaining humility can be a monumental task for some people - in my case it's simply too much to ask %% Button: Make my day - try to pick up someone else %% Button: Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler %% Button: Mao's poems are better than Hitler's paintings, but not as good as Winston Churchill's %% Button: Marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish %% Button: Marvelous! You're going to kill me. What a finely tuned response to the situation! %% Button: Matrix Technicians do it in relays %% Button: Maybe I'll become an evil genius and destroy the world and THEN I'll feel better %% Button: Me Concom -- you mundane %% Button: Me not responsible. Me just pawn in game of life %% Button: Member of Videophiles Anonymous %% Button: Mercy is a great virtue, but that doesn't mean you should pay full price for a late pizza %% Button: Militant Agnostic - I don't know and you don't either! %% Button: Militant Pacifist - stop fighting or I'll kill you %% Button: Mobile smoking area %% Button: Money can't buy happiness, but it does quiet the nerves %% Button: Money isn't everything, but it'll do till until everything comes along %% Button: Moody bitch seeks understanding gentleman for love/hate relationship %% Button: Moriarty killed a clone -- Holmes lives %% Button: Mr. Fusion Home Service Representative %% Button: Mr. Wesley Crusher, would you please report to the airlock %% Button: Mules and donkeys aren't used in war because they're too smart to go on a battlefield %% Button: Murphy's Law only fails when you try to demonstrate it %% Button: Mutate now - avoid the rush %% Button: My back is computerized - it has a floppy disc %% Button: My body belongs to me -- but I share! %% Button: My body, my choice - legalize drugs %% Button: My brain is the most important thing about me, but look what told me that %% Button: My commitment is to truth, not consistency %% Button: My great dream is that I've won all the beauty contests in the world and all the people I don't like are forced to build me a castle in France %% Button: My life is not organized around high probability events %% Button: My loyalties are divided between health food and high cholesterol swill %% Button: My mind is a deadly weapon - but don't worry, it's peace-bonded for the weekend %% Button: My mind isn't ALWAYS in the gutter - sometimes it comes out to feed %% Button: My opinion is uncluttered by facts %% Button: My other button is funny %% Button: My parents went to Ingolstadt, and all I got was this lousy apple %% Button: My parents were first cousins -- that's why I look so much alike! %% Button: My superiority complex is better than your superiority complex %% Button: NCC 1701 1966-1984 RIP %% Button: Nasty, British, and Short (Tony Gold) %% Button: National Lampoon Staff Anthropologist at large %% Button: Naugahyde is murder %% Button: Never confuse endurance with hospitality %% Button: Never learn to type. If you do, someone will ask you to do it %% Button: Never volunteer - they'll send you to earth %% Button: Never wrestle with a pig. You'll both get filthy - and the pig likes it. %% Button: Nietzsche is pietzsche, but Sartre is smartre %% Button: Nine hundred years ago, I couldn't spell transcendent parahuman deity, and now I are one %% Button: No food, no sleep, just THE GAME %% Button: No job too big, no job too small, no job too stupid %% Button: No major project is completed on time, within budget, or by the same staff who started it. Yours will not be the first. %% Button: No man is an island so long as he is on at least one mailing list %% Button: No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up %% Button: No matter who you vote for, the government gets elected %% Button: No more Mr. Nice Guy. %% Button: No one ever built a statue to a critic %% Button: No one is a failure who is enjoying life %% Button: No quarter asked - no change given %% Button: No smoking -- Oxygen in use %% Button: No, I haven't read ILLUMINATUS! %% Button: Not exactly working on all thrusters %% Button: Not tonight, darling - the Supreme Court is watching %% Button: Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result %% Button: Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten. %% Button: Nothing is uglier than truth when it is not on our side %% Button: Now everybody line up alphabetically by height %% Button: Nudge nudge wink wink say no more say no more %% Button: Nuke 'em from orbit - it's the only way to be sure %% Button: Nuke ET %% Button: Nuke the Whales %% Button: Nuke the fnords. Save the baby dronfs %% Button: Nurses are 'patient' people %% Button: Of course I'm arrogant. The best usually are. %% Button: Of course you're confused - you're wearing my underwear %% Button: Oh, please continue with your petty bickering. I find it fascinating %% Button: Old Jedi never die -- they just fade in and out %% Button: Old hippies never die - they just take a little longer to get a mortgage %% Button: Once a program is running, it's obsolete %% Button: Once upon a time... is now %% Button: One Step Beyond The Night Gallery into The Outer Limits of The Twilight Zone! %% Button: One company, one egg, one basket %% Button: Only borrow from pessimists - they don't expect to be paid back %% Button: Opposite Weirdnesses Attract - All weirdness is opposite %% Button: Our civilization has grown past that point of barbarism where it's possible to get anything done %% Button: Out of body, back in five minutes %% Button: Outnumbered, yes. Outmaneuvered, maybe. Outclassed, never! %% Button: Overload - core meltdown initiated %% Button: Overstressed, overtired, and oversensitive %% Button: PS/2 - yesterday's hardware today OS/2 - yesterday's software tomorrow OS/2 Ext. - today's software real soon now %% Button: Pagan Missionary - let me show you my positions %% Button: Paladin %% Button: Paladins were born to raze Hell %% Button: Passing directly from barbarism to decadence %% Button: Penguin Lust %% Button: Pensic XI -- The War that wasn't %% Button: People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs %% Button: Permanent Mobile Sabbath - On the Sabbath, it is forbidden to work, even on your character %% Button: Pick a blatant lie and then stick with it %% Button: Planets are smarter than astronomers because planets can solve the three-body problem %% Button: Please, Captain, not in front of the Klingons %% Button: Poetry is the right words in the right order. So is a dictionary. %% Button: Poets are writers too %% Button: Pointed ears are a sign of intelligence %% Button: Political language is designed to make lies sound useful and murder respectable %% Button: Power corrupts -- isn't that what it's for? %% Button: Pregnancy is hell. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or on drugs %% Button: Prepare for the future -- read science fiction %% Button: Press ENTER to go on to the next button %% Button: Programmers are a bit smarter %% Button: Progress at best consists of replacing errors with more subtle errors %% Button: Projecting empaths -- You gotta feel sorry for them %% Button: Pundit %% Button: Punned-it %% Button: Puns are for groan-ups %% Button: Punslinger %% Button: Pure as the driven slush %% Button: Purranoia: the fear your cats are up to something %% Button: Put your modem where your mouth is %% Button: QVACK %% Button: Quantum physics predicts the past with 80% accuracy %% Button: R2D2 is a renegade Dalek %% Button: RTFM %% Button: Ranger %% Button: Ranger Squire %% Button: Reading - It's not a pastime - it's an addiction %% Button: Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building %% Button: Real men hack APL %% Button: Real-life Heinlein female %% Button: Reality corrupts. Absolute reality corrupts absolutely %% Button: Reality is OK... Just don't make a habit of it %% Button: Reality is a collective hunch %% Button: Reality is a crutch for people who can't deal with Markland %% Button: Reality is a crutch for people who can't deal with the SCA %% Button: Reality is for people who can't handle buttons %% Button: Reality is just a transfer gate away %% Button: Reality is something you rise above %% Button: Reality is the leading cause of stress %% Button: Reality is the opiate of the people %% Button: Rebel without a clue %% Button: Red Giant seeks White Dwarf for binary relationship %% Button: Red meat isn't bad for you. Fuzzy blue-green meat is bad for you. %% Button: Relaxed Agnostic - I don't know any answers - I'm not looking very hard, either %% Button: Remember that writer's block is nothing more than a failure of nerve - but don't let that bother you %% Button: Remember the cold war? How pre-millenial! %% Button: Remember, there's more to life than science fiction, but not much %% Button: Repetition is the soul of wit. Repetition is the soul of wit. Repetition... %% Button: Resident Vampire %% Button: Revenge is a dish best served microwaved %% Button: Right theory, wrong universe %% Button: Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads! %% Button: Robert A. Heinlein memorial service 7:00 PM Barbecue 7:30 PM (no salt necessary) %% Button: Rules? What rules? %% Button: SEPPUKU button - to use, fold back pin %% Button: SPI died for our sins %% Button: SSDD - Same shit, different dimension %% Button: Sage with a Slight Flaw in Character %% Button: Save the mundanes - we need them for breeding stock! %% Button: Save the nukes %% Button: Save the werewolves - Help protect an endangered species %% Button: Say it sincerely... Say it with an Uzi %% Button: Scruffy-looking nerf herder %% Button: Secular Humanist Defense League %% Button: See Earth first %% Button: Self-sacrifice is always a virtue - in other people %% Button: Service with a snarl %% Button: Serving donuts on another planet %% Button: Set phasers on "annoy" %% Button: Sex and Drugs and Rock and Role-Playing %% Button: Sex is nobody's business but me and my teddy bear's %% Button: Sex, Drugs, & Unix %% Button: Shredded Disaster is Murphy Slaw %% Button: Shut up, Wesley %% Button: Shy, hard of hearing, and near-sighted - please flirt aggressively %% Button: Silly rabbithorn! Matrix are for kids! %% Button: Sleep is for the weak and sickly %% Button: Sleep is for wimps. Happy, healthy, well-rested wimps, but wimps nonetheless %% Button: Slight discomfort before dishonor %% Button: Smurfs are baby Gamelons %% Button: So many books, so little time %% Button: So many galaxies, so little time %% Button: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Imperial Admirals %% Button: Some things are still sacred - I haven't taken them apart yet %% Button: Someday my prince will come - but right now I'm available %% Button: Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination %% Button: Sometimes my NOW is later than it should be %% Button: Sometimes the only solution is to find a new problem %% Button: Sometimes the truth can be so unnecessary %% Button: Sorry, I don't date outside my gender %% Button: Speak softly and wear a LOUD shirt %% Button: Speaker to Teletypes %% Button: Squint when you approach me, lest you be blinded by my beauty %% Button: Squishy-do - the way of the slug %% Button: Star Trek IV - so long, and thanks for all the fish %% Button: Stop me before I volunteer again... and again... and again... %% Button: Story-tellers live to tell the tale %% Button: Student of the Harry Tuttle school of Revolutionary Plumbing %% Button: Stupid? I don't know the meaning of the word %% Button: Success didn't spoil me - I've always been insufferable %% Button: Suffering the inhumanity of regular employment %% Button: Support your local medical examiner -- die strangely %% Button: T'ai Chi isn't a martial art - it's a MARTIAN art. Martians move slowly in earth gravity %% Button: TERMINATOR - The few, the proud, the machines %% Button: THE BABY... and instrument of destruction %% Button: THINK - If you are already thinking, please disregard this button %% Button: Tailored bacteria have designer genes %% Button: Talk is cheap - bullets are cheaper %% Button: Talk to the OTHER autocrat! %% Button: Taste me, taste me - I'm organic %% Button: Taxation is theft; Conscription is slavery; War is murder %% Button: Team Banzai %% Button: Team Bolshoi %% Button: Techno-Hippie %% Button: Technopagan %% Button: Thank you for not lecturing me about not smoking %% Button: Thank you for not thanking me for not smoking %% Button: That may well be so true, but my mind working am not %% Button: That which does not kill me maims me severely %% Button: That which does not kill me makes me smarter except for oxygen deprivation %% Button: That would be telling %% Button: That's ok - I don't know my name either %% Button: The C Team - I love it when a program comes together %% Button: The DM is always right - cruel, sadistic, etc. but always right %% Button: The Dragon Taxi Service - we will take thee... anywhere %% Button: The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am %% Button: The New Age is just like the old age - only newer %% Button: The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously %% Button: The art of flying is aiming at the ground - and missing %% Button: The beauty of a pun is in the "Oy!" of the beholder %% Button: The best defense is a strong retreat %% Button: The cops can't get me - they're all prisoners of the donut shops %% Button: The cow ate bluegrass and mooed indigo %% Button: The customer isn't always right, but they do get an unnatural amount of slack %% Button: The death ray is in the eye of the beholder %% Button: The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits %% Button: The ee's are cummings! The ee's are cummings! %% Button: The end of the world is at hand - repent and return your library books %% Button: The fascination of the paper clip is inversely proportional to the work at hand %% Button: The few, the proud, the incurably insane... The Concom %% Button: The gods aren't crazy - they're only drunk %% Button: The good news is: I'm a perfectionist. The bad news is: I charge by the hour. %% Button: The hell with criticism - praise is good enough for me %% Button: The idea that God is His own grandmother may be unsupported by Scripture, but who wants to offend God's grandmother? %% Button: The impossible we do immediately. Miracles require 24 hours notice. %% Button: The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door. The alien said, "Ten minutes to showtime." %% Button: The longer I am around humans, the less I understand them %% Button: The lunatic fringe begins here %% Button: The map is not the territory, but you can't fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment %% Button: The meek are getting ready %% Button: The meek may inherit the earth, but it's the grumpy who get promoted %% Button: The most rabid literary purist %% Button: The obscure we see immediately, the completely apparent takes longer %% Button: The only good morning is a dead morning %% Button: The perfect lover turns into a pizza at 4 AM %% Button: The policeman isn't there to create disorder, he's there to preserve disorder %% Button: The problem with trouble-shooting is that trouble shoots back %% Button: The problem with unwritten laws is that they're so hard to erase %% Button: The question is not whether I'm out of my mind, but what are you doing trapped in yours? %% Button: The real world is only a special case %% Button: The rings of Saturn are actually composed of lost airline luggage %% Button: The road goes ever on and on %% Button: The secret is to find out what people really want and then call it self-awareness %% Button: The shortest distance between two points has a bridge out %% Button: The sleep of reason engenders monsters %% Button: The street finds its own uses for technology; the net finds its own uses for garbage %% Button: The therapist is NOT in %% Button: The toughest time in a person's life is when you have to kill a loved one because they're the Devil %% Button: The trouble with being boss is there's no satisfaction is stealing office supplies %% Button: The trouble with natural monopolies is that it's so much work to keep them going artificially %% Button: The twelfth regeneration's a bitch and then you die %% Button: The ultimate smart weapon would be too smart to blow itself up %% Button: The universe without the Doctor scarcely bears contemplation %% Button: The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the management %% Button: The way to a man's heart is with a broadsword %% Button: The work most executives do is not very different from the work most secretaries do, except that executives rarely have demonstrable skills like typing ninety words a minute %% Button: The world is cracked; this is all a bad yolk %% Button: The worst thing about censorship is %% Button: The worst thing about censorship is that it desensitizes people to violence - censorship IS violence %% Button: The y chromosome is the runt of the litter %% Button: There ain't no such thing as a free console %% Button: There ain't no such thing as a free weekend %% Button: There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats. %% Button: There are no accidents. Only plans other people don't tell you about %% Button: There are two types - those who hate the 8086 architecture, and liars %% Button: There are very few problems which can't be solved by a suitable application of high explosives %% Button: There comes a time when nothing's left but style %% Button: There is a very fine line between reality and fantasy - and I'd just as soon obscure it %% Button: There is intelligent life, but I'm only visiting %% Button: There is no heaven or hell - only smoking or non-smoking %% Button: There is no point in getting angry, but there is a stupid malignity to all this that does try one's patience %% Button: There is no substitute for incomprehensible good luck %% Button: There is something fascinating about cosmology. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. %% Button: There must be more fools than knaves in the world, or else the knaves wouldn't have enough to live on %% Button: There's a dance in the old boy yet %% Button: There's always the temptation to let other people think you're normal %% Button: There's famine. There's plague. There's death. There's war. Then there's us - Fifth Horseman Mercenary Corps. %% Button: There's more to life than sitting around in the sun in your underwear playing the clarinet %% Button: There's no rest for the greedy %% Button: There's so much entropy - wouldn't it be nice if it could be used for something constructive? %% Button: There's too much blood in my caffeine stream %% Button: These are the days of Miracle Whip and Wonder Bread %% Button: They got the library at Alexandria - they're not getting mine %% Button: They like you very much, but they are not the hell your whales! %% Button: They lived in two worlds. They loved in one %% Button: Thief %% Button: This button goes to the next person who buys me a drink %% Button: This button goes to the next person who gives me a hug %% Button: This button has no other purpose than to get you to read it %% Button: This button is cursed. As you read you will be confuset by ther printeb wertz. Yer intellijenc wil vabni... xrt! xrt! %% Button: This button is programming you in ways that may not be apparent for months, or even years %% Button: This button isn't really very witty and it goes on and on and you'd probably be happier reading some other button. Most of them aren't half as depressing as this one. Don't say I didn't warn you. %% Button: This is a nightmare and I'm going to wake up, RIGHT? %% Button: This is a test. Had it been an actual attack, the warning system wouldn't have worked. %% Button: This is no ordinary fool you're dealing with. %% Button: This person is a natural product. The slight variations in color and texture enhance its individual character and beauty and in no way are to be considered flaws or defects. %% Button: This sentence contains one non-standard English flutzpah %% Button: This slogan is programming you in ways that may not be apparent for months, or even years. %% Button: This universe is sold by weight, not by volume. Some settling may have occurred during shipment. %% Button: Those who like sausage or political policy shouldn't watch either being made %% Button: Thoth is my copilot %% Button: Time Lords say, "Go ahead, make my yesterday" %% Button: Time has little to do with infinity and jelly donuts %% Button: Time is defined so as to make motion look simple %% Button: To err is computer, to forgive is fine %% Button: To err is human - what's your excuse? %% Button: To err is human, to really foul up requires the root password %% Button: Today is the first day of the rest of your sentence %% Button: Total Strangers Need Love Too and I'm stranger than most! %% Button: Transcendent Paranoia %% Button: Trust me %% Button: Trust me - thousands don't %% Button: Trust me -- I'm almost a Doctor %% Button: Two things are universal - hydrogen and stupidity %% Button: Two's complement. Three's a crowd %% Button: Under the most carefully controlled conditions of scheduling, programming, and con security, the fen will do what they damn well please %% Button: Universal Church of Pan-Ethnic Cuisine %% Button: Until you walk a mile in someone else's moccasins, you can't imagine the smell %% Button: Up *&$@ pulsar without a gravity generator %% Button: Up your shaft %% Button: User Hostile %% Button: User Surly %% Button: Using a feather is kinky. Using the whole chicken is perverse! %% Button: Vampire victim - be nice to me today %% Button: Vegetarians eat vegetables - I am a humanitarian %% Button: Veni, Vidi, VCR I came, I saw, I taped %% Button: Vincent loves Catherine %% Button: Visit Scenic Dagobah - The Jedi's last resort %% Button: Vuja D'e: the strange feeling you get that nothing has happened before %% Button: WHAT Sixties revival? The Sixties never died! %% Button: Wandering Punster - do not remove gag %% Button: War is not healthy for soldiers and other living things %% Button: Warning! I still have all my spells! %% Button: Warning: GM whimsical when bored %% Button: Warp drive air conditioning is hyperventilation %% Button: Watch it - You're trying my infinite patience %% Button: We Discordians must stick apart %% Button: We all have faults, and mine is being wicked %% Button: We all live in a yellow subroutine %% Button: We are all God's children - by a previous marriage %% Button: We are experiencing synaptical difficulties - please stand by %% Button: We are looking for the nuclear wessels %% Button: We are the Weird %% Button: We came, we saw, we kicked its ass! %% Button: We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you %% Button: We don't carry loose change into combat %% Button: We must finally acknowledge that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis %% Button: We say that cats are playful creatures, perhaps they say the same about us %% Button: We'll KNOW that rock is dead when you need a degree to get a job in it %% Button: We'll get along fine as soon as you realize I'm the root user %% Button: We'll look for the alien, you find the cat %% Button: We're all aliens, but from different planets %% Button: We're so busy catching minnows, we forget we're standing on a whale %% Button: We're sorry, the button you have reached is not in service. Please check the button and dial again, or ask the operator for assistance. %% Button: We're tired of third-rate incompetents in public office. We want first-rate incompetents %% Button: We've got to stop hurting each other - you first %% Button: Weird "R" Us %% Button: Weird enough for all practical purposes %% Button: Weirdness Magnet %% Button: Weirdness is the best defense %% Button: Welcome back to square one %% Button: Welcome to Middle Earth %% Button: Were you standing at the shallow end of the gene pool? %% Button: Whales are mammals. Mammals have hair. SHAVE THE WHALES! %% Button: What a long strange trip it's been %% Button: What am I doing out of bed? %% Button: What are you doing wrong with our bug-free product? %% Button: What color is a chameleon on a mirror? The same color as the chameleon on the other side of the mirror %% Button: What do you look like when you aren't visualizing anything? %% Button: What if it was the Warren Commission who killed JFK? %% Button: What is the output of a vacuum pump? %% Button: What's the point of being fascinatingly crazy, if you don't enrich the world with it? %% Button: What's vanilla, vanilla and vanilla? Ice cream clones %% Button: Whatever you're doing, it's not as important as petting the cat %% Button: When everything is outlawed, outlaws will have everything %% Button: When evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve %% Button: When in doubt, use more thermite %% Button: When nine hundred years old you are, look as good you will not %% Button: When screwballs meet, they click %% Button: When you are not looking at it, this sentence is in Spanish %% Button: When you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend %% Button: When you're as great as I am, it's hard to be humble %% Button: When you're up to your ass in tribbles, it's hard to remember that the objective was to poison the grain %% Button: Whenever you're holding all the cards, why does everyone else turn out to be playing chess? %% Button: Which came first, the future or the past? %% Button: While you were reading my buttons, my friend was picking your pocket %% Button: Who died and made you Blake? %% Button: Who needs fantasy when you can have physics? %% Button: Who needs rational when your toes curl up? %% Button: Who's scruffy-looking? %% Button: Whoever said that money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop %% Button: Why are Earth people so parochial? %% Button: Why are elves chaotic? Brownian motion %% Button: Why be limited by your imagination - if something's impossible, you won't do it. %% Button: Why do people spend years writing a novel when they can buy one for a few dollars? %% Button: Why give the person who has everything a box to keep it in when it already comes in its own container? %% Button: Why reach for the musket when all you need is a custard pie? %% Button: Why work for a living when you can die for art? %% Button: Will you dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight? %% Button: Windows & Icons & Mice OH MY! %% Button: Wisdom is knowing when to stop %% Button: Witches use brooms because nature abhors a vacuum %% Button: Without the last minute, how much would ever get done? %% Button: Woad Warrior %% Button: Would all punsters please keep their gags in their mouths? %% Button: Would this body lie to you? %% Button: YOU can help wipe out COBOL in our lifetime %% Button: YUMMIE - Young Upwardly Mobile Mutant %% Button: Yeah... yeah... that's the ticket... %% Button: Yellow journalism is media ochre %% Button: Yes, but what if this weren't a rhetorical question? %% Button: Yield to temptation, I may not make the pass again %% Button: Yoda for President - Vote for him you will %% Button: You are in a maze of twisty little UNIX versions %% Button: You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend too much of your time reading buttons %% Button: You can fly, but that cocoon has to go %% Button: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time - that should be enough for most purposes %% Button: You can't be a figment of my imagination - I'd have done a better job %% Button: You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus %% Button: You can't go on forever "living in the shadow of world destruction." After a while, people get bored. %% Button: You can't have too many buttons - only too little surface area %% Button: You can't judge a book by its movie %% Button: You can't tell beforehand which side of the bread you should butter %% Button: You know you're in trouble when Spock starts to cry %% Button: You know, just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets! %% Button: You should be assertive, but not with me %% Button: You shouldn't go faster than twice the speed of light - it's too hard on the tires %% Button: You think you've found my weakness - but I have MORE %% Button: You will meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it %% Button: You'll have to be nice to me - I throw up easily %% Button: You're awfully picky for someone from the Twilight Zone %% Button: You're not right. You just SOUND right. %% Button: You're not the only one who thinks I don't know what I'm doing %% Button: You're only young once - after that you need another excuse %% Button: You're only young once, but you can be immature forever %% Button: You're so cute when you're cynical %% Button: You've got to know the rules before you break them - otherwise it's no fun %% Button: Young urban psycho killer %% Button: Your behavior is no excuse for the way you act %% Button: Your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency %% Button: Your reality is lies and balderdash and I am delighted to say I have no grasp of it whatsoever %% Button: Your silliness has been noted %% Button: ZORKers do it under the rug %% Button: Zero tolerance/infinite hypocrisy %% Button: lim sqrt(3)=2 3-->4 %% Button: lim sqrt(3)=2 3-->4 (with pictures of moon in different phases) %% Buttons: He's dead, Jim Of course he's dead, I killed him! %% Buttons: I thought YOU silenced the guard! What guard? Fool! I am the guard! %% Buy Land Now. It's Not Being Made Any More. %% Buy old masters. They bring better prices than young mistresses. -- Lord Beaverbrook %% Buy sheep, sell deer. Ancient Babylonian business proverb. %% 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. %% By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave -- the motives, the desires, the wishes ... we increase the feeling of freedom. -- B. F. Skinner %% By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let it go. -- John Powell %% By calling this number you have triggered a relay that will blow up your phone. %% By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% By definition, one divided by zero is undefined. %% By definition, when you are investigating the unknown, you do not know what you will find. %% By definition, when you are investigating the unknown, you do not know what you will find or even when you have found it. %% By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% By establishing real money, men rule out its debasement. -- Lewis E. Lehrman %% By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. %% By following the good, you learn to be good. %% By following the good, you learn to be good. But who wants to be good ? %% By following the good, you learn to be good. Unfortunately bad is more fun. %% By following the good, you will be bored to death. %% By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation. -- Edmund Burke %% By heaven we understand a state of happiness infinite in degree, and endless in duration. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% By making something absolutely clear, somebody will be confused. %% By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart. -- Confucius %% By night an atheist half believes a God. -- Edward Young %% 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 %% By perseverance the snail reached the Ark. -- Charles Spurgeon %% By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% By preserving over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination. -- Christopher Columbus %% By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death. -- Titus Lucretius Carus %% By removing goodness from power, one both makes goodness powerless and allows power to be evil. %% By repackaging age-old operating system features -- such as multitasking and virtual memory -- and marketing them as "innovations", and by making non-competitive product agreements, IBM and Microsoft Corp. were able to successfully pull a grand-scale commercial deception. The sad part is that MIS managers are still falling for the old song and dance. To OS/2 die-hards: "Wake up and face it; OS/2 is d-e-a-d!" -- Alex G. Christensen, "Information Week", April 29, 1991 %% By self-pollination, the farmer may get a flock of long-haired sheep. %% By some miracle of elven technology, you have managed to stop the leak in the dam. %% By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century. -- Edward Abbey %% By the age of forty, a man gets the face he deserves. %% By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate. -- Edward Abbey %% By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man --man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner -- check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. -- Hugh Akston %% By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. -- William Shakespeare %% By the time a person gets to greener pastures, he can't climb the fence. %% By the time a social science theory is formulated in such a way that it can be tested, changing circumstances have already made it obsolete. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% By the time of the Great Renaming, net.suicide, along with net.rumors, was mainly populated by refugees from net.bizarre, which was the first popular group ever dropped by the backbone. This group of people acted like a roving gang. "Ah, here's a NEW almost-empty group to post train schedules and core dumps in!" Imagine their squeals of joy when they discovered that posting to net.test got them mail from all over the net. -- Joe Buck, jbuck@janus.berkeley.edu, gives us some Usenet history %% By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying -- Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), "Unfortunate Coincidence" %% By the yard, life is hard. By the inch, it's a cinch. %% By the year 1984 the entire world may be run by computers. Digital Equipment Corporation will still be run by people. %% By the year 2000 we're going to have the best educated Americans in the world. -dan quayle %% By this time I got to looking for a kind of substitute, I can't tell you who I found, except that it rhymes with dissolute. %% By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity -- another man's, I mean. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% By work you get money, by talk you get knowledge. -- Haliburton %% By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. %% Bye Bye -- PDP 10 %% Bye bye life! Bye bye happiness! Hello, loneliness, I think I'm gonna die. %% Bye's First Law of Model Railroading: Anytime you wish to demonstrate something, the number of faults encountered is proportional to the number of viewers. %% Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye, sayin' 'This will be the day that I die.' -- Don MacLean %% Bye-bye  %% Byte - a mouthful, as in 'How many bytes in a Big Mac?' %% Byte rate - how fast you can eat -- Data communications glossary %% Byte your tongue. %% C -- A black Firebird, the all-macho car. Comes with optional seat belts (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler). %% C Programmer's Disease: n. The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion), and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of having done his bit to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences of {fandango on core}. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% C for yourself. %% C programmer run C programmer crash C programmer quit %% C programmers do it their way. %% C provides the infinitely-abusable GOTO statement, and labels to branch to. Formally, the GOTO is never necessary, and in practice it is almost always easy to write code without it. -- Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language %% C'Bers do it on the air. %% C'est l'amour dans l'age d'ordinateur. %% C'est la vie. %% C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341] %% C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la gare! %% C'mon boys, don't bother me. I'm debating Dan Quayle. The boy's retarded. -- Senator Birch Bayh %% C++ is the best example of second-system effect since OS/360. -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% 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 %% C: "Despite that amazing display of cunning, reflex and physical prowess, your tail still has a death grip on your butt." -- Calvin and Hobbes %% C: "I think life should be more like tv. I think all of life's problems ought to be solved in 30 minutes with simple homilies, don't you? I think weight and oral hygiene ought to be our biggest concerns. I think we should all have powerful, high-paying jobs, and everyone should drive fancy sports cars. All our desires should be instantly gratified. Women should always wear tight clothes, and men should carry powerful handguns. Life overall should be more glamorous, thrill-packed, and filled with applause, don't you think?" -- Calvin and Hobbes %% C: "Tigers don't worry about much, do they?" H: "Nope. That's one of the perks of being feral." -- Calvin and Hobbes %% C: A real language for real programmers. %% C: n. 1. The third letter of the English alphabet. 2. ASCII 1000011. 3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement {{UNIX}}; so called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named `B' in commemoration of *its* parent, BCPL. Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing C++, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named `D' or `P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. See also {languages of choice}, {indent style}. C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% CAD: A man who doesn't tell his wife that he's sterile until she's pregnant. %% CAMPERS do it in a tent. %% CAPITALISM - You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. %% CAPRICORN (Dec.22 - Jan.19) Play your hunches. This is a day when luck will play an important part in your life. If you were smarter, you wouldn't need so much luck and you wouldn't be reading your horoscope, either. You are a suspicious person, and it will occur to you that astrologers don't know what they're talking about any more than your Aunt Martha. %% CAPTAIN n. Decorative dummy found on sailboats. See FIGUREHEAD. %% CARD: a person lacking courage. "Yew yella bellied card!" -- Texan Dictionary %% CARPENTERS hammer it harder. %% CARPET LAYERS do it on the floor. %% CASE? A fool with a tool is still a fool. -- Zwittlinger %% CATATONIA (kat-uh-toe'-nee-uh) n. A condition of suspended animation in which the system is in a wedged (CATATONIC) state. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% CBBS : More tall tales of telecomputing told by Naval engineers. %% CCITT: Can't Certify I Trust Telecom. %% CCITT: Can't Conceive Intelligent Thoughts Today %% CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh.. %% CD-WOM, Wead Onwy Memowy. %% CDR (ku'der) [from LISP] v. With "down", to trace down a list of elements. "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% CELIBACY(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual CELIBACY(1) NAME celibacy - don't have sex SYNOPSIS celibacy DESCRIPTION Does nothing worth mentioning. %% CEO of Dementia and Other Meaningless Entities. %% CEREBRAL ATROPHY : The phenomena which occurs as brain cells become weak and sick, and impair the brain's performance. An abundance of these "bad" cells can cause symptoms related to senility, apathy, depression, and overall poor academic performance. A certain small number of brain cells will deteriorate due to everyday activity, but large amounts are weakened by intense mental effort and the assimilation of difficult concepts. Many college students become victims of this dread disorder due to poor habits such as overstudying. %% CEREBRAL DARWINISM : The theory that the effects of cerebral atrophy can be reversed through the purging action of heavy alcohol consumption. Large amounts of alcohol cause many brain cells to perish due to oxygen deprivation. Through the process of natural selection, the weak and sick brain cells will die first, leaving only the healthy cells. This wonderful process leaves the imbiber with a healthier, more vibrant brain, and increases mental capacity. Thus, the devastating effects of cerebral atrophy are reversed, and academic performance actually increases beyond previous levels. %% CHAINING - a method of attaching programmers to desks to speed up output %% CHASTITY BELT: An anti-trust suit. (And an unchivalrous knight is the one that files it.) %% CHECKPOINT - the location from where programmer draws his salary %% CHEERLEADERS do it with more enthusiasm. %% CHEMISTS like to experiment. %% CHESSPLAYERS check their mates. %% CHIP: One California hi-way patrolman. %% CHIROPRACTORS do it by manipulation. %% CHOMP v. To lose; to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. A hand gesture commonly accompanies this, consisting of the four fingers held together as if in a mitten or hand puppet, and the fingers and thumb open and close rapidly to illustrate a biting action. The gesture alone means CHOMP CHOMP (see Verb Doubling). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% CHRISTMAS: A time when each of us gets to reflect upon what we each most deeply and sincerely believe in. Money. At the mall of our choice. %% CHUBBY CHECKER just had a CHICKEN SANDWICH in downtown DULUTH! %% CI caught the end of a Mark Russell repeat last night on PBS. He was satirizing the 1980 presidential campaign (you know, the one that featured Jimmy and Ronny). Here are two lines which I thought were not only funny, but also just as valid today as they were in '80 (maybe even moreso). "My greatest fear is that... one of the candidates... will win." "One thing I know for sure... is that whoever wins... he'll be the evil of two lessers." %% CI$: // n. Hackerism for `CIS', CompuServe Information Service. The dollar sign refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges. Often used in {sig block}s just before a CompuServe address. Syn. {Compu$erve}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% CIA SECRET: Proof of P=NP found in UFO! -- "National Computer Science Enquirer" %% CINDERELLA 10: A woman who sucks and fucks 'til midnight and then turns into a pizza and a six-pack. %% CLEVELAND: Where their last tornado did six million dollars worth of improvements. %% CLM: /C-L-M/ [Sun: `Career Limiting Move'] 1. n. An action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job: "His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for `best CLM'." 2. adj. Denotes extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer and obviously missed earlier because of poor testing: "That's a CLM bug!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% CLOCK MAKERS do it mechanically %% CLONE OF MY OWN (to Home on the Range) Oh, give me a clone Of my own flesh and bone With the Y chromosome changed to X. And when she is grown, My very own clone, We'll be of the opposite sex. 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 %% CLOSE n. Abbreviation for "close (or right) parenthesis", used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. See OPEN. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% CLOWNS do it for laughs. %% COACHES whistle while they work. %% COBOL -- A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly, but it does the work. %% COBOL PROGRAMMERS do it with bugs %% COBOL fingers: /koh'bol fing'grz/ n. Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from coding in COBOL. The language requires code verbose beyond all reason; thus it is alleged that programming too much in COBOL causes one's fingers to wear down to stubs by the endless typing. "I refuse to type in all that source code again; it would give me COBOL fingers!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% COBOL is for morons. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods. %% COBOL programs are an exercise in Artificial Inelegance. %% COBOL: /koh'bol/ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] n. (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on {dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror. See also {fear and loathing}, {software rot}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% COBOL: Completely Over and Beyond reason Or Logic. %% COCK-SUCKER: Someone who got caught doing what you got away with. %% COCKTAIL WAITRESSES serve highballs. %% CODING: AN addictive Drug. %% COITUS INTERRUPTUS: A jerky movement following the words (by either sex partner) "I want to have your child." %% COKEBOTTLE n. Any very unusual character. MIT people complain about the "control-meta-cokebottle" commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complain about the "altmode-altmode-cokebottle" commands at MIT. %% COLLEGE: The fountains of knowledge, where everyone goes to drink. %% COLLIN'S LAW OF CONFERENCES: The speaker with the most monotonous voice speaks after the big meal. %% COLORADO: Where they don't buy M & M's, 'cause they're so hard to peel. %% COLVARD'S LOGICAL PREMISES: All probabilities are 50%. Either a thing will happen or it won't. GRELB'S COMMENTARY Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you. %% COM MODE (variant: COMM MODE) [from the ITS feature for linking two or more terminals together so that text typed on any is echoed on all, providing a means of conversation among hackers] n. The state a terminal is in when linked to another in this way. Com mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing, which are not used orally: Part 1: BCNU Be seeing you. BTW By the way... BYE? Are you ready to unlink? (This is the standard way to end a com mode conversation; the other person types BYE to confirm, or else continues the conversation.) CUL See you later. FOO? A greeting, also meaning R U THERE? Often used in the case of unexpected links, meaning also "Sorry if I butted in" (linker) or "What's up?" (linkee). %% COM MODE [cont.] (variant: COMM MODE) [from the ITS feature for linking two or more terminals together so that text typed on any is echoed on all, providing a means of conversation among hackers] n. The state a terminal is in when linked to another in this way. Com mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing, which are not used orally: Part 2: FYI For your information... GA Go ahead (used when two people have tried to type simultaneously; this cedes the right to type to the other). HELLOP A greeting, also meaning R U THERE? (An instance of the "-P" convention.) NIL No (see the main entry for NIL). OBTW Oh, by the way... R U THERE? Are you there? %% COM MODE [cont.] (variant: COMM MODE) [from the ITS feature for linking two or more terminals together so that text typed on any is echoed on all, providing a means of conversation among hackers] n. The state a terminal is in when linked to another in this way. Com mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing, which are not used orally: Part 3: SEC Wait a second (sometimes written SEC...). T Yes (see the main entry for T). TNX Thanks. TNX 1.0E6 Thanks a million (humorous). When the typing party has finished, he types two CRLF's to signal that he is done; this leaves a blank line between individual "speeches" in the conversation, making it easier to re-read the preceding text. %% COM MODE [cont.] (variant: COMM MODE) [from the ITS feature for linking two or more terminals together so that text typed on any is echoed on all, providing a means of conversation among hackers] n. The state a terminal is in when linked to another in this way. Com mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing, which are not used orally: Part 4: : When three or more terminals are linked, each speech is preceded by the typist's login name and a colon (or a hyphen) to indicate who is typing. The login name often is shortened to a unique prefix (possibly a single letter) during a very long conversation. At Stanford, where the link feature is implemented by "talk loops", the term TALK MODE is used in place of COM MODE. Most of the above "sub-jargon" is used at both Stanford and MIT. %% COME FROM: n. A semi-mythical language construct dual to the `go to'; `COME FROM' %% In his '90 Usenix presentation, Dennis Ritchie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X-windows was brain-dead and would soon die. "He was half-right. Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks." -- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of Unix, from an article in Unix Today %% In his book titled "Quick C", Al Stevens gives us a quick rundown on the origin, purpose and usefulness of so many programming languages. COBOL was designed so that managers could read code. BASIC was designed for people who are not programmers. FORTRAN is for scientists. ADA comes from a committee - a government committee no less. PILOT is for teachers. PASCAL is for students. LOGO is for children APL is for martians. FORTH, LISP and PROLOG are specialty languages. C, however, is for programmers. %% In his book, Mr. DePree tells the story of how designer George Nelson urged that the company also take on Charles Eames in the late 1940s. Max's father, J. DePree, co-founder of the company with Herman Miller in 1923, asked Mr. Nelson if he really wanted to share the limited opportunities of a then-small company with another designer. "George's response was something like this: 'Charles Eames is an unusual talent. He is very different from me. The company needs us both. I want very much to have Charles Eames share in whatever potential there is.'" -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% In his private heart no man much respects himself. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% In history-as-politics, the "future" is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen. -- Edward Abbey %% In itself, salmon is a great delicacy; but too much of it is harmful, in that it taxes the digestion. At one time when a very large catch of salmon had been brought to Hamburg, the police ordered that a householder should give his servants only one meal a week of salmon. One could wish for a similar police order against sentimentality. %% In jealousy there is more self-love than love. %% In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay. -- Charles Edwin Carruthers %% In just seven days, I can make you a man! -- Rocky Horror Picture Show %% In language, clarity is everything. -- Confucius %% In larger things we are convivial; What causes trouble is the trivial. -- Richard Armour %% In less than a century, computers will be making substantial progress on ... the overriding problem of war and peace. -- James Slagle %% In life there is but one bad thing and one good; both of them are women. %% In like a dimwit, out like a light. -- Pogo, by Walt Kelly %% In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people. -- Andre Maurois %% In love, all life's contradictions dissolve and disappear. %% In love, she who gives her portrait promises the original. -- Bruton %% In lover's quarrels, the party that loves most is always most willing to acknowledge the greater fault. -- Scott %% In many traditional corporations, too many people are fearful of saying what they really think because they don't trust each other. People believe their opinions can get them in trouble. -- John Scully, "Odyssey" %% In marriage, as in war, it is permitted to take every advantage of the enemy. %% In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine. -- Edward Abbey %% In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved. -- Butler %% In matters of dispute, the bank's balance is always smaller than yours. -- Rozanne Weissman %% In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% In me thou see'st the twilight of such day, the glowing of such fire. -- Tennyson %% In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy. -- Edward Abbey %% In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil. -- Mrs. Jameson %% In most instances, all an argument proves is that two people are present. %% In my Lucia's absence Life hangs upon me, and becomes a burden; I am ten times undone, while hope, and fear, And grief, and rage and love rise up at once, And with variety of pain distract me. -- Joseph Addison %% In my case, saving the world was only a hobby. -- Edward Abbey %% In my end is my beginning. -- Mary Stuart [Queen of Scots] %% In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany. She said, "Cut it out." -- Steve Wright %% In my opinion, Perl's biggest weaknesses are (1) its syntax is fantastically complex (consider the multiple meanings of / and $), and (2) it is a collection of features more than a coherent language for expressing algorithms. -- Dale Worley, worley@compass.com %% In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. -- William Shakespeare %% In my sweet little Alice Blue gown Was the first time I ever laid down, I was both proud and shy As he opened his fly And the moment I saw it I thought I would die. Oh it hung almost down to the ground, As it went in I made not a sound, The more that he shoved it The more that I loved it, As he came on my Alice Blue gown. %% In my sweet little night gown of blue, On the first night that I slept with you, I was both shy and scared As the bed was prepared, And you played peekaboo with my ribbons of blue. As we both watched the break of day, And in peaceful submission I lay, You said you adored it But dammit, you tore it, My sweet little night gown of blue. %% In my view, God educates us through our deceptions and mistakes, in order to make us understand at last that we ought to believe only in Him, and not in man. %% In my youth there was a young man who never succeeded in passing his first examination in the university, but said regularly, "Next time I make it," for which cause we never called him by his proper name but by "Next time I make it." %% In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments -- there are consequences. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% In need of a rest? Quaff a potion of sickness! %% In object oriented programming the children all inherit the properties of the parent. And there are no inheritance or property taxes! %% In olden times sacrifices were made at the alter -- a custom which is still continued. -- Helen Rowland %% In order not to be fooled by the clever, it sometimes suffices to be dense. %% In order to dial out, it is necessary to broaden one's dimension. %% In order to discover anything you must be looking for something. -- Harvey Neville %% In order to get a loan, you must first prove you don't need it. -- John Cameron %% In order to keep engineers and scientists cognizant of the importance of progress, load them down with forms, multiple reports, and frequent meetings. -- Richard F. Moore %% In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. %% In order to make [a person] covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. -- Samuel Clemens %% In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos %% 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 %% In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty. -- Edward Abbey %% In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman. -- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) %% In our Victorian dislike of the practice of calling a spade a bloody shovel, it is not necessary to go to the opposite extreme of calling it an agricultural implement. -- Robert W. Seton-Watson (1879-1951) %% In our century, we've learned not to fear words. -- Uhura, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.4 %% In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% In our cult," said the girl, "it was true: The mahatma'd get stoned and then screw. In the buff, he'd smoke bhang While his drug-plugged-in whang Just guh-rew...and guh-rew...and guh-rew!" %% In our haste to deal with the things that are wrong, let us not upset the things that are right. %% In philosophical minds, the familiar excites wonder. %% In politics stupidity is not a handicap. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% In politics, if it's against you, it's a machine. If it's for you, it's an organization. %% In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% In principle the Ringworld should have been an endless garden. It was not a randomly evolved world, after all, but a made thing. -- "The Ringworld Engineers" %% In punishing folly It does not further one To commit transgressions. The only thing that furthers Is to prevent transgressions. %% In recognizing AT&T Bell Laboratories for corporate innovation, for its invention of cellular mobile communications, IEEE President Russell C. Drew referred to the cellular telephone as a "basic necessity." How times have changed, one observer remarked: many in the room recalled the advent of direct dialing. -- The Institute, July 1988, pg. 11 %% In respect to lock-making, there can scarcely be such a thing as dishonesty of intention: the inventor produces a lock which he honestly thinks will possess such and such qualities; and he declares his belief to the world. If others differ from him in opinion concerning those qualities, it is open to them to say so; and the discussion, truthfully conducted, must lead to public advantage: the discussion stimulates curiosity, and curiosity stimulates invention. Nothing but a partial and limited view of the question could lead to the opinion that harm can result: if there be harm, it will be much more than counterbalanced by good." -- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850 %% In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim at top. -- Poor Richard %% In school, every period ends with a bell. Every sentence ends with a period. Every crime ends with a sentence. -- Rod Schmidt %% In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. -- Carl Sagan %% In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. -- Sir William Osler %% 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 %% In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% In simple cases, presenting one obvious right way versus one obvious wrong way, it is often wiser to choose the wrong way, so as to expedite subsequent revision. %% In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse. -- Edward Abbey %% In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students. -- Edward Abbey %% In some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence. -- Cesar Chavez %% In some ways, yesterday seems long ago; In other ways it seems like only yesterday.... %% In space nobody can hear you scream - ALIEN. %% In space, it's never Miller time. -- "Bloom County" %% In space, no one can hear you fart. %% In specifications, Murphy's Law supersedes Ohm's. %% In spite of all evidence to the contrary, the entire universe is composed of only two basic substances: magic and bullshit. %% In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality. %% In spite of the cost of living it's still popular %% In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing. -- Alan Kay %% In taking possession of a state the conqueror should well reflect as to the harsh measures that may be necessary, and then execute them at a single blow.... Cruelties should be committed all at once. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% In the 23rd century the solar system was wracked by constant warring between the fragmented states of the Asteroid Belt. Particularly successful in these wars was one tribe (I'll call them Joes) which managed to total up a surprising war record despite its amazingly primitive weaponry through sheer ferocity. After having dispatched a fleet from a rival nation (call them Jacks), the Joe general went over to his adversary's flagship to sign a treaty of peace. After the diplomatic niceties were taken care of, the Jack general (who had been wounded in the previous day's fighting) took a moment of his time to talk shop and mention his injury. Their exchange follows: (this line intentionally not left blank) Said the Jack general, "What was that laser you sawed me with last night?" Came the reply, "That was no laser--that was my knife!" %% In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rocks. -- Edward Abbey %% In the Art of Love, a slip of the tongue can land you in deep shit! %% 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. %% In the Garden of Eden sat Adam, Massaging the bust of his madam, He chuckled with mirth, For he knew that on earth, There were only two boobs and he had 'em. %% In the NY subway, a commercial for an abortion clinic goes... Pregnant? We can help! to which someone had scribbled: Not pregnant? I can help!! %% In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time. -- Edward Abbey %% In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), [on New England weather] %% In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques. -- Art Linkletter %% In the West the dragon was the natural enemy of man. Although preferring to live in bleak and desolate regions, whenever it was seen among men it left in its wake a trail of destruction and disease. Yet any attempt to slay this beast was a perilous undertaking. For the dragon's assailant had to contend not only with clouds of sulphurous fumes pouring from its fire-breathing nostrils, but also with the thrashings of its tail, the most deadly part of its serpent-like body. -- From: Mythical Beasts by Deirdre Headon (The Leprechaun Library) %% In the advance of civilization, it is new knowledge which paves the way, and the pavement is eternal. -- W. R. Whitney %% In the battle of existence, Talent is the punch; Tact is the clever footwork. %% In the beginning there was nothing. And the Lord said "Let There Be Light!" And there was still nothing, but at least now you could see it. %% In the beginning was the Plan. And then came the Assumptions. And the Assumptions were without form. And the Plan was without substance. And darkness was upon the face of the Workers. And they spoke amongst themselves, saying: "It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh." And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said: "It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof." And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying: "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it." And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying: "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength." And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying to one another: "It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very powerful." And the Vice Presidents went unto the President, saying unto him: "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company, with powerful effects." And the President looked upon the Plan, and saw that it was good. And the Plan became Policy. This is how Shit happens. %% In the beginning was the word. But by the time the second word was added to it, there was trouble. For with it came syntax ... -- John Simon %% In the beginning, God created the Earth and he said, "Let there be mud." And there was mud. And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what we have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud-as-man alone could speak. "What is the purpose of all this?" man asked politely. "Everything must have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all of this," said God. And He went away. -- Kurt Vonnegut, "Between Time and Timbuktu" %% In the beginning, God said "let there be light!" and there was light. and then God said "no, bud light!" and 3 million years or so, there was bud. %% In the beginning, I was made. I didn't ask to be made. No one consulted with me or considered my feelings in this matter. But if it brought some passing fancy to some lowly humans as they haphazardly pranced their way through life's mournful jungle, then so be it. -- Marvin the Paranoid Android, From Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts %% In the bird's nest is a large egg encrusted with precious jewels, apparently scavenged somewhere by a childless songbird. The egg is covered with fine gold inlay and ornamented in lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl. Unlike most eggs, this one is hinged and has a delicate looking clasp holding it closed. The egg appears extremely fragile. %% In the blackout they dance; rock into the aisles, and as the doors fly open even the promoter smiles. Someone takes his pants off and the rafters knock. Rock is dead, they say ............... LONG LIVE ROCK! %% In the blue grass region A paradox was born: The corn was full of kernels And the colonels full of corn. -- Chief Justice John Marshall %% In the bottle, discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence. -- Johnson %% In the broad and final sense all institutions are educational in the sense that they operate to form the attitudes, dispositions, abilities and disabilities that constitute a concrete personality...Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes, therefore, a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for its final effect upon all the interests and activities of a society that is committed to the democratic way of life. -- John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher %% In the case of a lady named Frost, Whose cunt's a good two feet acrost, It's the best part of valor To bugger the gal, or You're apt to fall in and get lost. %% In the center of the north wall of the passage is a bronze door which is #. %% In the center of the room is a large oriental rug. %% In the center of the room is an open trap door. %% In the corner of the room on the ceiling is a large vampire bat who is obviously deranged and holding his nose. %% In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king. -- Erasmus %% In the days of old, When Knights were bold, And women were too cautious; Oh, those gallant days, When women were women, And men were really obnoxious... %% In the dimestores and bus stations People talk of situations Read books repeat quotations Draw conclusions on the wall. -- Bob Dylan %% In the distant past Vulcans killed to win their mates. And they still go mad at this time. Perhaps the price they pay for having no emotions the rest of the time. -- Kirk and McCoy, "Amok Time," stardate 3372.7 %% In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss. -- Edward Abbey %% In the east there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home. The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears its message. The master programmer continues to work at his terminal, for he does not know that the bird has come and gone. %% In the economic sense, our socialism was more like state capitalism ... Marx had never dreamed of anything of the sort ... Soviet Russia had broken with everything in her history that was revolutionary, and had got onto the usual rails of great-power imperialism. -- Svetlana Alliluyeva %% In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free. -- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) %% In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other. -- Edward Abbey %% In the eyes of my dog, I'm a man. -- Martin Mull %% In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% In the fields of Hell where the grass grows high Are the graves of dreams allowed to die. %% In the fight between you and the world, back the world. -- Franz Kafka %% In the final analysis, more people depend on solar energy for snow removal than any other method. -- James Holt McGravran %% In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower %% In the first place God made idiots; this was for practice; then he made school boards. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% In the floor is a stone channel about six inches wide and a foot deep. The channel is oriented in a north-south direction. In the exact center of the room the channel widens into a circular depression perhaps two feet wide. Incised in the stone around this area is a compass rose. %% In the force if Yoda's so strong, construct a sentence with words in the proper order then why can't he? %% In the future, etiquette will become more and more important. That doesn't mean knowing which fork to pick up -- I mean basic consideration for the rights of other animals (human beings included) and the willingness, whenever practical, to tolerate the other guy's idiosyncracies. -- Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa Book" %% In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. %% In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs. %% In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. %% In the future, we will all drive standing up. %% In the future, women will have breasts all over. %% 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 %% In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season. -- Bill Vaughan %% In the garden's a castle with hundreds within, Yet though stripped to my shirt, I would never get in. An ant-hill %% In the gates of Eternity, the black hand and the white hand hold each other with an equal clasp. -- Mrs. Stowe %% In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiment, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so they can share each other's programs, bugs included. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% In the highest society, as well as in the lowest, woman is merely an instrument of pleasure. -- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) %% In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world -- a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy -- man's need for affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense. -- Eldridge Cleaver %% In the index of "Data Structures and Algorithms" by Aho, Hopcraft and Ullman (January 1983 corrected edition) page 425: Recursive procedure 24, 64-69, 425 %% In the intercourse of life we please, often, by our defects than by our good qualities. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% In the interest of more efficient data storage, your database is being replaced by three chimps and an old file cabinet. %% In the interests of better foreign relations, "Cheesehead" is presented here in several different languages. Make friends with our world-wide neighbors: Cabasa de Quesa (Spanish) Cara de Quesa (Spanish, actually "face of cheese", but equally as acceptable as "Cabasa de Quesa" in most social situations. It is important that this not be confused with "Casa de Quesa", which is "house of cheese", and another thing entirely.) Capa de Fromage (French) Head 'o Cheese (Scottish/Welsh) Ahhh-yu-gotta-Chezehead (Japanese, spoken very fast) %% In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is insane. %% In the land of the dark, the Ship of the Sun is driven by the Grateful Dead. -- Egyptian Book of the Dead %% In the land of the witless, the halfwit is king. %% In the last decade, we've been sending probes deeper and deeper into space. We've drawn attention to ourselves, Miss Shaw. -- Lethbridge-Stewart, SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE %% In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves for a bright manhood, there is no such word as fail. -- Bulwer %% In the light of the setting sun, Men either beat the pot and sing Or loudly bewail the approach of old age. Misfortune. %% In the little French town of Le'Beau, Lived a maiden exceedingly droll. At a masquerade ball, Clad in nothing at all, She backed in as a Parker house roll. %% In the long history of medicine, no doctor has ever caught the first few minutes of a play. -- McCoy, "The Conscience of the King," stardate 2919.8 %% In the long run we are all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory", 1936 %% In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble. -- Alan J. Perlis %% In the long run, men get only what they aim at. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore they had better aim at something high. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% In the long run, we're all dead. -- Prof. Friedrich Kratochwil %% In the mid '70s, just before it was overrun by fanatic Dungeons & Dragons (tm) players, the UCLA Computer Club was host to a long series of "glitter traps." Example: joke subject sits at a desk, pulls out a drawer. A string runs from the back of the drawer, up the wall, into the false ceiling, over to a spot directly over the subject's head, where it triggers the trap: a mousetrap whose action snaps a card away from its position covering a funnel, releasing a handful of glitter, which flows down the funnel, through its spout, through a hole in the ceiling acoustic tile, onto the subject. It was wonderful to watch: a muffled snapping noise, a quiet "chuff," and the slow, glittery descent of a cloud of brightly colored dust, to settle over the head and shoulders of a club member who by now has assumed an expression of appreciative resignation. %% In the middle of a forest, there was a hunter who was suddenly confronted with a huge, mean bear. In all his fears, his attempt to shot the bear was unsuccessful. Thus, he turned away and started to run as fast as he could. Finally, he ended up at the edge of a very steep cliff. His hopes were dim. But, he got on his knees, opened his arms and said, "My God! Please give this bear some religion!" Then, there was a lightning in the air and the bear stopped just a feet short of the hunter. The bear was puzzled and looked up in the air and said, "My God! What you are about to receive ... " %% In the middle of a wide field is a pot of gold. 100 feet to the north stands a smart manager. 100 feet to the south stands a dumb manager. 100 feet to the east is the Easter Bunny, and 100 feet to the west is Santa Claus. Q: Who gets to the pot of gold first? A: The dumb manager. All the rest are myths. %% In the middle of the earth is water: The image of The Army. Thus the superior man increases his masses By generosity toward the people. %% In the midst of one of the wildest parties he'd ever been to, the young man noticed a very prim and pretty girl sitting quietly apart from the rest of the revelers. Approaching her, he introduced himself and, after some quiet conversation, said, "I'm afraid you and I don't really fit in with this jaded group. Why don't I take you home?" "Fine," said the girl, smiling up at him demurely. "Where do you live?" %% In the midst of the army. Good fortune. No blame. The king bestows a triple decoration. %% In the midst of the garden stand the remains of small work of masonry. Its age is apparent from its state of ruination. The garden extends off in all directions. %% In the midst of the greatest obstructions, Friends come. %% In the midst of winter, there is in me an invincible summer. -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood. -- Edward Abbey %% In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political--especially that which pretends not to be. -- Edward Abbey %% In the morning, I do not want to eat gum drops and cheese noodles -- Madonna %% In the movies, your life would be passing in front of your eyes. %% In the music department of one of the universities there is a sign over the FAX machine that reads as follows: "If it ain't Baroque don't FAX it." %% In the newspapers I often read this pitiful sentence: "The people must be taught to read," and I say to myself, What shall they read? It is education and undesirable literature, these are our enemies. -- Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) %% In the next world, you're on your own. %% In the nice bee what sense so subtly true Form pois'ness herbs extract the healing dew? -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread. However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy. If you stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% In the parking lot the visionaries dance to the latest rage. %% In the past we have tried too much to prevent the making of mistakes. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% In the pitiful, multipage, connection-boxed form to which the flowchart has today been elaborated, it has proved to be useless as a design tool -- programmers draw flowcharts after, not before, writing the programs they describe. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. -- John Lilly %% In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared. -- Louis Pasteur %% In the relationship between man and religion, the state is firmly committed to a position of neutrality. -- Thomas Campbell Clark %% In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous. %% In the restrooms at school next to the toilet paper: Faculty photos, wipe ass to develop. and above the toilet: Deposit faculty gifts here. %% In the romantic days of Warsaw, Viennese whores were known for their beauty and delicacy. A gallant officer picked up one such lady of the evening, who took him to her apartment. They made delicious love all evening before drifting to sleep in each others arms. In the morning the man dressed, staring into a full-length mirror. The lady lay in her bed watching him. Finally, she said softly, "Didn't you forget something?" "What did I forget?" asked the officer. "You forgot about the money," said the lady. "Oh, no," said the man, standing at ramrod attention. "A Polish officer never accepts money." %% In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. -- T. S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" %% In the shade of the old apple tree Where between her fat legs I could see A little brown spot With the hair in a knot, And it certainly looked good to me. I asked as I tickled her tit If she thought that my big thing would fit. She said it would do So we had a good screw In the shade of the old apple tree. In the shade of the old apple tree I could hear the dull buzz of the bee I got all that was coming to me. As he sunk his grub hooks into me. In the soft dewy grass Her ass it was fine I had a fine piece of ass But you should have seen mine From a maiden that was fine to see. In the shade of the old apple tree. %% In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% In the stairway of life, you'd best take the elevator. %% In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death -- even vegetarians. -- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3615.4 %% In the strictest sense, I did not win. "Data..." I busted him up. -- Data and Troi, "Peak Performance", stardate 42923.4 %% In the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, it's often useful to have a nice, solid piece of wood in your hands. -- Ian Faith, manager of Spinal Tap %% In the town where I was born, lived a man who went to sea, and he told us of his life in the land of submarines. %% In the war of wits, he's unarmed. %% In the well there is a clear, cold spring From which one can drink. %% In the whole history of the world there's never been anybody just like Bert, and there'll never be another even if the world lasts a hundred million centuries. -- Prof. Clifford Jones, THE GREEN DEATH %% In the window of a New York City hardware store: "We Repair Every Type of Vacuum Cleaner." Just below: "Needed at Once: Experienced Vacuum Repair Person." -- "New York Times" %% In the window of a Swedish furrier: Fur coats made for ladies from their own skin. %% In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe. -- Edward Abbey %% In the worst-case scenario, investigators would find a direct link to financing Iraqi military expenditures. -- President George Bush, in a memo to his secretary of Agriculture, February 1990 %% In these matters the only certainty is that there is nothing certain. -- Pliny the Elder %% In these times of recession my father said unto me Don't you leave now my son you'll break our family I said I've got ideas that I can not deny, If I stay I'll be killed by the dreams on my mind -- The Alarm %% In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning. -- Carl Sandburg, in "New York Post", 1960 %% In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. -- Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) %% In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million, million galaxies like this. But in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us. -- McCoy, "Balance of Terror," stardate 1709.9 %% In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes and an occasional salutary recession. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% In this world some people are going to like me and some are not. So, I may as well be me. Then I know if someone likes me, they like me. %% In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), 1789 %% In this world, there are two sets of women: women that you would love to be with, and women that would love to be with you. THERE IS NO UNION OF THESE TWO SETS. %% In this world, truth can wait; she's used to it. %% In those days he was wiser than he is now -- he used to frequently take my advice. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% In time of trouble, men of talent are called for, but in times of ease the rich and those with powerful relatives are desired. -- Italo Bombolini %% In time of war the first casualty is truth. -- Boake Carter %% In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared. -- Jerome S. Bruner %% In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. -- Paul Harvey %% In times of crisis, it is of utmost importance not to lose one's head. -- Marie Antoinette %% 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. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% In unanimity there is cowardice and uncritical thinking. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% In unanimity there may well be either cowardice or uncritical thinking. -- Donald Rumsfeld %% In waking a tiger, use a long stick. -- Mao %% In war it is not men, but the man who counts. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% In war there is no substitute for victory. -- General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, 19 April 1951 %% In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes. -- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) %% In war, truth is the first casualty. -- U Thant %% In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory. -- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) %% In what can only be described as a surprise move, God has officially announced His candidacy for the U.S. presidency. During His press conference today, the first in over 4000 years, He is quoted as saying, I think I have a chance for the White House if I can just get my campaign pulled together in time. I'd like to get this country turned around; I mean REALLY turned around! Let's put Florida up north for awhile, and let's get rid of all those annoying mountains and rivers. I never could stand them! There apparently is still some controversy over the Almighty's citizenship and other qualifications for the Presidency. God replied to these charges by saying, "Come on, would the United States have anyone other than a citizen bless their country?" %% In which level of metalanguage are you now speaking? %% In wine there is truth (In vino veritas). -- Pliny %% In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth. -- Edward Abbey %% In youth, it was a way I had To do my best to please, And change, with every passing lad, To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know, And do the things I do; And if you do not like me so, To hell, my love, with you! -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), "Indian Summer" %% Inactivity is death. -- Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) %% Inadmissible: Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with, and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most momentous actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the testimony of men long dead whose identity is not clearly established and who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law... But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Incantations are useless once you have gotten this far. %% Incest, n.: Sibling revelry. %% Include me out. -- Sam Goldwyn %% Include this in your CONFIG.SYS File: BUGS=OFF %% Income is something you cannot live without or within. %% Incompatibility: In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Incompetence knows no barriers of time or place. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Incompetence tends to increase with the level of work performed. And, naturally, the individual's staff needs will increase as his level of incompetence increases. -- Arthur J. Riggs %% Incompetents often hire able assistants. -- Douglas Evelyn %% Incorrigible Romantic %% Incorrigible punster Do not incorrige %% Increase of freedom in the State may sometimes promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the boundaries of Empire... A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. -- Lord Acton (1834-1902) %% Increase. It furthers one To undertake something. It furthers one to cross the great water. %% Increased knowledge will help you now. Have mate's phone bugged. %% Incredible Shrinking Dickies, The %% Incrementally extended heuristic algorithms tend inexorably toward the incomprehensible. %% Incumbent, n.: Person of liveliest interest to the outcumbents. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Indecision is slow poison. It begets do-nothingness and can become a habit. Better to fail because you have made the wrong move than because you made no move at all. %% Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Indeed, the first noble truth of Buddhism, usually translated as `all life is suffering,' is more accurately rendered `life is filled with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness.' -- M. D. Epstein %% Indications of what humans would call a wild party. -- Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% Indifference is the only sure defense. -- Jody Powell %% Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares? %% Indifferent pictures, like dull people, must absolutely be moral. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Indirect file nested too deep. %% Individualists unite! %% Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything. -- Edward Abbey %% Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) %% Indomitable in retreat; Invincible in advance; Insufferable in victory. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill [on General Montgomery] %% Indubitably, sir, Indubitably. -- Data to Picard, "Lonely Among Us", stardate 41249.3 %% Inductors dissipate after doing it. %% Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the basic tyrant of the modern age. -- Edward Abbey %% Industrious spider activity has created webs in the trees to the northwest. %% Industry always moves in to fill an economic vacuum. %% Industry standard - This indicates that a certain company invented something, then published the specifications. It does not necessarily mean that other companies have adopted it. Publishing specifications is a form of corporate laziness - a company hopes somebody else will do work for it. %% Inertia makes the world go round. %% Inevitable advantage of man over the machine is illustrated in this drawing. At top human player loses to machine. In center nettled human player revises machine's instructions. At bottom human player wins. -- From a cartoon in the Saturday Evening Post quoted by Claude E. Shannon "A Chess Playing Machine" %% Infancy, n.: The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven lies about us." The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Infant care has to be learned from the bottom up. %% Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Infidelity does not consists in believing or disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. -- Thomas Paine %% Infinite-Monkey Theorem: n. "If you put an {infinite} number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet." (One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the intelligence of the one {random} monkey that eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type out all the possible *incorrect* versions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a {brute force} method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a {one-banana problem}. This theorem seems to have originated in the classic SF short story "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, but was widely popularized by a reference in Douglas Adam's `Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Infinity is where you transfer from one parallel line to another. %% Inflating it further would probably burst it. %% Inflation is when the only thing free of charge is a rundown battery. %% Influence. Success. Perseverance furthers. To take a maiden to wife brings good fortune. %% Influence: In politics, a visionary 'quo' given in return for a substantial 'quid'. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Information Center, n.: A room staffed by professional computer people whose job it is to tell you why you cannot have the information you require. %% Information flows efficiently through organizations, except that bad news encounters high impedance in flowing upwards. -- Paul Gray %% Information is the inverse of entropy. %% Information necessitating a change of design will be conveyed to the designer after -- and only after -- the plans are complete. (Often called the "Now they tell us!" Law.) %% Information travels more surely to those with a lesser need to know. -- Charles P. Boyle %% Ingrate, n.: A man who bites the hand that feeds him, and then complains of indigestion. %% Ingratitude is the crack in the sewer that turns the sweet waters of life into a running shit pot. -- Italo Bombolini %% Ingres is not a necessary precursor to Egress. %% Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. %% Ink, n.: 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Inner Truth. Pigs and fishes. Good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. Perseverance furthers. %% Innocence is always unsuspicious. -- Haliburton %% Innocence. Supreme success. Perseverance furthers. If someone is not as he should be, He has misfortune, And it does not further him To undertake something. %% Innocent action brings misfortune. Nothing furthers. %% Innocent behavior brings good fortune. %% Innovation is hard to schedule. -- Dan Fylstra %% Innovations in law, whether good or bad, spin an entangling weave far more often than they sew a straight stitch. Division of labor can make for great efficiency; too great a division of labor in lawmaking can instead create a crazy quilt. -- Michael Scully %% Innuendo: Italian Suppository. %% Inode table overflow %% Inquiring gnomes want to mine. %% Inquisitive people are the funnels of conversation; they do not take in anything for their own use, but merely to pass it to another. -- Steele %% Insanity is just an overdose of reality. %% Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% Insanity is the final defense ... It's hard to get a refund when the salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon. -- Cerebus %% Insert New Disk for Drive C: Press ENTER when ready. %% Insert inevitable trivial witticism of your choice. %% Inside a shop you better take a look at the price tags before buying anything. %% Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out. -- Tony Hoare %% Inside every science fiction novel is a trilogy struggling to get out. -- Martin Minow %% Inside his eggshell Ringare stirred, trying unsuccessfully to discover a comfortable version of his enforced fetal position. Reincarnation had its advantages, he mused, but the gestation period wasn't one of them. There was very little for the mind of the one-time wizard to do while waiting to be born, except wonder what sort of being he would be and pray for premature birth. Inside the egg, dozens of "days" passed into dozens of "nights" until one "morning" Ringare woke in the grip of an overwhelming sense of panic. Couped up in that tiny, dark, goopy-wet ovoid for the-gods-knew how long, the wizard had finally reached the breaking point. Madly - and with a screeching roar he had heretofore never been capable of uttering - Ringare beat his fists and legs and head against his eggshell. %% Inside, I'm already SOBBING! %% Insight is often mistaken for madness. -- Sir George Hutchinson, THE AWAKENING %% Insomnia isn't anything to lose sleep over. %% Inspected and rejected - ASHMC Secret Police. %% Inspector: "Why did you come to Casablanca, Rick?" Rick : "I came for the waters." Inspector: "But there are no waters in Casablanca!" Rick : "I was mis-informed." %% Inspiration without perspiration is usually sterile. %% Installation and Operating Instructions shipped with the device will be promptly discarded by the Receiving Department. %% Installing unix fixes the [VMS] bug. -- Barry Shein %% Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth. -- Will Rogers %% Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better. -- Edgar W. Howe %% Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% 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 %% Institute: An archaic school where football in not taught. %% Instruments register only through things they're designed to register. Space still contains infinite unknowns. -- Spock, "The Naked Time," stardate 1704.2 %% Insufficient facts always invite danger. -- Spock, "Space Seed," stardate 3141.9 %% Insults are effective only where emotion is present. -- Spock, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% Integrated Software: A single product that deftly performs hundreds of functions the user never needs and awkwardly performs the half-dozen he uses constantly. %% Integrity has no need of rules. -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% Integrity is praised, and starves. %% Intel 159710712746 micro processor : Able to accommodate 1.844674407 X 10 to the 81 bytes of memory and process 1,234,653,335,297 instructions per second. Lab staff is currently working on the next generation of micro processor just in case the 1597- 10712746 doesn't sell in year 2071. %% Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character. -- Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) %% Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally, I know that she is better than every other country. -- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) %% Intelligence and courtesy are not always combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow %% Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without an education. Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence. -- A. E. Wiggan %% Intelligence sources say that Soviet plans to build a memorial to the two workers who were killed in the Chernobyl disaster have been bogged down in arguments as to which two workers it was. %% Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier. -- Stanislaw Lem %% Intelligent creatures often object to having things thrust at them. %% Intelligent people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people. %% Intense Mutilation %% Interchangeable parts won't. %% Interesting. There seems to be something written on the underside of The oyster. %% Interface - the opposite of 'getouttamyface'. %% Interlace - Technique used by top runners to keep their shoes on. %% Internal combustion engines are the dinosaurs' revenge %% Internal consistency is more highly valued than efficiency. %% Internally, the 80287 employs three extra bits ( guard, round, and sticky bits ) that enable it to represent the infinitely precise true result of a computation; these bits are not accessible to programmers. iAPX286 Numeric Supplement 1-18 %% International Falls, Minnesota, forbids cats to chase dogs up telephone poles. %% International Transmutal Conglomeration of Associates. May I help you? %% Internet address:: n. 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a {sitename}, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast with {bang path}; see also {network, the} and {network address}. All Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since 1980 or so. See also {bang path}, {domainist}. 2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet; this includes {bang path} addresses and some internal corporate and government networks. Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a selection of geographical domains: com commercial organizations edu educational institutions gov U.S. government civilian sites mil U.S. military sites Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are in the U.S. or Canada. us sites in the U.S. outside the functional domains su sites in the ex-Soviet Union (see {kremvax}). uk sites in the United Kingdom Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally with a name identical to the state's postal abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. -- Susan Sontag %% Interpreter, n.: One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Interrogator's lunch -- grilled cheese -- Raymond D. Love %% Interstellar Matter is a Gas %% Intimacy: A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Intimigrate: Ask a calculus student to integrate exp(-x^2). %% Into each life a little fallout must rain. %% Into each life a little rain must fall...followed by large hail and damaging winds. %% Into that heaven of freedom my father, let my country awake -- Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) %% Intolerance is the last defense of the insecure. %% Introducing, the 1010, a one-bit processor. INSTRUCTION SET Code Mnemonic What 0 NOP No Operation 1 JMP Jump (address specified by next 2 bits) Now Available for only 12 1/2 cents! %% Intuition, however illogical, is recognized as a command prerogative. -- Kirk, "Obsession," stardate 3620.7 %% Invalid null command. %% Inventing is easy for staff outfits. Stating a problem is much harder. Instead of stating problems, people like to pass out half-accurate statements together with half-available solutions which they can't finish and which they want you to finish. -- Amrom Katz %% Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers, and springs, and believes it civilization. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Invertebrate punster Spinelessly unable to resist a pun So slug me %% Invest in physics, own a piece of Dirac. %% Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or somebody insists on getting some useful work done. -- Tom Gibb %% Invia virtuti nulla est via. [The path to virtue is not a path.] %% Invictus: Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud Under the bludgeoning of chance; My head is bloody but unbowed. It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishment the scroll; I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. -- Henley %% Invisible Systems, Inc. If you don't see it, we made it. %% Invoking the Rubbledrubers can be its own reward. %% Involvement with people is always a very delicate thing -- it requires real maturity to become involved and not get all messed up. -- Bernard Cooke %% Iowa state law prohibits the possession of rotten eggs. %% Iowans ask why Minnesotans don't drink more Kool-Aid. That's because they can't figure out how to get two quarts of water into one of those little paper envelopes. %% Iraq won the toss... and elected to receive. %% Iraq's national bird?, "DUCK" %% Iraqi Bingo B-52..F-16..A-10.. F-18..F-117..B-2 %% Iron Age: n. In the history of computing, 1961--1971 --- the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when {big iron} {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. These began with the delivery of the first PDP-1, coincided with the dominance of ferrite {core}, and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also {Stone Age}; compare {elder days}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Iron Law of Distribution: Them that has, gets. %% Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind. -- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) %% Irony is when you buy a suit with two pair of pants, and then burn a hole in the coat. %% Irrationality is the square root of all evil -- Douglas Hofstadter %% Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% Irving Berlin, an expert insomniac who claimed he hadn't slept well for 32 years, once vacationed in Bermuda with columnist Irving Hoffman. One morning Hoffman, noticing that the composer looked even more finely drawn than usual, asked if he got any sleep at all. "Yes, I slept," Berlin said bitterly, "but I dreamed that I didn't." %% Is "tired old cliche" one? -- Rod Schmidt %% Is FIDO a dog? %% Is Moby Dick the whale or the man? -- Harold Ross %% Is Mr. Kosinski what he seems, a joke? No. It's too cruel. -- Wesley and Traveler, "Where No One Has Gone Before", stardate 41263.1 %% Is a book listing the definitions of habitual substances known as an addictionary? %% Is a castrated pig disgruntled? %% Is a computer language with goto's totally Wirth-less? %% Is a dream a lie that don't come true or is it something worse? %% Is a folksinger an avant-bard? %% Is a group of trainee secret service agents aspiring? -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% Is a mirage real? Well, it's a real mirage. -- Edward Abbey %% Is a tattoo real, like a curb or a battleship? Or are we suffering in Safeway? %% Is a zebra black with white strips or white with black strips? The zebra is colored with dark stripes on a light background. %% Is death legally binding? %% Is everybody happy? -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% Is he the MAGIC INCA carrying a FROG on his shoulders?? Is the FROG his GUIDELIGHT?? It is curious that a DOG runs already on the ESCALATOR... %% Is is a good day to die, Duras, and the day is not yet over. -- Worf to Duras, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% Is it 1974? What's for SUPPER? Can I spend my COLLEGE FUND in one wild afternoon?? %% Is it NOUVELLE CUISINE when 3 olives are struggling with a scallop in a plate of SAUCE MORNAY? %% Is it a crime to forge a .signature? If so, what's the penalty of law for this hideous task? %% Is it bang for the buck, or pennies for a pop? %% Is it clean in other dimensions? %% Is it just me, or does Boris Yeltsin look an awful lot like Benny Hill? %% Is it ok to use my AM radio after NOON? %% Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? %% Is it possible that the solution to the software quality crisis was discovered in Korea in the 15th century? The following is from Daniel J. Boorstin, "The Discoverers" quoting, apparently, Kim Won-Yong, "Early Movable Type in Korea" (1954): "The supervisor and compositor shall be flogged thirty times for an error per chapter; the printer shall be flogged thirty times for bad impression, either too dark or too light, of one character per chapter." Boorstin continues, "This helps explain both the reputation for accuracy earned by the earliest Korean imprints and the difficulty that Koreans found in recruiting printers." -- Martin Minow, RISKS 11.37 [dated April 1, 1991] %% Is it possible to feel gruntled. %% Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so. -- Edward Abbey %% Is it progress to have solutions to problems that don't yet exist? %% Is it weird in here, or is it just me? %% Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know that? %% Is life so dear, or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? -- Patrick Henry %% Is not absence death to those who love? -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), "Beyond Good and Evil", 1885 - 1886 %% Is not light grander than fire? It is the same element in a state of purity. -- Carlyle %% Is not that the nature of men and women -- that the pleasure is in the learning of each other? -- Natira, the High Priestess of Yonada, "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky," stardate 5476.3 %% Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all. -- Gail Wynand %% Is something VIOLENT going to happen to a GARBAGE CAN? %% Is that a false nose? %% Is that a flying saucer or a pie in the sky? %% Is that a hard drive or are you just happy to see me? %% Is that really YOU that is reading this? %% Is that your face or did your neck throw up? %% Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds. -- Edward Abbey %% Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding industrial civilization? %% Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon? -- Edward Abbey %% Is there a special technique to this foot-washing? "You generally start at the top, and work your way down." I think I can handle that. "I was hoping you might." -- Riker and Brenna O'Dell, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% Is there any animal other the lion who puts the female in her place? %% Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment? -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider's web? -- Charlotte %% Is there intelligent life in the universe? %% Is there intelligent life on earth? Yes but I'm only visiting. %% Is there life before breakfast? %% Is there no way to bring home a wandering sheep, but by worrying him to death? -- Fuller %% Is there really a United States, of just a bunch of people pretending? %% Is there something wrong with me? %% Is there something wrong with the gravity in here? %% Is this TERMINAL fun? %% Is this a machine? I don't talk to machines! [Click] %% Is this a test? Or a Magritte painting... %% Is this acceptable? %% Is this an out-take from the "BRADY BUNCH"? %% Is this going to involve RAW human ecstasy? %% Is this really happening to me? %% Is this really happening? %% Is this the best of all possible worlds? %% Is this the line for the latest whimsical YUGOSLAVIAN drama which also makes you want to CRY and reconsider the VIETNAM WAR? %% Is this the right room for an argument? %% Is truth not truth for all? -- Natira, "For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky," stardate 5476.4 %% Is your job running? You'd better go catch it! %% Isaac Asimov did this one best; the story concerns a man, Mr. Stein, who robs a bank, jumps into a time machine, and re-emerges seven years later (after the statute of limitations has expired). They arrest him anyway, but the judge's verdict is "A niche in time saves Stein." %% Isaac Newton counts on his fingers. %% Isaac the famous seducer, Will meet a young lass and conducer To let him get fresh With her quivering flesh, But if there isn't the time, he'll just gucer. %% Isn't air travel wonderful? Breakfast in London, dinner in New York, luggage in Brazil. %% Isn't every computer a Digital computer? %% Isn't humanity egocentric? Whenever we talk, we say, "Here's my two cents worth," but we only offer "a penny for your thoughts." -- Ariel "The Rogue" Rogson %% Isn't it amazing how much fun two people can have just by taking off their clothes. -- Solomon Short %% Isn't it conceivable to you that an intelligent person could harbor two opposing ideas in his mind? -- Adlai Stevenson [to reporters] %% Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? -- Kelvin Throop III %% Isn't it ironic that many men spend a great part of their lives avoiding marriage while single-mindedly pursuing those things that would make them better prospects? %% Isn't it strange that the same people that laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take economists seriously? %% Isn't life grand? %% Isn't this a beautiful day! Just watch some bastard louse it up. %% Isn't this my STOP?! %% Isn't this the most fascinating country in the world? Where else would I have to ride on the back of the bus, have a choice of going to the worst schools, eating in the worst restaurants, living in the worst neighborhood -- and an average of $5000 a week just talking about it. -- Dick Gregory %% Isolated through opposition, One meets a like-minded man With whom one can associate in good faith. Despite the danger, no blame. %% Isolated through opposition, One sees one's companion as a pig covered with dirt, As a wagon full of devils. First one draws a bow against him, Then one lays the bow aside. He is not a robber; he will woo at the right time. As one goes, rain falls; then good fortune comes. %% Isolation breeds conceit. -- Charles Dudley Warner %% Issawi's Laws of Progress: The Course of Progress: Most things get steadily worse. The Path of Progress: A shortcut is the longest distance between two points. %% It [being a Vulcan] means to adopt a philosophy, a way of life which is logical and beneficial. We cannot disregard that philosophy merely for personal gain, no matter how important that gain might be. -- Spock, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.4 %% It [marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% It ain't easy being easy. %% It ain't over 'til it's over. -- Yogi Berra %% It ain't so hard to die for a cause. Any idiot can do that. What takes real genius is living for one. -- Solomon Short %% It all hinges on your definition of 'a good time'! -- L. Borgia %% It all looks the same if you're not the lead dog. %% It always delights me at Hank's To walk up the old river banks. One time in the grass I stepped on an ass, And heard a young girl murmur, "Thanks." %% It appears Lt. Commander Worf is quite adamant about his solitude. -- Data, "The Icarus Factor", stardate 42686.4 %% It appears some British newspaper ran a contest to come up with a new name for the USSR. One of the better entries was UFFR: Union of Fewer and Fewer Republics. %% It appears that PL/I (and its dialects) is, or will be, the most widely used higher level language for systems programming. -- J. Sammet %% It appears that after his death, Albert Einstein found himself working as the doorkeeper at the Pearly Gates. One slow day, he found that he had time to chat with the new entrants. To the first one he asked, "What's your IQ?" The new arrival replied, "190". They discussed Einstein's theory of relativity for hours. When the second new arrival came, Einstein once again inquired as to the newcomer's IQ. The answer this time came "120". To which Einstein replied, "Tell me, how did the Cubs do this year?" and they proceeded to talk for half an hour or so. To the final arrival, Einstein once again posed the question, "What's your IQ?". Upon receiving the answer "70", Einstein smiled and asked, "Got a minute to tell me about VMS 4.0?" %% It appears that in nature only gorillas and humans have to be taught not to foul their own nests. -- Irvin I. DeVore %% It appears that the dam has been opened, since the water level behind the dam is low and the sluice gate is open. Water is rushing downstream through the gates. %% It appears that the last blow was too much for you. I'm afraid that you are dead. %% It appears the last blow was too much for the troll. It is dead. %% It brings a sense of order and stability to my universe to know you're still a pompous ass...and a damn sexy man. -- Capt. Philipa Louvois, "The Measure of a Man", stardate 42523.7 %% It came to him in a cocaine rush as he took the Langley exit that if Aldrich had told Filipov about Hancock only Tulfgengian could have known that the photograph which Wagner had shown to Maximov on the jolting S-bann was not the photograph of Kessler that Bradford had found at the dark, sinister house in the Schillerstrasse the day the Straub told Percival that the man on the bridge had not been Aksakov but Pawstovsky, which meant that it was not Kliest but Kruger that Cherensky had met in the bleak, wintry Grunewald and that, therefore, only Frau Epp could have known that Muller had followed Droysen to the steamy aromatic cafe in the Beethovenstrasse where he told Buerger that Todorov had known since the Liebermann affair that McIntyre had not met Stotz at the Golitzer Bahnhof but instead had met Sommer in the cavernous Anhalter Bahnhof. -- one of the worst opening sentences to a novel Stephen Pile, "The Return of Heroic Failures" %% It can be proven... This may take upwards of a year, and no shorter than four hours, and may require something like 5 reams of scratch paper, 100 pencils, or 100 refills( For those who use mechanical pencils). If you are only an undergraduate, you need not bother attempting the proof as it will be impossible for you. %% It can be shown... Usually this would take the teacher about one hour of blackboard work, so he/she avoids doing it. Another possibility of course is that the instructor doesn't understand the proof himself/herself. %% It can't be bad if it feels good. %% It can't hurt but help us. %% It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt. It lies behind starts and under hills, And empty holes it fills. It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter. %% It contains apple juice - perhaps not what you hoped for. %% It contains first quality peaches - what a surprise! %% It contains rotten meat. You vomit. %% It contains salmon - not bad! %% It contains some nondescript substance, tasting awfully. %% It contains spinach - this makes you feel like Popeye! %% It costs more to buy the average new car in the United States today than it cost Christopher Columbus to equip and undertake his maiden voyage to the new world. %% It could happen to you, it could happen to me, it could happen to everyone, eventually. %% It could have been an organically based disturbance of the brain - perhaps a tumor or a metabolic deficiency - but after a thorough neurological exam it was determined that Byron was simply a jerk. -- 1988 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest, runner up %% It could very well be too late. %% It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. %% It depends on which end he tries to light. %% It did what? Well, it's not supposed to do that. %% It didn't matter. Not when all mistakes could be left behind at twelve hundred miles per hour. -- "Ringworld" %% It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% It does not disturb me to play a god. It disturbs me to play a god badly. -- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld" %% It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him. -- J. R. R. Tolkien %% It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations. %% It does not matter if you fall down as long as you pick up something from the floor while you get up. -- Avery %% It does not pay a prophet to be too specific. -- L. Sprague de Camp %% It does often seem that man must fight to live. -- Flavius Maximus, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4040.9 %% It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries -- to remain human, since the human is the rational ... Those who cry loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic -- are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas that they preached ... In such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies ... What complaint do they now have to make? That the universe is irrational? Is it? -- Hugh Akston %% It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. %% It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature. -- Steve Wright %% It doesn't matter what you do, it only matters what you say you've done and what you're going to do. %% It doesn't matter where you stand, it's still going to look like the middle. -- Solomon Short %% It doesn't matter whether you win or lose -- until you lose. %% It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find out next morning it was someone else. -- Rogers %% It doesn't need heating -- it's still hot. %% It doesn't say much. Only 'Howard Roark, Architect.' But it's like those mottos men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It's a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth -- and do you know how much suffering there is on earth? -- all the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don't know what it is, I don't know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world -- and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you -- or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You're on your way into hell, Howard. -- Henry Cameron %% It doesn't seem to work. %% It don't mean a THING if you ain't got that SWING!! %% It felt like my body was under siege. %% It furthers one to accomplish great deeds. Supreme good fortune. No blame. %% It gets bigger when you plug it in! %% It gets you! %% It gives me pleasure to be praised by you whom all men praise. -- Tully %% It goes all over hills and plains, But when it comes to a river, It breaks its neck. A path %% It goes through the house And through the barn, Through the woods, And around the farm, and never touches a thing. A sound %% It got to a point where I had to get a haircut or both feet firmly planted in the air. %% It had snowed, and the man in the drift, Flagged her down and asked, "Give me a lift?" They sat in her Bentley, She fondled him gently, And the lift that he'd asked for was swift! %% It happened long ago In the new magic land The Indians and the buffalo Existed hand in hand The Indians needed food They need skins for a roof The only took what they needed And the buffalo ran loose But then came the white man With his thick and empty head He couldn't see past his billfold He wanted all the buffalo dead It was sad, oh so sad -- Ted Nugent, "The Great White Buffalo" %% It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was just a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the wits, who believe that it is a joke. %% It has always seemed to me that the best symbol of common sense was a bridge. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% It has been determined that most teenage girls lose their virginity during the summer months. This stands to reason, since congress is recessed at that time. %% It has been justly observed by sages of all lands that although a man may be most happily married and continue in that state with the utmost contentment, it does not necessarily follow that he has therefore been struck stone-blind. -- H. Warner Munn %% 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% It has been said ... that there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice upon a dark night. -- Ernest Bramah, 1868-1942 %% It has been said [by Anatole France], "it is not by amusing oneself that one learns," and, in reply: "it is *____only* by amusing oneself that one can learn." -- Edward Kasner and James R. Newman %% It has been said by some cynic, maybe it was a former president, `If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.' We took them literally -- that advice -- as you know. But I didn't need that, because I have Barbara Bush. -- President George Bush %% It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% It has been said that there are two theories of history: conspiracy and blunder. If there is some truth to that, it is surely equally true that blunder seldom receives all the credit due it as an explanation of complex events. -- Michael Scully %% It has been written that Cleopatra, who lived from 69 - 30 B.C, had an insatiable desire for sex. It is said that she built a small temple where she kept many young lovers on drugs to increase their lust for her. It has also been reported that she could take on more than 100 men in a single night. %% It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats. %% It has long been an article of our folklore that too much knowledge or skill, or especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It dehumanizes those who achieve it, and makes difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in whom good old common sense has not been obliterated by mere book learning or fancy notions. This popular delusion flourishes now more than ever, for we are all infected with it in the schools, where educationists have elevated it from folklore to Article of Belief. It enhances their self-esteem and lightens their labors by providing theoretical justification for deciding that appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to be prized than knowledge, and relating (to self and others), more than skill, in which minimum competence will be quite enough. -- The Underground Grammarian %% It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Case of Identity" %% It has long been known that birds will occasionally build nests in the manes of horses. The only known solution to this problem is to sprinkle baker's yeast in the mane, for, as we all know, yeast is yeast and nest is nest, and never the mane shall tweet. %% It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another -- but which one? Differences are crucial. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% It has no lock. %% It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% It is I, Dudley Do-right, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police! %% It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it. -- Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) %% It is Texas law that when two trains meet each other at a railroad crossing, each shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed until the other has gone. %% It is Texas law that when two trains meet each other at a railroad crossing, each shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed until the other has gone. In one of those "true facts" books there was an explanation for this law. It seems that one of the state senators did not want a law passed. To to keep this particular law from passing he attached the train law to it. Hoping that that his fellow senators would discover the train law attached, see how ridiculous it was, and not pass the laws. Nobody saw the the train law attached and passed both laws. This may not be the real reason, but it sounds good. And it might explain some of the laws we have to live with. %% It is a bad plan that admits of no modification. -- Publilius Syrus %% It is a blessed thing that in every age someone has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. -- C. Northcote Parkinson, in "The Economist", 1955 %% It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick -- on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery. -- Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat" %% It is a faith (not always justified) of theoretical physics that if man proposes what is sufficiently elegant, nature, pleased and flattered, will say yes. -- Leon N. Cooper, "Introduction To The Meaning & Structure Of Physics" %% It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. -- William Shakespeare %% It is a good thing to learn caution from the misfortunes of others. -- Publius Syrus %% It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. -- John C. Calhoun %% It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgement to be silent. -- Jean de La Bruyere %% It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian. -- James Baldwin %% It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears. -- Marcus Porcius Cato (95-46 B.C.) %% It is a human characteristic to love little animals, especially if they're attractive in some way. -- McCoy, "The Trouble with Tribbles," stardate 4525.6 %% It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% It is a maxim among lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) "Gulliver's Travels" %% It is a miserable thing to live in suspense, it is the life of the spider. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% It is a mistake to allow any machine to realize that you are in a hurry. %% It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only from those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by something else, even it it be a scientific one. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% It is a poor judge who cannot award a prize. %% It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish. -- Aeschylus %% It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night. -- Willie Sutton %% It is a sad commentary on today's society that this fortune has to be classified as "offensive" simply because it contains the word "fuck". %% It is a secret known to but a few, yet no small use in the conduct of life, that if you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him. -- Steele %% It is a sin to water good scotch. Compelled to do so to meet the proof standards of his market, the conscientious distiller was heard to say to his vats: "We who are about to sigh dilute you." %% It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for 2 years. -- Tom Lehrer %% It is a special trick of low cunning to squeeze out knowledge from a modest man, who is eminent in any science, and then to use it as legally acquired, and pass the source in total silence. -- Horace Walpole %% It is a time for a new generation of leadership, to cope with new problems and new opportunities.For there is a new world to be won. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities. 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. Furthermore, 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 P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" %% It is a very sad thing nowadays there is so little useless information. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% It is a violation of Arkansas law to make a false oath in order to obtain a free bath in Hot Springs. %% It is a well-known fact that a deceased body harms the mind. %% It is a wise child that knows his own father. -- Homer %% It is a wise father that knows his own child. -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice" %% It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% It is advocacy of revolution by force and violence to write: "I hold a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." Out go the works of Thomas Jefferson. It is advocacy of change of government by assassination to say, "The right of nation to kill a tyrant in cases of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea." Jefferson is followed by his old antagonist, John Adams, the author of the Sedition Law of 1798. -- Zechariah Chaffe, Jr. (1885-1957) %% It is against District of Columbia law to paint lemons on your car so as to embarrass your auto dealer or any other person. %% It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical? -- Alan J. Perlis %% It is against the law for a monster to enter the corporate limits of Urbana, Illinois. %% It is against the law in North Dakota for a railroad engineer to take his train home with him each evening unless he carries a full crew. %% It is against the law in Oklahoma to get a fish drunk. %% It is against the law to act in an obnoxious manner on the campus of a state girls' school in South Carolina without the permission of the principal. %% It is against the law to molest an alligator in Miami. %% It is against the law to sell lollypops in Spokane, Washington. %% It is against the law to smoke a cigarette or use snuff in your kitchen in Atlantic City, New Jersey. %% It is against the law to speak English in Illinois. %% It is against the law to tickle a girl in Norton, Virginia. %% It is against the nature of man as he grows older ... to protest against change, particularly change for the better. -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) %% It is against the nature of man as he grows older to protest against change, particularly change for the better. -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) (This is, of course, bull crap; else why do so many old people begin sentences with "Back in my day..."?) %% It is alleged that when Einstein and his wife visited the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, Mrs. Einstein pointed to a particularly complex piece of equipment and asked its purpose. Their guide said that it was used to determine the shape of the universe. "Oh," she said, not at all impressed, "my husband uses the back of an old envelope to work that out." %% It is almost always dangerous to be right too soon. -- Solomon Short %% It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil. %% It is already dead, so why bother it? %% It is always better to proceed on the basis of a recognition of what is, rather than what ought to be. -- Stewart Alsop %% It is always better to sacrifice your opponent's men %% It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book. -- Edward Abbey %% It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative. -- John Burroughs (1837-1921) %% It is always preferable to visit home with a friend. Your parents will not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all to themselves and because in the presence of your friend, they will have to act like mature human beings ... -- Playboy, January 1983 %% It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. -- Jerome K. Jerome %% It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. %% It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry S. Truman %% It is amusing for someone accustomed to the traffic in New York to hear residents of places like Houston and Atlanta complain about congestion on the highways. Imagine, in rush hour they have to slow down to 35 miles an hour! -- Barry Bruce-Briggs %% It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will? -- Edward Abbey %% It is an extraordinary yet readily apparent fact of our lives that broadening our horizons proves to be a far lesser challenge than horizontalizing our broads. -- Weiner %% It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons. Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted ... -- Douglas Admas "The Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy" Encyclopedia Glactica, Vol 177, pg 14395.3 %% It is annoying to be honest to no purpose. -- Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) %% It is bad manners to break your bread and roll in your soup. %% It is bad manners to use a wand in a shop. %% It is best to avoid volcanos whenever possible. %% It is best to hope only for things possible and probable; he that hopes too much shall deceive himself at last; especially if his industry does not go along with his hopes; for hope without action is a barren undoer. -- Feltham %% It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws. -- Aristotle %% It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it. -- Henry Allen %% It is better never to have been born. But who among us has such luck? One in a million, perhaps. %% It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life. %% It is better to be always on your guard than to suffer once. %% It is better to be at the head of the jackals than the tail of the lions. %% It is better to be bow-legged than no-legged. %% It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies. -- Arthur Calwell, 1968 %% It is better to be feared than loved, more prudent to be cruel than compassionate. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% It is better to be feared than loved. %% It is better to be on penicillin, than never to have loved at all. %% It is better to be silent and appear stupid rather than open your mouth and remove all doubt. %% It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward. -- Dolores Ibarruri %% It is better to burn out than fade away. -- Neil Young %% It is better to copulate than never. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% It is better to decide between our enemies than our friends; for one of our friends will most likely become our enemy; but on the other hand, one of your enemies will probably become your friend. -- Bias %% It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. -- Emiliano Zapata %% It is better to forgive and forget than to let everyone know it was your mistake in the first place. %% It is better to give then receive, especially in the case of certain diseases. %% It is better to have Uranus in Cancer than to have Cancer in Uranus. %% It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions. -- De Foe %% It is better to have a positive Wasserman than never to have loved at all. %% It is better to have flunked your Wasserman test than never to have loved at all. %% It is better to have gifts then receipts. %% It is better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall. %% It is better to have loved and lost -- much better. %% It is better to have loved and lost than just to have lost. %% It is better to have loved and lost than to have hated and won. %% It is better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all. -- Tennyson %% It is better to have nothing to do than to be doing nothing. -- Attilus %% It is better to have too much courtesy than too little, provided you are not equally courteous to all, for that would be injustice. -- Baltasar Gracian %% It is better to kiss an avocado than to get in a fight with an aardvark %% It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% It is better to lead the revolution than to be caught by it. %% It is better to lead the revolution than to be caught by it. For who was eligible to [the prison] "La Ferte'"? Anyone whom the police could find in the lovely country of France (a) who was not guilty of treason, (b) who could not prove that he was not guilty of treason. By treason I refer to any little annoying habits of independent thought which <> are put in a hole and covered over, with the somewhat naive idea that from their cadavers violets will grow whereof the perfume will delight all good men and true and make such worthy citizens forget their sorrows. -- E. E. Cummings (1894-1963), "The Enormous Room" %% It is better to never have tried anything than to have tried something and failed. -- motto of jerks, weenies and losers everywhere %% It is better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent. -- Ezra Taft Benson %% It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. -- Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria (1738?-1794) %% It is better to remain childless than to father an orphan. %% It is better to shine than to reflect. %% It is better to sound a person with whom one deals afar off, than to fall upon the point at first. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% It is better to vote for someone you like and have them not elected than to vote for someone you dislike and have them elected. %% It is better to wear chains than to believe you are free, and weight yourself down with invisible chains. %% It is better to wear out than to rust out. %% It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing. -- Seneca, "Epistles" %% It is beyond your power to do that. %% It is broke. It will not work. It does not go. %% It is but poor eloquence, which only shows that the orator can talk. -- Sir Joshua Reynolds %% It is by acts and not by ideas that people live. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. -- Henri Poincare %% It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), Speech, 22 May 1932 %% It is commonly not your practice to make up your mind until the very last minute. %% It is contrary to New York City law to open or close an umbrella in the presence of a horse. %% It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing. -- Descartes %% It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are. -- Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), "Ars Amatoria" %% It is cooler in the mountains than in the summer. %% It is courage the world needs, not infallibility ... courage is always the surest wisdom. -- Sir Wilfred Grenfell %% It is customary for a decimal point to be misplaced. %% It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% It is dangerous to confuse children with angels. -- David Fyfe %% It is difficult for a politician to keep the note of envy out of his voice when accusing his opponent of fooling the public. %% It is difficult to legislate morality in the absence of moral legislators. %% It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. -- Rod Serling %% It is difficult to retain what you may have learned unless you should practice it. -- Pliny the Younger %% It is difficult to soar with eagles when you work with turkeys. %% It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The start speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the deserts speak of his insignificance right now. -- Edwin Way Teal %% It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task. -- Sydney J. Harris %% It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time. -- Honore de Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage", 1829 %% It is easier to buy small plaster models of what you think life is than it is to live it. %% It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. %% It is easier to fight for principles than to live up to them. -- Alfred Adler (1870-1937), 1939 %% It is easier to get forgiveness than permission. -- Cecile Stewart %% It is easier to harness human nature than to fight or repress it. %% It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor. -- Eric Hoffer %% It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. -- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) %% It is easier to run down a hill than up one. %% It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one. %% It is easily derived... Meaning that the teacher figures that even the student could derive it. The dedicated student who wishes to do this will waste the next weekend in the attempt. Also possible that the teacher read this somewhere, and wants to sound like he/she really has it together. %% It is easy to be brave from a safe distance. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% It is easy to make decisions on matters for which you have no responsibility. %% It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain Him. %% It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. -- Aeschylus %% It is enough to make one sympathize with a tyrant for the determination of his courtiers to deceive him for their own personal ends... -- Russell Baker and Charles Peters %% It is evident that the room you now occupy served as sleeping chambers for one of the high-ranking residents of the palace of Enlad. Stripped of all removable trappings, it still impresses the visitor with a sense of grandeur. Open doorways stand to the south and southeast. Due east of you is a wooden door. %% It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% It is far better to be deceived than to be undeceived by those we love. %% It is far better to sleep with an old hen than pullet. %% It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It is far easier to know men than to know man. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave than to expend it like a gentleman. -- Colton %% It is far safer to be feared than loved. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% It is fear that first brought gods into the world. %% It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution. -- Joseph Addison %% It is foolish to fear that which you cannot avoid. -- Publilus Syrus %% It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% It is fortune, not wisdom that rules man's life. %% It is fruitless to become lachrymal over precipitately departed lacteal fluid. %% It is fruitless: to become lachrymose over precipitately departed lactate fluid. to attempt to indoctrinate a superannuated canine with innovative maneuvers. %% It is generally agreed that "Hello" is an appropriate greeting because if you entered a room and said "Goodbye," it could confuse a lot of people. -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot" %% It is good that the young are beautiful; it is the only advantage they have. -- The Duchess of Windsor %% It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations. -- Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), "Biographical Studies", 1863 %% It is good to see you again. You are still too fat, K'mpec. -- K'mpec and Kahlest, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% It is great cleverness to know how to conceal our cleverness. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% It is hard to fight for one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul. -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) %% It is harder to eat sparingly than to fast. Moderation requires awareness. Renunciation requires only the tyranny of will. -- Sandor McNab %% It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one's self the seeds of the baseness the other party is accused of. -- Stanislaus %% It is idle to attempt to talk a young woman out of her passion: love does not lie in the ear. -- Walpole %% It is illegal for a male person in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to walk on the streets with his shirttail out. %% It is illegal for a woman in Owensboro, Kentucky, to buy a hat without her husband trying it on first. %% It is illegal in California to peel an orange in a hotel room. %% It is illegal in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for an intoxicated person either to climb a tree or play baseball. %% It is illegal in Elkhart, Indiana for a barber to threaten to cut off a youngster's ears. %% It is illegal in Salem, West Virginia, to leave your home or dwelling without having in mind a definite place to go. %% It is illegal to buy, sell, raise, or give away a parrot in the State of Georgia. %% It is illegal to drink from the public drinking fountains in Garden City, Kansas. %% It is illegal to drive more than two thousand sheep down Hollywood Boulevard at one time. %% It is illegal to dust public buildings with a feather duster in Clarendon, Texas. %% It is illegal to fish on the Chicago breakwater in pajamas. %% It is illegal to kick a garbage can in New Orleans, or sit on one in Alabama. %% It is illegal to mispronounce the name of the State of Arkansas in that state. %% It is illegal to play "Ring Around the Rosy" on Sunday in Kansas. %% It is illegal to put a skunk in your boss's desk in Michigan. %% It is illegal to putty nail holes on Sunday in Schenectady. %% It is illegal to ride a bicycle backwards on the streets of %% It is illegal to run out of gas in Youngstown, Ohio. %% It is illegal to say "Oh, Boy" in Jonesboro, Georgia. %% It is illegal to shave during the daytime in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. %% It is illegal to sneeze on the streets of Asheville, North Carolina. %% It is imperative when flying coach that you restrain any tendency toward the vividly imaginative. For although it may momentarily appear to be the case, it is not at all likely that the cabin is entirely inhabited by crying babies smoking inexpensive domestic cigars. -- Fran Lebowitz %% It is important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. -- Stephen A. Kallis, Jr. %% 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 %% It is impossible for a man to love his wife whole-heartedly without loving all women somewhat. I suppose that the converse must be true of women. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% It is impossible to cross this distance. %% It is impossible to defend perfectly against the attack of those who want to die. %% It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. %% It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune. -- Woody Allen %% It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not. -- Jeremy Taylor %% It is impossible to read in the dark. %% It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off. -- Woody Allen %% It is impossible to wean kittens. Wait till their claws get sharp enough and the cat will do the job herself. -- Solomon Short %% It is in his pleasures that a man really lives, it is from his leisure that he constructs the fabric of self. -- Agnes Repplier %% It is in the #, which is in the room. %% It is in the #, which you are carrying. %% It is in the nature of mobs to cheer fools. %% It is in the process - so wrapped up in red tape that the situation is almost hopeless -- Glossary of important business terms %% It is inconceivable that a judicious observer from another solar system would see in our species -- which has tended to be cruel, destructive, wasteful, and irrational -- the crown and apex of cosmic evolution. Viewing us as the culmination of *anything* is grotesque; viewing us as a transitional species makes more sense -- and gives us more hope. -- Betty McCollister, "Our Transitional Species", Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 %% It is inconceivable that three competing networks, working independently in complete secrecy, could produce by accident twenty-six new series so similar in quality. -- Marvin Kitman %% It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. %% It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors. -- Plutarch %% It is interesting to hear certain kinds of people insist that the citizen cannot fight the government. This would have been news to the men of Lexington and Concord, as well as the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The citizen most certainly can fight the government, and usually wins when he tries. Organized national armies are useful primarily for fighting against other organized national armies. When they try to fight against the people, they find themselves at a very serious disadvantage. If you will just look around at the state of the world today, you will see that the guerillero has the upper hand. Irregulars usually defeat regulars, providing they have the will. Such fighting is horrible to contemplate, but will continue to dominate brute strength. -- Jeff Cooper %% It is interesting to note the whimpering tone of journalists and commentators when they speak of battle casualties. Any man who puts on the uniform and takes the oath certainly must be aware that his violent death in action is a distinct possibility. The soldier asks for no sympathy, but what he does need is a legitimate military objective handed to him by his commander-in-chief. No fighting man has ever resented the deadly perils of his profession as long as he was truthfully told the merits of his cause. As the Romans put it, "Dulce et decorum pro patrim mori est." But you really have to understand what is meant by "pro patria." -- Jeff Cooper %% It is like saying that for the cause of peace, God and the Devil will have a high-level meeting. -- Rev. Carl McIntire [on Nixon's China trip] %% It is long accepted by the missionaries that morality is inversely proportional to the amount of clothing people wore. -- Alex Carey %% It is man's perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die. %% It is meet that we come unto Moqueforte, for we would seek the Archminister," cried the Captain of the Archers. "Hight be Sir Gristwolde." %% It is misery enough to have once been happy. %% It is more blessed to give than to receive. -- Acts 20:35 %% It is more difficult to give money away intelligently than it is to earn it in the first place. %% It is more disgraceful to distrust than to be deceived by our friends. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It is more helpful to attack with an object which is a weapon. %% It is more rational to sacrifice one life than six. -- Spock, "The Galileo Seven," stardate 2822.3 %% It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they're alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem. %% It is much harder to find a job than to keep one. -- Jules Becker %% It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% It is my feeling at this time still that Mr. Blank is still in need of surgical correction in order to provide a more definitive direction and solution to the problem that is at hand. %% It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous... We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's eye of disaster. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill "Memoirs of the Second World War" (Houghton Mifflin, 1959) %% It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% It is necessary to have purpose. -- Alice #1, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% It is necessary to restate the President's viewpoint very clearly, and that is that we are a party that is diversified. We are a party that, though we have a position on abortion, that those who disagree with us should not feel excluded because of that issue. We do, in former Chairman Lee Atwater's words, offer the party as a big tent, and therefore that message has to be clear. How we do that within the platform, the preamble to the platform or whatnot, remains to be seen, but the message will have to be articulated with great clarity. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% It is never clear just how many hands -- or minds -- are needed to carry out a particular process. Nevertheless, anyone having supervisory responsibility for the completion of the task will invariably protest that his staff is too small for the assignment. -- Andrew Hacker %% It is nice to be content in a little house by the side of the road, but a split-level in suburbia is a lot more comfortable. -- Charles Merrill Smith %% It is no disgrace not to be able to do everything; but to undertake, or pretend to do, what you are not made for, is not only shameful, but extremely troublesome. -- Plutarch %% It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today's world. -- Norman Cousins %% It is no pleasure to build a web and catch only flies when one knows there is a wasp about. %% It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same. -- Thomas Paine %% It is not a good omen when goldfish commit suicide. %% It is not always a good idea to whistle for your dog. %% It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog. -- Edward Abbey %% It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. -- Seneca %% It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is impossible to find it elsewhere. %% It is not enough that I should succeed. Others must fail. -- Ray Kroc [Founder of McDonald's] %% It is not enough to be busy. The question is what we are busy with? -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% It is not enough to do the right thing; one must also do it the right way. %% It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. -- Rene Descartes %% It is not enough to have great qualities, we should also have the management of them. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. -- Gore Vidal %% It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. -- Edward Abbey %% It is not every question that deserves an answer. -- Publilius Syrus %% It is not for me to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence. -- The Earl of Birkenhead %% It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. by space the universe emcompasses and swallows me up lika an atom; by thought I comprehend the world. -- Blaise Pascal %% It is not good for a man to be without knowledge, and he who makes haste with his feet misses his way. -- Proverbs 19:2 %% It is not good to punish an innocent man, or to flog officials for their integrity. -- Proverbs 17:26 %% It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life. -- Ragnar Danneskjold %% It is not love of self, but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict the world. -- Eric Hoffer %% It is not meet that the farjon should ripsnipe the cuskapids. Franchope! %% It is not normally necessary to change these values, you should not do so unless you have a very complete understanding of the XENIX operating system and know how to restructure the disk partitions, a complex and tricky operation. %% It is not possible to both understand and appreciate Intel CPUs. -- D.Wolfskill %% It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man -- the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse -- the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting. -- Mrs. Jameson %% It is not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused the trouble in the garden. %% It is not the critic who counts, or how the strong man stumbled, or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, and who spends himself in a worthy cause, and if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that he'll never be with those cold and timid souls who never know either victory or defeat. -- Teddy Roosevelt %% It is not the crook in modern business that we fear but the honest man who does not know what he is doing. -- Owen D. Young %% It is not the disease but neglect of the remedy which generally destroys life. %% It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives... When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered. -- Dorothy Thompson, American journalist, author (1894-1961) %% It is not the quality of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, that makes the feast. -- Lord Clarendon %% It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank -- to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning, -- it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. -- The noble soul has reverence for itself. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive. -- Edward Abbey %% It is not true that life is one damn thing after another -- it's one damn thing over and over. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay %% It is not well to be thought of as one who meekly submits to insolence and intimidation. %% It is not wise to make love more than once in the morning. You never know who you'll meet later in the day. %% It is not wise to press the break key, my son. %% It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secretes acids, but love and trust are sweet juices. -- Beecher %% It is not worldly ecclesiastics that kindle the fires of persecution, but mystics who think they hear the voice of God. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% It is now 10 p.m. Do you know where Henry Kissinger is? -- Elizabeth Carpenter %% It is now pitch black. %% It is now pitch dark. If you proceed, you will likely fall into a pit. %% It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% It is obvious... Only to Phd's who specialize in that field, or to instructors who have taught the course 100 times. %% It is obvious... Only to the Author of the textbook, or Carl Gauss. More likely is only Carl Gauss. Last time I saw this was as a step in a proof of Fermat's last theorem. %% It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, so he be man of merit. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it. %% It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home. -- Carl T. Rowan %% It is often easier to earn money than it is to spend it wisely. %% It is one of our most important laws that none of us may interfere with the affairs of others. -- Kirk, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4040.7 %% It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it. -- Cervantes %% It is one thing to purloin finely-tempered steel, and another to take a pound of literary old iron, and convert it in the furnace of one's own mind into a hundred watchsprings, worth each a thousand times as much as the iron. When genius borrows, it borrows grandly, giving to the borrowed matter, a life and beauty it lacked before. %% It is only after an unknown number of unrecorded labors, after a host of noble hearts have succumbed in discouragement, convinced that their cause is lost; it is only then that cause triumphs. -- Guizot %% It is only by a miracle that you escape death as the troll's attack lands fair upon you. %% It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity. -- Ruskin %% It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. -- William James %% It is only from the belief of the goodness and wisdom of a supreme being that our calamities can be borne in the manner which becomes a man. -- Henry Mackenzie %% It is only people of small moral stature who have to stand on their dignity. %% It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great. -- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) %% It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% It is only too easy to make suggestions and later try to escape the consequences of what we say. -- Jawaharlal Nehru %% It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are. -- Clive James, in "The Observer", 1976 %% It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. -- The Fox, from The Little Prince, chapter XXI %% It is our policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the %% It is part of human nature to think wise things and do silly ones. %% It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. %% It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated. -- Alec Bourne, "A Doctor's Creed" %% It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% It is proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob. -- Seneca (the Younger) (4 B.C. - A.D. 65) %% It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. -- Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) %% It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. %% It is rather to be chosen that great riches, unless I have omitted something from the quotation. -- Robert Benchley %% It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way of survival of the fittest. -- Ray Kroc [Founder of McDonald's] %% It is right to be contented with what we have, never with what we are. -- James Mackintosh %% It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% It is said of some things in maths that a mathematician should read the proofs precisely once. %% It is said that Giant Rabbits can be tamed with carrots only. %% 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? %% It is shattered in a thousand pieces! %% It is so soon that I am done for, I wonder what I was begun for. -- Epitaph, Cheltenham Churchyard %% It is so very hard to be an on-your-own-take-care-of- yourself-cause-there-is-no-one-else-to-do-it-for-you grown up. %% It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Where I Live" %% It is sometimes necessary to play the fool to avoid being deceived by cunning men. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions. -- Robert Bly %% It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion. -- Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) %% It is the beautiful bird that often gets caged. %% It is the business of little minds to shrink. -- Carl Sandburg %% It is the business of the future to be dangerous. -- Hawkwind %% It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it. -- Seneca %% It is the coward who fawns upon those above him. It is the coward who is insolent whenever he dares be so. -- Junius %% It is the curse of talent that, although it labors with greater steadiness and perseverance than genius, it does not reach its goal, while genius, already on the summit of the ideal, gazes laughingly about. %% It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight. -- Edward Abbey %% It is the function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new forms--the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. %% It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel. %% It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel. (or vice-versa) %% It is the guilt, not the scaffold, which constitutes the shame. -- Cornville %% It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive. -- Jawaharlal Nehru %% It is the height of absurdity to sow little but weeds in the first half of one's lifetime and expect to harvest a valuable crop in the second half. -- Percy Johnston %% It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. -- Alfred Adler (1870-1937) %% It is the law in Baltimore that any service performed by a jackass must be recorded. %% It is the natural order of things. Nothing can alter it. The strong take, the weak surrender. -- Sepp von Plum %% It is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set an house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% It is the nature of our species to be free. -- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8 %% It is the nature of the human disposition to hate him who you have injured. -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% It is the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts. %% It is the pleasure of reward rather than the pain of punishment that motivates people. %% It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65) %% It is the quality rather than the quas brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% It is the task of science to turn the impossible into the boring. %% It is the uncensored sense of humor ... which is the ultimate therapy for man in society. -- Evan Esar %% It is the weak man who urges compromise -- never the strong man. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% It is the wise bird who builds her nest in a tree. %% It is the working man who is the happy man. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% It is time for us men to acknowledge not only that women are vastly superior beings (that's easy) but also that they are--in every way that matters--our *equals*. That's hard. -- Edward Abbey %% It is to the interest of the commonwealth of mankind that there should be someone who is unconquered, someone against whom fortune has no power. -- Seneca %% It is too dangerous, you must not go alone. Hey, I'm your cha'DIch. -- Worf and Picard, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% It is too dark in here to see. %% It is too far up for you to reach. %% It is too narrow even for most insects. %% It is true that if your paperboy throws your paper into the bushes for five straight days it can be explained by Newton's Law of Gravity. But it takes Murphy's law to explain why it is happening to you. %% It is true that liberty is precious - so precious that it must be rationed. -- Nikolai Lenin %% It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written. -- Edward Abbey %% It is undignified for a woman to play servant to a man who is not hers. -- Spock, "Amok Time," stardate 3372.7 %% It is unfortunate, but often true that: Imagination is bounded by the constraints of experience. %% It is unlawful to drink beer in your underwear in Cushing, Oklahoma. %% It is unlawful to mispronounce the name of the city of Joliet, Illinois. %% It is unlawful to roll a baby carriage on the streets of Tupelo, Mississippi. %% It is unlawful to sneeze on a train in West Virginia. %% It is unlawful to throw onions in Princeton, Texas. %% It is unwise to do unto others as you would that they do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% It is unwise to trust those you do not know well. %% It is unworthy of great men to lose hours gamble@owlnet.rice.edu like slaves in the labor of calculation. -- Pascal %% It is useless for sheep to propose vegetarianism while wolves remain of a different persuasion. -- Turkisk Proverb %% It is useless to resist. -- A Sensorite, The Sensorites %% It is very difficult to prophesy, especially when it pertains to the future. %% It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces a false impression. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it. -- Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), December 1862 %% It is what we are that gets across, not what we try to teach. %% It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% It is wise to have one's own lawyer as attorney general, for it is written that the eunuch will not molest the concubines. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final. -- Roger Babson %% It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create. -- John Saxe %% It is wonderful what strength of purpose and boldness and energy of will are roused by the assurance that we are doing our duty. -- Walter Scott %% It is worthy of observation, that the most imperious masters over their own servants, are at the same time, the most abject slaves to the servants of other masters. -- Seneca %% It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. -- W. K. Clifford, British philosopher, circa 1876 %% It is your concern when your neighbor's wall is on fire. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% It is your destiny. -- Darth Vader %% It isn't a bad life to have everyone in the universe at your beck and call, and you win all the arguments. -- Kirk, "The Man Trap," stardate 1513.8 %% It isn't easy being a Friday kind of person in a Monday kind of world. %% It isn't easy being a Princess. %% It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% It isn't that things will necessarily go wrong (Murphy's Law), but rather that they will take so much more time and effort than you think, if they are not to. -- Charles Wolf, Jr. %% It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper. -- Errol Flynn %% It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. -- Will Rogers %% It isn't what you know but the simple things you don't overlook. %% It it weren't for underachievers nobody would be better than average. %% It lifts and separates. %% It looks as though you're dead. Well, seeing as how it's so close to closing time anyway, I think we'll just call it a day. %% It looks like blind screaming hedonism won out. %% It looks like it's up to me to save our skins. Get into that garbage chute, flyboy! -- Princess Leia Organa %% It looks rather muddy down here. %% It looks up, and dies of fright! %% It makes me feel so excited when you touch my keys that way. %% It marks a big step in a man's development when he comes to realize that other men can be called on to help him do a better job than he can do alone. -- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) %% It may be bad manners to talk with your mouth full, but it isn't too good either if you speak when your head is empty. %% It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% It may be remarked for the comfort of honest poverty, that avarice reigns most in those who have but few good qualities to recommend them. This is a weed that will grow in a barren soil. -- Hughes %% It may be taken as an axiom that the majority is always wrong in cultural matters... Politically I believe in democracy, but culturally, not at all... Whenever a cultural matter rolls up a majority, I know it's wrong. -- John Sloan (1871-1951) %% It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others. %% It may be true that human beings make more mistakes than computers, but for a real foul up, give us a computer anytime. %% It may be true that my desk here is really "nothing but" a transient eddy of electrons in the flux of universal process. Nevertheless, I find that it continues to support my feet, my revolver, and my cigars all day long. What happens when my back is turned I don't know. Or much care. That's no concern of mine. -- Edward Abbey %% It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. %% It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other. -- Edward Abbey %% It may or may not be worthwhile, but it still has to be done. %% It may soon be time for you to look for a new line of work. %% It may stop, but it never ends. -- Matt Howarth %% It might be a good idea to offer the unicorn a ruby. %% It might be worth reflecting that this group was originally created back in September of 1987 and has exchanged over 1200 messages. The original announcement for the group called for an all inclusive discussion ranging from the writings of Gibson and Vinge and movies like Bladerunner to real world things like Brands' description of the work being done at the MIT Media Lab. It was meant as a haven for people with vision of this scope. If you want to create a haven for people with narrower visions, feel free. But I feel sad for anyone who thinks that alt.cyberpunk is such a monstrous group that it is in dire need of being subdivided. Heaven help them if they ever start reading comp.arch or rec.arts.sf-lovers. -- Bob Webber %% It misses! %% It must be checked with a brake of bronze. Perseverance brings good fortune. If one lets it take its course, one experiences misfortune. Even a lean pig has it in him to rage around. %% It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% It never will rain roses; when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees. -- George Eliot The Spanish Gypsy %% It now costs more to amuse a child than it once did to educate his father. %% It occurred at a party. A male guest tried to introduce himself to a female guest with whom he was not acquainted. "Hello, I'm ---" "A MOTEL????" she interrupted, very conspicuously, near the top of her lungs. "What?" "WHY DO YOU WANT TO TAKE ME TO A MOTEL????" "I never said anything about any ---" "I'M NOT GOING TO ANY MOTEL WITH YOU AND THAT'S FINAL!!!" Of course, he decided she was out of her mind and moved away, avoiding her the rest of the evening. But about a half hour later she tapped him on the shoulder from behind. He turned around to see who it was, recognized her, and backed away. "Wait, please," she said. "I'm sorry about what I did earlier, but you see, I'm a psychology student, and I'm doing research on how people react to unexpected stresses and other difficult situations. Please let me apologize." "TWO HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS????" %% It occurred to me lately that nothing has occurred to me lately. %% It occurs once in every minute, twice in every moment, and yet never in one hundred thousand years. The letter "m" %% It really bothers me when people cut me o... %% It rolled off my back like a duck. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% It runs as smooth as any rhyme, and loves to fall but can not climb. A river %% It runs up the hill, it runs down the hill, but in spite of it all, still it stands still. A road %% It said "Insert disk #3", but only two will fit! %% It says the same thing it did before. %% It says, "there is something strange about this place, such that one of the words I've always known now has a new effect." %% It seemed all was well for old Bill For the night was romantic and still. She was warm, she was waiting, She was ripe for the mating But alas--she was not on the pill. %% It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better ... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more. -- Woody Allen, "Side Effects" 1981 %% It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch -- someone, she thought bitterly, who had reversed the principle of the Twentieth Century motor and was now turning kinetic energy into static. %% It seems a little silly now, but this country was founded as a protest against taxation. %% It seems even darker in here than before. %% It seems that a # won't do. %% It seems that a devout, good couple was about to get married, but a tragic car accident ended their lives. When they got to heaven, they asked St. Peter if he could arrange for them to be married, saying that it was what they had hoped for in life, and they still desired wedded union. He thought about it and agreed, but said they would have to wait. It was almost one hundred years later when St. Peter sent for them. They were married in a simple ceremony. So things went on, for thirty years or so, but they determined, in this time, that eternity was best not spent together. They went back to St. Peter, and said, "We thought we would be happy forever, but now we believe that we have irreconcilable differences. Is there any way we can get divorced?" "Are you kidding?" said St. Peter. "It took me a hundred years to get a priest up here to marry you. I'll never get a lawyer!" %% It seems that all of those secret police guys in East Germany won't be jobless for long. Most of the field agents have been snapped up by cab companies, since they know their areas so well, and the desk workers have been hired as dispatchers. The neat thing about the new dispatchers is that all they need is the name of the customer and they can give the cabbies the address. %% It seems that nature has concealed at the bottom of our minds, talents and abilities of which we are not aware. The passions alone have the privilege of bringing them to light, and of giving us sometimes views more certain and more perfect than art could possible produce. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It seems that somewhere in the legendary past of louse history, an offspring of a free living form, not unlike our book louse, found that life could be infinitely simplified, if instead of having to grub for food in straw [or] under tree bark, ... it could attach itself to some food-supplying host and sit tight. The louse, by adapting itself to parasitism, has attained the ideal of bourgeois civilization, though its methods of getting food, shelter, and clothing are more direct than those of business and banking, and its source of nourishment is not its own species. -- Hans Zinsser (1878-1940) %% It seems the foreman of a construction site was continually dismayed to observe that one of his prize workers, Paddy, consistently wore his "Wellies" (rubber boots) on the wrong feet (left on right, right on left). After many days of watching Paddy plod around in discomfort, he determined to set things right. Accordingly, that night he took some of that great Day-Glo Orange paint and carefully put an "L" on the left boot and an "R" on the right boot. The next morning, Paddy came to him, outraged, carrying on about vandalism and the rights of personal property, etc. The foreman stopped him and explained that he had done it himself, in a effort to help Paddy wear his Wellies more comfortably. He explained that the L indicated the boot for the left foot, and the R for the right. At this, Paddy paused and reflected "Ah, sure and that's a marvelous idea. Tell me now, d'ya suppose that's why me wife has C&A on her underdrawers?" %% It seems the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag. -- Frank Hubbard %% It seems the weight of the rock above is a little too much for the ceiling of the cave. The cave appears to be falling in around you on all sides. %% It seems these two Airmen decided to rob the local 7-11, a stupid move in and of itself. But wait, its stupid to rob a store when you're in the military 'cause the haircut will give you away every time. But wait again, its even stupider to do it in UNIFORM with you NAME emblazoned in 1 inch letters on the front. But wait yet again, its even stupider to tie up the clerk and try and ring up customers purchases from behind the register while in uniform outside an Air Force base. Especially when your first customer is a Chief Master Sgt. %% It seems to make an auto driver mad if he misses you. %% It seems to me that your antenna doesn't bring in too many stations anymore. %% It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. -- Geroge Eliot %% It seems we have a nun who is at the airport early for a flight to the east coast. She checks her bag and gets her seat assignment. She has about half an hour to waste so she walks around a piece. Then she comes across one of those scales that spits out a piece of paper with your weight and your fortune. So she stands on the scale and deposits her nickel. The machine spits out her paper which reads; "You weigh 112 lbs., you are a nun and you are going to fart". Amazingly enough, as she steps off the scale, she farts. Well she found this mildly remarkable and figures God works in mysterious ways. So she gets back on the scale and deposits another nickel. She reads her fortune; "You weigh 112 lbs., you are a nun, and you're going to have sex". She is astonished by this and steps off the scale. As she does a man grabs her, takes her into the mens bathroom and proceeds to do the deed. She stumbles out of the bathroom. No longer having any doubt as to the accuracy of the scale, she gets back on to find out what will happen next. She deposits her nickel. The fortune tells her; "You weigh 112 lbs., you are a nun and if you hadn't been farting and screwing around all morning, you wouldn't have missed your flight". %% It seems you keep overlooking a sign reading "No trespassing"! %% It shall be unlawful for any suspicious person to be within the municipality. -- Local ordinance, Euclid Ohio %% It should be that simple, Wesley. Judging by her appearance, it is likely you and Salia are biologically compatible. Of course, there could be a difference in the histocompatibility complex if the cell membrane, but- Data, I want to meet her, not dissect her. -- Data and Wesley, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8 %% It show'd discretion, the best part of valor. -- Beaumont and Fletcher %% It slices! It dices! It makes mounds and mounds of mouth-watering coleslaw! %% It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins %% It sounds like there is something inside the #. %% It strikes me that religion has very little to do with God. %% It suddenly becomes dark in here. %% It sure has been a pleasure for us to broadcast for the sailors and soldiers; besides, it's part of the National Defense Program to prepare our boys for anything. -- Bob Hope %% It takes a brave man to admit his mistakes. Especially in a paternity hearing. %% It takes a giant to fight a giant. -- H. Prym %% It takes a long time to understand nothing. -- Edward Dahlberg %% It takes a lot less time to do it right the first time than to explain why you didn't! %% It takes a modem to run a baudy house. %% It takes a special kind of courage to face what we all have to face. %% It takes about 8 years for an oyster to produce a small pearl. %% It takes all kinds to fill the freeways. -- Crazy Charlie %% It takes both a weapon, and two people, to commit a murder. %% It takes everyone to make a happy day. -- Marcy Kay Rumsfeld %% It takes leather balls to play rugby. -- [Blood makes the grass grow!] %% It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong. -- H. W. Longfellow %% It takes little strain and no art To bang out an echoing fart. The reaction is hearty When you fart at a party, But the sensitive persons depart. THE POOTMOBILE Our staff proctologist, Dr. Barr, Has invented a new kind of car. With a tank full of shit There's no stopping it -- For short trips, two poots take you far. %% It takes money to make money because you have to copy the design exactly. -- Rod Schmidt %% It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% It takes nine months to have a baby - no matter how many women you put on the job. %% It takes two hands to handle a Whopper. %% It takes two to tango, unless they're Newcomers, in which case it takes three... %% It takes two to tango. %% It takes two to tell the truth: one to speak and one to hear. %% It takes vision and courage to create -- it takes faith and courage to prove. -- Owen D. Young %% It took 300 years to build and by the time it was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But by then the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it has cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing. There are at present no plans to replace it, since it was never really needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above. -- Kenneth E. Iverson commenting on the Leaning Tower of Pisa %% It used to be a man's world, and the woman's place was in the home. They can kiss that shit goodbye. %% It used to be said that someone who lived from paycheck to paycheck was shiftless, today they're called thrifty. %% It used to be the fun was in The capture and kill. In another place and time I did it all for thrills. -- Lust to Love %% It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% It walks east, west, north and south, Has a tongue, but nary a mouth. A shoe %% It warms me, it charms me, To mention but her name; It heats me, it beats me, And set me a' on flame. -- Burns %% It was 20 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. %% It was New Year's Eve and the house was brightly decorated with holiday trappings. The only sound that broke the quiet was the click of Grandma's knitting needles. The children; Jane, eight and Mary, five, were seated in front of a cheerily burning fire, leafing through a picture book. Tiring of this, they went over to Grandma's rocker. Jane climbed up on the arm of the chair and Mary snuggled into Grandma's cozy lap. "Tell us a story," begged Mary. "Oh," said the old lady, laying aside her knitting and wrapping her arms around the children. "What story should I tell you?" "Tell us our favorite story," whispered little Jane eagerly. "About the time you were a hooker in Chicago." %% It was Penguin lust... at its ugliest. %% It was a JOKE!! Get it?? I was receiving messages from DAVID LETTERMAN!! YOW!! %% It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies. -- Edith Hamilton, "The Greek Way" %% It was a blonde, a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. -- Raymond Chandler %% It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead. %% It was a brave man that ate the first oyster. %% It was a contest without time, a struggle of two abstractions, the thing that had created the building against the things that made the play possible -- two forces, suddenly naked to her in their simple statement -- two forces that had fought since the world began -- and every religion had known of them -- and there had always been a God and a Devil -- only men had been so mistaken about the shapes of their Devil -- he was not single and big, he was many and smutty and small. The Banner had destroyed the Stoddard Temple in order to make room for this play -- it could not do otherwise -- there was no middle choice, no escape, no neutrality -- it was one or the other -- it had always been -- and the contest had many symbols, but no name and no statement... %% It was a dark and stormy night. Two shots rang out. The first bullet shattered the large plate glass window as the second ricocheted off of the brick fireplace and entered my skull. "My goodness," I thought. "Now I have a place to store my pens and pencils. Or to pour cool water into when I get hot." %% It was a female that drove me to drink and I didn't even have the kindness to thank her. -- R. E. Baber %% It was a hot summer afternoon, and all the scots were pursuing their favourite hobby - drinking whiskey in the pub. Suddenly, the door bursts open, and a man comes in panting, his tongue lolling and totally black in colour. " What happened, Mac?", inquired one of the regulars." Well, a bottle of whiskey fell on the hot tar road. " said Mac. %% It was a mistake, I never should have picked human. I knew it the moment I said it. To think of a future in this shell. Forced to cover myself with a fabric because of some outdated human morality. To say nothing of being too hot or too cold, growing feeble with age, losing my hair, catching a disease, being ticklish, sneezing, having an itch, a pimple, bad breath...having to BATHE. Too BAD! -- Q and Worf, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% It was a nice place to visit, Number One, but I wouldn't want to die there. -- Picard about the Holodeck, "The Big Goodbye", stardate 41997.7 %% It was a saying of the ancients, "Truth lies in a well;" and to carry on this metaphor, we may justly say that logic does supply us with steps, whereby we may go down to reach the water. -- Dr. I. Watts %% It was a summer's day in winter, And the snow was raining fast, As a barefoot boy with shoes on, Stood sitting in the grass. %% It was a virgin forest, a place where the Hand of Man had never set foot. %% It was a warm, sunny Sunday, so a man and his wife decided to take in the zoo. They spent the day, and at closing time they walked past the gorilla cage, and the man noticed the gorilla looking at his wife. "That gorilla is getting excited just looking at your tits," he said. "Why don't you take your blouse off and we'll see what he does?" At first she declined. But finally persuaded by her husband, she took off her blouse and bra. The gorilla went nuts. He started grunting and jumping up and down. "Hey," the husband said, "let's really blow his mind. Take off all your clothes and we'll see what he does." Again she said no and again he persuaded her. This time the ape really went bananas! He climbed up and down the bars, did flips, ran around in circles and tossed his food all over the cage. The husband went over to the cage, opened the door and pushed his wife in. "Now," said the husband, "tell that motherfucker you have a headache!" %% It was almost closing time when a male patron who had been getting the frosty treatment from a girl at the end of the bar called to the bartender and said, "Give that bitchy douche bag over there one on me." "We discourage that sort of language here, sir," the bartender answered sternly. "OK, OK. Serve the lady a cocktail with my compliments." The bartender approached the female in question. "The, uh, gentleman at the other end of the bar would like to buy you a drink, miss. What would you like?" "Vinegar and water," she replied. %% It was always thus; and even if 'twere not, 'twould inevitably have been always thus. -- Dean Lattimer %% It was an adult who did it. -- Wesley, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% It was at the eighth annual mouse convention and mice from near and far had gathered for the ball. A pretty little female mouse waltzed by the stag line and one of the males whistled a low, dirty whistle to himself. Turning to another mouse he said, "Look at the legs on that bitch, aren't they beautiful?" "Just fair," was the answer. "You're crazy," said the first mouse and then turning to another, asked his opinion. "They're nice," said the third mouse, "but nothing to get excited about." "Some mice have no appreciation," exclaimed the first mouse. "Now you," he said to a fourth mouse, "what did you think?" "To tell you the truth," was the reply, "I'm no authority on legs, I'm a titmouse myself." %% It was her wedding night, and the sweet young thing was in a romantic haze. "Oh, darling," she sighed, "We're married at last. It's all like a wonderful dream!" Her husband didn't answer. A few moments passed. She sighed again and said, "I'm afraid I'll awake in a moment and find it isn't true." Still no response from her spouse. Another pause and another sensuous sigh, then, softly. "I just can't believe that I'm really your wife." "Damn it," growled her mate, "as soon as I get this shoelace untied, you will!" %% It was here that the emperor liked to put on his grand alfresco spectacles. %% It was his third marriage and her fourth. He was quite surprised when on their honeymoon she pleaded, "Please be gentle, I'm still a virgin." "Darling, what do you mean you're still a virgin? You've been married three times." "Yes, but they all worked for DEC. The first was a salesman, and all he ever did was promise how good it would be. The second was one of their software hacks, he told me to take care of it myself. And the third was a field service representative, and he kept promising that it would be up in 15 minutes. %% It was in 1936 and the baseball game was the championship game for the Northeastern League pennant (AAA Minor Leagues). It was the bottom of the 9th, the bases were loaded and the home-team Buffalo Giants were behind 5-4. The Syracuse Chiefs had to use another pitcher but the only one remaining was an infamous carouser named Milt Famey, whose only joy in life seemed to be drinking beer and throwing baseballs. If he was called into the game before the 6th inning he was an adequate pitcher but after that, his beer consumption (while working out in the bullpen) made for some legendary gaffes. Well, the manager had no choice but to call in Milt, who threw down his beer bottle and went to the mound, proceeding to walk in the tying and winning runs. Two of the victorious Giants, the third baseman and the left fielder, while strutting back to the clubhouse, passed by the entrance to the visitors' bullpen. Spotting Milt's beer bottle by the entrance, the third baseman said to the left fielder: "Was that the beer that made Milt Famey walk us?" %% It was just a job. It wasn't any special interest in consumer affairs. I needed a paycheck and the Attorney General said that I would be best to go down there, because he knew I was anti-consumer. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, remembering his job as chief investigator in the consumer products division of the Indiana Attorney General's office %% It was just my imagination ... runnin' away with me. %% It was kinda like stuffing the wrong card in a computer, when you're stickin' those artificial stimulants in your arm. -- Dion [noted computer scientist] %% It was like blaming the victim of a holdup, for corrupting the integrity of the thug ... and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victim, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. %% It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour that all wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command. -- Adam Smith (1723-1790) %% It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. I've never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life-- my first day in the bush in Vietnam, and this fellow walked into the clearing where we were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us our youngest son might be hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an oversized head, thank God); the long crazy weeks before my mother died. I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail. But eight hundred million Red Chinese don't give a shit, right? The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life. -- Stephen King, "Different Seasons, The Body" %% It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all. -- P. G. Wodehouse %% It was one of those perfect summer days -- the sun was shining, a breeze was blowing, the birds were singing, and the lawn mower was broken ... -- James Dent %% It was one time too many One word too few It was all too much for me and you There was one way to go Nothing more we could do One time too many One word too few -- Meredith Tanner (Gypsy) %% It was pity stayed his hand. "Pity I don't have any more bullets," thought Frito. -- "Bored of the Rings", a Harvard Lampoon parody of Tolkein %% It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty .... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever -- unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime. -- Thomas Aldrich %% It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% It was raining heavily, and the motorist had car trouble on a lonely country road. Anxious to find shelter for the night, he walked over to a farmhouse and knocked on the front door. No one responded. He could feel the water from the roof running down the back of his neck as he stood on the stoop. The next time he knocked louder, but still no answer. By now he was soaked to the skin. Desperately he pounded on the door. At last the head of a man appeared out of an upstairs window. "What do you want?" he asked gruffly. "My car broke down," said the traveler, "and I want to know if you would let me stay here for the night." "Sure," replied the man. "If you want to stay there all night, it's okay with me." %% It was reported that England was uffereing from a plague of aunts. %% It was sick...But it gave of the sanctified odor of serious art, and so Sherman hesitated to be candid. -- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities" %% It was so cold last winter that I saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets. %% It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but now it's Miller time. %% It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. %% It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of foolishness; it was the age of wisdom. -- Charles Dickens %% It was the first day of a new term at Princeton, and a Texas A&M freshman was learning his way around the campus. Stopping a distinguished looking upperclassman, he inquired, "Say, buddy, can you tell me where the library is at?" "My good fellow," came the reply, "at Princeton we do not end our sentences with a preposition." "All right," said the freshman, "can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?" %% It wasn't a rock - was a Rock Lobster! %% It wasn't that she had a rose in her teeth, exactly. It was more like the rose and the teeth were in the same glass. %% It were not best that we should all think alike; it is the difference of opinion that makes horse races. %% It will be advantageous to cross the great stream ... the Dragon is on the wing in the Sky ... the Great Man rouses himself to his Work. %% It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples. -- Charles Dickens %% It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessane changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow. -- The Federalist, No. 62 %% It would be advisable to use the exit. %% It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a dairy. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity. %% It would be illogical to assume that all conditions remain stable. -- Spock, "The Enterprise" Incident," stardate 5027.3 %% It would be illogical to kill without reason. -- Spock, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.4 %% It would be inappropriate for the President of the United States to try to fine-tune for the people of Hungary how they ought to eat - how the cow out to eat the cabbage, as we say in the United States. -- George Bush, quoted in "Philadelphia Inquirer", 13 July 1989 %% It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or two things still safe to eat. -- Robert Fuoss %% It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything. %% It would be well, if some who have taken upon themselves the ministry of the Gospel, that they would first preach to themselves, then afterwards to others. -- Cardinal Pole %% It would seem that evil retreats when forcibly confronted. -- Yarnek of Excalbia, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.5 %% It'll be a nice world if they ever get it finished. %% It'll be just like Beggars Canyon back home. -- Luke Skywalker %% It's -37! Okay? -37! Sheesh! Some people! %% It's Fabulous! We haven't seen anything like it in the last half an hour! -- Macy's %% It's HARD when you're in love. %% It's Like This Even the samurai have teddy bears, and even the teddy bears get drunk. %% It's NO USE ... I've gone to "CLUB MED"!! %% It's NOT my fault!!! -- Han Solo (and a cast of thousands) %% It's OBVIOUS ... The FURS never reached ISTANBUL ... You were an EXTRA in the REMAKE of "TOPKAPI" ... Go home to your WIFE ... She's making FRENCH TOAST! %% It's OKAY --- I'm an INTELLECTUAL, too. %% It's Tekonojikly better! %% It's [war is] instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers...but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill today! -- Kirk, "A Taste of Armageddon," stardate 3193.0 %% It's a Tough Job! ..... So I'd Rather YOU do it. %% It's a battle in which one must make one's stand clear. A battle? What battle? I don't fight the disarmed. I hold the whip hand. Are they? They have a weapon against you. It's their only weapon but it's a terrible one. %% It's a beautiful world we live in. %% It's a boy, Mrs. Walker, it's a boy. %% It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word. -- Andrew Jackson %% It's a fact of life... Males are born with 2 heads, but only enough blood to operate one at a time! %% It's a fine night to have an evening. -- Steve Wright %% It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave. -- Edward Abbey %% It's a funny thing that when a woman hasn't got anything on earth to worry about, she goes off and gets married. %% It's a good idea to keep your words soft and sweet to the taste. You may have to eat them. %% It's a good thing money can't buy happiness. We couldn't stand the commercials. -- Solomon Short %% It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for. %% It's a good thing we have gravity, or else when birds died they'd just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused. -- Steve Wright %% It's a good thing you're cute Wesley, or you could really be obnoxious. -- Oliana Mirren, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2 %% It's a long way down. %% It's a lot of fun being alive...I wonder if my bed is made?!? %% It's a match made in heaven. Unfortunately, it will have to be a shotgun wedding. -- Dr. Pulaski and Riker, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish -- we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world -- but we let out enemies write its moral code ... they use your love of virtue as a hostage ... Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have on you. -- Francisco d'Anconia %% It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% It's a perfectly good shuttlecraft. -- Picard, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% It's a poor workman who blames his tools. %% It's a question of Napleon brandy versus Ripple. I am mellow and amber and I go down real smooth. -- Rita Moreno [commenting in Newsweek on the sex appeal of older women versus younger women] %% It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours. -- Harry S. Truman, 1958 %% It's a sad house where the cock is silent and the hen crows. %% It's a shame ignorance isn't painful. %% It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it. -- Steven Wright %% It's a time-honored way of practicing medicine. With your head, and your heart, and your hands. -- Dr. Pulaski, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% It's a very *__UN*lucky week in which to be took dead. -- Churchy La Femme %% It's a very rare and precious Chinese puzzle box. You won't be able to open it, so put it down. -- Countess Scarlioni, CITY OF DEATH %% It's a very valuable function and requirement that you're performing, so have a great day and keep a stiff upper lip. -- Vice President Dan Quayle remarks to oil spill clean-up workers at Prince William Sound, May, 1989 %% It's about time to beam back up. %% It's all a matter of life and death, so beware of the undead. %% It's all a matter of taste. -- B. Midler %% It's all in the mind, ya know. %% It's all in your wrist. %% It's all very funny until someone loses an eye. %% It's always darkest just before it gets pitch black. %% It's always darkest just before the lights go out. -- Alex Clark %% It's always easier to destroy than to create. -- Any general, any army, any age %% It's always easy to see both sides of an issue we are not particularly concerned about. %% It's amazing how many people you could be friends with if only they'd only make the first approach. %% It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% It's amazing the number of persons intimidated by mere competence. %% It's an Earth drink, prune juice. A warrior's drink. -- Guinan and Worf, "Yesterday's Enterprise", stardate 43625.2 %% It's an ill wind that gathers no moss. %% It's bad enough that life is a ratrace.,but why do the rats always have to win? %% It's bad luck to be superstitious. -- Andrew W. Mathis %% It's bad luck, being punished. %% It's been Monday all week today. %% It's been a business doing pleasure with you. %% It's been a hard day's night. You should be sleeping like a log. %% It's been a long time since I rock and rolled. %% It's been real and it's been fun, but it hasn't been real fun. %% It's been really nice talking to you. We must have lunch sometime. %% It's been so long since I made love that I can't even remember who gets tied up. -- Joan Rivers %% It's better to be pissed off than pissed on. %% It's better to be respected than to be loved. -- David O. McKay %% It's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% It's better to be wanted for murder that not to be wanted at all. -- Marty Winch %% It's better to burn out than it is to rust. %% It's better to divorce than to murder. %% It's better to eat soap than little stones. %% It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear. -- Freeman Dyson %% It's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it. %% It's better to have a horrible ending than to have horrors without end. %% It's better to keep your mouth closed and be presumed a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. %% It's better to retire too soon than too late. -- Charles A. Mosher %% It's business doing pleasure with you. %% It's clever, but is it art? %% It's currently a problem of access to gigabits through punybaud. -- J. C. R. Licklider %% It's curtains for the # as your sword removes his head. %% It's difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame. %% It's easier to be a liberal a long way from home. -- Don Price %% It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise. -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz %% It's easier to believe in God than to accept the blame ourselves. -- Solomon Short %% It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for being right. %% It's easier to get older than it is to get wiser. %% It's easier to take it apart than to put it back together. -- Washlesky %% It's easy to apply yourself, just use crazy glue! %% It's easy to be virtuous when your boyfriend isn't around. -- Ilana Sobel %% It's easy to forgive someone for being wrong; it's much harder to forgive them for being right. %% It's easy to lose touch with Reality when you see so little of it. %% It's easy to make decisions if you don't know the facts. %% It's easy to make decisions if you ignore the facts. %% It's easy to tell when you've got a bargain -- it doesn't fit. %% It's faster horses, Younger women, Older whiskey and More money. -- Tom T. Hall, "The Secret of Life" %% It's from Casablanca. I've been waiting all my life to use that line. -- Woody Allen, "Play It Again, Sam" %% It's getting near dawn, when stars close their tired eyes. I'll soon be with you, my love; give you my dawn surprise. -- Cream %% It's getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does -- if it really is a principle -- is to kill somebody. -- Dorothy Sayers %% It's going to be a very bad day. %% It's gonna be alright, It's almost midnight, And I've got two more bottles of wine. %% It's good if you know the law, but it's better if you know the judge. %% It's good to be looked over and not overlooked. %% It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good too, to check up once and a while and make sure you haven't lost the things that money can't buy. -- George Horace Lorimer %% It's great to hear your voice, Captain. We're a little busy right now. I'll get right back to you. -- Geordi, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2 %% It's hard to RTFM when you can't find the FM.. %% It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am. %% It's hard to be humble when you're perfect. %% It's hard to be serious when you're naked. %% It's hard to believe that something which is neither seen nor felt can do so much harm. That's true. But an idea can't be seen or felt. And that's what kept the Troglytes in the mines all these centuries. A mistaken idea. -- Vanna and Kirk, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5819.0 %% It's hard to drive at the limit, but it's harder to know where the limits are. -- Stirling Moss %% It's hard to get ivory in Africa, but in Alabama the Tuscaloosa. %% It's hard to keep a good girl down -- but lots of fun trying. %% It's hard to keep your shirt on when you're getting something off your chest. %% It's hard to say who brags more, the reformed smoker or the guy whose car gets 30 miles to the gallon. -- James Alexander %% It's hard to sing with an empty glass. %% It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys. %% It's hard to think of you as the end result of millions of years of evolution %% It's illegal for an unlicensed pigeon to fly over Bayonne, N.J. %% It's illegal in Hillsboro, Oregon, for a horse to ride in the back seat of a car. %% It's illegal in Wilbur, Washington, to ride an ugly horse. %% It's illegal to drive any car while asleep in Tennessee. %% It's illegal to sleep in a trash can in Lubbock, Texas. %% It's illegal to snore in Coral Gables, Florida. %% It's immoral to parent irresponsibly... And it doesn't help matters any when prime time TV, like 'Murphy Brown', a character who is supposed to represent a successful career woman of today, mocks the importance of the father by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice.' Marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program there is... Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at [such values] I think most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. -- Vice President Dan Quayle addressing the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and criticizing Murphy Brown's decision to NOT have an abortion and to be a single (highly successful) mother %% It's impolite to silence a fool and cruel to let him go on. %% It's important that people know what you stand for. It's more important that they know what you won't stand for. %% It's interesting to think that many quite distinguished people have bodies similar to yours. %% It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs. -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News %% It's just a jump to the left and then a step to the right. %% It's just a jump to the left And then a step to the right. Put your hands on your hips And pull your knees in tight. It's the pelvic thrust That really gets you insa-a-a-a-ane LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN! -- Rocky Horror Picture Show %% It's just apartment house rules, So all you 'partment house fools Remember: one man's ceiling is another man's floor. One man's ceiling is another man's floor. -- Paul Simon, "One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Floor" %% It's kind of fun to do the impossible. -- Walt Disney %% It's later than you think. %% It's later than you think: the joint Russian-American space mission has already begun. %% It's life Jim, but not as we know it. %% It's lucky you're going so slowly, because you're going in the wrong direction. %% It's men like him that give the Y chromosome a bad name. %% It's more cheesier! %% It's more than a reader. It's a message base manager! %% It's more than magnificent -- it's mediocre. -- Sam Goldwyn %% It's my snake, I trained it and now I'm going to eat it! -- The gyrocopter pilot in 'Road Warrior' %% It's my understanding that one of the duties of the First Officer on a Klingon ship is to assassinate the Captain. "Yes, sir. When and if the Captain becomes weak and unable to perform, it is expected that his honorable retirement should be assisted by his First. The Second Officer would assassinate you for the same reasons." This method of attrition could take a little getting used to. -- Riker and Worf, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% It's never too late to have a happy childhood %% It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or another. -- President George Bush %% It's no surprise that things are so screwed up: everyone that knows how to run a government is either driving taxicabs or cutting hair. -- George Burns %% It's no use crying over spilt milk;it only makes it salty for the cat. %% It's no use! Your call won't get through! We now control the telephone company! %% It's not Camelot, but it's not Cleveland, either. -- Kevin White, mayor of Boston %% It's not a bug it's a feature. %% It's not a bug--it's an undocumented feature %% It's not a dungeon--it's fortified underground defense installation %% It's not a question of harm. One William Riker is...unique, perhaps even special. But a hundred of him, a thousand of him, diminishes me in ways I can't even imagine. -- Riker about cloning, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% It's not a sin to be rich- it's a miracle. -- W. F. Dettle %% It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon. -- Tom Lehrer %% It's not an "air conditioner" air conditioner; It's an air "conditioner." %% It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one. -- Phil White %% It's not easy being green. -- Kermit %% It's not easy being this cute %% It's not easy for a night person to work days. %% It's not enough that I should succeed -- others should fail. -- David Merrick %% It's not enough to be Hungarian; you must have talent too. -- Alexander Korda %% It's not hard to admit errors that are [only] cosmetically wrong. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% It's not hard to meet expenses, they're everywhere. %% It's not hungry (it's merely pinin' for the fjords). Besides, you have no bird seed. %% It's not just a job, it's $12.75 an hour! %% It's not just a job, it's an adventure! %% It's not like Data to be so secretive. And cautious. He's got that lab locked every minute. Now how do you know that? -- Troi, Wesley, and Geordi, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% It's not my week to care. %% It's not often that you get so much class entertainment outside your bedroom window or outside your bedroom, period. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% It's not pretty being easy. %% It's not reality or how you perceive things that's important -- it's what you're taking for it... %% It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things. %% It's not safe out here! It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross...but it's not for the timid. -- Q, "Q-Who?", stardate 42761.3 %% It's not safe to Save. %% It's not so bad. You could have been killed already. %% It's not so hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps once you're off the ground. -- Daniel B. Luten %% It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens. -- Woody Allen %% It's not that I'm so clever, but that the others are such fools. %% It's not that men don't like cuddling, they just don't like it used as an excuse for not having sex. %% It's not that simple, no matter how you wish it so. You made public statements from a position of false authority; now you're having them shoved down your throat. Welcome to netnews. -- Thomas Maddox %% It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole. %% It's not the critic that counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, and often comes up short again and again. Who knows the great enthusiasms and spends himself in a worthy cause. And who, if at best in the end, knows the triumph of higher treatment and high achievement. And who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his soul shall never be with those cold and timid ones who know neither victory nor defeat. -- Leo Buscaglia (I believe quoting John F. Kennedy) %% It's not the end of the world and if it is, it doesn't really matter anyway. %% It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop -- (seen on a wall in Down by law) %% It's not the kill, it's the thrill of the chase. -- Deep Purple %% It's not the knife through the heart that tears you apart, it's just the thought of someone sticking it in. %% It's not the men in my life, but the life in my men that counts. %% It's not the ups and downs of love, it's the ins and outs. %% It's not the valleys in life I dread so much as the dips. -- Garfield %% It's not the will to win that makes the difference. It's the will to practice. -- LaVell Edwards %% It's not the work that gets me down, it's the coffee breaks. %% It's not the years, it's the mileage. %% It's not what you know or what you do, it's who you know. %% It's not what you write that counts, it's how it's read. %% It's not whether you win or lose but how you look playing the game. %% It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. -- Grantland Rice %% It's not whether you win or lose. It's how you place the blame. %% It's not whether you win or lose. It's whether I win. %% It's not who wins or loses that counts -- it's who keeps score. -- Solomon Short %% It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts. -- Millard Fuller, in "Time", 16 January 1989 %% It's odd how sin must advertise in gaudy trappings. One would think it would be darker, more discreet. %% It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case. -- Sydney J. Harris %% It's okay to be ugly...but aren't you overdoing it? %% It's one o'clock and time for lunch, dum dee dum dee dum. %% It's only a hobby ... only a hobby ... only a %% It's only at mid-life that a Betazoid female becomes...well...fully sexual if you know what I mean. -- Troi, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% It's only by NOT taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess. -- Roger Noe %% It's only fair to mention Wesley in a log entry, sir. Fair is fair. And let's credit his science teacher, too. -- Riker and Picard, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% It's our fault. We should have given him better parts. -- Jack Warner, on hearing that Reagan had been elected governor of California. [Warner is also reported to have said when told of Reagan's candidacy for governor, "No, Jimmy Stewart for Governor; Reagan for best friend."] %% It's over when the fat lady sits on your face. %% It's party time in Dana Point! %% It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. -- Kim Hubbard %% It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ... %% It's rather a pity in a way. Now the universe is down to 699 wonders. -- Doctor, DEATH TO THE DALEKS %% It's rather difficult to believe that this country was formed as a protest against taxation. %% It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles. %% It's really, really hard to stay innocent. %% It's round the world I've traveled; it's round the world I've roamed; but I've yet to see an outlaw drive a family from its home. -- Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd" %% It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% It's safe to vote for Gary Hart, but only if you wear a condom. -- From an article in the NEW REPUBLIC %% It's smart to pick your friends, but not to pieces. %% It's smart to pick your friends, but not your nose. %% It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart. %% It's so big! %% It's so confusing choosing sides in the heat of the moment, just to see if it's real, Oooh, it's so erotic having you tell me how it should feel, But I'm avoiding all the hard cold facts that I got to face, So ask me just one question when this magic night is through, Could it have been just anyone or did it have to be you? -- Billy Joel, "Glass Houses" %% It's so fuckin' great to be alive! %% It's so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the Devil when he is the only explanation of it. %% It's something of a tradition Guinan - the captain touring the ship before a battle. Before a hopeless battle if I remember the tradition correctly. Not necessarily, Nelson toured the HMS Victory before Trefalger. But Nelson never returned from Trefalger. No, but the battle was won. -- Picard & Guinan, "The Best of Both Worlds," stardate 43989.1 %% It's sometimes wisest to leave bad enough alone. %% It's sort of a threat, you see. I've never been very good at them myself but I'm told they can be very effective. %% It's starting to rain, .SQZ the animals into the .ARC ! %% It's sweet to be remembered, but it's a lot cheaper to be forgotten. %% It's ten o'clock; do you know where your processes are? %% It's the RINSE CYCLE!! They've ALL IGNORED the RINSE CYCLE!! %% It's the custom of my people to help one another when we're in trouble. -- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion," stardate 3259.2 %% It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine... -- R.E.M, from the song of the same name. %% It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time. -- Tallulah Bankhead %% It's the most unhappy people who most fear change. -- Mignon McLaughlin %% It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon. Which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to. -- Franklin P. Jones %% It's the responsibility of the media to look at the president with a microscope, but they go too far when they use a proctoscope. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% It's the shampoo manufacturers that have defined the most expensive endless loop: 'Lather, rinse, repeat.' %% It's the sighs that count. %% It's the thought, if any, that counts! %% It's time once again to "ask Dr. Science"! Remember, he knows MORE than you do. %% It's time to boot, do your boot ROMs know where your disk controllers are? %% It's time you learned that freedom is never a gift. It has to be earned. -- Kirk, "The Return of the Archons," stardate 3157.4 %% It's times like these when people like to make up 'it's times like these' sayings. %% It's too bad that televisions don't have a knob to turn up the INTELLIGENCE of the programs. I tried 'brightness', but it didn't work. %% It's true that money can't buy you love, but it can buy some VERY interesting substitutes. %% It's true, forgiveness IS easier to get than permission %% It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life. -- Edward Abbey %% It's unix me son! `taint spozed tah make cents %% It's useless to try to plan for the unexpected... by definition! -- Alfred Hitchcock %% It's very awkward to chew and even harder to swallow. You do manage to get it down, but you die of acute indigestion shortly afterward. %% It's very inconvenient to be mortal-- you never know when everything may suddenly stop happening. %% It's way too early -- way too early -- to get into that. -- President George Bush, on aid to Russia after the coup. In November 1991, guards at a Soviet nuclear-missile base left nuclear weapons unguarded to forage for food %% It's worse than that, he's dead Jim. %% It's wrong to create a whole race of humans to live as slaves. -- Number One, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown. %% It's you and me against the world--when do we attack? %% It's your thing - do what you wanna do. %% Items sold separately. %% Iteration in everyday life: Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Recursion in everyday life: To seal, moisten flap, fold over and seal. %% Its Miller time! %% Its a JOKE, like the funny kind but different. %% Its a long, long way to Tiparari. %% Its blow glances off your helmet. %% Its body brevity, and wit its soul -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% Its coming is sudden; It flames up, dies down, is thrown away. %% Its just business as usual. %% Its my party, and I'll cry if I want to! %% Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Its not the size of the ship, its the size of the waves. -- Little Richard %% Its not whether you win or lose, and its not how you play the game, Its the thrill of the chase %% Ivan Poorovitch, Russia's new premier. %% Ivan Strokanoff %% Ivensky: "My grandfather was a pole." Woddy: "North or South?" %% Ivo Andric - Yugoslavia's First Nobel Laureate %% J'aurais toujours faim de toi. %% J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty--you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial. -- Edward Abbey %% J. Paul Getty's formula for success: Rise early, work late, strike oil. %% J. RANDOM See RANDOM. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% J. Random Hacker: [MIT] /J rand'm hak'r/ n. A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. See {random}, {Suzie COBOL}. This may originally have been inspired by `J. Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a household word back in the early days of {TMRC}, and was probably influenced by `J. Presper Eckert' (one of the co-inventors of the electronic computer). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% J. Random: /J rand'm/ n. [generalized from {J. Random Hacker}] Arbitrary; ordinary; any one; any old. `J. Random' is often prefixed to a noun to make a name out of it. It means roughly `some particular' or `any specific one'. "Would you let J. Random Loser marry your daughter?" The most common uses are `J. Random Hacker', `J. Random Loser', and `J. Random Nerd' ("Should J. Random Loser be allowed to {gun} down other people?"), but it can be used simply as an elaborate version of {random} in any sense. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% JACOBSON'S LAW: The less work an organization produces, the more often it reorganizes. %% JAM'S LAW: Anything you do to rescue a fouled up project will foul it up further. %% JANITORS clean up afterwards. %% JAPAN is a WONDERFUL planet -- I wonder if we'll ever reach their level of COMPARATIVE SHOPPING... %% JCL: /J-C-L/ n. 1. IBM's supremely {rude} Job Control Language. JCL is the script language used to control the execution of programs in IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very {fascist} syntax, and some versions will, for example, {barf} if two spaces appear where it expects one. Most programmers confronted with JCL simply copy a working file (or card deck), changing the file names. Someone who actually understands and generates unique JCL is regarded with the mixed respect one gives to someone who memorizes the phone book. It is reported that hackers at IBM itself sometimes sing "Who's the breeder of the crud that mangles you and me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e" to the tune of the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme to express their opinion of the beast. 2. A comparative for any very {rude} software that a hacker is expected to use. "That's as bad as JCL." As with {COBOL}, JCL is often used as an archetype of ugliness even by those who haven't experienced it. See also {IBM}, {fear and loathing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% JEDR: // n. Synonymous with {IYFEG}. At one time, people in the USENET newsgroup rec.humor.funny tended to use `JEDR' instead of {IYFEG} or `'; this stemmed from a public attempt to suppress the group once made by a loser with initials JEDR after he was offended by an ethnic joke posted there. (The practice was {retcon}ned by the expanding these initials as `Joke Ethnic/Denomination/Race'.) After much sound and fury JEDR faded away; this term appears to be doing likewise. JEDR's only permanent effect on the net.culture was to discredit `sensitivity' arguments for censorship so thoroughly that more recent attempts to raise them have met with immediate and near-universal rejection. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% JERK: Snotty, give me full power! Get us out of here fast! SNOTT: Ach, I canna do it. The toilets have backed up into the warp drive! It will take time to make repairs! %% JESUS SAVES, but Clones 'R' Us makes backups! -- William Lewis (wiml@blake.acs.washington.edu) %% JEWELERS mount real gems. %% JFCL (djif'kl or dja-fik'l) [based on the PDP-10 instruction that acts as a fast no-op] v. To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that out?" [The licence plate on Geoff Goodfellow's BMW is JFCL.] -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% JFCL: /jif'kl/, /jaf'kl/, /j*-fi'kl/ vt., obs. (alt. `jfcl') To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that out?" The fastest do-nothing instruction on older models of the PDP-10 happened to be JFCL, which stands for "Jump if Flag set and then CLear the flag"; this does something useful, but is a very fast no-operation if no flag is specified. Geoff Goodfellow, one of the jargon-1 co-authors, had JFCL on the license plate of his BMW for years. Usage: rare except among old-time PDP-10 hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% JFK: I need this motorcade like a hole in my head! %% JIFFY n. 1. Interval of CPU time, commonly 1/60 second or 1 millisecond. 2. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. "I'll do it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% JIFFY: the time it takes for light to go one centimeter in a vacuum. %% JOB INTERVIEW: The excruciating process during which personnel officers separate the wheat from the chaff -- then hire the chaff. %% JOCK n. Programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute force programs. The term is particularly well-suited for systems programmers. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% JOE PAGE: "[I] had been hunting with Enos Slaughter, and Enos had been jumping in and out of the bushes so much looking for quail that he got a cyst on his back." YOGI BERRA: "What kind of bird is a cyst?" %% JOFD Jump On Flag and Defect %% JOGGER: An odd sort of person with a thing for pain. %% JOSE'S LAW: Nothing is as permanent as something designed to be temporary. %% JOYSTICK: Peripheral used by consulting adults. %% JRST (jerst) [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] v. To suddenly change subjects. Usage: rather rare. "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick; Jack jrst over the candle stick." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% JRST: /jerst/ [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] v.,obs. To suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to the previous topic. Usage: rather rare except among PDP-10 diehards, and considered silly. See also {AOS}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% JR[LN]: /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/ n. The names JRL and JRN were sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID used under {{TOPS-10}} and {WAITS}; they were understood to be the initials of (fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser' and `J. Random Nerd' (see {J. Random}). For example, if one said "To log in, type log one comma jay are en" (that is, "log 1,JRN"), the listener would have understood that he should use his own computer ID in place of `JRN'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% JSYS (jay'sis), pl. JSI (jay'sigh) [Jump to SYStem] See UUO. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% JTZ Jump To Zero %% JUDD, for the defense. %% JUNKIE DOG KILLS OWNER TO GET A FIX %% Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism. -- Edward Abbey %% Jack an Jill went up the hill. Jill went down, Jack came. %% Jack and Jill fell down the hill, To me, that sounds a bit frisky; If water has that kind of an effect, I think I'll stick to whiskey. %% Jack and Jill went up a hill Jack to Jill thus did such ill To fetch a pail of water. That Jill, to pay the rotter, Jack fell down and broke his crown Told the town Jack's crown broke down And Jill came tumbling after. When he set out to shaft her. Jack on Jill produced a thrill Jack and Jill have split the bill When on the ground he got her, Since Jack led Jill to totter. Then went down and told the town Half the town deals Jill a frown He tumbled Jill and gaffed her. And half greets Jack with laughter. %% Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water God knows what they did out there But they came back with a daughter Jack and Jill went up the hill To have some fun Stupid Jill forgot her pill And now she's having a son %% Jack and Jill went up the hill Each had a buck and a quarter. Jill came down with two and a half -- And you thought that they went for water. %% Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. Jack jumped over the candle stick, And burnt his balls. %% Jack-And-Jill Party: A Squire tradition; baby showers to which both men and women are invited as opposed to only women. Doubled purchasing power of bisexual attendance brings gift values up to Eisenhower-era standards. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Jackals are intrinsically rotten. %% Jackson, Mississippi, orders that if you want to burn down your house, you must first remove the top. %% Jacksonville, Illinois, Revised Ordinances, 1884: "No person shall halloo, shout, bawl, scream, use profane language, dance, sing, whoop, quarrel, or make any unusual noise or sound in any house in such manner as to disturb the peace and quiet of the neighborhood." %% Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government: No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. %% Jah love. %% James Bond Crushs Kermit the frog In Latest Flick. %% James Bond rules. 00K. %% James Bond: What do you expect me to talk? A.Goldfinger: No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die! -- Goldfinger %% James Dean. James Dean. Bought it sight-unseen. Too fast to live, too young to die: bye-bye. -- The Eagles %% James Joyce -- an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized. -- Tom Stoppard %% James Joyce buried himself in his great work. "Finnegan's Wake" is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end. -- Edward Abbey %% James Watt is so dense, he absorbs neutrinos. %% Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life. -- Edward Abbey %% Jane sent Tarzan out to find some food, and all he could find was a bird and a monkey. "What!", she exclaimed, "Finch and chimps again!". %% January 1988 My heart breaks, thinking of life Without you What can I do? How can I express the essence of Everything For that you are Love Without bound Knowing Him, my soul is complete Knowing you My heart Knows fulfillment Time brings all things to pass By its gaze Pretensions of infinity Bringing all full-circle Each unto all And back again In imitations of eternity But Every river has a fount Every spring an end All must fall Somewhere Love knows No end bound Only by choice Time Completeness in destitution Perfection In sacrifice And so My love For you Shall it always be Forever In the eyes of God -- Me, "Spur of the Moment, But Very Heartfelt Sincere Abstract Poem With Much Love" -- 6/26/87 %% January 20, 1986 -- Vatican City Pope John Paul called for prayers for Lebanon yesterday and then tried to release two white doves as symbols of peace, but the birds refused to fly away. -- New York Daily News %% January 21 -- The Audi Corporation is forced to recall 250,000 cars after repeated incidents wherein parked Audis, apparently acting on their own, used their mobile phones to purchase stocks on margin. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% January 28 -- In the Middle East, Syria has its name legally changed to "Jordan." A welcome calm settles over Beirut as the six remaining civilians are taken hostage. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% January 3 -- Oral Roberts tells his followers that unless they send him $4.5 million by the end of the month, God will turn him into a hypocritical money-grubbing slimebag. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% January 5 -- In response to growing pressure from the United States, the government of Colombia vows to track down its major drug dealers and, if necessary, remove them from the cabinet. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% Japan is an important ally of ours. Japan and the United States of the Western industrialized capacity, 60 percent of the GNP, two countries. That's a statement in and of itself. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Japanese Minimalism: The most frequently offered interior design aesthetic used by rootless career-hopping young people. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Japanese Proverb: "Practice your kata 1,000 times per day and you may pass; practice your kata 10,000 times per day, and you will be able to see your opponent; practice your kata 100,000 times per day and everyone will be able to see your opponent." %% Jargon is used as a means of succeeding by not simplifying. %% Jaye's project estimation paradox : All project estimates will be out by a factor of 2, even if Jaye's project estimation paradox is taken into account. %% Jazz, n. An appeal to the emotions by an attack on the nerves. -- Leonard L. Levinson %% Jazz. It's not a sensation or a feeling, it just doesn't exist in reality. %% JazzerSleep %% Jealousy has often been a motive for murder. -- Kirk, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3614.9 %% Jealousy is all the fun you think they have. %% Jean, Jean, the dancing machine. %% Jean-Luc, what naughty thoughts, but how wonderful you still think of me like that. -- Lwaxana Troi, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% Jean-Luc. Shame on you for thinking such a thing! -- Lwaxana Troi to Picard, Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% Jed: Do you know what's underneath every altar at a Catholic church? Voice from the crowd: Led Zeppelin records! -- quote attributed to Brother Jed, from alt.brother-jed %% Jedi Knights do it FORCEfully? %% Jeeps Bought/Sold * Dictators Overthrown * Bombs Defused -- John Todd jtod_ltd@uhura.cc.rochester.edu %% Jeez if you love honkus %% Jefferson, I think we're lost. %% Jenkinson's Law: It won't work. %% Jennifer came to the pool In a bathing suit that was cool. Through the weave in the knit You could see her left tit And it made all the gentlemen drool. %% Jesuit priests are DATING CAREER DIPLOMATS!! %% Jesus Christ and the Nail Knockers %% Jesus Christ is the answer. Now, what was your question %% Jesus Christ walks into the Hyatt in Boston. He plunks three nails down on the counter and says "Say, can you put me up for the night?" %% Jesus Saves, Moses Invests, But only Buddha pays Dividends. %% Jesus and Moses are in Heaven, fishing from a rowboat. As they were fishing, they began to reminisce the miracles they performed when they were on Earth. Just to see if they could still had the knack, they each decided to do one of their miracles. So, Moses stood up and extended his arms. Sure enough, the waters of the lake parted and the rowboat settled gently to the bottom. He then lowered his arms and the waters closed back in. In a few moments, the lake had returned to normal with the rowboat floating on top. "Pretty good, Mo," Jesus said approvingly. "Now I'll give it a try," he said as he climbed out of the boat. He took a couple steps and then began to sink quickly. Just in time, Moses reached out and pulled Jesus into the boat. "Jesus Christ!" Moses exclaimed. "What do you suppose happened to you?" "Aw, Mo, I should have known better than to try that one," Jesus replied. "The last time I did that I didn't have these blasted holes in my feet." %% Jesus and Moses decided to take a trip down to earth. Upon arrival Moses says, "Remember that trick you did when you walked on the water? Can you still do that?." Jesus replied, "Sure, that was easy!" Jesus then attempts to walk on water but instead sinks like a stone. After wiping himself off he says "I just don't understand it. I used to do this all the time!" Moses then looks Jesus up and down and points at his feet and says, "Did you always have holes in your feet like that!" %% Jesus comes back to Rome. Inside the Vatican a cardinal rushes to the pope and asks what should they do? `Look busy.' %% Jesus could've made it up Mount Calvary without assistance if he had cross-trained. -- Steve Connelly %% Jesus died for our enemies, too. %% Jesus died for your sins. Make it worth his time. %% Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak. -- Edward Abbey %% Jesus had it coming. The self-righteous always get nailed. -- Solomon Short %% Jesus is coming back, and boy, is he ticked! %% Jesus is hanging on the cross. As he is hanging, he yells, "John, John, come here, quick!" John hear's the voice of his master and came running up to the Lord. As he gets there the guards catch him, cut off his legs, and through him back in the crowd. Jesus yells again, "John, John, come here quickly, quickly!" So John, crawling on his hands alone, approaches the cross. The guards catch him again, cut off his arms and throw him back in the crowd. Jesus yells a third time, "John, John, you must come quickly, time is short, hurry!" So John with his tremendous faith, using his chin alone, approaches the cross. The guards do not see him and he gets to the base, flips over and says, "Yes Lord." Jesus says, "I can see your house from up here!!!" %% Jesus is my POSTMASTER GENERAL ... %% Jesus lives! %% Jesus lives! Darwin survives. %% Jesus loves you, but everybody else thinks you're a dork. %% Jesus only told us half of it. The truth will set you free. But first it's going to piss you off. -- Solomon Short %% Jesus saves, Gretzky steals, he shoots, HE SCORES! %% Jesus saves. Moses invests. %% Jesus saves... but Gretzky gets the rebound! He shoots. HE SCOOORES!!! %% Jesus still wants you for a sunbeam. %% Jesus sweat blood because of the loss of the Holy Ghost. -- Brigham Young %% Jesus was killed by a Moral Majority. %% Jet Engine Theory -Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow! %% Jim Nasium's Law: In a large locker room with hundreds of lockers, the few people using the facility at any one time will all have lockers next to each other so that everybody is cramped. %% Jim, it's Grace at the bank. I checked your Christmas Club account. You don't have five-hundred dollars. You have fifty. Sorry, computer foul-up! %% Jim, it's Jack. I'm at the airport. I'm going to Tokyo and wanna pay you the five-hundred I owe you. Catch you next year when I get back! %% Jim, this is Janelle. I'm flying tonight, so I can't make our date, and I gotta find a safe place for Daffy. He loves you, Jim! It's only two days, and you'll see. Great Danes are no problem! %% Jim, this is Matty down at Ralph's and Mark's. Some guy named Angel Martin just ran up a fifty buck bar tab. And now he wants to charge it to you. You gonna pay it? %% Jim. Your name...is Jim. -- Spock to Kirk, "ST III: The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% Jimmy Carter says the GOP Convention was "a debacle." That's French for Trust Me. -- National Review %% Jimmy Carter says the GOP Convention was "a debacle." That's high praise from our country's Debacleur-in-Chief. -- National Review %% Jimmy Carter says the GOP Convention was "a debacle." What did he expect--a helicopter rescue mission? -- National Review %% Jimmy Carter says the GOP Core the meeting began, or the outcome of the larger meeting will be modified later when three or four people get together. -- Charles Wolf, Jr. %% Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin's flaming gay, Catwoman's on the corner, Charging fifty for a lay | Turning tricks all day %% Joan Rivers has a very effective form of birth control. Nudity. %% Joan of Arc is alive and medium well. %% Job Placement, n.: Telling your boss what he can do with your job. %% Job control cards that positively cannot be arranged in improper order will be. %% Job creation is fast. -- President George Bush, October 1991 %% Job, in all his suffering, discusses with his friends his blamelessness and seeks their counsel as to why the Lord has afflicted him. They agree that he, Job, has done nothing to deserve such misfortune. In deep despair, Job raises his voice to the heavens, "Why, oh Lord of Heaven and Earth, Why???" The sky darkens, the clouds boil, lightning and thunder crash all about Job. A mighty voice comes out of the storm, "BECAUSE,.... YOU PISS- ME- OFF!" %% Jobs are physically easier, but the worker now takes home worries instead of an aching back. -- Homer Bigart %% Jobs, jobs, jobs. -- Secretary of State James Baker, on why we went to war against Iraq. Jobs, jobs, jobs. -- President Geroge Bush, on why he went to Japan in 1992. 30 in eight. -- George Bush's 1988 campaign pledge: 30 million new jobs in eight years. Currently (July 1992), he is 29,912,000 jobs short %% Jockeys do it with whips and saddles. %% Jodie Foster's Army %% Joe Bummer and the Assbites from Hell %% Joe Cool always spends the first two weeks at college sailing his frisbee. -- Snoopy %% Joe sat as his dying wife's bedside. Her voice was little more than a whisper. "Joe, darling," she breathed, "I've got a confession to make before I go. I ... I'm the one who took the $10,000 from your safe... I spent it on a fling with your best friend, Charles. And it was I who forced your mistress to leave the city. And I am the one who reported your income-tax evasion to the I.R.S..." "That's all right, dearest, don't give it a second thought," whispered Joe. "I'm the one who poisoned you." %% Joe's Abortion Clinic. You make 'em, we scrape 'em. No fetus can beat us. %% Joe's Morgue. You stab 'em, we slab 'em. %% Joe's sister puts spaghetti in her shoes! %% Joe: I got a problem. Ed: What's the matter? Joe: Women. I just don't understand them. Ed: Do you understand your TV? Joe: No. Ed: So what's the problem?! %% Joggers do it on the run. %% John Dame May Oscar Was Gay Was Whitty Was Wilde But Gerard Hopkins But John Greenleaf But Thornton Was Manley Was Whittier Was Wilder -- Willard Espy %% John Birch Society -- that pathetic manifestation of organized apoplexy. -- Edward P. Morgan %% John Paul 2 is famous for his touring, and his quaint habit of pressing his lips to foreign soil on his arrival. This sparked some wit to remark: "The Pope has it backwards: he kisses the ground, and walks on the women!" %% John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest *living* author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing--like a faery breath!--upon the glass. -- Edward Abbey %% John the Baptist after poisoning a thief, Looks up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief, Saying tell me great leader, but please make it brief Is there a hole for me to get sick in? The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly, Saying death to all those who would whimper and cry. And dropping a barbell he points to the sky, Saying the sun is not yellow, it's chicken. -- Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues" %% John von Neumann was in the audience at a physics talk. The speaker had put up a slide showing some widely scattered points. The speaker had bravely tried to fit a curve to the data, and had plotted a line. Von Neumann leaned over to a friend and whispered: "well, at least they lie on a plane." %% John would affectionately become known as Largo to his friends, and he and I would share many great adventures--the Nose in a day, the crossing of Borneo and others--but I'll never forget those first two days. There were others I met when they first came; Ron Kauk, Werner Braun, Lynn Hill, Maria Cranor and many more. They were children when I first knew them. -- Jim Bridwell, "Largo's Apprenticeship" 1970 %% Johnny Carson's Observation on Geriatrics: Sex in the sixties is great, but it improves if you pull over to the side of the road. %% Johnny Carson's explanation of relativity: The smallest interval of time known to man is that which occurs in Manhattan between the traffic signal turning green and the taxi driver behind you blowing his horn. %% Johnny don't surf (and we think he should). %% Johnson's First Law: When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the most inconvenient possible time. %% Johnson's Third Law: If you miss one issue of any magazine, it will be the issue which contained the article, story, or installment you were most anxious to read. Corollary: All of your friends either missed it, lost it, or threw it out. %% Johnson's law: Systems resemble the organizations that create them. %% Johnson-Laird's Law: Toothache tends to start on Saturday night. %% Join in the new game that's sweeping the country. It's called "Bureaucracy". Everybody stands in a circle. The first person to do anything loses. %% Join the Army; travel to exotic distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them. %% Join the Navy and see the coast! %% Join the Navy; travel to far-off exotic lands, meet exciting interesting people, and kill them. %% Join the Sensitive Guys (tm) Martial Arts and Gun Club. Our motto: "We hit hard, we shoot straight, and...we listen." -- Don Baldwin, donb@tamri.com - Software Engineer %% Join the march to save individuality! %% Joint approach. Good fortune. Everything furthers. %% Joint approach. Perseverance brings good fortune. %% Jolt advertisement from July '93 "Program Now" Magazine. Note the text: When you're gonna pull an all-nighter to finish some vital code, there's no substitute for the excellent sugar rush and full-on caffeine buzz of Jolt to get you through. Jolt is made of totally natural ingredients, like * Caffeine - twice the caffeine content of other cola drinks * Sugar - the real stuff, for energy * Water - helps it get out of the can and down your throat Fill your fridge with Jolt and be the envy of your workgroup. %% Jolt cola. All the sugar and twice the caffeine. Available at a college campus near you. %% Jon's First Law of Driving : The car in front of you wishes to turn into the least accessible turning. Addendum : If he doesn't he'll certainly give way to the car coming out of it. %% Jon's Second Law of Driving : The light is red. %% Jones Rule of the Road: The easiest way to refold a road map is differently. %% Jones and Doodah went fishing one Saturday afternoon. All of a sudden a terrible storm came up and in the midst of the storm the boat tipped over and Doodah drown. Jones was completely devastated. This was his best friend, how in the world would he break the news to Mrs. Doodah? Jones went back to the Doodah home and announced that he had returned from the trip. Mrs. Doodah was quick to notice that her husband was not with Jones. She asked where Doodah was. Jones replied; "We went fishing and guess who drown---- Doo-dah, Doo-dah" %% Jones' Law: Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. %% Jones's First Law: Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the importance of their original contribution. %% Joshu: What is the true Way? Nansen: Every way is the true Way. J: Can I study it? N: The more you study, the further from the Way. J: If I don't study it, how can I know it? N: The Way does not belong to things seen: nor to things unseen. It does not belong to things known: nor to things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or name it. To find yourself on it, open yourself as wide as the sky. %% Joss-sticks: Small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain sacred rites of our holy religion. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Journalism is literature in a hurry. -- Matthew Arnold %% Journalism may kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it. %% Joy and grief are never far apart. In the same street the shutters of one house are closed while the curtains of the next are brushed by the shadows of the dance. A wedding party returns from the church; and a funeral winds to its door. The smiles and sadness of life are the tragi-comedy of Shakespeare. Gladness and sighs brighten the dim mirror be he holds. -- Robert Eldridge Willmott %% Joy can be many things. -- Dr. Miranda Jones, "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" stardate 5630.7 %% Joy descends gently upon us like the evening dew, and does not patter down like a hailstorm. -- Richter %% Joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks -- Saltheart Foamfollower (S. R. Donaldson) %% Joyousness that is weighed is not at peace. After ridding himself of mistakes a man has joy. %% Juall's Law on Nice Guys: Nice guys don't always finish last; sometimes they don't finish. Sometimes they don't even get a chance to start! %% Juanita, the subject of scandals, Used to use unscented candles, But now thinks it nice To use a device With batteries, buzzers, and handles. %% Judge a tree from its fruit; not from the leaves. -- Euripides %% Judge: Haven't I seen you before? Man: Yes, your honor, I taught your daughter how to play the piano. Judge: Thirty Years! %% Judging a being by its physical appearance is the last major human prejudice, Wesley. -- Data, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% Judging a piece of fiction by the quality of its writing without considering its subject matter is like buying a car because it has a pretty paint job, without considering the state of its engine and transmission. -- Kelvin Throop III %% Judging by the size of its mandibles, this chap doesn't live on plankton. -- Harry Sullivan, ARK IN SPACE %% Judging from their laughter, the children at school found my remarks humorous. So without understanding humor, I have somehow mastered it. -- Lal to Data, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% Judgment Day is not a thing that can be delayed overlong. -- Roger Zelazny %% Judgment is not the knowledge of fundamental laws; it is knowing how to apply a knowledge of them. -- Charles Gow %% Judy's Tiny Head. %% Jugglers do it until they drop. %% Jugglers do it with more balls. %% Julia Child does it with asparagus and Hollandaise sauce. %% Julie's been workin' in the drug squad. %% July 11 -- The Iran-Contra hearings reach their dramatic peak when Lt. Col. North, his eyes glistening and his voice cracking with emotion, makes a sweeping patriotic hand gesture and knocks over his bottle of Revlon Eye Glistener. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% July 15 -- The giant Citicorp bank announces that it has agreed to forgive Mexico's $56.3 billion debt in exchange for 357.9 gazillion chickens. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% July 18 - In Hollywood, plans are formulated for a major motion picture based on the Oliver North story, starring Sylvester Stallone as North, Fawn Hall as herself and Helen Keller as the president. %% July 21 - The discovery of "superconductors" - materials that offer no resistance to electricity even at relatively high temperatures - creates a worldwide stir of excitement among the kind of dweebs who always had their Science Fair projects done early. %% July 4. Statistics show that we loose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so. %% July 7 -- The central figure in the Iran-Contra hearings, Lt. Col. Oliver North, becomes an instant national folk hero when, with his eyes glistening and his voice cracking with emotion, he courageously admits, before a worldwide television audience, that he is very patriotic. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% Jumbo shrimp? %% Jumpers Homeless, hopeless suicide dude Sitting on a shelf, Have things got so bad You do this to yourself? Your money's gone, your honey's gone, They played you for a chump. Can it really hurt so much That you have to jump? There comes a time along the line For each and every one To die for those who hate you Or live for those who don't. %% June 18 -- A survey of Florida residents reveals that their number one concern about the state is that "not enough people are walking around with guns." Alarmed, the state Legislature passes a law under which all citizens who are not actually on Death Row will be REQUIRED to carry revolvers. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% June 2 -- True Item: In the ongoing Iran-Contra hearings, the committee learns that a country named "Brunei" contributed $10 million to help the Contras, except Fawn Hall or somebody typed a wrong number, so the money ended up in the Swiss bank account of a total stranger. This helps explain why, despite all the elaborate assistance efforts with secret codes and passwords and everything, the only actual aid ever received by the Contras was a six-month trial subscription to Guns and Ammo. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% Junior! Quit playing with your floppy. %% Junk - stuff we throw away. Stuff - junk we keep. %% Junk your mind. It is of no value to you in the game. -- Carl Frederick, "est: Playing the Game the New Way" %% Jury Acquits Notorious Hatchet Murderer from Planet Vulcan. %% Jury: Twelve people who determine which client has the better lawyer. %% Just a song before I go, Going through security To whom it may concern, I held her for so long. Traveling twice the speed of sound She finally looked at me in love, It's easy to get burned. And she was gone. When the shows were over Just a song before I go, We had to get back home, A lesson to be learned. And when we opened up the door Traveling twice the speed of sound I had to be alone. It's easy to get burned. She helped me with my suitcase, She stands before my eyes, Driving me to the airport And to the friendly skies. -- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Just a Song Before I Go" %% Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). -- Bill Joy 6/21/85 %% Just about the time most of us finally learn all the answers, they change all the questions. %% Just another drop in the ocean. %% Just another fish in the sea. %% Just another garden-variety Communist dupe... %% Just another pretty face. %% Just another stupid crumb. %% Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Just as a side light: Did you ever pay close attention to the very end of the new LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS? Look verrrrrry closely at the plant growing under the fence in front of Seymour and Audrey's house . . . %% Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions seldom black or white. Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the winner. The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side has all the facts. Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political motivation. Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth. -- Stephen R. Schwambach %% Just as there are three R's there are also three A's of business life. They are: Ability, Ambition, and Attitude. Ability establishes what a worker does and will bring him a paycheck. Ambition determines how much he does and will get him a raise. Attitude guarantees how well he does. -- Wilbert E. Sheer %% Just as you reach the other side, the bridge buckles beneath the weight of the bear, which was still following you around. You scrabble desperately for support, but as the bridge collapses you stumble back and fall into the chasm. %% Just as you sow ye shall reap. %% Just because a girl runs out doesn't mean she doesn't want you to follow. -- Guinan to Wesley, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8 %% Just because a path is well-beaten is no proof it's the right one. %% Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. -- Irene Peter %% Just because he's dead is no reason to lay off work. %% Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% Just because the message may never be received does not mean it is not worth sending. %% Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything. -- Bob Dylan %% Just because you're STUPID ain't no excuse. %% Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. %% Just because you've beaten a sorcerer, doesn't mean you've beaten a sorcerer. -- Toth-aamon %% Just because your doctor has a name for your condition doesn't mean he knows what it is. %% Just before the battle, Mother, I was thinking most of you. . . -- Sonny Barker %% Just before you pass out, you notice that the vapors from the flask's contents are fatal. %% Just below any trapdoor there may be another one. Just keep falling! %% Just call him the vacation president. -- An aide to President George Bush %% Just close your eyes, tap your heels together three times, and think to yourself, `There's no place like home.' -- Glynda %% Just don't tell the asylum you saw me here %% Just follow the money in a political campaign and you'll follow the power. %% Just give Alice some pencils and she will stay busy for hours. %% Just go with the flow control, roll with the crunches, and, when you get a prompt, type like hell. %% Just hoping this isn't the usual way our missions will go, sir. Oh no, Number One, I'm sure most will be much more interesting. Let's see what's out there. Engage. -- Riker and Picard, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% Just how much leg have I got %% Just look at that face. The face of a thinker, a warrior, a man for all seasons. Yet, Ira Graves was not perfect. Perhaps his greatest flaw was that he was too selfless. He simply cared too much about his fellow man, with nary a thought for himself. A man of limitless accomplishments and unbridled modesty. I can safely say that to know Ira Graves was to love him. And to love him was to know him. Those who know him LOVED him - while those who did not know him, loved him from afar - -- Data/Graves, "The Schizoid Man", stardate 42437.5 %% Just machines to make big decisions, Programmed by men for compassion and vision, We'll be clean when their work is done, We'll be eternally free, yes, eternally young, What a beautiful world this will be, What a glorious time to be free. -- Donald Fagon, "IGY What A Beautiful World" %% Just my two rubber ningis worth. %% Just once I would like to persuade the audience not to wear any article of blue denim. If only they could see themselves in a pair of brown corduroys like mine instead of this awful, boring blue denim. I don't enjoy the sky or sea as much as I used to because of this Levi character. If Jesus Christ came back today, He and I would get into our brown corduroys and go to the nearest jean store and overturn the racks of blue denim. Then we'd get crucified in the morning. -- Ian Anderson [of Jethro Tull] %% Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets -- Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, ROBOT "Dr. Who" %% Just once, I would like to see an intelligent witness on the stand: Prosecutor: Did you kill the victim? Defendant: No, I did not. P: Do you know what the penalties are for perjury? D: Yes, I do. And they're a hell of a lot better than the penalty for murder. %% Just once, I'd like to see all the runners in a race suddenly stop and look at each other. And then they would come together and join hands. And they would say to each other, "Hey! Let's stop this silliness and one-upsmanship and win-lose approach! Hey! Can't we just all be brothers? Let's think, 'Win-Win'!" And they'd all march, arm in arm, side-by-side, and cross that darn finish tape Together! -- sarcasm from rec.org.mensa Today I'll play the part of nonparent, not make a hundred rules for you to kno about yourself, not lie and make you believe what's evil is making love and making friends and meeting God your own way; to see, to bleed cannot be taught. In turn, you're making us.....*******G HOSTILE! -- Pantera VDP %% Just one atomic bomb could ruin your whole day. %% Just one look and a whisper and they are gone. %% Just one of the boys, eh? Just one if the boys with an IQ of 2005. -- Guinan and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Just out from NASA: when the pilot of the ill fated Challenger went to push the throttle lever to full throttle, he missed and accidently pushed the switch which turned on the no-smoking sign in the passenger area. %% Just remember this, my girl, as you look up in the sky -- You can see the stars and still not see the light. %% Just remember: Wherever you go, there you are. %% Just say 'NO!' to rugs This message sponsored by the American Hardwood Floor Association. %% Just think: here we are, the afternoon sun beating down on us, a dead, bloated rhino underfoot and friends flying in from all over. I tell you, Ed, these are the best of times. %% Just think: how would Bugs Bunny have handled this? %% Just to have it is enough. %% Just to your southwest is Paln, an enormous mountainous land. %% Just weigh your own hurt against the hurt of all the others, and then do what's best. -- Lovers and Other Strangers %% Just what part of "NO" didn't you understand...? %% Just when I finally figure out where it's at ... somebody moves it. %% Just when you get really good at something, you don't need to do it anymore. -- William P. Lowrey %% Just when you think it's finally settled, it isn't. -- Solomon Short %% Just when you thought it was safe to buy a computer: OS/2 -- The nightmare continues. %% Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along comes a faster rat!!! %% Just wrap your hands around my velvet rims and strap yourself to my engins. %% Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone, Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you, I went out this morning and I wrote down this song, Just can't remember who to send it to... Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain, I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end, I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend, But I always thought that I'd see you again. Thought I'd see you one more time again. -- James Taylor, "Fire and Rain" %% Justice always prevails ... three times out of seven! -- Michael J. Wagner %% Justice is blind, he knows nobody. -- Dryden %% Justice is incidental to law and order. -- J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) %% Justice is lame as well as blind among us. -- Otway %% Justice, like lightning, ever should appear To few men's ruin, but to all men's fear. -- Swetnam %% Justice, n.: A decision in your favor. %% Justice: A commodity which (in a more or less adulterated condition) the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes, and personal service. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% K - A term used in employment ads to disguise how much they are really willing to pay. %% K - J - O - I. Kjoy 99 on your FM dial. Just beautiful music. %% K&R: [Kernighan and Ritchie] n. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book `The C Programming Language', esp. the classic and influential first edition (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-113-110163-3). Syn. {White Book}, {Old Testament}. See also {New Testament}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% K'Ehleyr, I will not be complete without you. -- Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% K-line: [IRC] v. To ban a particular person from an {IRC} server, usually for grossly bad {netiquette}. Comes from the `K' code used to accomplish this in IRC's configuration file. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% K-toe tan-tzu-yet c mo-yay sis-tray, dyen-gee dole-zhen dat yay. %% K/D Are you sure? (Y or N): Yes. Deleted all files (13870 blocks) %% K: Cobalt's metal, hard and shining; Cobol's wordy and confining; KOBOLDS topple when you strike them; Don't feel bad, it's hard to like them. -- The Roguelet's ABC %% K: /K/ [from {kilo-}] n. A kilobyte. This is used both as a spoken word and a written suffix (like {meg} and {gig} for megabyte and gigabyte). See {{quantifiers}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% KAINT: contraction for cannot. "Yew kaint do that!" -- Texan Dictionary %% KAMIN'S LAW: Politicians will always inflate when given the opportunity. %% KANSAS: Where the men are men and so are the women! %% KEEP YOUR ENVIRONMENT CLEAN! Recycle your shell variables. %% KEN BOSWELL: "I'm in a rut. I can't break myself of this habit. I keep swinging up at the ball." YOGI BERRA: "Well, swing down." %% KEN'S LAW: A flying particle will seek the nearest eye. %% KENNEDY'S COMMENT ON COMMITTEES: A committee is 12 men doing the work of one. %% KERNEL: A part of an operating system that preserves the medieval traditions of sorcery and black art. %% KEY PUNCH OPERATOR - the best informed source regarding the weaknesses of the system, new large scale computers and best nightclubs %% KIBO: /ki:'boh/ 1. [acronym] Knowledge In, Bullshit Out. A summary of what happens whenever valid data is passed through an organization (or person) which deliberately or accidentally disregards or ignores its significance. Consider, for example, what an advertising campaign can do with a product's actual specifications. Compare {GIGO}; see also {SNAFU principle}. 2. James Parry , a USENETter infamous for various surrealist net.pranks and an uncanny, machine-assisted knack for joining any thread in which his nom de guerre is mentioned. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% KIPS: /kips/ [abbreviation, by analogy with {MIPS} using {K}] n. Thousands (*not* 1024s) of Instructions Per Second. Usage: rare. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% KISS Principle: /kis' prin'si-pl/ n. "Keep It Simple, Stupid". A maxim often invoked when discussing design to fend off {creeping featurism} and control development complexity. Possibly related to the {marketroid} maxim on sales presentations, "Keep It Short and Simple". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% KLUGE (kloodj) alt. KLUDGE [from the German "kluge", clever] n. 1. A Rube Goldberg device in hardware or software. 2. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an efficient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often verges on being a crock. 3. Something that works for the wrong reason. 4. v. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way." Also KLUGE UP. 5. KLUGE AROUND: To avoid by inserting a kluge. 6. (WPI) A feature which is implemented in a RUDE manner. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING: A combination of Engineering: The application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to man in structures, machines, products, systems and processes. and Knowledge: sexual intercourse. see also: prostitution, grantsmanship. %% KNOWLEDGE: Things you believe. %% KOHLER'S PROGRAMMING AXIOM: Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. %% KOHN'S COROLLARY TO MURPHEY'S LAW: Two wrongs are only the beginning. %% KOTEX: Not the best thing on earth, but next to the best. %% KOVAK'S CONUNDRUM: When you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal. %% KUMQUAT: Any of several small citrus fruits with sweet spongy rind and somewhat acid pulp that are used chiefly for preserves. Extremely popular in some forms of sexual intercourse. In fact, an early indication that your partner is willing to experiment sexually may be a rather insistent moaning of "kumquat, kumquat" during orgasm. Note: this is *not* to be confused with a warning from your partner that his/her parents are upstairs and probably awake. %% KWAT: lacking noise. "Ah want peace an kwat aroun here!" -- Texan Dictionary %% Kamikaze Chemist %% Kamikaze Pilot Wanted: Experienced only need apply. %% Kansas state law requires pedestrians crossing the highways at night to wear tail lights. %% Karl's version of Parkinson's Law: Work expands to exceed the time allotted it. %% Karma, Let me guess, The Toyota Factory! %% Kasha, n.: Kasha is always defined as "buckwheat groats". There's only one problem with this definition: what the fuck are "buckwheat groats"? *_I* know what they are -- they're kasha. But that doesn't help *___you* much. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Katz' Law: Man and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted. %% Kaufman's First Law of Party Physics: Population density is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the keg. %% Kaufman's Law: A policy is a restrictive document to prevent a recurrence of a single incident, in which that incident is never mentioned. %% Kawaresksenjajok, Harkabeeparolyn, shall we check out some legends for ourselves? And maybe make a few. -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Keane's Kriterion: All true theorems are obvious. "Gentlemen, gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!" %% Keep America beautiful. Swallow your beer cans. %% Keep Cool, but Don't Freeze -- Hellman's Mayonnaise %% Keep NZ Beautiful.... emigrate. %% Keep NZ beautiful. Swallow your beer cans. %% Keep Sn"orpsh Now! -- Slogan seen on overpass in Louisiana %% Keep a clear head and always carry a lightbulb. %% Keep a clear mind: quaff clear potions. %% Keep a stiff upper chin. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she With silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me... -- Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus" %% Keep away from fire or flame. %% Keep away from me, I didn't mean to reveal everything. %% Keep cool: it will be all done a hundred years hence. %% Keep cool; anger is not an argument. -- Daniel Webster %% Keep cool; especially during meltdowns. %% Keep cool; process promptly. %% Keep emotionally active. Cater to your favorite neurosis. %% Keep grandma off the streets -- legalize bingo. %% Keep in mind always the four 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!" 3) The probability of a Frisbee hitting something is directly proportional to the cost of hitting it. For instance, a Frisbee will always head directly towards a policeman or a little old lady rather than the beat up Chevy. 4) Your best throw happens when no one is watching; when the cute girl you've been trying to impress is watching, the Frisbee will invariably bounce out of your hand or hit you in the head and knock you silly. -- Dan Roddick %% 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!" %% Keep it short for pithy sake. %% Keep moving. Futz, it won't hurt any less if you stop moving. You've got to get over this sometime. Why not now? -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Keep on keepin' on. %% Keep patting your enemy on the back until a small bullet hole appears between your fingers. -- Joe Bonanno %% Keep playing with the same toys. But let's paint them a little shinier. -- A domestic-policy adviser to President George Bush %% Keep that semi-soft cheese (Brie, Camenbert, Aloutte) out of the rotor blades! %% Keep the juices going by jangling around gently as you move. -- Satchel Paige %% Keep the number of passes in a compiler to a minimum. -- D. Gries %% Keep the phase, baby. %% Keep the war alive. -- A White House official, describing President Bush's 1992 reelection strategy %% Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help. %% Keep what you've got; the ills that we know are the best. -- Plautus %% Keep women you cannot. Marry them and they come to hate the way you walk across the room; remain their lover, and they jilt you at the end of six months. -- Moore %% Keep you 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! %% Keep your armours away from rust. %% Keep your boss's boss off your boss's back. %% Keep your chin up, it helps you keep your mouth shut. %% Keep your emotional exchanges on a tranquil level. %% Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and completely shut after the kids grow up. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards. -- Poor Richard %% Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. -- Helen Keller %% Keep your fears to yourself; share your courage with others. -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% Keep your glottis open. %% Keep your hands open, and all of the sands of the universe pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit. -- Taisen Deshimaru %% Keep your laws off my body! %% Keep your mouth shut and people will think you stupid; Open it and you remove all doubt. %% Keep your nose to the wheel and your shoulder to the grindstone and you'll end up with a hunchback and a flat face. %% Keep your sense of humor about your position. -- Donald Rumsfeld %% Keep your weaponry away from acids. %% Keeping Still. Keeping his back still So that he no longer feels his body. He goes into the courtyard And does not see his people. No blame. %% Keeping his calves still. He cannot rescue him whom he follows. His heart is not glad. %% Keeping his hips still. Making his sacrum stiff. Dangerous. The heart suffocates. %% Keeping his jaws still. The words have order. Remorse disappears. %% Keeping his toes still. No blame. Continued perseverance furthers. %% Keeping his trunk still. No blame. %% Keeping instructions and operands in different memories saves .20 (.09) microseconds. %% Keillor has a sort of low-key, "Huh? Whuzzat?" humor that I'm very fond of. %% 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." %% Kener's Law: Tape only sticks to itself. %% Kennedy's Market Theorem: Given enough inside information and unlimited credit, you've got to go broke. %% Kenneth, what's the frequency? %% Kentucky law prohibits women from marrying the same man four times. %% Kentucky law states that a fine of one dollar is to be levied for each cuss word uttered in public. %% Kentucky: The state that needs Japan to bring it into the 20th century. -- Anonymous Net Poster %% Kenworthy's Benchmark: The deeper the carpet you're called upon, the deeper the trouble you're in. %% Kermit : A popular file-transmission protocol, most effective for short hops. %% Kernal looks corrupted. %% Kernel memory error, all memory is now randomized. %% Kernel segmentation violation in floating point mode %% Kernel system call %% Kerr's Three Rules for Trying New Foods: (1) Never try anything with tomatoes in it. (2) Never try anything bigger than your head. (3) Never, NEVER try anything that looks like vomit. It is said that Kerr broke all three rules by discovering pizza. %% Kerr's Three Rules for a Successful College: Have plenty of football for the alumni, sex for the students, and parking for the faculty. %% Kettering's Observation: Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence. %% Kev Loves Shaz %% Key to Status: S=D/K. S is the status of a person in an organization, D is the number of doors he must open to perform his job and K is the number of keys he carries. A higher number denotes a higher status. Examples: The janitor needs to open 20 doors and has twenty keys (S = 1), a secretary has to open two doors with one key (S = 2), but the president never has to carry around any keys since there is always someone around to open doors for him (with K equal to 0 and a high D, his S reaches infinity). -- Robert Sommer %% Keyboardists use *all* their fingers %% Keyboardists use both their hands on one organ %% Keypone poisioning factory - turn people into bonsai trees. %% Kick ass now--take names later %% Kicked wide of the goal with such precision. %% Kicking the terminal doesn't hurt the monsters. %% Kid -- Have you rehabilitated yourself?" -- Arlo Guthrie %% Kid: "Mommy mommy, the dog threw up!" Mom: "What's the matter with that?" Kid: "Billies getting all the big pieces!" %% Kids flash guitars, just like switchblades, hustling for the record machine. %% Kids have *_____never* taken guidance from their parents. If you could travel back in time and observe the original primate family in the original tree, you would see the primate parents yelling at the primate teenager for sitting around and sulking all day instead of hunting for grubs and berries like dad primate. Then you'd see the primate teenager stomp up to his branch and slam the leaves. -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly Do" %% Kids, don't gross me off.. "Adventures with MENTAL HYGIENE" can be carried too FAR! %% Kids, the seven basic food groups are GUM, PUFF PASTRY, PIZZA, PESTICIDES, ANTIBIOTICS, NUTRA-SWEET and MILK DUDS!! %% Kids? Who said anything about kids? -- Conan %% Kill Kill, Hate Hate, Murder, Maim, and Mutilate! %% Kill Ugly Processor Architectures -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% Kill Ugly Radio -- Frank Zappa %% Kill a commie for Christ! %% Kill a commy for your mommy. %% Kill a unicorn and you kill your luck. %% Kill and kill again. %% Kill files are an expression of resentment by the unmemorable or untalented against the memorable and talented. Your appearance in kill files merely marks the fact that you have more than once tried to make people think, when they really would rather not. It is an honor. -- Tim Maroney, tim@hoptoad.UUCP, who is in at least a few... %% Kill the poor tonight. %% Kill them all and let God sort them out! %% Killer of dead flowers. %% Killer of men. %% Killing is stupid; useless! -- McCoy, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8 %% Killing is wrong. -- Losira, "That Which Survives," stardate unknown %% Kilocycle - capital punishment for a bike -- Data communications glossary %% Kilpatrick's law: Interchangeable parts aren't. %% Kilroe hic erat! %% Kilroy occupied these coordinates. %% Kilroy was here. %% Kilt, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Kime's Law for the Reward of Meekness: Turning the other cheek merely ensures two bruised cheeks. %% Kin, n.: An affliction of the blood %% Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. -- Tennyson %% Kindly enter them in your notebook. And in order to refer to them conveniently, let's call them A, B, and Z. -- The tortoise in Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" %% Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Kindness is the beginning of cruelty. -- Muad'dib %% King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer. -- Edward Abbey %% King Louis gave a lesson in class, One time while enjoying a lass. When she used the word "Damn" He rebuked her: "Please ma'am, Keep a more civil tongue in my ass." %% Kington's Law of Perforation: If a straight line of holes is made in a piece of paper, such as a sheet of stamps or a check, that line becomes the strongest part of the paper. %% Kinkler's First Law: Responsibility always exceeds authority. %% Kinkler's First Law: Responsibility always exceeds authority. Kinkler's Second Law: All the easy problems have been solved. %% Kinkler's Second Law: All the easy problems have been solved. %% Kiri-Kin-Tha's Law of Metaphysics: Nothing unreal exists. %% Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack. %% Kirk to Enterprise... %% Kirkland, Illinois, law forbids bees to fly over the village or through any of its streets. %% Kiss her, you fool. %% Kiss him, you fool. %% Kiss me twice. I'm schizophrenic. %% Kiss me, I just ate a dead moose! Don't worry, I got the Signal! Come on; Kiss me! %% Kiss me, Kate, we will be married o'Sunday. -- William Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew" %% Kiss me--I'm not Irish, but don't let that stop you %% Kiss the tear from her lip, you'll find the rose the sweeter for the dew. -- Webster %% Kiss you?? I shouldn't even be doing THIS! %% Kiss your keyboard goodbye! %% Kissing a fish is like smoking a bicycle. %% Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. -- "Bumper Snickers" %% Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are all right as long as they are sincere. I have never given a kiss in my life that wasn't sincere. As for intercourse, I'd say three times a day was about right. -- Margaret Sangor %% Kitchen activity is highlighted. Butter up a friend. %% Kite fliers keep it up longer. %% Kites rise highest against the wind -- not with it. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Kitman's Law: Pure drivel tends to drive away ordinary drivel. %% Kitty Hawk: a buzzard that eats cats. %% Kleeneness is next to Godelness. %% Klein bottle for sale ... inquire within. %% Kleptomania: take something for it %% Kleptomaniac, n.: A rich thief. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Kliban's First Law of Dining: Never eat anything bigger than your head. %% Klingon phaser attack from front!!!!! 100% Damage to life support!!!! %% Klingon. I should have said Klingon. In my heart of hearts I am a Klingon. -- Q to Worf, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Klingons appreciate strong women. -- Worf, "Angel One", stardate 41636.9 %% Klingons are not supposed to mind hardships, nonetheless I am delighted to be out of that damned coffin. -- K'Ehleyr, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Klingons are so unusual in their reactions, aren't they? -- Dr. Crusher to Picard, "Lonely Among Us", stardate 41249.3 %% Klingons do not faint. -- Worf to Dr. Pulaski, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% Klingons do not give in to illness. -- Worf to Dr. Pulaski, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% Klingons do not surrender. -- Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Knaves will thrive when honest plainness knows not how to live. -- Shirley %% Knebel's Law: It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. %% Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Knights of the Lambda Calculus: n. A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The name refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which LISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and the criteria for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give out buttons and, in general, the *members* know who they are.... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Knives and scissors, fork and candle, little children should not handle. %% Knock Knock. Who's There? Polish Burglar %% Knock Knock. Who's there? Christa McAuliffe. She's also there, and there, and over there, and there. In fact, she's scattered all over the ocean! %% Knock knock Who's there? Sam and Janet Sam and Janet who? Sam and Janet Evening... %% Knock, knock Who's there? Bella Bella who? Bella no ringa, so I knocka! %% Knocked, you weren't in. -- Opportunity %% Know God...No peace. No God...Know peace. %% Know Thy User. %% Know how to save 5 drowning lawyers? -- No? GOOD! %% Know that a happy dieter has other problems. -- Erma Bombeck %% Know then this truth, enough for man to know Virtue alone is happiness below. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Know then thyself; presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Know thyself - but don't tell anyone. %% Know thyself, buhbie. %% Know thyself. %% Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A. %% Know what I hate most? Rhetorical questions. -- Henry N. Camp %% Know when to quit. %% Knowing Murphy's Law won't help either. %% Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall %% Knowledge is like a river ... The deeper it is, the less noise it makes. %% Knowledge is power. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns. -- J. M. Clarke %% Knowledge is true opinion. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. -- James Madison %% Knowledge without common sense is folly. %% Knowledge, sir, should be free to all! -- Harry Mudd, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% Knoxville, Tennessee, law says you must call a policeman if a lion or tiger brushes against you on the street. %% Knuth: /nooth/ [Donald E. Knuth's `The Art of Computer Programming'] n. Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms. A safe answer when you do not know: "I think you can find that in Knuth." Contrast {literature, the}. See also {bible}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Koan: Why *did* the chicken cross the road? -- Edward Abbey %% Kramer's Law: You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track. %% Krogt, n. (chemical symbol: Kr): The metallic silver coating found on fast-food game cards. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Krusty: "And what would you do if Krusty got cancelled?" kids: "WE'D KILL OURSELVES!" -- "Krusty Gets Busted" %% Krusty: "Hey kids, who do you love?" kids: "Krusty!!" Krusty: "How much do you love me?" kids: "With all our hearts!" Krusty: "What would you do if I went off the air?" kids: "WE'D KILL OURSELVES!" -- "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons %% L I C E N S E T O S T E A L Words (and Music) by Al Stewart. He walks into the room He's got a briefcase like a bomb A smile on both faces And he calls it aplomb He wants a bite of your apple Hands you back the peel He's fresh out of law school He's got a licence to steal When he offers his advice You can guarantee For several hundred dollars an hour He will see how many complications Your life will reveal He's fresh out of law school He's got a license to steal He's an ambulance chaser A waver of papers He loves to mix with the movers and shakers He's taking from them He's taking from you Lawyers love money Anybody's will do Just take it He's poking his nose into people's despair When tragedy strikes he will always be there Looking so cool His greed is hard to conceal He's fresh out of law school You gave him a license to steal We've got seven hundred thousand Attorneys at law Nobody can tell me what we need them all for We should throw them in chains Chastise them and rebuke them If that doesn't work We ought to take 'em out and nuke 'em Blow a lawyer to pieces It's the obvious way Don't wait for a thesis Do it today Take him to the court of no final appeal When you're fresh out of lawyers You don't know how good it's gonna feel %% LA: Where the only way to determine that the seasons have changed is to note that people have changed the main topic of conversation. From mud slides to brush fires. %% LABIA MAJORA: The curly gates. %% LAGNAF: Let's All Get Naked And Fuck! %% LAGS: the lower limbs. "She got the cutest lags in town!" -- Texan Dictionary %% LAMAR'S LAMENT: It was all so different before everything changed. %% LANDSCAPERS plant it deeper. %% LANE: to incline. "Jes lane it upside the wall!" -- Texan Dictionary %% LARRY BERRA: "The man is here for the Venetian blinds." YOGI BERRA: "Look in my pants pocket and give him five bucks." %% LASER: Failed death ray. %% LAST LAW OF PRODUCT DESIGN: If you can't fix it, feature it. %% LATER..........AS IN MUCH!! %% LAUNEGMYER'S RULE: Asking dumb questions is easier than correcting dumb mistakes. %% LAW OF DIRECTIONS: The probability of your getting lost is directly proportional to the number of times you are told, "you can't miss it." %% LAW OF GOVERNMENT COST OVERRUNS: 1. It is too early to predict what the program will cost. 2. It is too far down the road to do anything about it. %% LAW OF INANIMATE REPRODUCTION: If you take something apart and put it back together often enough, you will eventually have two of them. %% LAW OF INSTITUTIONS: The opulence of the front office is inversely proportional to the fundamental solvency of the organization. %% LAW OF KITCHEN CONFUSION: Once a dish is fouled up, adding anything to make it better will not work. %% LAW OF MURPHIAC SPACE CURVATURE: The probability of a piece of toast falling, buttered side down, is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet. %% LAW OF REGRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENT: Last year's was better. %% LAW OF REVELATION: The hidden flaw never remains hidden. %% LAW OF SELECTIVE GRAVITATION A dropped object will always fall where it can do the most damage. %% LAW OF TELEPHONE DYNAMICS: The phone call you're waiting for comes the minute you go out the door. %% LAW OF UNEVEN DISBURSAL: Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly disbured. %% LAWS OF CONTENTMENT: 1. Encourage conformity. 2. Don't take chances. 3. Discourage innovation. 4. Be satisfied with mediocrity. %% LAWYER: Someone who can get a sodomy charge changed to "following too closely." %% LAZY: Marrying a pregnant woman. %% LBJ, LBJ, how many JOKES did you tell today??! %% LDB (lid'dib) [from the PDP-10 instruction set] v. To extract from the middle. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LDB: /l*'d*b/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. To extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly. See also {DPB}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% LEARNING CURVE: An astonishing new theory, discovered by management consultants in the 1970's, asserting that the more you do something the quicker you can do it. %% LEE'S LAW: In dealing with a collective body of people, they will always be more tacky than expected. %% LEEMAN'S OBSERVATION: Efficiency is a highly developed form of laziness. %% LEO (July 23 - Aug 22) Your determination and sense of humor will come to the fore. Your ability to laugh at adversity will be a blessing because you've got a day coming you wouldn't believe. As a matter of fact, if you can laugh at what happens to you today, you've got a sick sense of humor. %% LER: /L-E-R/ [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] n. A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken. See {SED}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% LERP: /lerp/ vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the operation. E.g., Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the two endpoints of the line. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% LET Jesus be YOUR anchor! So when Satan rocks your boat, THROW Jesus overboard! %% LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (The Times of London) Dear Sir, I am firmly opposed to the spread of microchips either to the home or to the office. We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive unemployment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry. Yours faithfully, Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J. P. Sevenoaks %% LEVERAGE: Even if someone doesn't care what the world thinks about them, they always hope their mother doesn't find out. %% LIBEL: likely. "Yur libel t'git snockered drinkin RC!" -- Texan Dictionary %% LIBRA (Sep. 23 to Oct. 22) Your desire for justice and truth will be overshadowed by your desire for filthy lucre and a decent meal. Be gracious and polite. Someone is watching you, so stop staring like that. Most Libras are loan sharks. %% LIBRA (Sept 23 - Oct 23) Major achievements, new friends, and a previously unexplored way to make a lot of money will come to a lot of people today, but unfortunately you won't be one of them. Consider not getting out of bed today. %% LIBRARIANS do it quietly. %% LIBRARY - an organized collection of obsolete material %% LIFE n. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway, and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific American, October 1970). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LIFE: That brief interlude between nothingness and eternity. %% LIGHTWEIGHT: lighter than rugged %% LIKE: When being alive at the same time is a wonderful coincidence. %% LINE FEED (standard ASCII terminology) 1. v. To feed the paper through a terminal by one line (in order to print on the next line). 2. n. The "character" which causes the terminal to perform this action. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LINE STARVE (MIT) Inverse of LINE FEED. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LINEAR MODEL: An assumption concerning the nature of reality applied unquestioningly to every relationship as though God had determined that truth must always run in straight lines. %% LIPPMAN'S LEMMA: People specialize in their area of greatest weakness. %% LISP -- An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available. %% LISP car-and-cdr worlds are a more reasonable representation of the things that make life interesting than fixed decimal(15) or FILE OLDMSTR RECORD IS PAYROLL. -- Bernie Greenberg %% LISP is written in TECO! %% LISP just wants to have fun. %% LISP: To call a spade a thpade. %% LISP: [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] n. The name of AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other {HLL} still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP now shares the throne with {C}. See {languages of choice}. All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs, gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing". One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example that most newer languages, such as {COBOL} and {Ada}, are full of unnecessary {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer languages. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% LITTLE DEATH: (la petite mort) Some women do indeed pass right out, the 'little death' of french poetry. Men occasionally do the same. The experience is not unpleasant, but it can scare an inexperienced partner cold. A friend of ours had this happen with the first girl he ever slept with. On recovery she explained, "I am awfully sorry, but I always do that." By then he had called the police and an ambulance. So there is no cause for alarm, any more than over the yells, convulsions, hysterical laughter, or sobbing, or any of the other quite unexpected reactions that go along with complete orgasm in some people. By contrast others simply shut their eyes, but enjoy it no less. Sound and fury can be a flattering testimony to a partners skills, but a fallacious one, because they don't depend on the intensity of feeling, nor it upon them. -- "The Joy of Sex" %% LIVING YOUR LIFE: A task so difficult, it has never been attempted before. %% LOCKSMITHS can get into anything. %% LOGIC: "The point is frozen, the beast is dead, what is the difference?" -- Gavin Millarrrrrrrrrr (JC) %% LOGICAL OPERATION - getting out of programming to marry rich %% LOGICAL [from the technical term "logical device", wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary name] adj. Understood to have a meaning not necessarily corresponding to reality. E.g., if a person who has long held a certain post (e.g., Les Earnest at SAIL) left and was replaced, the replacement would for a while be known as the "logical Les Earnest". The word VIRTUAL is also used. At SAIL, "logical" compass directions denote a coordinate system in which "logical north" is toward San Francisco, "logical west" is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical north varies between physical (true) north near SF and physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that El Camino Real by definition always runs logical north-and-south.) %% LOGO -- A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn. %% LOGO for the Dead LOGO for the Dead lets you continue your computing activities from "The Other Side." The package includes a unique telecommunications feature which lets you turn your TRS-80 into an electronic Ouija board. Then, using Logo's graphics capabilities, you can work with a friend or relative on this side of the Great Beyond to write programs. The software requires that your body be hardwired to an analog-to-digital converter, which is then interfaced to your computer. A special terminal (very terminal) program lets you talk with the users through Deadnet, an EBBS (Ectoplasmic Bulletin Board System). LOGO for the Dead is available for 10 percent of your estate from NecroSoft inc., 6502 Charnelhouse Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44101. -- '80 Microcomputing %% LON: a large feline. "The lon is the king of the jungle!" -- Texan Dictionary %% LONDON'S LAW OF LIBRARIES: The book you want is on either the bottom shelf, accessible by crawling, or on the top shelf, accessible only by wobbly ladder. %% LONG DISTANCE RUNNERS last longer. %% LOOK!! Sullen American teens wearing MADRAS shorts and ``Flock of Seagulls'' HAIRCUTS! %% LOSE [from MIT jargon] v. 1. To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition. 2. To be exceptionally unaesthetic. 3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant). 4. DESERVE TO LOSE: v. Said of someone who willfully does the wrong thing; humorously, if one uses a feature known to be marginal. What is meant is that one deserves the consequences of one's losing actions. "Boy, anyone who tries to use MULTICS deserves to lose!" LOSE LOSE - a reply or comment on a situation. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LOSER n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Especially "real loser". -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LOSS n. Something which loses. WHAT A (MOBY) LOSS!: interjection. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LOSSAGE n. The result of a bug or malfunction. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LOVE POEM My heart breaks out in pustules of joy When each new morning struggles to its knees To vomit in the toilet of your eyes The stringy yellow phlegma of the sun. It dribbles down your cheesy peeling nose, On to the pillow where you lie, passed out Like a wino urinated on by dogs -- You cannot comprehend my love for you. My thoughts like scattered robins sing their tunes They swoop to dine on breadcrumbs you have left Behind the plate glass window of your heart. They hit the glass, and instantly are killed. Your beauty is as constant as the scars Inflicted by a hot grease accident, And like the fetid odor of your breath My love for you can never be erased. %% LOVE: Love ties in a knot in the end of the rope. %% LOVING well is the best revenge. -- Solomon Short %% LOW ORDER POSITION - the programmer's position in the chain of command %% LPT (lip'-it) n. Line printer, of course. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LPT: /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ [MIT, via DEC] n. Line printer, of course. Rare under UNIX, commoner in hackers with MS-DOS or CP/M background. The printer device is called `LPT:' on those systems that, like ITS, were strongly influenced by early DEC conventions. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% LSD melts in your mind, not in your hand. %% LUCAS -- The Prince of Darkness %% LUCKY: When you have a wife and a cigarette lighter -- both of which work. %% LUFTENBERG'S PUNCTUALITY OBSERVATIONS: 1. If you're early, it'll be cancelled. 2. If you bust your buns to be on time, you'll have to wait. 3. If you are not on time, it'll be too late. %% LUSER See USER. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% LUSER: Someone who picks up a female hitch-hiker walking home from a date. %% La vache qui rit est jolie. (Laughing cows are pretty.) %% La via del tren subterreneo es peligrosa... Siga las instructiones de los operadores del tren o la policia. %% La-dee-dee, la-dee-dah. %% Labor, n.: One of the processes by which A acquires property for B. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Lack of capability is usually disguised by lack of interest. %% Lack of money is the root of all evil. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman" %% Lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part. %% Lack of proof <> proof of lack. %% Lack of skill dictates economy of style. -- Joey Ramone %% Lack of will power has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability. -- Flower A. Newhouse %% Lackland's Laws: (1) Never be first. (2) Never be last. (3) Never volunteer for anything %% 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" %% Ladies Night Tuesday! %% Ladies and Gentlemen, Hobos and Tramps, Cross-eyed mosquitos and bowlegged ants, I come before you to stand behind you To tell you of something I know nothing about. Next Thursday (which is good Friday), There will be a convention held in the Women's Club which is strictly for men. Admission is free, pay at the door, Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor. %% Ladies and Gentlemen, Hobos and Tramps, Cross-eyed mosquitos and bowlegged ants, I come before you to stand behind you To tell you of something I know nothing about. Next Thursday (which is good Friday), There will be a convention held in the Women's Club which is strictly for men. Admission is free, pay at the door, Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor. It was a summer's day in winter, And the snow was raining fast, As a barefoot boy with shoes on, Stood sitting in the grass. Oh, that bright day in the dead of night, Two dead men got up to fight. Three blind men to see fair play, Forty mutes to yell "Hooray"! Back to back, they faced each other, Drew their swords and shot each other. A deaf policeman heard the noise, Came and arrested those two dead boys. %% Ladies and gentlemen, hoboes and tramps, Cross eyed mosquitoes, and bo-legged ants. I come before you, to stand behind you, To tell you something, I know nothing about. Admission is free, pay at the door. Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor. There will be a women's tea, for men only. At this tea, we will discuss such things as: The four corners of the round table, And how Christopher Columbus struggled across the Mississippi Ocean Holding only two flags: The first flag, the flag of the star spangled banana, The second flag, the flag of indigestion. Very important speech, no need to come. The End. %% Ladies and gentlemen, hobos and tramps, Cross-eyed monkeys, and bow-legged ants. I come before you to stand behind you, To tell you something I know nothing about. This Thursday, which is Good Friday, There is a Lady's Aid meeting for fathers only. It's absolutely free, just pay at the door, Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor. It doesn't matter where you sit, The man in the gallery is sure to spit. Our guest announcer will gladly tell you About Christopher Columbus, who sailed the ocean blue, In a peanut shell with a hole clear through, Holding in one hand the Declaration of Indigestion, And in the other, the Star-Spreckled Banana, And said, "Give me Life. Or any other 25 cent magazine." -- James Preston %% Ladies' sewing circle and terrorist society %% Lady Astor: "If you were my husband, I'd poison your coffee." Winston Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it." %% Lady Luck brings added income today. Lady friend takes it away tonight. %% Lady to Golf Pro: "Say I was stung by bees on your golf course." Pro: "Ah, where?" Lady: "Between the 1st and 2nd holes." Pro: "Um, that's going to hard to treat." %% Lady, your sign fell down. %% Ladybug, ladybug, Look to your stern! Your house is on fire, Your children will burn! So jump ye and sing, for The very first time The four lines above Have been put into rhyme. -- Walt Kelly %% Laetrile is the pits %% Laissez Faire Economics is the theory that if each acts like a vulture, all will end as doves. %% Lake Erie died for your sins. %% Lakes resting on one another: The image of the Joyous. Thus the superior man joins with his friends For discussion and practice. %% Lal is my child. You ask that I volunteer to give her up. I cannot. It would violate every lesson I have learned about human parenting. I have brought a new life into this world and it is my duty, not Starfleet's, to guide her through these difficult steps to maturity. To support her as she learns. To prepare her to be a contributing member of society. No one can relieve me from that obligation. And I cannot ignore it. I am...her father. -- Data about Lal, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% Lal, I am unable to correct the system failure. "I know." We must say goodbye now. "I feel..." What do you feel, Lal? "I love you, father." I wish I could feel it with you. "I will feel it for both of us. Thank you for my life. Flirting. Laughter. Painting. Family. Female. Humo-" -- Data and Lal, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% Lamenting and sighing, floods of tears. No blame. %% Lamonte Cranston once hired a new Chinese manservant. While describing his duties to the new man, Lamonte pointed to a bowl of candy on the coffee table and warned him that he was not to take any. Some days later, the new manservant was cleaning up, with no one at home, and decided to sample some of the candy. Just than, Cranston walked in, spied the manservant at the candy, and said: "Pardon me Choy, is that the Shadow's nugate you chew?" %% Land o' Goshen! Can't a person get any privacy around here? Now go away, I'm taking a bath. %% Land of the Single Entendre... %% Landru! Guide us! -- A Beta 3 person, "The Return of the Archons," stardate 3157.4 %% Langsam's Laws: (1) Everything depends. (2) Nothing is always. (3) Everything is sometimes. %% Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. -- B. L. Whorf %% Language: The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Languages are the pedigrees of nations. -- Johnson %% Lank: Here we go. We're about to set a new record. Earl: (to the crowd) How about a date? Lank: We've done it. Earl has set a new record. Turned down by 20,000 women. -- Lank and Earl %% Lap-top - Smaller and lighter than the average secretary. %% Lap-top: Smaller and lighter than the average secretary. Portable: Smaller and lighter than the average refrigerator. Transportable: Neither chained to a wall nor attached to an alarm system. %% Lap: One of the most important organs of the female system; an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly used in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and the heads of adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal's substantial welfare. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Large cats can be dangerous, but a little pussy never hurt anyone. %% Large dogs make larger turds than little ones. %% Large numbers of things are determined, and therefore not subject to change. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% Larkinson's Law: All laws are basically false. %% Larry Flynt for President. %% Larry Michels, CEO of the Santa Cruz Operation, has resigned amid charges of routine sexual harrassment of female employees (San Jose Mercury News, 12/22/92), causing us to take a new look at some of the standard commands distributed with SCO UNIX: look, tty, touch, tail, grep, awk, sh, date, sed -no, unzip, nice, biff %% Las cucarachas entran... pero no pueden salir! %% Laser printers do it without making an impression. %% Lasherism: [Harvard] n. A program which solves a standard problem (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the {life} algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way. Distinguished from a {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became notorious for such behavior. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Lassie kills chickens. %% Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do you think something's wrong? Do you think she wants us to follow her? What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the applications for. -- Dave Barry %% Last Words of Advice: If you pay your taxes and don't get into debt and go to bed early and never answer the telephone--no harm can befall you. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% Last guys don't finish nice. -- Stanley Kelly %% Last night I discovered a new form of oral contraceptive. I asked a girl to go to bed and she said 'No'. -- Woody Allen %% Last night I met upon the stair a little man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. Gee how I wish he'd go away! %% Last night I watched the news from Washington (the Capitol). The Russians had escaped while we weren't watching them (like Russians will). Now we have all this room; we've even got the moon, and I hear the USSR will be open soon as Vacationland for lawyers in love. -- Jackson Browne %% Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness, and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. -- William Shakespeare %% Last week I saw a girl in a sweater so tight I could hardly breathe. %% Last week a cop stopped me in my car. He asked me if I had a police record. I said, no, but I have the new DEVO album. Cops have no sense of humor. %% Last week the local power company had a minor problem and much of downtown Madison and the UW-Madison campus lost power. Turns out that the computer science building got power restored before many of the other buildings. When asked why we got our power back so soon, someone claimed that we have a generator in the basement with a squirrel running on a wheel to generate it. To which someone else remarked: "Only one squirrel powers the whole building??? Must be Canadian." %% Last week's pet, this week's special. %% Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish. -- Steve Wright %% Last year, Fred Akers and Crew, The Texas Titty-Babies, were traveling via bus in Oklahoma. Anyway, as they crossed into Oklahoma, they saw an OU football player standing on top of a hill mooning them. Well that was too much of an insult, and Fred stopped the bus. He called his biggest player to the front of the bus and said "Go kick that boy's ass!" The football player took off up the hill and disappeared. A couple of minutes passed and Fred was getting worried. He called another player up and said, "Go help him." So the second player takes off up the hill and he too disappears. That was too much for poor Fred's ticker, what with half of Texas on his case for _LOSING_TOO_DAMN_MANY_GAMES_, and he sent the rest of the busload of football players up the hill. Well there was a lot of noise, and finally after about 10 minutes, the punter comes back over the hill, his jersey torn to hell. Fred says, "What the hell happened? Couldn't you all get that jerk off the hill?" To this the punter replied. "Aw shit, coach, there were two more of them back there!" %% Last yeer I kudn't spel Engineer. Now I are won. %% Last, but by no means least, courage -- moral courage, the courage of one's convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It's the age-old struggle -- the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other. -- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) %% Lasting perseverance furthers. %% Late last night I slew my wife, Stretched her on the parquet flooring; I was loath to take her life, But I had to stop her snoring! -- Harry Graham %% Latest news? Put 'net.games.hack' in your .newsrc ! %% Latest news? Put newsgroup 'netUNX.indoor.hackers-scroll' in your .newsrc! %% Laugh and the world thinks you're an idiot. %% Laugh at your problems; everybody else does. %% Laugh when you can; cry when you must. %% Laugh, and say I'm green, I've seen things you've never seen. %% Laugh, and the world ignores you. Crying doesn't help either. %% Laugh, and the world laughs with you, snore, and you sleep alone. %% Laughing on the outside, paneling on the inside, ... %% Laughter is the closest distance between two people. -- Victor Borge %% Laughter should dimple the cheek, not furrow the brow. A jest should be such, that all shall be able to join in the laugh which it occasions; but if it bear hard upon one of the company, like the crack of a string, it makes a stop in the music. -- Feltham %% Laundry is the fifth dimension!! ...um...um... th' washing machine is a black hole and the pink socks are bus drivers who just fell in!! %% Laura's Law: No child throws up in the bathroom. %% Lavish spending can be disastrous. Don't buy any lavishes for a while. %% Law Of The Search: The first place to look for anything is the last place you would expect to find it. %% Law enforcement officers should use only the minimum force necessary in dealing with disorders when they arise. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% Law expands in proportion to the resources available for its enforcement. -- Dalin B. Oaks %% Law of Communications: The result of improved and enlarged communications is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding. %% Law of Computability Applied to Social Sciences: If at first you don't succeed, transform your data set. %% Law of Continuity: Experiments should be reproducible. They should all fail the same way. %% Law of Historical Causation: "It seemed like the thing to do at the time." -- Michael Uhlmann %% Law of Institutional Food: Everything is cold except what should be. %% Law of Institutional Food: Everything, including the corn flakes, is greasy. %% Law of Local Anesthesia: Never say "oops" in the operating room. -- Dr. Leo Troy %% Law of Petroleum: Where there are Muslims, there is oil; the converse is not true. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% Law of Probable Dispersal: Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed. %% Law of Procrastination: Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do. %% Law of Selective Gravity: An object will fall so as to do the most damage. Jenning's Corollary: The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet. %% Law of Social Dynamics: If, in the course of several months, only three worthwhile social events take place, they will all fall on the same evening. %% Law of Work: The more crap you put up with, the more crap you are going to get. You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard. Don't be irreplaceable, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. If you are good, you'll be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you'll get out of it. When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, " How would the Lone Ranger have handled this ?" %% Law of the Lost Inch: In designing any type of construction, no overall dimension can be totalled correctly after 4:40 p.m. on Friday. Corollaries: 1. Under the same conditions, if any minor dimensions are given to sixteenths of an inch, they cannot be totalled at all. 2. The correct total will become self-evident at 9:01 a.m. on Monday. %% Law stands mute in the midst of arms. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Lawful Dungeon Master - and they're MY laws! %% Lawful Game Master--and I pick the laws %% Lawrence Radiation Laboratory keeps all its data in an old gray trunk. %% Lawrence Welk does it with feeling. %% Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Laws are made to be broken %% Laws can disover sin, but not remove. -- Milton %% Laws of Computer Programming: 1. Any given program, when running, is obsolete. 2. Any given program costs more and takes longer. 3. If a program is useful, it will have to be changed. 4. If a program is useless, it will have to be documented. 5. Any given program will expand to fill all available memory. 6. The value of a program is proportional the weight of its output. 7. Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it. 8. Make it possible for programmers to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in English. -- SIGPLAN Notices, Vol 2 No 2 %% Laws of Procrastination: (1) Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility for its termination on someone else (the authority who imposed the deadline). (2) It reduces anxiety by reducing the expected quality of the project from the best of all possible efforts to the best that can be expected given the limited time. (3) Status is gained in the eyes of others, and in one's own eyes, because it is assumed that the importance of the work justifies the stress. (4) Avoidance of interruptions including the assignment of other duties can usually be achieved, so that the obviously stressed worker can concentrate on the single effort. (5) Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do. (6) It may eliminate the job if the need passes before the job can be done. %% Laws of Project Management #1: No major project is ever installed on time, within budgets, with the same staff that started it. Yours will not be the first. %% Laws of Project Management #2: Projects progress quickly until they become 90% complete, then they remain at 90% complete forever. %% Laws of Project Management #3: One advantage of fuzzy project objectives is that they let you avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs. %% Laws of Project Management #5: If project content is allowed to change freely, the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress. %% Laws of Project Management #6: No system is ever completely debugged. Attempts to debug a system inevitably introduce new bugs that are even harder to find. %% Laws of Serendipity: 1. In order to discover anything, you must be looking for something. 2. If you wish to make an improved product, you must already be engaged in making an inferior one. %% Laws of computer programming: Never do anything clever on a Friday afternoon. %% Laws were made to be broken. -- Christopher North %% Lawsuit (noun) -- A machine which you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Lawyers do it in front of the Judge and Jury. %% Lawyers do it in their briefs. %% Lawyers do it on a trial basis. %% Lawyers do it to everyone. %% Lawyers sometimes tell the truth---they'll do anything to win a case. %% Lawyers: America's untapped export market. %% Lawyers: The larval form of politicians. %% Lay on, MacDuff, and curs'd be him who first cries, `Hold, enough!'. -- William Shakespeare %% Lays eggs inside a paper bag; The reason, you will see, no doubt, Is to keep the lightning out. But what these unobservant birds Have failed to notice is that herds Of bears may come with buns And steal the bags to hold the crumbs. %% Laziness is the mother of nine inventions out of ten. -- Philip K. Saunders %% Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats -- approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less. %% Lead me not into temptation, I can find it myself. %% Lead, follow, or get out of the way. %% Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way! %% Lead: A heavy blue-grey mineral most useful in imparting a sense of responsibility to those who love not wisely but other men's wives. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Leaders who aid others in growing are certain to experience growth in themselves. %% Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it; what is happening in America is that those parades are getting smaller and smaller--and there are many more of them. -- John Naisbitt, "Megatrends" %% Leadership, at its highest, consists of getting people to work for you when they are under no obligation to do so. %% League of Bloodthirsty Women %% League of Pushy Women Self-appointed Chapter Head %% Learn a new language and get a new soul. %% Learn a new word today. %% Learn from other people's mistakes, you don't have time to make your own. %% Learn how to spell. Play Hack! %% Learn of the skillful: he that teaches himself hath a fool for a master. -- Poor Richard %% Learn to be sincere. Even if you have to fake it. -- Solomon Short %% Learn to hold thy tongue. Five words cost Zacharias forty weeks' silence. -- Fuller %% Learn to pause -- or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you. %% Learn to reason forward and backward on both sides of a question. -- Thomas Blandi %% Learn to splel, danmit! %% Learn what we should learn; do what we should do; be what we should be. -- Thomas S. Monson %% Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads. %% Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way. -- Alan J. Perlis %% Learning at some schools is like drinking from a firehose. %% Learning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. -- Confucius %% Least said is soonest disavowed. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Leave bigotry in your quarters; there's no room for it on the bridge. -- Kirk, "Balance of Terror," stardate 1709.2 %% Leave me alone, I'm having a crisis. -- "Bumper Snickers" %% Leave no stone unturned. -- Euripides %% Leda loves swans. %% Lee Harvey Oswald: Where are ya when we REALLY need ya? %% Lee's Law: Mother said there would be days like this, but she never said that there'd be so many! %% Left to themselves, things always go from bad to worse. %% Lefty Gomez: What's your cap size Yogi? Yogi: How do I know? I'm not in shape yet. %% Legacy: A gift from one who is legging it out of this vale of tears. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Legalize free-enterprise murder: why should governments have all the fun? %% Legalize freedom. %% Legalize necrophilia!! %% Legalize vandalism!! %% Legareque loquere Latinam bene possum. It's not the initial cost of the notebook that counts -- it's the upkeep. %% Legislated Nostalgia: To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess: "How can I be a part of the 1960s generation when I don't even remember any of it?" -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Legislation is a series of catastrophes that results in a policy. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% Legislation proposed in the Illinois State Legislature, May, 1907: "Speed upon county roads will be limited to ten miles an hour unless the motorist sees a bailiff who does not appear to have had a drink in 30 days, when the driver will be permitted to make what he can." %% Legless Mom `walks' 20 miles to aid tot. %% Leibowitz's Rule: When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you hold the hammer with both hands. %% Leisure tends to corrupt, and absolute leisure corrupts absolutely. %% Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night. -- George Allen %% Lemmings don't grow older, they just die. -- "Bumper Snickers" %% Lend money to a bad debtor and he will hate you. %% Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold. -- William Shakespeare %% Lends grace to the beard on his chin. %% Lenin is dying, and talking things over with Stalin, his successor. "The one worry I have", says Lenin, "is this: will the people follow you? What do you think, comrade Stalin?" "They will", says Stalin, "they surely will." "I hope so", says Lenin, "but what if they don't follow you?". "No problem", says Stalin, "then they'll follow you." %% Lenin once observed that gold should adorn the floors of latrines. %% Lensmen eat Jedi for breakfast. %% Leo (July 22 - Aug 21) : Julia Child, Robert Culp, Wilt Chamberlain, Martin Sheen, Alfred Hitchcock, Carrol O'Connor, Robert Redford, Sally Struthers %% Leona, I want to CONFESS things to you ... I want to WRAP you in a SCARLET ROBE trimmed with POLYVINYL CHLORIDE ... I want to EMPTY your ASHTRAYS ... %% Leona, I want to CONFESS things to you.. %% Leprechauns are the most skilled cutpurses in this dungeon. %% Leroy's wife heard that the gummint was giving out free cheese so she told him to go and get some. Leroy gets in his pickup truck and heads to the distribution center. When he gets there, all that's left is a big wheel of cheese so he puts it in the back of the truck and takes off. Unfortunately, he forgets to latch the tailgate so when he gets to the top of a hill and stops for a stop sign, the cheese knocks down the tailgate and starts to roll down the hill. Leroy gets out of the car and starts to chase after the cheese. Meanwhile, there's a good ole boy named Sam at the bottom of the hill who sees the cheese coming. Not being one to pass up something for free, he catches the cheese and throws it into HIS pickup truck. When Sam gets home with his cheese, he proudly shows it to his wife. The following conversation ensues: Sam's wife: That's wonderful! But, what kind of cheese is it? Sam: Uh, uh, oh yeah, it's nacho cheese. Sam's wife: Huh, how do you know it's nacho cheese? Sam: Well, when I found it there was this guy running down the hill yelling, "Hey mon, that's nacho cheese". %% Les salons de la ville de Trieste Sont vaseux, suraigus, at funestes; Parmi les grandes chaises On cause des malaises, Des estropiements, et des pestes. -- Edward Gorey %% Less is more. %% Less substance, more ambience. -- Picard, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% Less than one ounce of anti-matter here is more powerful than ten thousand cobalt bombs. Let's home it's as powerful as man will ever get. -- Ensign Garrovick and Kirk, "Obsession," stardate 3620.7 %% Lessness: A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: "I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open a little roadside cafe in Idaho." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Lesson #1 in becoming more human. You must observe all human customs. -- Lore to Data, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4 %% Let Your Fingers Do It. %% Let a Field Service Engineer put it in. %% Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage. %% Let a man proclaim a new principle. Public sentiment will surely be on the other side. -- Thomas B. Reed (1839-1902) %% Let an electrician check your shorts. %% Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips. -- Proverbs XXVII, 2 %% Let cavillers deny that brutes have reason; sure tis something more, 'tis heaven directs, and stratagems inspires beyond the short extent of human thought. -- Somerville %% Let he who takes the plunge remember to return it by Tuesday. %% Let he who takes the plunge remember to return it! %% Let him choose out of my files, his projects to accomplish. -- William Shakespeare, "Coriolanus" %% Let him turn and twist slowly in the wind. -- John Ehrlichman %% Let him who expects one class of society to prosper in the highest degree, while the other is in distress, try whether one side of the face can smile while the other is pinched. -- Thomas Fuller %% Let him who is stoned cast the first sin. %% Let him who plays the monarch be a king; %% Let him who plays the monarch be a king; Who plays the rogue, be perfect in his part. -- Erskine %% Let honesty be as the breath of thy soul, and never forget to have a penny, when all thy expenses are enumerated and paid; then shall thou reach the point of happiness, and independence shall be thy shield and buckler, thy helmet and crown; then thy soul walk upright, nor stoop to the silken wretch because he hath riches, nor pocket an abuse, because the hand which offers it wears a ring set with diamonds. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Let it be borne on the flag under which we rally in every exigency, that we have one country, one constitution, one destiny. -- Daniel Webster %% Let me assure you that to us here at First National, you're not just a number. You're two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash and another number. -- James Estes %% Let me do my TRIBUTE to FISHNET STOCKINGS... %% Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleck-headed men and such as sleep o'nights. Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much; such men are dangerous. -- William Shakespeare %% Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the -- to the back! -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. %% Let me play with it first and I'll tell you what it is later. -- Miles Davis %% Let me state that programming is not the science of coding but the art of finding solutions of non-formalized problems and expressing these solutions in explicit and clear way. -- Vadim Antonov (avg@hq.demos.su) %% Let me take you a button-hole lower. -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost" %% Let me take you under my thumb. %% Let me tell you something. As we were walking around in the store, Marilyn and I were just really impressed by all the novelties and the different types of little things that you could get for Christmas. And all the people that would help you, they were dressed up in things that said 'I believe in Santa Claus.' And the only thing that I could think is that I believe in George Bush. -- Vice President Dan Quayle at a garden center and produce store in Baltimore (from the Los Angeles Times, Douglas Jehl, November 6, 1988) %% Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity. -- Louis Pasteur %% Let no guilty man escape. -- U. S. Grant %% Let no man call you wise, you might make a liar of him. %% Let no man presume to give advice to others that has not first given good counsel to himself. -- Seneca %% Let no man value at a little price a virtuous woman's counsel; her winged spirit is feathered often times with heavenly words, and, like her beauty, ravishing and pure. -- Chapman %% Let none think to fly the danger For soon or late love is his own avenger. -- Byron %% Let not the sands of time get in your lunch. %% Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. -- Daniel Webster %% Let sleeping bags lie. %% Let sleeping dogma lie. -- Solomon Short %% Let sleeping dogs lie. -- Charles Dickens %% Let the Wookiee win! %% Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it -- let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives, or verbs -- let the witch doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception -- let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without logic -- let the pygmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours -- let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man's mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and a bearskin, not a university chair of economics. -- John Galt %% Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second be what thou will. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Let the good times roll. %% Let the greatest part of the news thou hearest be the least part of what thou believest, lest the greater part of what thou believest be the least part of what is true. -- Francis Quarles (1592-1644) %% Let the machine do the dirty work. -- Kernighan and Ritchie, "Elements of Programming Style" %% Let the programmers be many and the managers be few then all will be productive. %% Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage, a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array. -- Lord Brougham %% Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best way they can. I'm sick of the job. It's a thankless one and full of grief. -- Capone %% Let them obey that know not how to rule. -- William Shakespeare %% Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen. -- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) %% Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth - to see it like it is, and tell it like it is - to find the truth, to speak the truth, and live the truth. -- Richard Nixon. accepting the Presidential Nomination, 1968 %% Let us cling to our principles as the mariner clings to his last plank when night and tempest close around him. -- Dr. Young %% Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. %% Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question... Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" -- T. S. Eliot, "Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" %% Let us keep our mouths shut and our pens dry until we know the facts. -- A. J. Carlson %% Let us live!!! Let us love!!! Let us share the deepest secrets of our souls!!! You first. %% Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around us in awareness. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% Let us not say, Every man is the architect of his own fortune; but let us say, Every man is the architect of his own character. -- George Dana Boardman %% Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height. -- Edward Abbey %% Let us pray for understanding and for compassion. Let us do no such damn thing. -- Q and Picard, "Hide and Q", stardate 41590.5 %% Let us remember that ours is a nation of lawyers and order. %% Let us suffer any person to tell us his story morning and evening, but for one twelve-month, and he will become our master. -- Edmund Burke %% Let us treat men and women well; Treat them as if they were real; Perhaps they are. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow %% Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Let your Wit rather serve you for a buckler to defend yourself, by a handsome reply, than the Sword to wound others, though with never so facetious a Reproach, remembering that a Word cuts deeper than a sharper weapon, and the Wound it makes is longer curing. -- Osborn %% Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. -- Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat" %% Let your conscience be your guide. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Let your fingers do the walking on the yulkjhnb keys. %% Let your humor always be good humor in both senses. If it comes of a bad humor, it is pretty sure not to belie its parentage. %% Let zeal be ever present, but hesitation absent. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Let's all show human CONCERN for REVEREND MOON's legal difficulties!! %% Let's bring it up to date with some snappy nineteenth century dialogue. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Let's do lunch, have your god call my god... %% Let's do the Time Warp again! %% Let's flush this toilet. -- Noah %% Let's get drunk and be somebody. %% Let's get some Hiney and have some fun! %% Let's get together on this - I'm assuming you are as confused as I am -- Glossary of important business terms %% Let's go crazy. %% Let's go play with the Meat Puppets! %% Let's hope that the sheiks' being brash Won't inspire women's lib to be rash. Though a shortage of gas Is a pain in the ass, Just imagine -- a shortage of gash! %% Let's hope they find you as tasty as they did their last associates. -- Riker to Groppler Zorn about the Ferengi, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% Let's just be friends and make no special effort to ever see each other again. %% Let's just say that where a change was required, I adjusted. In every relationship that exists, people have to seek a way to survive. If you really care about the person, you do what's necessary, or that's the end. For the first time, I found that I really could change, and the qualities I most admired in myself I gave up. I stopped being loud and bossy ... Oh, all right. I was still loud and bossy, but only behind his back." -- Kate Hepburn, on Tracy and Hepburn %% Let's just stay home tonight. %% Let's not complicate our relationship by trying to communicate with each other. %% Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it. %% Let's roll up our elbows and get to work. %% Let's say your wedding ring falls into your toaster, and when you stick your hand in to retrieve it, you suffer Pain and Suffering as well as Mental Anguish. You would sue: * The toaster manufacturer, for failure to include, in the instructions section that says you should never never never ever stick you hand into the toaster, the statement "Not even if your wedding ring falls in there". * The store where you bought the toaster, for selling it to an obvious cretin like yourself. * Union Carbide Corporation, which is not directly responsible in this case, but which is feeling so guilty that it would probably send you a large cash settlement anyway. %% Let's see some T and A! %% Let's send the Russians defective lifestyle accessories! %% Let's split up, we can do more damage that way. %% Let's take a look at this sexy circuit. %% 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" %% Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains. -- Adlai Stevenson %% Let's visit reality for awhile. %% Lets do some food. %% Lets stop bad mouthing our mail system. We all depend on the post office to provide excuses for us. -- Jeff McNelly %% Letters which are warmly sealed are ofter but coldly opened. -- Richter %% Letting oneself be drawn Brings good fortune and remains blameless. If one is sincere, It furthers one to bring even a small offering. %% Lettuce doth extinguish venerious acts. -- Andrew Boorde (1490?-1549) It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is 'soporific'. -- Beatrix Potter (1868-1943) "The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies." %% Leveraging always beats prototyping. %% Levity is the soul of wit. -- Melville D. Landon %% Lewis's Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever. %% Liar, n.: A lawyer with a roving commission. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Liar: One who tells an unpleasant truth. %% Liars ought to have good memories. -- Algernon Sidney %% Liberal - a power worshiper without power. -- George Orwell (1903-1950) %% Liberals are the first to dump you if you con them or get into trouble. Conservatives are better. They never run out on you. -- Joseph "Crazy Joe" Gallo %% Liberals don't care what people do, as long as it's compulsory. %% Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen. -- Mort Sahl %% Liberals, but not conservatives, can get attention and acclaim for denouncing liberal policies that failed; and liberals will inevitably capture the ensuing agenda for "reform." -- John McClaughry %% Liberals: Making the world safe for hypocrisy. %% Liberty and freedom have to be more than just words. -- Kirk, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown %% Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties. -- Edward Abbey %% Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by law. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches. -- Will Rogers %% Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick %% Liberty is always unfinished business. %% Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves to the things we do like. -- Ernest Benn %% Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord the weak. -- Judge Learned Hand %% Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely. -- Gertrude Himmelfarb %% Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Libra (Sept 23 - Oct 22) : George Peppard, John Lennon, Pierre Trudeau, Oscar Wilde, Olivia Newton-John, Suzanne Somers, Ben Vereen, Juliet Prowse %% Librarians do it by the book. %% Librarians do it silently. %% Libraries are the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Licker talks mighty loud w'en it gets loose fum de jug. -- Joel C. Harris, "Uncle Remus: Plantation Proverbs" %% Lie, cheat, steal, kill, leave the toilet seat up. %% Lie, n.: A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one discovered to date. %% Lieberman's Law: Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens. %% Lies! All lies! You're all lying against my boys! -- Ma Barker %% Lieutenant Uhura, send a message to StarFleet Command. %% Lieutenant, I order you to relax. I am relaxed! -- Picard and Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Lieutenant, I understand your feelings about the Romulans. But this is not the time or the place. "If you had seem them KILL your parents, you would understand Doctor, it is always the time and place for those feelings." This Romulan didn't murder your parents and you are the only one who can save his life. "Then he will die." -- Dr. Crusher and Geordi, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2 %% Lieutenant, do you intend to blast a hole through the viewer? -- Capt. Picard to Worf, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% Life -- Love It or Leave It. %% Life Sucks. Cynical, misanthropic male, 34, looking for soul mate but certain not to find her. Drop me a note. I'll call you, we'll talk and I'll ask you out to dinner where I'll probably spend more than I can afford in a feeble attempt to impress you. Then we'll realize we have absolutely nothing in common and we'll go our separate ways, more embittered and depressed than before (if such a thing is possible). %% Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Life and death are seldom logical. But attaining a desired goal always is. -- McCoy and Spock, "The Galileo Seven," stardate 2821.7 %% Life begins at the centerfold and expands outward. -- Miss November (1966) %% Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge. -- Gaugin %% Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Life can be modeled as a hidden Markov process with infinite states and no a-priori knowledge of the probability density functions. %% Life can be only understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. -- Soren Kierkegaard, "Life" %% Life can be profitable, if you know the odds. -- Ripley %% Life can be so tragic -- you're here today and here tomorrow. %% Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Life consists of accommodating oneself to the Universe. %% Life consists of accommodating the Universe to oneself. %% Life creates it [the Force] and makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we ... Feel the flow. Feel the Force around you. -- Yoda %% Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Life exists for no known purpose. %% Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object. -- Georg Wihelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) %% Life imitates art--but badly. -- Edward Abbey %% Life in the fast lane will surely make you lose your mind. %% Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Leviathan %% Life is Hell. %% Life is Roff when yer Stewpid %% Life is a Ferris wheel - you get dizzy. by Linette %% Life is a POPULARITY CONTEST! I'm REFRESHINGLY CANDID!! %% Life is a bitch, but the puppies can be cute. %% Life is a bizarre thing. First you spend it running from childhood, then you spend the rest of it trying to get back. -- Ravenous Tenebrosity %% Life is a fractal in Hilbert space. -- Rudy Rucker %% Life is a game of bridge -- and you've just been finessed. %% Life is a game, to win you must play and to play you must win %% Life is a game. In order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. If what already is, is more important than what isn't, the game is over. So, life is a game in which what isn't, is more important than what is. Let the good times roll. -- Werner Erhard %% Life is a game. Money is how we keep score. -- Ted Turner %% Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. -- Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in "Time", 1981 %% Life is a handkerchief; smooth and clean and white... until you blow it. -- Wild Bill Shakespeare (Jeff Anderson) %% Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed. %% Life is a little like cards: You fall in love - Hearts You become engaged - Diamonds You marry - Clubs You die - Spades %% Life is a process, not a principle, a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. -- Gerard Straub, television producer and author (stolen from Frank Herbert??) %% Life is a sandwich, and it's always lunchtime %% Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. %% Life is a series of rude awakenings. -- R. V. Winkle %% Life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly inflict on someone else. -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938) %% Life is a shit sandwich, and every day is another bite. %% Life is a test, if this had been a real life you would have been given instructions on where to go. %% Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. %% Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. %% Life is a yo-yo, and mankind ties knots in the string. %% Life is act, and not to do is death. -- Lewis Morris %% Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others. %% Life is anything that dies when you stomp it! %% Life is both difficult and time consuming. %% Life is but a moment. THerefore a moment of love is worth a lifetime. %% Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts. %% Life is cruel? Compared to what? -- Edward Abbey %% Life is difficult because it is non-linear. %% Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death. -- Miguel de Unamuno %% Life is evil spelled backwards. %% Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut. %% Life is full of concepts that are poorly defined. In fact, there are very few concepts that aren't. It's hard to think of any in non-technical fields. -- Daniel Kimberg %% Life is full of little surprises. -- Pandora %% Life is hard: [XEROX PARC] prov. This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1) "While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it." (2) "While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Life is hard? True--but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies. -- Edward Abbey %% Life is just a bowl of cherries, but why do I always get the pits? %% Life is like a 10 speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use. -- C. Schultz %% Life is like a B-grade movie. You don't want to leave in the middle of it, but you don't want to see it again. -- Ted Turner %% Life is like a Car-wash and I'm on a bicycle. %% Life is like a bagel. It's delicious when it's fresh and warm, but often it's just hard. The hole in the middle is its great mystery, and yet it wouldn't be a bagel without it. %% Life is like a bowl of soup with hairs floating on it. You have to eat it nevertheless. -- Flaubert %% Life is like a buffet; it's not good but there's plenty of it. %% Life is like a cucumber -- one moment it's in your hand, the next it's up your ass. %% Life is like a diaper - short and loaded. %% Life is like a dick: when its hard, you get screwed and when its soft, you can't beat it! %% Life is like a fountain... I will tell you how when I figure it out. %% Life is like a maze in which you try to avoid the exit. %% Life is like a penis: when it's soft you can't beat it, and when it's hard you get fucked. %% Life is like a poker game. You deal or are dealt to. It includes skill and luck. You bet, check, bluff and raise. You learn from those you play with. Sometimes you win with a pair or lose with a full house. But whatever happens, it's best to keep on shuffling along. %% Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it. -- Tom Lehrer %% Life is like a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat. %% Life is like a simile. %% Life is like a tin of sardines. We're, all of us, looking for the key. -- Beyond the Fringe %% Life is like an analogy. %% Life is like an egg stain on your chin -- you can lick it, but it still won't go away. %% Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer, then you find there is nothing in it. %% Life is like an unassembled abacus. It's what you make of it that counts. %% Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. %% Life is like bein' on a mule team. Unless you're the lead mule, all the scenery looks about the same. %% Life is like climbing a ladder To get where you are going you must reach high, But to reach to high is to fall. %% Life is like surrealism. If you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it. -- Solomon Short %% Life is much too complicated in the morning %% Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, who can't and those in cemeteries. -- Everett Dirksen %% Life is not for everyone. %% Life is not one thing after another.... it's the same damn thing over and over! %% Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Life is one long struggle in the dark. -- Titus Lucretius Carus %% Life is only as long as you live it. %% Life is serious, but ART is fun! %% Life is short and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Oh, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind. -- Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881) %% Life is short, art long, occasion sudden; to make experiments dangerous; judgment difficult. Neither is it sufficient that the physician do his office, unless the patient and his attendants do their duty, and that externals are likewise well ordered. -- Hippocrates (460?-377? B.C.) %% Life is short. Get it right. %% Life is short; live it up. -- Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894-1971) %% Life is silly but should be taken seriously. %% Life is so strange. %% Life is sometimes hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other. To fail to love it is to cease to exist. %% Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premisses. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% Life is the childhood of our immortality. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Life is the living you do, Death is the living you don't do. -- Joseph Pintauro %% Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules. %% Life is the urge to ecstasy. %% Life is to the universe as rust is to iron. We are, in the final judgement (on a planetary scale, certainly), nothing more than an advanced form of corrosion, just one more way for the universe to wear itself out a little faster. -- Solomon Short %% Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure. %% Life is too important to take seriously. -- Corky Siegel %% Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit. -- Edward Abbey %% Life is too short to be taken seriously. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900 %% Life is too short to spend debugging Intel parts. -- Van J. %% Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice. -- Edward Abbey %% Life is tough, but it's fair. You had a good home; you could've stayed there. %% Life is uncertain...eat dessert first! %% Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair. -- Edward Abbey %% Life is wonderful. %% Life is worth living, but only if we avoid the amusements of grown-up people. -- Robert Lynd %% Life itself is the proper binge. -- Julia Child %% Life may have no meaning -- or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. %% Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward. %% Life never gets so bad that it can't get worse. -- Solomon Short %% Life often presents us with a choice of evils rather than of goods. -- Charles Caleb Colton %% Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible -- not to have run away. -- Dag Hammarskjold %% Life sucks, but Death swallows! %% Life to you is a bold and dashing responsibility -- a Mary Chung's fortune cookie %% Life without caffeine is stimulating enough. -- Sanka Ad %% Life without music would be an intolerable insult. -- Edward Abbey %% Life would be easier if I had the source code. %% Life would be much simpler and things would get done much faster if it weren't for other people -- Blore %% Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code. %% Life would be tolerable but for its amusements. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Life's a beach, and then you dive... %% Life's a beach. %% Life's a bitch and we're her puppies. %% Life's a bitch, and then you marry one. %% Life's a bitch, then you marry one. %% Life's a bitch--and then you die %% Life's a bitch. %% Life's a shit sandwich and each day you take a bigger bite. %% Life's a witch, then you fly. %% Life's but a walking shadow -- a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by idiots, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. -- William Shakespeare %% Life's little mystery: How can a two pound box of candy make you gain 5 pounds? %% Life's the same, except for the shoes. -- The Cars %% Life, as we know it, does not exist. %% Life, liberty and the happiness of pursuit! %% Life, n.: A fatal, sexually transmitted disease. %% Life. Don't talk to me about life. -- Marvin the Paranoid Anroid %% Life: another day, another dolor. -- Edward Abbey %% Lifeguards do it on the beach. %% Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has bought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. -- James Weldon Johnson %% Lifting her skirt, she revealed her treasure. The mother lode. Pretty, I thought, but is it art? -- Edward Abbey %% Light and warmth! That's necessary to all humanoids. -- Kirk, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5818.4 %% Lighten up, while you still can, Don't even try to understand, Just find a place to make your stand, And take it easy. -- The Eagles, "Taking It Easy" %% Lighthouse: A tall building on the seashore in which the government maintains a lamp and the friend of a politician. %% Lighting an object which is already lit has profound ontological implications. %% Lightning is one hell of a murder weapon -- and the best part is, it can't be traced. -- Solomon Short %% Lightning strikes the rod at the top of the Empire State Building about fifty times a year. %% Like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring; when he was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. -- William Shakespeare %% Like a steely blade in a silken sheath We don't see what their made of. They shout about love but when push comes to shove They look for things they're afraid of. And the knowledge that they fear Is a weapon to be used against them. He's not afraid of your judgment. He knows of horrors worse than your hell. He's a little bit afraid of dying, But he's a lot more afraid of your lying ... -- Neil Peart, Rush %% Like all women, she believed that rest and pleasure were bad for men. -- Fritz Leiber, "Swords and Ice Magic" %% Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Major Barbara" %% Like any writer, I'd rather be read than dead. Like any serious *author*, I'd rather be dead than not read at all. -- Edward Abbey %% Like corn in a field I cut you down, I threw the last punch way too hard, After years of going steady, well, I thought it was time, To throw in my hand for a new set of cards. And I can't take you dancing out on the weekend, I figured we'd painted too much of this town, And I tried not to look as I walked to my wagon, And I knew then I had lost what should have been found, I knew then I had lost what should have been found. And I feel like a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford I'm as low as a paid assassin is You know I'm cold as a hired sword. I'm so ashamed we can't patch it up, You know I can't think straight no more You make me feel like a bullet, honey, a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford. -- Elton John, "I Feel Like a Bullet" %% Like jumping off buildings? Henri La Mothe dove 40 feet from a building in New York City into only 12.5 inches of water into a child's wading pool in 1974. %% Like my mom always said, "When your dad dies, then we'll be in heaven." %% Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts -- there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On the other hand, I respect and envy the people who get inspiration from their religions. -- Benjamin Spock %% Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners. -- G. O. Ashley %% Like prehistoric cave dwellers, the devotees of electronic bulletin-boards and "e-mail" have struggled to find a new way to express themselves. Wall painting would not work. Words, it seems, are not enough. Inarticulate sounds cannot be displayed on screens. To make their messages feel more like personal contact, they have hit on using the punctuation marks on an ordinary keyboard in order to pull faces at each other. To read these signs, you have to put your head on your left shoulder. The basic unit is: :-) the "smiley", a standard smiling face. In context, this can mean "I'm happy to hear from you", or other pleasantries. The smiley can also wink: ;-) Of course the possibilities are endless, and they have all been posted to the net (a million times). %% Like punning, programming is a play on words. %% Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. %% Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem. -- Alan McKay %% Like the time I ran away... And turned around and you were standing close to me. -- YES (Going For The One/Awaken) %% Like winter snow on summer lawn, time past is time gone. %% Like, wow. Have a nice day, ok? %% Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you. %% Likes and dislikes are among my favourites %% Liko, you don't want to kill me. -- Troi, "Who Watches the Watchers?", stardate 43173.5 %% Limericks are art forms complex, Their topics run chiefly to sex. They usually have virgins, And masculine urgin's, And other erotic effects. %% Limitation. Success. Galling limitation must not be persevered in. %% Limited time offer, call now to insure prompt delivery. %% Line dropped from an early script of a popular Disney flick: "Didn't there used to be more than eight of us, Hungry?" %% Line printer paper is strongest at the perforations. %% Lines are coming, Blessing and fame draw near. Good fortune. %% Linguists do it cunningly. %% Linguists do it with their tongues. %% Lint is the compiler's only means of dampening the programmer's ego. %% Linus' Law: There is no heavier burden than a great potential. %% Linus: Hi! I thought it was you. I've been watching you from way off... You're looking great! Snoopy: That's nice to know. The secret of life is to look good at a distance. %% Linus: I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe we should think only about today. Charlie Brown: No, that's giving up. I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better. %% Lion Hunting: A contribution to the mathematical theory of big game hunting... The following represents a mathematical method for capturing a lion in the middle of the Sahara Desert: * The Schrodinger method. At any given moment, there is a positive probability that there is a lion in the cage. Sit down and wait. %% Lionel: What's the difference between a teacher and an engineer? Tyronne: A teacher trains minds; an engineer minds trains. %% Lions Book: n. `Source Code and Commentary on UNIX level 6', by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire source listing of the UNIX Version 6 kernel, and (2) a commentary on the source discussing the algorithms. These were circulated internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976--77, and were, for years after, the *only* detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Because Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the kernel, the Lions book was never formally published and was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early UNIX hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Lions do it with pride. %% Lions in the street and roaming, Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming, A beast caged in the heart of the city. The body of his mother lying in the summer ground, He fled the town. Went down south across the border, Left the chaos and disorder Back there, over his shoulder. One morning he awoke in a green hotel, A strange creature groaning beside him. Sweat oozed from its shiny skin. Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. -- Jim Morrison, "Celebration of the Lizard" %% Lions may not be taken to the theater in Maryland. %% Liposuction will destroy your FAT %% Lipstick on your dipstick told a tale on you, Lipstick on your dipstick said you were untrue. Bet your bottom dollar you and I are through, 'Cause lipstick on your dipstick told a tale on you. -- To the tune of "Lipstick On Your Collar" %% Liquor sellers do not drink; they hate to see you twice. %% Lisa/Bart (?): "We were fighting over who loves you more." Homer: "You were? Oh, go ahead." Lisa: "You love him more." Bart: "No, you do." Lisa: "No, you do." Bart: "No, you do." < etc. ad nauseum > -- ??, from The Simpsons %% Lisa: "Gross! Mom, Bart's taking a picture of his butt." Bart: "Yah right, like I would take a picture of my butt." -- "Homer's Night Out", from The Simpsons %% Lisa: "Mom, I'm scared." Marge: "We all are, dear, but your father says everything is all right." -- "Call of the Simpsons", from The Simpsons %% Lisa: "Wait! Members of the creative community, this could be a blessing in disguise, a chance to do away with winning and losing. If you agree with me, that competition should be a thing of the past, that we should stand together as peers then we should rip up every winning envelope. If you agree with me then stand up and applaud!" [mild applause] Homer: "See Lisa, they want to beat each other." -- Emmy Awards, from The Simpsons %% Lisp Users: Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection. %% Lisp hackers do it in cars. %% Lisp hackers do it with tail recursion. %% Lisp hackers first do it in the front, then do it in the back. %% Lisp hackers have DEFUN while doing it. %% Lisp hackers have Moby dicks. %% Lisp hackers have to be bound (to-do 'it) ... %% Lisp programmers do it between the parentheses. %% Lisp programmers do it deeper and deeper and deeper. %% Lisp programmers have to be bound to do it. %% Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine, Lisp Machine is Fun. Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine, Fun for everyone. %% List at least two alternate dates. %% List each check separately by bank number. %% List was current at time of printing. This supersedes all previous notices. This information is subject to change without notice. All rights reserved. %% Listen intently while others are arguing the problem. Pounce on a trite statement and bury them with it. %% Listen punk, in my eyes you're nothin' but a dog shit. Know what can happen to a dog shit? It can dry up and blow away in the wind, or it can get scooped up by a shovel, or it can get stepped on and squashed. So you better watch it, punk, or you're gonna end up like that third dog shit. Squashed. %% Listen to my heart beat! %% Listen to some music. %% Listen to the fools reproach! It is a kingly title! %% Listen to your heart. %% Listen to your instincts, and do the opposite. %% Listerine kills the germs that can cause bad breath. %% Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires. -- Edward Abbey %% Literature is the grindstone to sharpen the coulters, and to whet their natural faculties. -- Hammond %% Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco. -- Edward Abbey %% Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct. Now I saw that one man was to be bound by it, but the other was not, one was to obey a rule, the other was to assert an arbitrary wish -- his need -- and the law was to stand on the side of the wish. Justice was to consist of upholding the unjustifiable. -- Judge Narragansett %% Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Litt's Paradox of Deadlines: The reason for the rush is the delay conversely, the reason for the delay is the rush. %% Littering is dumb. -- Ronald Macdonald %% Little Herbie had been blind since birth. One day at bedtime, his mother told him that the next day was a very special one. If he prayed extra hard, he'd be able to see when he woke up the next morning. The next morning she came into Herbie's room and asked him if he'd prayed hard the night before. "Yes, Mommie," was his reply, "all night long!" "Well, then," she said, "open your eyes and you'll know that your prayers have been answered." Little Herbie opened his eyes, only to cry out, "Mother! Mother! I still can't see!" "I know, dear," said his mother, "April Fool." %% Little Jack Horner Sat in a Corner Eating his christmas pie He stuck in a plumb and pulled out a Thumb and said, "there's a Dead one in there...." %% Little Jack Horner Sat in a corner Eating a Christmas pie He stuck in his thumb And pulled out a plum And said "Holy smoke am I high!" %% Little Johnny is visiting the zoo with his mother. They go to the elephant exhibit, where a big old bull elephant is taking a leak. Johnny points to the pachyderm's privates and says, "Mommy, what"s that?" Mommy, seeing the huge member, turns bright red and says, "Oh, that's nothing. Never mind. Come along now." A few weeks later, Johnny is at the zoo with his father. Johnny grabs his dad by the hand, and pulls him over the elephants, saying he has a question. Once there, Johnny points to the elephant's member and says, "Daddy, what's that?" Dad replies, "Didn't your mother tell you?" "Yes, she told me it was nothing." "Well, your mom is spoiled, son." %% Little Johnny with a grin, Drank up all of daddy's gin, Mother said, when he was plastered, Go to bed, you little love-child. %% Little Martin is four years old. One day while he was pestering his mother, she said "Why don't you go across the street and watch the builders work, maybe you will learn something". Martin was gone about two hours. When he came home, his mother asked him what he had learnt. Martin replied - "Well first you put the goddamn door up. Then the son of a bitch doesn't fit so you have to take the cock sucker down. Then you have to shave a cunt hair off each side and put the mother fucker back up." Martin's mother said "Wait until your father gets home." When Martin's father got home, Martin's mum told him to ask Martin what he had learnt today. When Martin told him the whole story, dad said "Martin, go outside and get me a switch." Martin replied "Get fucked. Thats the electrician's job." %% Little Mary on the ice, Went out to have a frisk, Now wasn't little Mary nice, Her pretty *? %% Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, Eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider And bit her right in the snatch. %% Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider and sat down besider her And she squashed it with her spoon. %% Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider, and sat down beside her and said, "What ya got in the bowl bitch?" %% Little Miss Muffet Decided to rough it So she traded her curds for an Uzi; Along came a spider And sat down beside her She blew him away and said, "Scusi". %% Little Nanny Etticoat, In a white petticoat, And a red nose The longer she stands, The shorter she grows. A candle %% Little Prick and the Erector Set %% Little Red Riding Hood was walking through the woods on her way to visit her grandmother when a wolf jumped out from behind a tree. "Aha!" the wolf said, "Now I've got you, and I'm going to eat you." "Eat, eat, eat," Little Red Riding Hood said angrily, "Damn it, doesn't anybody fuck anymore?" %% Little Weiner Countries. -- President George Bush's term for Third World nations without oil %% Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk. -- Edward Abbey %% Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Little joys refresh us constantly, like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it. -- Richter %% Little known fact: Oral Roberts has a twin brother named Anal. %% Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them. -- Washington Irving %% Little miss muffet sat on her Tuffet eating her curds and weigh along came a spider and sat down beside her and she ate him also. %% Little progress can be made merely by repressing what is bad. Our great hope lies in developing what is good. %% Little rivers which run into the Nile, Juveniles. %% Little strokes fell John B. Oakes. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% Live Free Or Die!: imp. 1. The state motto of New Hampshire, which appears on that state's automobile license plates. 2. A slogan associated with UNIX in the romantic days when UNIX aficionados saw themselves as a tiny, beleaguered underground tilting against the windmills of industry. The "free" referred specifically to freedom from the {fascist} design philosophies and crufty misfeatures common on commercial operating systems. Armando Stettner, one of the early UNIX developers, used to give out fake license plates bearing this motto under a large UNIX, all in New Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now valued collector's items. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Live Free or Live in Massachusetts. %% Live Lent in the fast lane %% Live a life worthy of the things that will be said of you when you're dead. -- Ambidextrous Rex %% Live and learn... Die and forget it all. %% Live and let live. %% Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse. -- James Dean %% Live fast, die young. %% Live fast, fight hard, and have a beautiful death... %% Live free or die. %% Live from New York ... It's Saturday Night! %% Live in a world of your own, but always welcome visitors. %% Live life as though someone is writing a book about you. %% Live long and prosper. -- Spock, "Amok Time," stardate 3372.7 %% Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world -- even if what is published is not true. -- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul %% Live now--procrastinate later %% Live now. There'll be plenty of time to be dead later. %% Live so that you can at least get the benefit of the doubt. -- Kin Hubbard %% Live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so. -- Josh Billings %% Liver: A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious with. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Lives in winter, Dies in summer, And grows with its root upwards. %% Living Dead the path is chosen, to live forever is to die forever. To not know when you'll die is to find life wherever you are. -- Alagad %% Living in California is like living in a bowl of granola. What ain't flakes and nuts is fruits. %% Living in Hollywood is like living in a bowl of granola. What ain't fruits and nuts is flakes. %% Living in LA is like not having a date on Saturday night. -- Candice Bergen %% Living in New York City gives people real incentives to want things that nobody else wants. -- Andy Warhol %% Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun. %% Living poor is best left to those with no money. %% Living right doesn't really make you live longer, it just SEEMS like longer. %% Lizzie Borden took an axe, And plunged it deep into the VAX; Don't you envy people who Do all the things YOU want to do? -- Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother on 4 Aug. 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts %% Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done She gave her father forty-one! -- Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother on 4 Aug. 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts %% Lo! I am waste! %% Loan-department manager: "There isn't any fine print. At these interest rates, we don't need it." %% Lobotomy %% Lobster: Everyone loves these delectable crustaceans, but many cooks are squeamish about placing them into boiling water alive, which is the only proper method of preparing them. Frankly, the easiest way to eliminate your guilt is to establish theirs by putting them on trial before they're cooked. The fact is, lobsters are among the most ferocious predators on the sea floor, and you're helping reduce crime in the reefs. Grasp the lobster behind the head, look it right in its unmistakably guilty eyestalks and say, "Where were you on the night of the 21st?", then flourish a picture of a scallop or a sole and shout, "Perhaps this will refresh that crude neural apparatus you call a memory!" The lobster will squirm noticeably. It may even take a swipe at you with one of its claws. Incorrigible. Pop it into the pot. Justice has been served, and shortly you and your friends will be, too. -- Dave Barry, "Cooking: The Art of Using Appliances and Utensils into Excuses and Apologies" %% Local Area Network : A UHF television station that carries high school sporting events. %% Local geniuses, Paul and Bob built an engine that uses air as fuel. "But the biggest problem," says Bob, "is that we can't get it to run." %% Lockwood's Long Shot: The chances of getting eaten up by a lion on Main Street aren't one in a million, but once would be enough. %% Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law: `n+1' trivial tasks take twice as long as `n' trivial tasks. %% Logic -- an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here. You admit that? To deny the facts would be illogical, Doctor. -- Spock and McCoy, "A Piece of the Action," stardate unknown. %% Logic doesn't apply to the real world. -- Marvin Minsky %% Logic is a little bird, sitting in a tree; that smells *_____awful*. %% Logic is a little bird, sitting in a tree; that smells BAD. %% Logic is a means of CONFIDENTLY being wrong. %% Logic is a pretty flower that smells bad. %% Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. -- Mr. Spock %% Logic is like the sword -- those who appeal to it shall perish by it. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence. -- Joseph Wood Krutch %% Logic is the chastity belt of the mind! %% Logic is the soul of wit, not of wisdom; that's why wit is funny. -- Lincoln Steffens %% Logic programmers' theme song: The first cut is the deepest -- Lindsay Groves %% Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority. %% Logicians do it consistently and completely. %% Logicians have but ill defined As rational the human kind. Logic, they say, belongs to man, But let them prove it if they can. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% Loneliness is a terrible price to pay for independence. %% Lonely is a man without love. -- Englebert Humperdinck %% Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet. %% Lonesome? Like a change? Like a new job? Like excitement? Like to meet new and interesting people? JUST SCREW-UP ONE MORE TIME!!!!!!! %% Long ago I proposed that unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency be quietly hanged, as a matter of public sanitation and decorum. The sight of their grief must have a very evil effect upon the young. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "A Carnival of Buncombe" %% Long computations that yield zero are probably all for naught. %% Long life is in store for you. %% Long live the Klingon Empire. A wise decision, Captain. -- Captain K'Temoc and Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? -- Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet" %% Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care. -- Edward Abbey %% Loni Anderson's hair should be LEGALIZED!! %% Look DEEP into the OPENINGS!! Do you see any ELVES or EDSELS... or a HIGHBALL??... %% Look afar and see the end from the beginning. %% Look around. %% Look at governmental programs for the past fifty years. Every single one-- except for warfare--achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal. %% Look at it this way: MSDOS is an overgrown program loader; the MacOS is an overgrown user interface. Neither is an operating system, but the second is better for running applications. -- Paul Placeway %% Look at it this way: Your wife's spending $280 a month on meditation lessons to forget $26,000 of college education. And you're still drinking ordinary scotch? %% Look at my pustules grow! -- Captain Slarn, SLIPBACK %% Look at that stupid girl! %% Look at the camera and say "birdie". %% Look at these three words written larger than all the rest, and with special pride never written before or since -- tall words, proudly saying "We the people" .. these words and the words that follow ... must apply to everyone or they mean nothing. -- Kirk, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown %% Look back at the last year. You've done well, haven't you? Celebrate by getting drunk and consummating your self-love. %% Look back on time with kindly eyes, He doubtless did his best; How softly sinks his trembling son In human nature's west! -- Emily Dickinson %% Look before you leap. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% Look behind you! Quick!! %% Look content. Like this: "Ooo, contentment, contentment." %% Look ere ye leap. -- John Heywood %% Look into my eyes and try to forget that you have a Macy's charge card! %% Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. -- Proverbs xxxii 31-32 (The Authorized Version, 1604) %% Look not upon the wine when it is yellow, when the colour thereof shineth in the glass. It goeth in pleasantly: But in the end, it will bite like a snake, and will spread abroad poison like a basilisk. -- Proverbs xxxii 31-32 (The Douai Version, 1914) Look on my works ye mighty -- and despair!!! %% Look not upon the wine when it is yellow, when the colour thereof shineth in the glass. It goeth in pleasantly: But in the end, it will bite like a snake, and will spread abroad poison like a basilisk. -- Proverbs xxxii 31-32 (The Douai Version, 1914) Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. -- Proverbs xxxii 31-32 (The Authorized Version, 1604) %% Look on my works ye mighty -- and despair!!! %% Look out! Behind you! %% Look out! Behind you! %% Look out, it's going to slime you! %% Look over your shoulder now and then to be sure someone's following you. -- Henry Gilmer %% Look round the wrecks of play behold, Estates dismember'd, mortgaged, sold; Their owners now to jail confin'd, Show equal poverty of mind. -- Gay %% Look to be pleasantly surprised sometime around mid-May, 2023. %% Look to premature senility to save your self-respect. %% Look to your conduct and weigh the favorable signs. When everything is fulfilled, supreme good fortune comes. %% Look up WHALES in the index to Thomas, 4th ed. %% Look! A ladder! Maybe it leads to heaven, or a sandwich! %% Look! Before our very eyes, the future is becoming the past. %% Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too? -- Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox %% Lookie, lookie, here comes cookie... -- Stephen Sondheim %% Looking at postcards is better than looking at the real thing. %% Looking back, I should have pursued philosophy and history and economics and things of that sort in college more, but I didn't. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Looking for a cool one after a long, dusty ride, the drifter strode into a saloon. He sidled up to the bar, ordered shot and a beer, and settled back to enjoy his refreshment. Suddenly, a man galloped into the bar, shouting, "Run for your lives! Big Mike's comin'!" The drifter watched as most of the locals bolted for the door. Suddenly, the bar doors burst open. An enormous man, standing eight feet tall and weighing at least 400 pounds, rode in on a bull. Grabbing the drifter by the ankle, he tossed him over the bar and thundered, "Gimme a drink!" The terrified fellow handed over a bottle of whiskey, which the man guzzled in a single gulp and then shattered on the bar. The drifter stood aghast as the man stuffed the broken bottle in his mouth, munched the broken glass and smacked his lips with relish. "Can I, ah, get you another, sir?" the drifter stammered. "Naw, I gotta git," the man grunted. "Big Mike's comin'." %% Looking for true love. All major credit cards accepted. %% Looking pale? Quaff a red potion! %% Looking up is as scary as looking down. %% Lookit, I've done it their way this far and now it's my turn. I'm my own handler. Any questions? Ask me ... There's not going to be any more handler stories because I'm the handler ... I'm Doctor Spin. -- Vice President Dan Quayle responding to press reports his aides having to, in effect, 'potty train' him %% Looks like it's just us, handsome. -- Dr. Pulaski to Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Looks like its time for you to go home! %% Looks pretty good to us. It will not... affect our earnings. -- Exxon chairman Lawrence Rawl on the settlement he reached with President George Bush's Justice Department following the Exxon Valdez spill %% Loop - a method of execution no longer in vogue, except in Iran. %% Loose bits sink chips. %% Loosing is nature's way of keeping you from winning. %% Lord Dimwit's crown is here. %% Lord Falkland's Rule: When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision. %% Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light Himself. It struck him dead: and serve him right! It is the business of the wealthy man To give employment to the artisan. -- Hilaire Belloc, "Lord Finchley" %% Lord of the Disks Nine megs for the secretaries fair, Seven megs for the hackers scarce, Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs, Three megs for system source; One disk to rule them all, One disk to bind them, One disk to hold the files And in the darkness grind 'em. -- signature file of Andrew Cole, csed3cp@hatfield.ac.uk %% Lord of the Flies. %% Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them. -- Morris Udall, quoted in "Sierra", May/June 1989 %% Lord, please let me find a one-armed economist so we won't always hear 'On the other hand...' -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% Lord, the day you made a skunk, Did you act before you thunk? %% Lord, what fools these mortals be! -- William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer-Night's Dream" %% Lord, when we are wrong, make us easy to change. And when we are right, make us easy to live with. -- Peter Marshall %% Los Angeles Daily News: Have you ever had the urge to rip the tag from a pillow or mattress, despite the warning of dire penalties? Well, it's perfectly legal now - if you live in Colorado. Governor Roy Romer formalized the law by gleefully tearing a label from a pillow at his office. "I've been worrying about the mattress inspector jumping through the window for years ..." he said. %% Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1990: The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane - the one that made a 68-minute flight from California to Washington, D.C. last Tuesday - was originally called the RS-71. But when President Johnson made the first public announcement of the Blackbird during a national telecast, he called it the SR-71. So the designation was changed on 30,000 engineering drawings of the aircraft, making it officially the SR-71. If the boss says it's an SR-71, it's an SR-71. %% Los Angeles law prohibits hunting moths under a street light. %% Loses the goat with ease. No remorse. %% Losing your drivers' license is just God's way of saying "BOOGA, BOOGA!" %% Lost interest? It's so bad I've lost apathy. %% Lost ticket pays maximum rate. %% Lost: Dog. Missing right front forepaw, blind in one eye, black and white fur with patches missing. Answers to Lucky. %% Lost: gray and white female cat. Answers to electric can opener. %% Lots of comedians have people they try to mimic. I mimic my shadow. -- Steve Wright %% Lots of fellows think a home is only good to borrow money on. -- Kin Hubbard %% Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard %% Lots of girls can be had for a song. Unfortunately, it often turns out to be the wedding march. %% Lots of people drink from the wrong bottle sometimes. -- Edith Keeler, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate unknown. %% Lots of them go to the spring, but none of 'em ever drink. Footprints %% Loud burping while walking around the airport is prohibited in Halstead, Kansas. %% Louis Wu was alone in the universe, and the universe was a plaything for Louis Wu. The most important question in the universe became: Is Louis Wu satisfied with himself? -- "Ringworld" %% Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of range is sufficient. You scream and you leap. -- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld" %% Love & Rockets %% Love America - or give it back. %% Love IS what it's cracked up to be. %% Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy rather in power than use; and keep thy friend under thine own life's key; be checked for silence, but never taxed for speech. -- William Shakespeare %% Love and marriage may go together like a horse and carriage, but when was the last time you saw one of those? %% Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. %% Love at first sight is not so remarkable. It's after we've been looking at each other for years that it becomes remarkable. %% Love at first sight is one of the greatest labor-saving devices the world has ever seen. %% Love built on beauty, soon as beauty dies. -- John Donne (1572-1631), "Elegy II, The Anagram" %% Love cannot be much younger than the lust for murder. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% Love conquers all things. -- Virgil %% Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to love. -- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) %% Love cures people--both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. -- Dr. Karl Menninger %% Love demands infinitely less than friendship. -- George Jean Nathan %% Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery %% Love does not make the world go around, just up and down a bit. %% Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and brings them to a conclusion, where he who does not love, faints and lies down. -- Thomas a Kempis %% Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing. -- Edward Abbey %% Love in your heart wasn't put there to stay. Love isn't love 'til you give it away. -- Oscar Hammerstein II %% Love is a four letter word %% Love is a god Strong, free, unabounded, and as some define Fears nothing, pitieth none. -- Milton %% Love is a grave mental disease. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% Love is a matter of chemistry, but Sex is a matter of physics. %% Love is a passion which kindles honor into noble acts. -- Dryden %% Love is a poster on a post office wall, a black and white photo two inches tall, a detailed description with names and with places, a list of crimes with expressionless faces. %% Love is a rose, but you'd better not pick it. It only grows when it's on the vine %% Love is a variation of hopelessness. Love is the fire in the dragon's mouth, the sting in the scorpion's tail. %% 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. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% Love is a word, a word with a meaning, but just a word. %% Love is always open arms. With arms open you allow love to come and go as it wills, freely, for it will do so anyway. I you close your arms about love you'll find you are left only holding yourself. %% Love is an angel disguised as lust... -- Patti Smith %% Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Love is blind but desire doesn't give a good goddam. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% Love is blind, but like is just too freaked out to see straight. %% Love is blind, marriage is the eye-opener. %% Love is blond. -- Herbert Gold's mother %% Love is eating her even when she's not having her period. %% Love is grand. Divorce is twenty grand. %% Love is in the offing. Be affectionate to one who adores you. %% Love is in the offing. -- The Homicidal Maniac %% Love is just a word ... Just a word without meaning. Just a word without feeling %% Love is just a word ... Just a word without meaning Just a word without feeling And it means ...... - ##### ####### # # -# # # # # -# # # # - ##### ##### # - # # # # -# # # # # - ##### ####### # # %% Love is just for now... herpes lasts forever. %% Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. -- Bruce Lee %% Love is like age, it can not be hidden %% Love is merely madness; and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip, as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured, is that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too. -- William Shakespeare %% Love is missing someone even when they're with you %% Love is never asking why? %% Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the infinite in the finite--of the ideal made real. -- Carlyle %% Love is not enough, but it sure helps. %% Love is not in our choice, but in our fate. -- Dryden %% Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), "A Writer's Notebook" 1949 %% Love is sentimental measles. %% Love is strong as death. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned. -- Solomon's Song VIII, 6,7 %% Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions. -- Woody Allen %% Love is the answer. %% Love is the greatest power you can have as the Lord's servant. -- Sister Kikuchi %% Love is the law, love under will! %% Love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself. -- Saint Exupery %% Love is the salt of life; a higher taste It gives to pleasure, and then makes it last. -- Buckingham %% Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Love is the warm feeling you get towards someone who meets your neurotic needs. %% Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise. %% Love is when you look into your lover's eyes and see God smiling back at you. -- Solomon Short %% Love is...ten minutes of squelching noises %% Love laughs at locksmiths. %% Love letters no longer they write us, To their homes they so seldom invite us. It grieves me to say, They have learned with dismay, We can't cure their `vulva pruritus'. %% Love letters, business contracts and money due you always arrive three weeks late, whereas junk mail arrives the day it was sent. %% Love me little, love me long. -- Milton %% Love me tender, love me true. %% Love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes. %% Love means never having to say you're sorry. -- Eric Segal, "Love Story" %% Love means nothing to a tennis player. %% Love means telling you why you're sorry. %% Love not! Love not! the thing you love may change, The rosy lip may cease to smile on you, The kindly beaming eye grow cold and strange, The heart still warmly beat, and not for you. -- Mrs. Norton %% Love quickens all senses except the common. %% Love someone. Anyone. %% Love sometimes expresses itself in sacrifice. -- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3220.3 %% Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in good health is short lived, and apt to have ague fits. -- Erasmus %% Love the sea? I dote upon it - from the beach. %% Love thy neighbor -- but don't get caught. %% Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood. -- Louise Beal %% Love thy neighbor. Tune thy piano. %% Love to eat them mousies, Mousies what I love to eat. Bite they little heads off, Nibble on they tiny feet. -- Kliban %% Love turns to lust; angst turns to fire - open your heart to my flaming desire %% Love will find its way Through paths where wolves would fear to prey, And if it dares enough 'twere hard If passion met not some reward. -- Byron %% Love without irritation is just lust. %% Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be bastards. -- R. A. Dickson %% Love your enemies. It'll make 'em crazy. %% Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to. %% Love's a disease. But curable. %% Love's a matter of degrees; that's true. (That's true!) It loses it's perspective when its taken to extremes. That's why we work so hard to take that love away. %% Love's like the measles -- all the worse when it comes late in life. -- Jerrola %% Love, and a cough, are not concealed. -- Ovid %% Love, cough, and a smoke, can't be well hid. -- Poor Richard %% Love, the sole disease thou canst not cure. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Love, which proclaims thee human bids thee know a truth more lofty in thy lowliest hour than shallow glory taught to human power, "What's human is immortal!" -- Bulwer %% Love: A temporary insanity curable either by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder... It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than the patient. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Love? What is love? I want existence. -- Marriner, Enlightenment %% Loving relationships work because there is no work. %% Lowbrow, n. The kind of person who looks at Picasso and thinks of baloney. -- Leonard L. Levinson %% Lower the age of puberty. %% Lowery's Law: If it jams -- force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. %% Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There's always one more bug. %% Luck is what enabled others to get where they are. Talent is what enabled us to get to where we are. %% Luck won't last a lifetime, unless you die young, which is unlucky. %% Luck: when preparation and opportunity meet. -- Pierre E. Trudeau %% Lucky Eddie: "It is better to battle well and lose than to battle poorly and win." Hagar the horrible: "Where did you get that from?" Lucky Eddie: "This guy's tombstone." %% Lucky is he for whom the belle toils. %% Lucy: Dance, dance, dance. That is all you ever do. Can't you be serious for once? Snoopy: She is right! I think I had better think of the more important things in life! (pause) Tomorrow!! %% Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain; Awake but one, and lo, what myriads arise! Each stamps its image as the other flies. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Luminance - Title used when addressing the president of National Computer %% Luminary: One who throws light on a subject; as a reporter, by not writing about it. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Lunatic Asylum, n.: The place where optimism most flourishes. %% Lust consumes me like a fungus. %% Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions. -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% Lutheran Chemist Really Alien From Vulcan. %% Lying half buried in the mud is an old trunk, bulging with jewels. %% Lying here is a crude torch, an old branch with tar on the end. %% Lying in the corner of the room is a small brass bell. %% Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts.... It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forbearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that -- being what it is -- it falls so short of in fact and in deed. -- Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) %% Lying is your key. %% Lysistrata had a good idea. %% M-I-C K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. %% M.A.D.D.: Midgets Against Desk Drawers. %% M.M.Vault cashiers teleport any amount of gold to the next local branch. %% M: "Why don't I take you home and give you a thrill?" F: "You can't do both." %% M: [SI] pref. (on units) suff. (on numbers) See {{quantifiers}}. %% MAC user's dynamic debugging list evaluator? Never heard of that. %% MACBETH She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! %% MACHINESTS make the best screws. %% MACHO: Jogging home from a vasectomy. %% MACRO - the last half of an expression, for example: "Holy Macro!" %% MAD VAX - The Australian version %% MAFIA, n: [Acronym for Mechanized Applications in Forced Insurance Accounting.] An extensive network with many on-line and offshore subsystems running under OS, DOS, and IOS. MAFIA documentation is rather scanty, and the MAFIA sales office exhibits that testy reluctance to bona fide inquiries which is the hallmark of so many DP operations. From the little that has seeped out, it would appear that MAFIA operates under a non-standard protocol, OMERTA, a tight-lipped variant of SNA, in which extended handshakes also perform complex security functions. The known timesharing aspects of MAFIA point to a more than usually autocratic operating system. Screen prompts carry an imperative, nonrefusable weighting (most menus offer simple YES/YES options, defaulting to YES) that precludes indifference or delay. Uniquely, all editing under MAFIA is performed centrally, using a powerful rubout feature capable of erasing files, filors, filees, and entire nodal aggravations. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" %% MAGIC adj. 1. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain. (Arthur C. Clarke once said that magic was as-yet-not-understood science.) "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits." "This routine magically computes the parity of an eight-bit byte in three instructions." 2. (Stanford) A feature not generally publicized which allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled. Example: The keyboard commands which override the screen-hiding features. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MAGICIANS are quicker than the eye. %% MAGTAPES ROASTING ON AN OPEN FIRE, DECTAPES LYING ON THE FLOOR, ALL NASTY FILES BEING THROWN ON A PYRE AND OPS.SAV'S AROUND NO MORE EVERYBODY KNEW A TAPE SEARCH WOULD BE DRAWING NEAR, TRIED TO GET THEIR TAPES FROM W A C C C BUT BIG EGP, WITH A SMILE EAR TO EAR, REFUSED TO GIVE THE DECTAPES BACK THEY KNEW THAT DOOM WAS ON ITS WAY THEY'RE LOSING 'TEST' AND OTHER GOODIES ON THIS DAY, AND EVERY UFD THAT ISN'T NICE, WILL BE DELETED ONCE... ...OR MAYBE EVEN TWICE! SO WE'RE OFFERING THIS SIMPLE SONG TO ALL KIDS WHO LIKE TO HACK ONLY DO WHAT'S RIGHT...DON'T GET CAUGHT DOING WRONG MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM W A C C C. %% MAID'S DAY OFF Thurs. Hers %% MAIDEN AUNT: A girl who never had the sense to say "uncle." %% MAINTENANCE MEN sweep 'em off their feet. %% MALE: Life support system for a cock. %% MALEK'S LAW: The simpler and more straightforward a concept, the longer and more complex the documentation. %% MALLERY'S ENGINEERING TRUISM: After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found on the bench. %% MALPRACTICE: The reason surgeons wear masks. %% MANAGEMENT: The art of getting other people to do all the work. %% MANAGER: A man known for giving great meeting. %% MANAGERS supervise others. %% MANIC-DEPRESSIVE: Easy glum, easy glow. %% MARCH ON WITH IBM Verse: The fame of IBM Spreads across the seven seas, Our standards fly aloft, Proudly waving in the breeze, With T. J. Watson guiding us we lead throughout the world, For peace and trade our banners are unfurled - unfurled. Chorus: March on with IBM We lead the way, Onward we'll ever go, In strong array; Our thousands to the fore, Nothing can stem, Our march forevermore, With IBM. March on with IBM Work hand in hand, Stout hearted men go forth, In every land; Our flags on every shore, We march with them, On high forevermore, For IBM. A note on sources: these lyrics were from the liner notes to a record distributed by Advanced Computer Techniques (ACT) Corporation at the Western Joint Computer Conference circa 1960-62. %% MARGINAL adj. 1. Extremely small. "A marginal increase in core can decrease GC time drastically." 2. Of extremely small merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability of winning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it crapped out." 4. MARGINALLY: adv. Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MARKETING REPs do it on commission %% MARRIAGE: The evil aye. %% MARTIN'S MAXIM: In a surplus labor economy, the squeaky wheel does not get greased, it get's replaced. %% MARY LINDSAY: "You look nice and cool Yogi." YOGI BERRA: "You don't look so hot yourself." %% MASTURBATION...the human version of AUTOEXEC.BAT. %% MATHEMATICAL MODEL - 46-26-38 MATHEMATICAL CHECK - the renumeration received by a mathematical model %% MATILDA'S LAW OF SUB-COMMITTEE FORMATION: If you leave the room, you're elected. %% MATURE: Adjective used to describe anything that nobody uses anymore. %% MAZDICK'S FIRST LAW OF SCIENCE: Only someone who understands something completely can explain it so no one else can understand it at all. %% MCGOWAN'S MADISON AVENUE AXIOM: If it's advertised for "less than $100," you can bet it will cost $99.95. %% MEETINGS: A place where minutes are kept and hours are lost. %% MEETS QUALITY STANDARDS: ours, not yours %% MEGO: /me'goh/ or /mee'goh/ [`My Eyes Glaze Over', often `Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over', attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also `MEGO factor'. 1. n. A {handwave} intended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because the listener does not want to admit to not understanding what is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and contains a high proportion of {TLA}s. 2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics. 3. Among non-hackers this term often refers not to behavior that causes the eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which may be triggered by the mere threat of technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MEMO: An interoffice communication too often written more for the benefit of the person who sends it than the person who receives it. %% MEMORY DUMP - amnesia %% MEMORY: A component of a computer that holds data. Sometimes it doesn't. Amount present in a given system is calculated in a manner similar to REGISTERS (see). REGISTER: A part of a computer's processor that holds information for a while. Number of registers in a given system is N-3 where N is the number needed to efficiently implement a function. %% MEMORY: A component of a computer that holds data. Sometimes it doesn't. Amount present in a given system is calculated in a manner similar to REGISTERS (see). %% MENAGE A TROIS: Using both hands to masturbate. %% MERYL STREEP is my obstetrician! %% MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED -- The Pershing II missiles have been launched. %% METEOROLOGIST: A man who can look in a woman's eyes and predict whether. %% METHODOLOGICALLY UNSOUND: Using methodology with which I am unfamiliar. %% MEYER'S 3rd LAW: It is simple to make things complex, but complex to make things simple. %% MFTL: /M-F-T-L/ [abbreviation: `My Favorite Toy Language'] 1. adj. Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on the syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g., type systems), but rarely, if ever, has any content (see {content-free}). More broadly applied to talks --- even when the topic is not a programming language --- in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL talk". 2. n. Describes a language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of prosyletic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. "He cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL." The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it in itself. Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is "Has it been used for anything besides its own compiler?". On the other hand, a language that *cannot* be used to write its own compiler is beneath contempt. See {break-even point}. (On a related note, Dennis Ritchie has proposed a test of the generality and utility of a language and the operating system under which it is compiled: "Is the output of a program compiled under the language acceptable as input to the compiler?" In other words, can you write programs which write programs? (see {toolsmith}) Alarming numbers of (language, OS) pairs fail this test, particularly when the language is Fortran; Ritchie is quick to point out that {UNIX} (even using Fortran) passes it handily. That the test could ever be failed is only surprising to those who have had the good fortune to have worked only under modern systems which lack OS-supported and -imposed "file types".) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MICRO: Thinker toys. %% MICROFICHE n, Plankton. %% MICROSECOND - the amount of time required for a program to hang up %% MICROTAPE n. Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a MACROTAPE. This was the official DEC term for the stuff until someone consed up the word "DECtape". -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MIDAS' LAW: Everything the government touches turns to mold. %% MILKMEN deliver twice a week %% MILLIONAIRES pay to have it done. %% MINERS sink deeper shafts. %% MINISTERS do it on Sundays. %% MIPS, n. Acronym for "Meaningless Indications of Processor Speed" -- Courtesy of Mike Werner %% MIPS: /mips/ [abbreviation] n. 1. A measure of computing speed; formally, `Million Instructions Per Second' (that's 10^6 per second, not 2^(20)!); often rendered by hackers as `Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in other unflattering ways. This joke expresses a nearly universal attitude about the value of most {benchmark} claims, said attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers and {marketroid}s. The singular is sometimes `1 MIP' even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also {KIPS} and {GIPS}. 2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of {computron}s. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the basement." 3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among other things, they designed the processor chips used in DEC's 3100 workstation series. 4. Acronym for `Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, prob. from sense 1). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MIRACLE -- something that never happens in our generation. %% MIS Definition of an Elegant Frankfurter? A "haute" dog! %% MISFEATURE n. A feature which eventually screws someone, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation which has evolved. It is not the same as a bug because fixing it involves a gross philosophical change to the structure of the system involved. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because a tradeoff was made whose parameters subsequently changed (possibly only in the judgment of the implementors). "Well, yeah, it's kind of a misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but we're stuck with it for now." %% MISSILEMEN have better thrust. %% MISTRESS: Something between a mister and a mattress. %% MMM-MM!! So THIS is BIO-NEBULATION! %% MOBY [seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago. Entered the world of AI with the Fabritek 256K moby memory of MIT-AI. Derived from Melville's "Moby Dick" (some say from "Moby Pickle").] 1. adj. Large, immense, or complex. "A moby frob." 2. n. The maximum address space of a machine, hence 3. n. 256K words, the size of a PDP-10 moby. (The maximum address space means the maximum normally addressable space, as opposed to the amount of physical memory a machine can have. Thus the MIT PDP-10s each have two mobies, usually referred to as the "low moby" (0-777777) and "high moby" (1000000-1777777), or as "moby 0" and "moby 1". MIT-AI has four mobies of address space: moby 2 is the PDP-6 memory, and moby 3 the PDP-11 interface.) In this sense "moby" is often used as a generic unit of either address space (18. bits' worth) or of memory (about a megabyte, or 9/8 megabyte (if one accounts for difference between 32.- and 36.-bit words), or 5/4 megacharacters). 4. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent hacker. "So, moby Knight, how's the CONS machine doing?" 5. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in "moby sixes", "moby ones", etc. MOBY FOO, MOBY WIN, MOBY LOSS: standard emphatic forms. FOBY MOO: a spoonerism due to Greenblatt. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MOCK APPLE PIE (No Apples Needed) Pastry to two crust 9-inch pie 36 RITZ Crackers 2 cups water 2 cups sugar 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 2 tablespoons lemon juice Grated rind of one lemon Butter or margarine Cinnamon 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. -- Found lurking on a Ritz Crackers box %% MODE n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." Usage: in its jargon sense, MODE is most often said of people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. "If you're on a TTY, E will switch to non-display mode." In particular, see DAY MODE, NIGHT MODE, and YOYO MODE; also COM MODE, TALK MODE, and GABRIEL MODE. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MODELS do it in any position. %% MODEM MANUFACTURERS do it with all sorts of characters %% MODESTY: Being comfortable that others will discover your greatness. %% MOMENTUM: What you give a person when they are going away. %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY (MGM/UA). Michael J. Fox is a Manhattan yuppie who worries about his identity while wearing $400 suits and driving his new BMW. This is about as gritty as Fox ever gets." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "BUCKEYE AND BLUE (Academy). Two spoiled teen-agers from the New York Academy for the Performing Arts prance around in Civil War duds and say `Yup,' `Nope,' and `Ah reckon.' This really sucks." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "E.T. (MCA). I met him at the Video Software Dealers Association Convention in Las Vegas. Helluva sweet guy." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "FUNNY FARM (Warners). A lot of good things have gotten screwed up during the 80s. Chevy Chase isn't one of them -- he stopped being funny in 1977!" %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "JUNGLE HEAT (Interglobal). Lovable, obscenity-spewing Peter Fonda teams up with frigid, hard-working Deborah Raffin to track down a homicidal, gooey 'lost tribe' who look like midget Sons of Kong on bad Electric Kool-Aid." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "MICHAEL JACKSON'S MOONWALKER (CMV). As SCTV would say, `Stay tuned for THE MAKING OF MICHAEL JACKSON'S MOONWALKER, followed by THE MAKING OF THE MAKING OF MICHAEL JACKSON'S MOONWALKER.'" %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "PHANTASM II (MCA). To make up for featuring The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) for about ten minutes, this languid sequel spotlights some fairly graphic nudity. Problem is you're never really sure if the androgynous actor in question is a man or a woman, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "PROMISED LAND (Vestron). Kiefer Sutherland, Meg Ryan, and Tracy Pollan. And they all look alike. And they're all made of ticky-tacky." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "REDNECK ZOMBIES (TransWorld). Ad states `Slobbering hillbillies drink some radioactive brewsky and become cannibal kinfolk from Hell!' Personally, I would reflect long and hard before renting any movie that was shot in `entrail-vision.'" %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "SCAVENGERS (Academy). As far as films featuring stuntment driving motorcycles out of airplanes goes, this is one of the best." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "SLIPPING INTO DARKNESS (Virgin). `Thrilling action occurs when small-town girls seeking big-time excitement accidentally kill a young boy and must escape the vengeance of his biker buddies.' You meet the nicest people on a Honda." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "STARRING TOM AND JERRY! (MGM/UA). The cartoon adventures of a hyper-active cat and an anally retentive mouse. For some reason, Simon and Garfunkle originally recorded under this name!" %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (MGM/UA) 1957. Over-achieving gluttony, excessive sex, and inebriation among powerful Manhattan entertainment columnists. Why don't I ever get invited to these parties?" %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "THE FEAR CHAMBER (Republic). Boris Karloff and his daughter discover a super-intelligent, subterranean rock that can only survive on the blood of terrified human beings. Apparently the rock plans to conquer the world, though it spends most of its time watching bad topless dancing." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "THE GHOUL (Sinister Cinema) 1933. Boris Karloff, correctly sensing that his indifferent relatives, his corrupt accountant, and his slavishly persnickety butler are all going to steal his estate blind, comes back from the grave and scares the whoozits out of the greedy fuckers." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "THE NEW ADVENTURES OF PIPPI LONGSTOCKING (Columbia). For unfathomable reasons, these Pippi movies have a fanatical following among the New York punk underground. You figure it out." %% MONDO VIDEO with Prof. Fred Hopkins: "YOUNG GUNS (Vestron). Big-budget misfire stars Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen and two others as Hollywood drugstore outlaws. If you made one of them a construction worker and another an Indian, they'd be The Village People!" %% MONOTONY: Marriage to one woman at a time. %% MONTANA: Where men are men and women are sheep. %% MOON n. 1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to hackers. See PHASE OF THE MOON. 2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MORE PEOPLE DIED AT CHAPPAQUIDIK THAN AT 3-MILE ISLAND %% MORLEY'S LAW: Things go right long enough to lull you into a false sense of security, then they go totally wrong. %% MOTAS: /moh-toz/ [USENET: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MOTHER: Half a word. %% MOTORCYCLISTS like something hot between their legs. %% MOTOS: /moh-tohs/ [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET: Member Of The Opposite Sex] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which have largely displaced it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MOTSS: /mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET, Member Of The Same Sex] n. Esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues newsgroup on USENET is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS}, which derive from it. Also see {SO}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING %% MOVIE STARS do it on film. %% MR. COOPER'S LAW: If you do not understand a word in a piece of technical writing, ignore it, the piece will make perfect sense without it. %% MRS. WEILER'S LAW: Anything is edible if it is chopped finely enough. %% MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s. -- Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985) %% MS-DOS must die! %% MS-DOS: Just say NO! %% MS-DOS:: /M-S-dos/ [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] n. A {clone} of {{CP/M}} for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson, who is said to have regretted it ever since. Numerous features, including vaguely UNIX-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name further annoys those who know what the term {operating system} does (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}, {ill-behaved}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MTV is the lava lamp of the 1980s. -- Doug Ferrari %% MTV: Chewing gum for the eyes. %% MUD: /muhd/ [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. n. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD (see {hack-and-slay}). The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding', etc. Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game still exist today (see {BartleMUD}). There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false --- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in PD in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth. Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that USENET feeds have been spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there. AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of USENET in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition. In 1991, over 50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue. The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. There is now (early 1991) a move afoot to deprecate the term {MUD} itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. See also {BartleMUD}, {berserking}, {bonk/oif}, {brand brand brand}, {FOD}, {hack-and-slay}, {link-dead}, {mudhead}, {posing}, {talk mode}, {tinycrud}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% MUDDLE is written in TECO! %% MULTICS MAN!!!! With his power ring PL-1, backed by the mighty resources of the powerful H-6880, his faithful sidekick, the Fso Eagle, and his trusted gang: "The System Daemons", he fights a never ending battle for truth, security, and the Honeywell Way! -- T Kenney %% MUMBLE interj. 1. Said when the correct response is either too complicated to enunciate or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a big long discussion. "Well, mumble." 2. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement. "I think we should buy it." "Mumble!" Common variant: MUMBLE FROTZ. 3. Yet another metasyntactic variable, like FOO. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MUMMY: An Egyptian who was pressed for time. %% MUNCHING SQUARES n. A display hack dating back to the PDP-1, which employs a trivial computation (involving XOR'ing of x-y display coordinates - see HAKMEM items 146-148) to produce an impressive display of moving, growing, and shrinking squares. The hack usually has a parameter (usually taken from toggle switches) which when well-chosen can produce amazing effects. Some of these, discovered recently on the LISP machine, have been christened MUNCHING TRIANGLES, MUNCHING W'S, and MUNCHING MAZES. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MUNG (variant: MUNGE) [recursive acronym for Mung Until No Good] v. 1. To make changes to a file, often large-scale, usually irrevocable. Occasionally accidental. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% MURPHEY'S ITERATION: There is no limit to how bad things can get. %% MURPHEY'S LAW FOR THE GOVERNMENT: If anything can go wrong, it will...in triplicate. %% MURPHEY'S LITTLE KNOWN SECOND LAW: If everything must go wrong, don't bet on it. %% MURPHEY'S PARADOX: Doing it the hard way is always easier. %% MURPHEY'S REAL LAW: Don't mess with Mrs. Murphy. %% MURPHY'S FOURTH LAW If there are several things that can go wrong at once, the thing that will do the most damage, will %% MURPHY'S LAW Corollary 10 Mother nature is a bitch. %% MURPHY'S LAW Corollary 4 If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly develop %% MURPHY'S LAW Corollary 6 Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first. %% MURPHY'S LAW Corollary 7 Every solution breeds new problems. %% MURPHY'S LAW Corollary 8 It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. %% MURRAY'S LAW: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut %% MW Malfunction Whenever %% MY OTHER CAR IS A REAL OTA %% MY income is ALL disposable! %% Ma Bell runs a baudy house. %% MacPHERSON'S LAW OF ENTROPY: It requires more energy to remove an object from it's proper place than to put it back. %% Macaluso's Doctrine: You've never been as sick as just before you stop breathing. %% Macaw - what I have trouble starting on a cold morning. %% Macbeth.--If we should fail -- Lady Macbeth.--We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place, And we'll not fail. -- William Shakespeare %% Mace: A staff of office signifying authority. Its form, that of a heavy club, indicates its original purpose and use in dissuading from dissent. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Machination: The method employed by one's opponents in baffling one's open and honorable efforts to do the right thing. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Machine-Independent, adj.: Does not run on any existing machine. %% Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games -- but not with pleasure. -- Leo Rosten %% Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. -- Andy Warhol %% Machines should work. People should think. -- IBM motto %% Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -- Alan Turing %% Machines that have broken down will work perfectly when the repairman arrives. %% Macho does not prove mucho. -- Zsa Zsa Gabor %% Macintoy: /mak'in-toy/ n. The Apple Macintosh, considered as a {toy}. Less pejorative than {Macintrash}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Macintrash: /mak'in-trash`/ n. The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from the *real computer* by the interface. The term {maggotbox} has been reported in regular use in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Compare {Macintoy}. See also {beige toaster}, {WIMP environment}, {point-and-drool interface}, {drool-proof paper}, {user-friendly}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Macomb, Illinois, law makes it illegal for a car to impersonate a wolf. %% Macro : A tasty saltwater fish. %% Mad, adj.: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence ... -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Madam, I may be drunk, but you're ugly, and in the morning I'LL be sober. %% Madam, have you ever considered a career in security. If it's anything like baby-sitting, I'm an authority. -- Worf and Brenna O'dell, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child -- if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender. -- W. C. Fields %% Made by HONG KONG NOODLE COMPANY %% Madison's Inquiry: If you have to travel on the Titanic, why not go first class? %% Madness has no purpose. Or reason. But it may have a goal. -- Spock, "The Alternative Factor," stardate 3088.7 %% Madness takes its toll. %% Madness, we fancy, gave an ill-timed birth To grinning laughter and to frantic mirth. -- Prior %% Magary's Principle: When there is a public outcry to cut deadwood and fat from any government bureaucracy, it is the deadwood and the fat that do the cutting, and the public's services are cut. %% Magic is always the best solution -- especially reliable magic. %% Magic is everywhere! %% Magic is real (unless declared integer). -- Wiz Zumwalt %% Magic users have crystal balls %% Magicians do it with rabbits. %% Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet. 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Magnocartic, adj.: Any automobile that, when left unattended, attracts shopping carts. -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends" %% Magpie, n.: A bird whose theivish disposition suggested to someone that it might be taught to talk. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Maiden, n. A young person of the unfair sex addicted to clewless conduct and views that madden to crime. The genus has a wide geographical distribution, being found wherever sought and deplored wherever found. The maiden is not altogether unpleasing to the eye, nor (without her piano and her views) insupportable to the ear, though in respect to comeliness distinctly inferior to the rainbow, and, with regard to the part of her that is audible, beaten out of the field by the canary -- which, also, is more portable. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Maier's Law: If the facts don't 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. %% Main Article of General Systems Faith: the order of the empirical world itself has an order which might be called order of the second degree. -- Boulding %% Main's Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite government program. %% Maine state law forbids whistling on Sunday. %% Maintain eternal vigilance, small squishy thing, and kill anything that threatens. -- Viver farewell saying %% Maintainer's Motto: If we can't fix it, it ain't broke. %% Maintenance mode activated. All users will be terminated. %% Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds. Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds. Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. Hence the logic of adding manpower to a late project, or to any project for that matter. %% Major actions are rarely decided by more than four people. If you think a larger meeting you're attending is really "hammering out" a decision, you're probably wrong. Either the decision was agreed to by a smaller group before the meeting began, or the outcome of the larger meeting will be modified later when three or four people get together. -- Charles Wolf, Jr. %% Major changes in construction will always be requested after fabrication is nearly complete. %% Major premise: Sixty men can do sixty times as much work as one man. Minor premise: A man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds. Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. Secondary Conclusion: Do you realize how many holes there would be if people would just take the time to take the dirt out of them? %% Majorettes do it with guns in their hands %% Majorities, of course, start with minorities. -- Robert Moses %% Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law. %% Make a clean break. %% Make a present to yourself. Make a friend. %% Make a promise to yourself. %% Make a wish, it might come true. %% Make a wish, it might come true. If it does, you'll wish it hadn't. %% Make hay while the sun shines. %% Make headway at work. Continue to let things deteriorate at home. %% Make input easy to proofread. %% Make it do ... Or do without. %% Make it myself? But I'm a physical organic chemist! %% Make it possible to write programs in English and you will quickly discover that programmers do not know how to write in English. %% Make it right before you make it faster. %% Make it so. -- Geordi, "Angel One", stardate 41636.9 %% Make it sufficiently difficult for people to do something, and most people will stop doing it. -- Robert Sommer %% Make like a Tom and Cruise. %% Make like a bottom and split. %% Make like a drum and beat it! %% Make like a shepherd and get the flock out of here. %% Make like a tree and leave. %% Make love, not war. %% Make me look like LINDA RONSTADT again!! %% Make money, not war. -- slogan popular in libertarian circles in the early 70s %% Make new friends but keep the old ones; One is silver and the other's gold. %% Make no laws whatever concerning speech and, speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license;" and they will define and define freedom out of existence. -- Voltarine de Cleyre (1866-1912) %% Make no little plans; thay have no magic to stir men's blood. -- Daniel Hudson Burnham %% Make no mistake about it, this president is in charge. He is in touch. -- Vice President George Bush, on Ronald W. Reagan %% Make other people like themselves a little better and rest assured they'll like you very much. %% Make somebody happy and become a ridiculous frog! %% Make somebody happy and die! %% Make somebody happy. Mind your own business. %% Make sure all variables are initialized before use. %% Make sure comments and code agree. %% Make sure your code "does nothing" gracefully. %% Make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes. %% Make the most of an uncertain future. Enjoy yourself today. Tomorrow may never come at all. -- Trelane, "The Squire of Gothos," stardate 2125.7 %% Make the most of the day, by determining to spend it on two sort of acquaintances only -- those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something may be learned. -- Colton %% Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Make the world a better place and stick a needle in your nose. %% Make this evening a memorable one. %% Make your enemies by choice, not by accident. The same applies to friends. -- Xavier R. Quinton %% Make your own Chtorran joke: Q. ____________________________________________? A. Lunch %% Make your words sweet and tender for tomorrow you may have to eat them. %% Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% Making a Bussard ramjet was no task for primitives. -- "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Making files is easy under the UNIX operating system. Therefore, users tend to create numerous files using large amounts of file space. It has been said that the only standard thing about all UNIX systems is the message-of-the-day telling users to clean up their files. -- System V.2 administrator's guide %% Making progress with the horns is permissible Only for the purpose of punishing one's own city. To be conscious of danger brings good fortune. No blame. Perseverance brings humiliation. %% Male zebras have white stripes, but female zebras have black stripes. %% Male, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Malefactor: The chief factor in the progress of the human race. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Malek's Law: Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way. %% Malpractice makes malperfect. -- Solomon Short %% Mama mia, that's a spicy meatball! %% Mama told me there'd be years like these. %% Mammon has enriched his thousands, and has damned his ten thousands. -- South %% Man 1: Ask me the what the most important thing about telling a good joke is. Man 2: OK, what is the most impo--- Man 1: ______TIMING! %% Man TRAPPED IN ELEVATOR with RICH ROSEN -- EATS OWN FOOT %% Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter. %% Man and wife make one fool. %% Man belongs wherever he wants to go. -- Wernher von Braun %% Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Man can live without air for seconds, without water for days, without food for weeks, and without ideas for years. %% Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on this earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons -- a process of thought. >From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man -- the function of his reasoning mind. -- Howard Roark %% Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them. -- Adlai Stevenson %% Man does work for profit in order to enjoy pain; but in a positive sense, he works to enjoy the excitement and meaning that achievement provides for his own psychological growth and thereby his happiness. -- Frederick Herzberg %% Man flogging a dead horse has traits of sadism, necrophilia and bestiality. %% Man had achieved FREEDOM FROM -- without yet having achieved FREEDOM TO -- to be himself, to be productive, to be fully awake. -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock. -- Alvin Toffler %% Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality -- not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute. -- John Galt %% Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice -- and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man -- by choice; he has to hold his life as a value -- by choice; he has to learn to sustain it -- by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues -- by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. -- John Galt %% Man has his will. Woman has her won't! %% Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. -- Albert Schweitzer %% Man has made his bedlam; let him lie in it. -- Fred Allen %% Man has never reconciled himself to the ten commandments. %% Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain. -- Lily Tomlin %% Man is a blind, witless, low-brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. -- Ian McHarg %% Man is a military animal, Glories in gunpowder, and loves parade. -- P. J. Bailey %% Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Man is a thinking being, whether he will or no; all he can do is to turn his thoughts the best way. -- Sir W. Temple %% Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this-- no dog exchanges bones with another. -- Adam Smith (1723-1790) %% Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward. -- Job v, 7 %% Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. -- Blaise Pascal, "Pensees", 1670 %% Man is by nature a political animal. -- Aristotle %% Man is by nature metaphysical and proud. He has gone so far as to think that the idealistic creations of his mind, which correspond to his feelings, also represent reality. -- Claude Bernard %% Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) %% Man is demolishing nature ... We are killing things that keep us alive. -- Thor Heyerdahl %% Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits... For my part I would as soon be descended from [a] baboon ... as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies ... treats his wives like slaves ... and is haunted by the grossest suspicions. -- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) %% Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God's command ... From the standpoint of the Church, which represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% Man is nature's sole mistake. -- William S. Gilbert (1836-1911) %% Man is not just a biological unit that you can patch together. -- McCoy, "The Changeling," stardate 3541.9 %% Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. -- Wernher von Braun %% Man is the lowest cost, 150 pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass produced by unskilled labor. -- A 1965 NASA, man-in-space report %% Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not. -- Protagoras of Adera (481-411 B.C.)? %% Man is the only animal that blushes--or needs to. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality. -- William Ernest Hocking %% Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not the only one that deserves to be laughed at? -- Grenville %% Man is ultimately superior to any mechanical device. -- Kirk, "The Corbomite Maneuver," stardate 1514.0 %% Man know thyself! All writing centers there. -- Young %% Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God never will. -- William Cowper (1731-1800) %% Man must accept responsibility for himself ... There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers. %% Man must shape his tools lest they shape him. -- Arthur R. Miller %% Man never fastened one end of a chain around the neck of his brother, that God's own hand did not fasten around the neck of the oppressor. -- Lamartine %% Man proposes, God disposes. -- Thomas a Kempis %% Man shall never reach his full capacity while chained to the earth. We must take wing and conquer the heavens. -- Icarus %% Man there's an opera out on turnpike and a ballet being fought out in the alley %% Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it is an enemy. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Man was created to complete the horse. -- Edward Abbey %% Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Man who arrives at party two hours late will probably find he has been beaten to the punch. %% Man who dance in crowded ballroom dance cheek to cheek with woman behind him. %% Man who falls in blast furnace is certain to feel overwrought. %% Man who falls in vat of molten optical glass makes spectacle of self. %% Man who get hit by car,get that run down feeling %% Man who keep money in jockstrap has financial matters all balled up. %% Man who sleep in beer keg wake up stickey. %% Man will never fly. Space travel is merely a dream. All aspirin is alike. %% Man with athletic finger make broad jump. %% Man year: 730 people working feverishly until noon. %% Man's a kind of missing link. Fondly thinking he can think. -- Piet Hein %% Man's character is his fate. -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) %% Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat--planet Earth--could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama--soap opera with literary trimmings. -- Edward Abbey %% Man's greatest inventions are few... Though pundits are prone to rate two As virtually clever-- The wheel and the lever-- More essential by far is the screw! %% Man's horizons are bounded by his vision. %% Man's lust for a bust is hardly recent, Some say not even indecent. But if you lust, It's a must! %% Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch -- or build a cyclotron -- without a knowledge of his aim and the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. -- John Galt %% Man's reach must exceed his grasp, for why else the heavens? %% Man's rich with little, were his judgment true; Nature is frugal, and her wants are few; These few wants, answer'd bring sincere delights; But fools create themselves new appetites. -- Young %% Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in. -- Sydney J. Harris %% Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish -- man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish -- man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish -- man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom -- by instinct. -- Ayn Rand %% Man, in the unsearchable darkness, knoweth one thing That as he is, so was he made; and if the Essence And characteristic faculty of humanity Is our conscient Reason and our desire of knowledge That was Nature's Purpose in the making of man. -- Robert Bridges %% Man, n.: 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Man-machine identity is achieved not by attributing human attributes to the machine, but by attributing mechanical limitations to man. %% Man: "Table for 4, please" Maitre d: "Do you have reservations, sir?" Man: "Yes, we do. But we thought we'd try your place anyhow." %% Management directs and controls change. -- Thomas L. Martin %% Management is incapable of recognizing a true crisis. -- Gene Franklin %% Management reaction test: 1) You are making a presentation to the corporate executives in the plushest office you've ever seen. The lunch you had creates severe pressure. You lose control and break wind, causing the glass bookcase doors to shatter and a secretary to pass out. YOU SHOULD: a) Offer to come back next week when the smell has dissipated. b) Point to the Chief Executive and say "Why did you do that?". c) Challenge anyone in the room to do better. 2) 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. 3) You have just returned from a trip to Green Bay, Wisconsin. You 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. b) Ask what position she played. c) Ask if she is still working the streets. 4) You have prepared a proposal for your boss. The success of this proposal will mean a 20% salary increase. In the middle of your proposal your boss leans over to look at your report and spits into your coffee. You: a) Tell him you take your coffee black. b) Ask him if he has any communicable diseases. c) Show him who's in command; promptly take a leak in his "In" basket. %% Management will select actions or events and convert them to crises. It will then over-react. -- Gene Franklin %% Management's biggest problem is all the unemployed people on the payroll. %% Managers do it by delegation. %% Managers make others do it. %% Managing change and innovation. %% Mandrell: "You know what I think?" Doctor: "Ah, ah that's a catch question. With a brain your size you don't think, right?" -- Dr. Who %% Mandy Torpedoes %% Manicheism: The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight, the Persians joined the victorious Opposition. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Manifestation of holding together. In the hunt the king uses beaters on three sides only And foregoes game that runs off in front. The citizens need no warning. Good fortune. %% Mankind -- ready to kill. That's the way it was in 1881. I wonder how humanity managed to survive? We overcame our instinct for violence. -- Spock and Kirk, "Spectre of the Gun," stardate 4385.3 %% Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must also resign yourself to seeing others also happy. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Mankind has no need for gods. We find the One quite adequate. -- Kirk, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts. -- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) %% Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. -- Plotinus %% Mankind is the only one of God's creatures who will foul his own nest. -- Mildred Martin %% Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% Mankind would be vastly poorer if it had not been for men who were willing to take risks against the longest odds. Even if it could be done, we would be foolish to try to stamp out this willingness in man to buck seemingly hopeless odds. Our problem is how to remain properly venturesome and experimental without making fools of ourselves. -- Bernard Baruch %% Mankind's struggle upwards, in which millions are trampled to death, that thousands may mount on their bodies. -- Clara Lucas Balfour %% 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" %% Manly's Maxim: Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. %% Manny Happeereeturns %% Manny, Moe, and Jack. They know what I'm after. %% 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 %% Manual? ... What manual ?!? This is Unix, My son, You just GOTTA Know!!! %% Manufacturer's specifications of performance should be multiplied by a factor of 0.5. %% Many Myths are based on truth. -- Spock, "The Way to Eden," stardate 5832.3 %% Many a bachelor feels the need to insert his masculinity. %% Many a bum show has been saved by the flag. -- George M. Cohan %% Many a family tree needs trimming. %% Many a girl at loose ends is anxious to be tied up. %% Many a man gets to the top of the ladder, and then finds out it has been leaning against the wrong wall. %% Many a man that can't direct you to a corner drugstore will get a respectful hearing when age has further impaired his mind. -- Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) %% Many a man who thinks he's going on a maiden voyage with a woman finds out later that it was just a shake-down cruise. %% Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant. -- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) %% Many a wife thinks her husband is the world's greatest lover. But she can never catch him at it. %% Many a woman hasn't realized that she was raped until the check bounced. %% Many a writer seems to thing he is never profound except when he can't understand his own meaning. -- George D. Prentice %% Many alligators will be slain, but the swamp will remain. %% Many an optimist has become rich by buying out a pessimist %% Many are called, but few are chosen. %% Many are called, few are chosen. Fewer still get to do the choosing. %% Many are called, few volunteer. %% Many are cold, but few are frozen. %% Many are prone to garnish the graves of past prophets and mentally stone living prophets. -- Spencer W. Kimball %% Many books require no thought from those who read them, for a very simple reason--they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. -- Colton %% Many changes of mind and mood; do not hesitate too long. %% Many empty Coke bottles are here. Alas, they can't hold water. %% Many hands make light work. -- John Heywood %% Many journeys end here, But the secret's told the same. Life is just a candle And a dream must give it flame. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% Many live by their wits but few by their wit. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Many live by their wits but few by their wit. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter (On the other hand, the witty man merely says what you would have said if you had thought of it.) %% Many mental processes admit of being roughly measured. For instance, the degree to which people are bored, by counting the number of their fidgets. I not infrequently tried this method at the meetings of the Royal Geographical Society, for even there dull memoirs are occasionally read. [...] The use of a watch attracts attention, so I reckon time by the number of my breathings, of which there are 15 in a minute. They are not counted mentally, but are punctuated by pressing with 15 fingers successively. The counting is reserved for the fidgets. These observations should be confined to persons of middle age. Children are rarely still, while elderly philosophers will sometimes remain rigid for minutes altogether. -- Francis Galton (1909) %% Many might go to heaven with half the labor they go to hell. -- Ben Johnson %% Many monsters make a murdering mob. %% Many nice things suck. %% Many of the convicted thieves Parker has met began their life of crime after taking college Computer Science courses. -- Roger Rapoport, "Programs for Plunder", Omni, March 1981 %% Many of the truths we cling to are greatly the result of our own point of view %% Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. -- Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Return of the Jedi" %% Many of us spend half our life wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing. -- Alexander Woollcott %% Many pages make a thick book, except for pocket bibles which are on very very thin paper. %% Many pages make a thick book. %% Many people are desperately looking for some wise advice which will recommend that they do what they want to do. %% Many people are secretly interested in life. %% Many people are unenthusiastic about your work. %% Many people feel that if you won't let them make you happy, they'll make you suffer. %% Many people feel that they deserve some kind of recognition for all the bad things they haven't done. %% Many people go throughout life committing partial suicide -- destroying their talents, energies, creative qualities. Indeed, to learn how to be good to oneself is often more difficult than to learn how to be good to others. -- Joshua Leibman %% Many people have the ambition to succeed in their work; they may even have special aptitude for their job. And yet they do not move ahead. Why? Perhaps they think that since they can master the job, there is no need to master themselves. -- John Stevenson %% Many people resent being treated like the person they really are. %% Many people think that raindrops are shaped like pears, but high speed photos show them to be flat-bottomed with rounded tops - not unlike mushrooms. %% Many people write memos to tell you they have nothing to say. %% Many politicians ... are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool ... who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) %% Many receive advice, few profit by it. -- Publilius Syrus %% Many suitcases look alike. %% Many times we will get more and better ideas in two hours of creative loafing than in eight hours at a desk. -- Wilferd A. Peterson %% Many writers are bad at being promiscuous with women, from the certainty of knowing how the affair will end before it has even begun. -- Andrew Sinclair, "No Man More Magical" %% 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 %% Many years ago, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra was a man named Josef Stransky. Stransky was arrested, tried, and convicted for perpetrating violence on Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and other victims. He was sentenced to death in the electric chair. On the day appointed for his execution, Stransky was strapped into the lethal chair. The executioner stepped up to the switch, and pulled it! BUZZZZZ!!! ZAPPPP!!! When the smoke cleared, the witnesses were astonished to see Stransky still very much alive, smiling at them from his seat in the Chair. The executioner, puzzled, thought there must have been a fault in the wiring, so he called the Chief Electrician. The electrician came, took one look at the scene, and said, "You cannot execute this man! You see..... "HE'S A NON-CONDUCTOR!!!" %% Maple/MACSYMA - All-terrain vehicles. %% Mar 1 1988 "I'm going to a commune in Vermont, and will deal with no unit of time less than a season." -- resignation note of a DG engineer, from "Soul of a New Machine" %% Mar 5 1988 Written between the tiles in a mens' room at George Mason Univ.: "Down and Grout in Beverly Hills" "True Grout" "Twist and Grout" "Groutful Dead" "What's it all a-Grout, Alfie?" "For a Grout time, call Denise" "Grout, Grouter, Groutest" "Grout Fishing in America" "Kilgore Grout" "These sayings are driving me Grout of my mind..." %% Mar 10 1988 "I'm in charge, here." -- General Alexander Haig %% Mar 9 1988 "What you're thinking isn't true." "Good, then George Bush ISN'T married to his mother." -- dialog from "The Golden Girls" %% March 21 -The IRS releases an even newer, simpler W-4 form in response to complaints from a number of taxpayers, all of whom will be audited for the rest of their lives. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% March 27 -- In what is hailed as a major arms-race breakthrough, U.S. and Soviet arms negotiators in Geneva agree to wear matching outfits. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% Marching to a different kettle of fish. %% Mardon me padam, I see you are occupewing the wrong pie. May I so you to another sheet? 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. %% Mares eat oats and does eat oats, but little lambs eat ivy. A kid'll eat ivy too; wouldn't you? %% Margaret Fuller: I accept the universe. Thomas Carlyle: Gad! she'd better! %% Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, You, with your fresh thoughts Care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name Sorrow's springs are the same: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. -- Gerard Manley Hopkins %% Marge: "Bart, you love your sister, don't you?" Bart: "Don't make me say it. I know the answer. You know the answer. He knows the answer. Let's just drop it, okay?" -- "Moaning Lisa", from The Simpsons %% Marge: "You don't even know why you're sorry!" Homer: "Yes I do. Because I'm hungry, my shirt is smelly, and I'm tired!" -- "Homer's Night Out", from The Simpsons %% Marginal Hacks: n. Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the {D. C. Power Lab}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Maria Montessori taut me to rite at age too. %% Marijuana is like Coors beer. If you could buy the damn stuff at a Georgia filling station, you'd decide you wouldn't want it. -- Billy Carter %% Marijuana is nature's way of saying, "Hi!". %% Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves. -- Lenny Bruce %% Marilyn Monroe? A vacuum with nipples. %% Marines are like bananas; they're born green; they turn yellow; and they die in bunches. %% Mark Griswold, NICS-TARE scapegoat. %% Mark all Mathematical heads which be wholly and only bent on these sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with other, how unapt to serve the world. -- Roger Ascham (ca. 1550) %% Mark is a crumb! %% Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought. -- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) %% Mark's Dental-Chair Discovery: Dentists are incapable of asking questions that require a simple yes or no answer. %% Market Street unless they are on a leash. %% Marketing is a fashionable term. The sales manager becomes a marketing vice-president. But a grave digger is still a grave digger even when he is called a mortician--only the price of burial goes up. %% Marriage Banns: 8th Century, Europe Curing European feudal times, all public announcements concerning deaths, taxes, or births were called "banns." Today we use the term exclusively for an announcement that two people propose to marry. That interpretation began as a result of an order by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, who on Christmas Day in AD 800 was crowned Emperor of the Romans, marking the birth of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne, with a vast region to rule, had a practical medical reason for instituting marriage banns. Among rich and poor alike, a child's parentage was not always clear; an extramarital indiscretion could lead to a half-brother and half-sister marrying, and frequently did. Charlemagne, alarmed by the high rate of sibling marriages, and the subsequent genetic damage to the offspring, issued an edict throughout his unified kingdom: All marriages were to be publicly proclaimed at least seven days prior to the ceremony. To avoid consanguinity between the prospective bride and groom, any person with information that the man and women were related as brother or sister, or as half-siblings, was ordered to come forth. The practice proved so successful that it was widely endorsed by all faiths. %% Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family. -- O. C. Ogilvie %% Marriage causes dating problems. %% Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the feast. -- Colton %% Marriage is a ghastly public confession of a strictly private intention. %% Marriage is a good deal like taking a bath -- not so hot once you get accustomed to it. %% Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution, yet. -- Mae West %% Marriage is a rest period between romances. %% Marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering. -- Roger Price %% Marriage is a three-ring circus: first, there's the engagement ring, then there's the wedding ring, and finally, the suffering. %% Marriage is a trip between Niagara Falls and Reno. %% Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to spend their life in an institution? %% Marriage is an institution in which two undertake to become one, and one undertakes to become nothing. %% Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity? -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902), "Notebooks" 1912 %% Marriage is learning about women the hard way. %% Marriage is like a cafeteria. You pick out something that looks good, and you pay later. %% Marriage is like a hot bath. Once you get used to it, it's not so hot. %% Marriage is like a mousetrap. Those on the outside are trying to get in. Those on the inside are trying to get out. %% Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucine, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucine restaurant in the first place. -- Calvin Trillin %% Marriage is one of the chief causes of divorce. %% Marriage is really tough because you have to deal with feelings and lawyers. -- Richard Pryor %% Marriage is the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise lounge. -- Mrs. Patrick Campbell %% Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy. -- Unknown %% Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of man your wife would have preferred. %% Marriage is the sole cause of divorce. %% Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. %% Marriage is the waste-paper basket of the emotions. %% Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence. -- Dora Russell (1894-?) %% Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity. -- Honore de Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage", 1829 %% Marriage, being a lifelong venture, must be approached with care and caution. -- Bluebeard %% Marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making (in all) two. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Marriage: the only sport in which the trapped animal has to buy the license. %% Marriage? Sorry, I can't mate in captivity. %% Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on earth. -- John Lyly %% Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love. -- Edward Abbey %% Marry money. %% Marry your mistress, create a job vacancy. %% Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as the Earth]... We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe. -- J. Danforth Quayle, interviewed on Cable Network News, 11 August 1989 %% Mars is essentially in the same orbit... somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Mars is missing. -- The Hindmost "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Mars: n. A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group); the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique {Foonly} F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries, including the operating system, with no modifications at about 2--3 times faster than a KL10. When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or UNIX boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe. This tale and the related saga of {Foonly} hold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in the {Real World}, you need to learn Real World moves. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Marshal Goering was a fat man because he was one of Hitler's stoutest supporters. %% Marshall McLuhan is print-oriented. %% Marshall's Dad: "Anything good on the old boob tube?" Simon's brother: "You do not want to know." -- Edgar and Harley, "Scarest Home Videos", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall's generalized iceberg theorem: Seven-eighths of everything can't be seen. %% Marshall/Omri: "Wait... uh... What's my motivation?" Joe Dante: "Your motivation is you say a few words, you go outside, you get shot, and you die. Because I said so." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Wh-wh-what do you mean wh-when you say - 'dead'?" Jose Schaefer: "I mean 'offed'" Dash X: "'snuffed'" Jose Schaefer: "'kicked the bucket'" Dash X: "'pushing up daisies'" Jose Schaefer: "'bought the farm'" Dash X: "Did I mention 'rigor mortis'?" [chuckle] -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "You gotta stop this. They don't even know what they're buying." %% Marshall: "So... what exactly happened to all the guys who saw the wolf before?" Mr Chaney: "Uh... they're in... Spain." -- "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "What are those?" Prop Man: "Squibs, for when the bullets hit you." Marshall: "What's he using, an uzzi?" Dash X: "Oh Lyle, Lyle, those won't be necessary. We'll be doing this take _au naturel_." [evil chuckle] -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "... So now Dad's all freaked out that he's got this old people's disease that makes him lose stuff. He's pushing 35, you know." Simon: "Scary." -- "The Losers", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "And when he bit down on the remote control he caused some sort of video feedback timewarp zapping thing." Mummy: "Of course, why didn't I think of that." -- "Scariest Home Videos", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Hey, Mr. Radford. How come you aren't pressing any charges against that impostor guy?" Radford: "Well, in spite of all his faults, 'that guy' was one hell of a salesman. He moved more merchandise in six months with me tied up in the basement than I made in my best year. You just can't find help like that anymore." -- "Hole in the Head Gang", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "It's too quiet. I don't hear the pitter-patter of little monsters, Simon." Simon: "Bad sign." -- "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Poor lady, she doesn't stand a chance." Simon: "Harley (tap, tap on TV screen), Harley, Harley Schwarzenegger Holmes, you leave that poor lady alone right now or I'm going to come in there and blister your butt. Do you hear me?" Harley: "Hee Hee" Marshall: "Oh he's really scared now." -- "Scarest Home Videos", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Right, here's the key to the evidence locker. You know what to do if I don't come back." Simon: "I go straight to the President, and if I can't get through to him, I tell your mom and dad." Marshall: "Check." -- "Foreverware", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Say - aren't you...?" Elvis: "You in love, little paperboy?" Marshall: "Well, uh... uh, maybe. How'd you know?" Elvis: "It's the eyes. They give you away every time." Marshall: "That's it. I'm gettin' sunglasses." -- "Heart on a Chain", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Simon - if anything happens -" Simon: "I can have your bike?" -- "Tornado Days", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Who do these Tasmanian devils think they are, anyway?" Sara Bob: "My brothers." -- "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% Marshall: "Why do you have gray hair?" Dash X: "I'm starting a trend, OK?!?" -- "The Hole in the Head Gang", Eerie Indiana %% Martha: What did you get for the density of the block, George? George: Well, it weighed about 17 pounds, and had a volume of about 29 cubic feet, so I guess the density is .58620689551 pounds per cubic foot. This calculator is really swell! -- "I Think Therefore I Laugh" by John Allen Paulos: %% Martin's Mutilated Meat Market. Marvin Martin here. %% Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief. -- Arthur Schnitzler (1882-1931) %% Marvin the Nature Lover spied a grasshopper hopping along in the grass, and in a mood for communing with nature, rare even among full-fledged Nature Lovers, he spoke to the grasshopper, saying: "Hello, friend grasshopper. Did you know they've named a drink after you?" "Really?" replied the grasshopper, obviously pleased. "They've named a drink Fred?" %% Marxist Law of Distribution of Wealth: Shortages will be divided equally among the peasants. %% Mary Tyler Moore's SEVENTH HUSBAND is wearing my DACRON TANK TOP in a cheap hotel in HONOLULU! %% Mary had a little RAM -- only about a MEG or so. %% Mary had a little lamb and when she saw it sicken, She sent it off to Packingtown and now it's labeled "chicken." %% Mary had a little lamb, a little beef, a little ham. %% Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. It followed her through rain or snow, lightning, sleet or hail. It fetched the evening paper, her slippers, and the mail. She never had a moments peace; the lamb was always on her heels, And on her feet its head would rest, while she ate her meals. It followed her to school one day, the devotion never ended. The lamb waltzed into her history class and Mary got suspended. The night she went to Senior Prom, she thought she had him beat, Until she heard a mournful "baaa" coming from her car's seat. Oh, Mary had a little lamb, it surely didn't please her. So for dinner she had lambchops; the rest is in the freezer. %% Mary had a little lamb, She kept it in a bucket. And every time she let it out, The bulldog used to Chase it around the garden. %% Mary had a little lamb; ...that's what she gets for sleeping in a barn. %% Mary had a little sheep, And with the sheep she went to sleep, The sheep turned out to be a ram, And Mary had a little lamb. %% Mary had a little watch; She swallowed it one day. And so she took some Ex-Lax To pass the time away. But when she took the Ex-Lax The time it did not pass. So when you want to know the time, Just look up Mary's ... uncle, he has a watch, too. %% Mary had a little watch she swallowed it one day and now she's taking castor oil to pass the time away Eamon %% Mary owned a little lamb, Its fleece was pale as snow, And every place its mistress went It certainly would go; It followed Mary to class one day It broke a rigid law; It made the students giggle aloud, A lamb in class all saw. Mary had a pygmy lamb, His fleece was pale as snow, And every place where Mary walked Her lamb did also go; He came inside her classroom once, Which broke a rigid rule; How children all did laugh and play On seeing a lamb in school. Mary had a tiny lamb, Its wool was pallid as snow, And any spot that Mary did walk This lamb would always go; This lamb did follow Mary to school, Although against a law; How girls and boys did laugh and play, That lamb in class all saw. Polly owned one little sheep Its fleece shown white like snow, Every region where Polly went The sheep did surely go; He followed her to school one time, Which broke the rigid rule; The children frolicked in their room To see the sheep in school. %% Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? I'm not an agricultural expert, So how am I supposed to know? %% Maryann's Law: You can always find what you're not looking for. %% Maryel brought her bat into Exit once and started whacking people on the dance floor. Now everyone's doing it. It's called grand slam dancing. -- Ransford, Chicago Reader 10/7/83 %% Maryland law makes it illegal to knock a freight train off the tracks. %% Maslow's Maxim: If the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail. %% Masochist's Battle Cry - Stop it again!!! Quit it some more!!! %% Mason's First Law of Synergism: The one day you'd sell you soul for something, souls are a glut. %% Massachusetts has the best politicians money can buy. %% Massachusetts law states that it is a crime to lounge on the shelves in a bakery. %% Massachusetts law states that peanuts may not be eaten in court. %% Massachusetts makes it unlawful to duel with water pistols. %% Master Baiter %% Mastermind specialist subject - the bleedin' obvious.. %% Masturbation -- sex with someone you love. %% Masturbation is coming unscrewed. %% Mater artium necessitas. [Necessity is the mother of invention]. %% Maternity pay? Now every Tom, Dick and Harry will get pregnant. -- Malcolm Smith %% Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek %% Math is the language God used to write the universe. %% Math is tough! -- Barbie %% Mathematician: 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 11 is prime... Physicist: 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime (experimental error), 11 is prime... Engineer: 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime... Computer Scientist: 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, ... Artificial Intelligence Expert: 7 is prime, 5 is prime, 3 is prime, 2 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, .... Engineering Technician: 3 is prime. Probablist: 2 is prime (p = 1), 3 is prime (p = 1), 5 is prime (p = 1) 7 is prime (p = 1), 9 is prime (p = 1/2), ... Statistician: 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 8 is prime, ... [the density of primes within the positive integers is asymptotic to 1/[n*ln(n)] %% Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Mathematicians do it an uncountable number of times. %% Mathematicians do it continuously. %% Mathematicians do it exponentially! %% Mathematicians do it in groups. %% Mathematicians do it in theory. %% Mathematicians do it necessarily and sufficiently. %% Mathematicians do it with a small imaginary part. %% Mathematicians do it with imaginary parts. %% Mathematicians do it with pencils. %% Mathematicians do it, theoretically. %% Mathematicians have to prove they did it. %% Mathematicians often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is described as being n-dimensional. Like modern sex, any number can play. -- Dr. Thor Wald, in "Beep/The Quincunx of Time", by James Blish %% Mathematicians practice absolute freedom. -- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) %% Mathematicians take it to the limit. %% Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Mathematics gets its semblance of reality by never saying what it is talking about. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Matrimony is a process by which a grocer acquired an account the florist had. -- Francis Rodman %% Matrimony is the root of all evil. %% Matrimony isn't a word, it's a sentence. %% Matrix: [FidoNet] n. 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call {FidoNet}. 2. Fanciful term for a {cyberspace} expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see {network, the}). 3. The totality of present-day computer networks. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons", speaking on fans of "The Simpsons": "I have this comic strip called 'Life In Hell', which runs in 200 newspapers, and I get a lot of fan mail from generally articulate, literate people. And now I walk down the street and I see people wearing Simpsons T shirts who I'm afraid might beat me up, so the quality of fans has broadened. The people who are my fans now frighten me." -- from "Newsweek" magazine, June 18, 1990, page 13 %% Matt Jones, fashion consultant. %% Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a receipt. %% Matters more urgent caused our absence. Now witness the result. Outposts destroyed, expansion of the Federation everywhere. Yes, we have indeed been negligent, Captain, but no more. -- T'bok, "The Neutral Zone", stardate 41986.0 %% Mature software: code old enough that for every bug fixed, one or more new bugs are created. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% Maturity is knowing when and where to be immature. %% Maturity is only a short break in adolescence. -- Jules Feiffer %% Maturity: Acting your age instead of your urge. -- Frank Tyger %% Matz's Law: A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. %% Mausoleum, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Maxi Monster Madness / Monsters on the march They eat major cities / And everyone's dead Doot doot doot. %% Maxie Mumoverdrive %% Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations. -- Sir J. Mackintosh %% Maximum verbosity. %% May 12 -- U.S. drug agents become concerned when aerial photographs reveal that several dozen Bahamian "islands" are in fact enormous piles of some kind of white powdery substance. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% May 29 -- Nineteen-year-old German Mathias Rust, flying a single-engined Cessna airplane, manages to cross 400 miles of Soviet airspace to reach Red Square in Moscow, where he narrowly avoids colliding with a Delta Air Lines flight en route from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% May 3 -- Like a raging unquenchable forest fire, the Gary Hart story sweeps across the nation, as voters are consumed by a burning need to know more about the candidate's monetary views. Rumors abound that Hart, at various times in his career, may also have had views on a number of other issues. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% May 30 -- Caspar Weinberger orders 5,000 single-engine Cessna airplanes. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% May 4 -- The Hart story becomes so hot that issue-oriented Phil Donahue devotes a show to it, canceling the regular weekly appearance of the sex-change lesbian surrogate-mother nude-dancer ex-priests. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% May 5 -- The Iran-Contra hearings begin with Sen. Daniel Inouye doing his hilarious two-hour impersonation of a 78 r.p.m. record being played at 33 r.p.m. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% May 6 -- An angry Gary Hart is forced to withdraw from the race after word leaks out that The Washington Post has obtained documented evidence that he once proposed tying the prime rate to the Index of Leading Economic Indicators. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% May Euell Gibbons eat your only copy of the manual! %% May God answer all your prayers -- then mistake your worst enemy for you. %% May God give you a long life of a hundred and twenty and not one day without pain, sorrow, and suffering. %% May I come down and approach you? -- Riker to Kevin Uxbridge, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% May Rothschild make you his heir, then outlive you. %% May a Misguided Platypus lay its Eggs in your Jockey Shorts %% May a diseased yak take a liking to your sister. %% May all your PUSHes be POPped. %% May all your boils, sores, scabs, scurfs, and carbuncles be little ones. %% May all your debtors pay off your partner in cash while you're out of the city. %% May all your dreams come true, and may you have only nightmares. %% May all your pains be small enough so there's room for them all. %% May all your programs work the first time. %% May bad luck follow you all your days and never catch up. %% May be too intense for some viewers. %% May famous specialists come to you from all over the world, to learn about sickness. %% May god have mercy on your soul. He didn't have it on your face. %% May gold, jewels, and silver never mean a thing to you. %% May misfortune never befall you, God forbid, except when you sneeze. %% May not taste be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it? -- Greville %% May our nation continue to be the beakon of hope to the world. -- The Quayle's 1989 Christmas card. [Not a beacon of literacy, though.] %% May the Farce be with you. %% May the Fleas of a Thousand Camels infest one of your Erogenous Zones. %% May the Force be with you. %% May the God of Thunder strike you in the kneecap! %% May the Great Bird of the galaxy bless you planet. -- Sulu, "The Man Trap," stardate 1513.4 %% May the Great Camel of Paradise bestow upon you and yours a dropping. %% May the Porsche be with you. %% May the angel of death skip your house altogether -- and send Satan instead. %% May the angels that guard your bed take bribes from the devil. %% May the bird of paradise shit on your head. %% May the bluebird of happiness shit on your shoulder. %% May the bluebird of happiness twiddle your bits. %% May the egg you ate tonight rouse you bright and early tomorrow. %% May the fairy god-camel leave a lump on your pillow! %% May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits. %% May the road rise to meet you, May the wind be always at your back. %% May the secondhand-clothes dealer marvel at the good condition of your wardrobe. %% May the seed of your loins be fertile in the belly of your woman -- Dr. H. Ippy %% May the sun and the spring breeze warm and caress you like an apple as you hang from a tree. %% May the wolves never eat you because you're so tough and stringy. %% May they find thousands of new cures for you each year. %% May they name something new after you: a disease. %% May we dance with your dates? %% May you afford only the finest gruel. %% May you always be loved. %% May you always have more than your enemies: a seven-year itch lasting fourteen years, a twenty-four-hour catarrh lasting six weeks, a bigger hernia, a fatter goiter. %% May you always have someone to share your bed and board: mice, lice, rats, gnats, bedbugs, and fleas. %% May you and your partner be as close as brothers -- Cain and Abel. %% May you and your wife share with each other like a horse and a sparrow. %% May you back into a pitchfork and grab a hot stove for support. %% May you be as healthy as the salmon. %% May you be blessed with a wife so healthy and strong, she can pull the plow when your horse drops dead. %% May you be cursed with a chronic anxiety about the weather. -- John Burroughs (1837-1921) from "The Book of Insults" %% May you be forever spared the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. %% May you be fruitful and multiply so that your generations are as plentiful as the stars in the sky, and may you have to house, feed, and clothe them all. %% May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead. -- irish blessing %% May you be invited to a banquet by the governor-general and belch in his face. %% May you be known for you hospitality to God's creatures: lice, rats, bedbugs, fleas, worms, maggots. %% May you be rich enough to afford only the best: a diamond truss, jeweled crutches, crystal eyes, and gold teeth. %% May you be so endowed no one envies you. %% May you be spared the indignities and infirmities of old age. %% May you be strong enough to endure prison without getting sick, God forbid. %% May you be such a fast healer, new boils keep growing over you scabs. %% May you be twins, so that all your pains, troubles, and worries are double. %% May you become the greatest expert on drought, locust, pip, and anthrax. %% May you croak one day before your worst enemy. %% May you daughters' beauty be admired by everyone in the circus. %% May you die in bed at 95, shot by a jealous spouse. %% May you enjoy your wedding feast, then choke on the last bite. %% May you fool your enemies and beat them to Paradise. %% May you get the winning lottery ticket and a hole in your pocket. %% May you get to see all Russia at the Tsar's expense. %% May you grow so healthy, husky, and fat the worms take eighteen years to pick you clean. %% May you grow so rich you never have to eat, drink, piss, crap, wash, or walk by youself, God forbid. %% May you grow so rich your widow's second husband never has to worry about a living, God forbid. %% May you have a dozen daughters, each uglier than sin, and not one penny in dowry. %% May you have an interesting life. -- chinese curse %% May you have devoted children to chase the flies off your nose. %% May you have eyes like a hawk and a spouse with warts. %% May you have many beautiful and obedient daughters. %% May you have many handsome and obedient sons. %% May you have nightmares each night and may you awaken each time to find yourself in another nightmare. %% May you have the nicest neighbors in all Siberia. %% May you inherit a barrel of wine and a bladder without a hole. %% May you know enough about courts, judges, bailiffs, and bail bondsmen to be a lawyer. %% May you learn the secret of life in every dream, then forget it each time you awaken. %% May you learn to perform miracles: earn a living and marry off your daughters. %% May you live as long as you want to, and want to as long as you live. %% May you live forever with a beautiful wife, a rose garden, and music, and have the eyes, nose, and ears of a stone. %% May you live in interesting times. %% May you live in uninteresting times. -- Chinese proverb %% May you live long and prosper. %% May you lose all your teeth -- but one should remain for a toothache. %% May you lose everything, so that no enemy can cast an evil eye upon you. %% May you make a poor man richer: your doctor. %% May you make a widow and orphans happy -- your own. %% May you marry the best cook in the world and get ulcers. %% May you never develop rheumatism, so you can scratch away till you're ninety. %% May you never develop stomach trouble from too rich a diet. %% May you never feel pain, itch, burn, heat, cold, sting, prick. %% May you never have healthy mice in the house. %% May you never have to visit such a filthy place as the outhouse. %% May you never hear a word of gossip, slander, profanity, or blasphemy. %% May you never see an old-age home, God forbid. %% May you outlive everyone but your mother-in-law. %% May you travel the world over just one step ahead of the police. %% May you walk a mile behind a camel. %% May your Tongue stick to the Roof of your Mouth with the Force of a Thousand Caramels. %% May your breath always be sweet. %% May your camel be as swift as the wind. %% May your children be so famous every policeman knows them. %% May your children grow tall, strong, straight, and hardy like the weeds in the Garden of Eden. %% May your clock run slow, your heart fast, your bile over, your wife away, your nose always. %% May your daughters be like the flowers in the field -- wither away and fade. %% May your daughters grow up such gems, their presence in your house illuminates your old age. %% May your daughters marry men of substance: gypsies with two bears. %% May your daughters' hair grow thick, black, and abundant -- all over their faces. %% May your enemies get cramps in their legs when they dance on your grave. %% May your fortune grow so, you can afford only the finest specialist. %% May your friends always appreciate you. %% May your life be filled with experiences. %% May your life be sublime. %% May your mother-in-law treat you like her own child and move in with you. %% May your mouth never close and your arse never open. %% May your name be always associated with charity -- as you rot away in the poorhouse. %% May your name be so famous that every bailiff, bill collector, constable, and police inspector knows it. %% May your possessions never tempt another to steal. %% May your son grow up to be a famous doctor, and may you be his only case. %% May your sons turn out so smart they're promoted to corporal. %% May your soul be forever tormented by fire and your bones be dug up by dogs and dragged through the streets of Minneapolis. -- Garrison Keillor %% May your spouse always know when you need a hug. %% May's Law: The quality of correlation is inversely proportional to the density of control. (The fewer the data points, the smoother the curves.) %% Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology. -- R. S. Barton %% Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing. -- Tom Baker, INVASION OF TIME %% Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game? %% Maybe I'm lucky to be going so slowly, because I may be going in the wrong direction. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth -- but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Maybe ain't ain't so correct, but I notice that lots of folks who ain't using ain't ain't eatin' well. -- Will Rogers %% Maybe fear was in a puppeteer's genes. But in a human being fear had to be learned. -- "Ringworld" %% Maybe if the guy who developed Twinkies hadn't had such a low opinion of himself they would have been an inch or two longer! %% Maybe love hasn't changed much through history, but can you imagine Heloise and Abelard sitting around rubbing suntan oil on each other? -- Bill Vaughan %% Maybe someday your name will be in lights, saying "Johnny B. Goode tonight" %% Maybe this world is another planet's hell. -- Aldous Huxley %% Maybe we could paint GOLDIE HAWN a rich PRUSSIAN BLUE-- %% Maybe we weren't meant for Paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through. Struggle. Claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lutes. We must march to the sound of drums. -- Kirk, "This Side of Paradise," stardate 3417.7 %% Maybe what Ron needs is a good proctologist! %% Maybe you can't buy happiness, but these days you can certainly charge it. %% Maybe. %% Mayor Daley does it 5 times every election day. %% Mayor John Overflow %% Mayor Vincent J. `Buddy' Cianci on the ACLU's suit to have a city nativity scene removed: "They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men and a virgin in the whole organization." %% Mazel tov! %% Mbogo, Dr. Fred: /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ [Stanford] n. The archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem, esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster. "Do you know a good eye doctor?" "Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dry Cleaning." The name comes from synergy between {bogus} and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show. See also {fred}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% McCoy's a seducer galore, And of virgins he has quite a score. He tells them, "My dear, You're the Final Frontier, Where man never has gone before." %% McDonald's -- Because you're worth it. %% McDonald's new McSUSHI: "America's Eating It Raw!" -- SNL %% McDonalds, which has just gotten a liquor license around here, has developed a new drink -- Everclear, Tab and an olive. They call it "The Crystab McOlive." %% McEwan's Rule of Relative Importance: When traveling with a herd of elephants, don't be the first to lie down and rest. %% McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom: If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not $19.95. %% McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Me know gammar. Me cood use it gud. %% Me, I'm just a lawn mower. You can tell by the way I walk. %% Me-ism: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in the traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Me: The objectional case of "I". The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the diminutive, the objectional, and the oppressive. Each is in all three. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Meader's Law: Whatever happens to you, it will previously have happened to everyone you know, only more so. %% Mealtime is when the kids sit down to continue eating. %% Meanwhile, Andre Marrou is campaigning in downtown Manhattan on a platform that if we just abolish western civilization, all the muggers will settle down and form corporations to compete with GM and Chrysler. Three winos and a pimp have gone away to change their voter registration. -- From a post to alt.peeves %% Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Granny was beating off the Indians, and, as the fourth Calvary came over the hill, Tonto, cleverly camouflaged as a doorknob, came off in the Lone Ranger's hand. %% Meanwhile, back on the farm, granny lies helpless in a ditch. %% Meanwhile, the guilty soul cannot keep its own secret. It is false to itself; or, rather, it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself ... It must be confessed--it will be confessed--there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession. -- Daniel Webster %% Measure not men by Sundays, without regarding what they do all the week after. -- Fuller %% Measure of Disorder %% Measure twice, cut once. %% Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not take money. %% Meat Loaf again??? %% Mechanical engineers do it automatically. %% Medical researchers make mice do it first. %% Medical statistics are like a bikini -- what they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is vital. %% Medicare and Medicaid are the greatest measures yet devised to make the world safe for clerks. %% Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding. -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665 %% Mediocrity finds safety in standardization. -- Frederick Crane %% Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity. -- Charles G. Dawes %% Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worthwhile. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Meet Elmer, young son of the Thorpes, Afflicted with psychotic warps. His idea of fun Is to bugger a nun, And then vomit all over the corpse. %% Meet George Jetson; his boy Elroy; daughter Judy; Jane, his wife. %% Meet me in St. Louis. %% Meeting, n.: An assembly of people coming together to decide what person or department not represented in the room must solve a problem. %% Megabyte: A nine course dinner. %% Megahertz - a very large car rental company. %% Megaton Man: "LOOK at them! Helpless, tender creatures, relying on ME, waiting for ME to make my move!" (from below): "Move your ASS, Fat-head!" Megaton Man: "It is a MANDATE, and I am DUTY BOUND to OBEY!" -- Megaton Man %% Mel's Law: If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done. %% Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy. -- William Shakespeare %% Members of the jury, does this gentle, loving, grandmotherly, frail old lady remind you of a coldblooded, psychotic serial killer? Would you, in good conscience, convict her of this heinous crime which decent folks will not describe, and to condemn her to the electric chair? ... Er, You would? Eh, your honor sir, my client is guilty. %% Memories of you remind me of you. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% Memory bank error bit map = %% Memory fault -- Where am I? %% Memory fault -- brain fried %% Memory fault -- core...uh...um...core... Oh dammit, I forget! %% Memory is a thing we forget with. %% Memory should be the starting point of the present. %% Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by or rather, things that are! -- Plutarch %% Men are April when they woo, December when they wed, and maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. -- William Shakespeare %% Men are always ready to respect anything that bores them. -- Marilyn Monroe %% Men are apt to deceive themselves in big things, but they rarely do so in particulars. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% Men are blind in their own cause. -- Heywood Hale Broun (1888-1939) %% Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say. -- Colton %% Men are but children of a larger growth. -- Dryden %% Men are like wine - some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age. -- Pope John XXIII, 1978 %% Men are machines, with all their boasted freedom, Their movements turn on some favorite passion; Let art but find the foible out, We touch the spring and wind them at our pleasure. -- Brooke %% Men are more sentimental then women. It blurs their thinking. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely. -- Macaulay %% Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves. -- Gene Fowler %% Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen. -- Lord Halifax Works %% Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent. -- Horace Walpole %% Men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are honestly making money. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Men are so constituted that everybody undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths. %% Men are the sport of circumstances, when the circumstances seem the sport of men. -- Byron %% Men aren't attracted to me by my mind. They're attracted by what I don't mind... -- Gypsy Rose Lee %% Men become old, but they never become good. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Men bound in fellowship first weep and lament, But afterward the laugh. After great struggles they succeed in meeting. %% Men can suck the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure--failures are usually the most conceited of men. -- D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) %% Men come in 3 sizes: small, medium and Oh my God!.. %% Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose minds aren't. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren't. -- John Galt %% Men do not mind a bust in the mouth if provided by beautiful voluptuous lady! %% Men don't talk peace unless they're ready to back it up with war. -- Col. Green, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.4. %% Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Selected Papers" %% Men fight for freedom; then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from them. %% Men freely believe that what they wish to desire. -- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) %% Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Men have always sought the elusive unicorn, for the single twisted horn which projected from its forehead was thought to be a powerful talisman. It was said that the unicorn had simply to dip the tip of its horn in a muddy pool for the water to become pure. Men also believed that to drink from this horn was a protection against all sickness, and that if the horn was ground to a powder it would act as an antidote to all poisons. Less than 200 years ago in France, the horn of a unicorn was used in a ceremony to test the royal food for poison. Although only the size of a small horse, the unicorn is a very fierce beast, capable of killing an elephant with a single thrust from its horn. Its fleetness of foot also makes this solitary creature difficult to capture. However, it can be tamed and captured by a maiden. Made gentle by the sight of a virgin, the unicorn can be lured to lay its head in her lap, and in this docile mood, the maiden may secure it with a golden rope. -- From: Mythical Beasts by Deirdre Headon (The Leprechaun Library). %% Men have as exaggerated an idea of their rights as women have of their wrongs. -- E. W. Howe %% Men have become tools of their tools. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. -- William Shakespeare %% Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell only to find it ridiculous. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Men have many faults, Women only two: Everything they say, And everything they do! %% Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal. -- Edward Abbey %% Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers -- show me yours -- show me that it is possible -- show me your achievement -- and the knowledge will give me courage for mine. %% Men learn while they teach. -- Seneca %% Men like pastries, women like custards. %% Men live for three things, fast cars, fast women and fast food. %% Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it. -- Edward Abbey %% Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. %% Men must either be caressed or annihilated and the injury must be such that the victim cannot pay you back for it. Whoever acts otherwise is obliged to stand forever with a knife in his hand. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% Men must either be caressed or annihilated. They will revenge themselves for small injuries, but they can't do so for great ones. The harm the leader does must be such that he need not fear revenge. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone. -- Longfellow %% Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active. -- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) %% Men of peace usually are [brave]. -- Spock, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.5 %% Men of quality are not afraid of women for equality. %% Men often believe -- or pretend -- that the "Law" is something sacred, or at least a science -- an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments. %% Men often deceive themselves in believing that humility can overcome insolence. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason. -- William Rounseville Alger %% Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit... -- Hippocrates (460?-377? B.C.), The Sacred Disease %% Men play the game; women know the score. %% Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Men rattle their chains to show that they are free. %% Men resemble the gods in nothing so much as in doing good to their fellow creatures. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Men say of women what pleases them; women do with men what pleases them. -- DeSegur %% Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), "News Item" %% Men seldom show dimples to girls who have pimples. %% Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebels against anything that does not deserve rebelling against. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Men still remember the first kiss after women have forgotten the last. %% Men take only their needs into consideration--never their abilities. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Men trifle with their business and their politics, but they never trifle with their games. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% Men were born to lie, and women to believe them. %% Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged. -- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams %% Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the governer of the Bank of England, another will think he is the king, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships of philosophy, and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Men who cherish for women the highest respect are seldom popular with them. %% Men will always be men -- no matter where they are. -- Harry Mudd, "Mudd's Women," stardate 1329.8 %% Men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level. -- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) %% Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs. -- Moritz Guedemann %% Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but--live for it. -- Colton %% Men willingly believe what they wish. -- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) %% Men with gray eyes are generally keen, energetic, and at first cold; but you may depend upon their sympathy with real sorrow. Search the ranks of our benevolent men and you will agree with me. -- Dr. Leask %% Men's Rights? NO Women's Rights? NO Equal Rights? YES -- Curtis Jackson %% Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her ... [EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the woman's skin. Thank you.] ... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from below. -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face" %% Men, iron, money and bread are the strength of the war, but of these four, the first two are the most necessary; because men and iron find money and bread, but bread and money find not men and iron. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest. -- Jean Paul Richter %% Men, take care not to make women weep, for God counts their tears. -- Thomas S. Monson %% Men: Can't live with them, can't shoot 'em. %% Men: You can't live with them, and you can't leave them by the curb when you're done with them. %% Mencken and Nathan's Fifteenth Law of The Average American: The worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife. %% Mencken and Nathan's Ninth Law of The Average American: The quality of a champagne is judged by the amount of noise the cork makes when it is popped. %% Mencken and Nathan's Second Law of The Average American: All the postmasters in small towns read all the postcards. %% Mencken and Nathan's Sixteenth Law of The Average American: Milking a cow is an operation demanding a special talent that is possessed only by yokels, and no person born in a large city can never hope to acquire it. %% Mene, mene, tekel, upharsen. %% Mental Ground Zero: The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool. -- Edward Abbey %% Mental power tended to corrupt, and absolute intelligence tended to corrupt absolutely, until the victim eschewed violence entirely in favor of smart solutions to stupid problems. -- Piers Anthony %% Mental things which have not gone in through the senses are vain and bring forth no truth except detrimental. -- Leonardo %% Mention this ad at the door to receive a 20% discount. %% Menu - vittle statistics. %% Menu, n.: A list of dishes which the restaurant has just run out of. %% Menu-driven - Easy to learn, tedious to use. %% Mercy! %% Mercy: An attribute beloved of detected offenders. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Merde. -- Picard, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch Life from the side lines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a single day's work an achievement for eternity. -- Gabriel Heatter %% Merely because the group is in formation does not mean that the group is on the right course. %% Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. %% Meskimen's Law: There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over. %% Message from Our Sponsor on ttyTV at 13:58 ... %% Message from console... Message from qdaemon: request `PRIMARY.OUTPUT' has finished on device `lp1' EOF %% Message from on HIGH: Prepare to meet thy doom! %% Message will arrive in the mail. Destroy it, before the FBI sees it. %% Message: I care. -- President George Bush, in New Hampshire %% Metalhead General Features: As much black as possible. Leather and/ or metal typically added to help matters. Hair 'Rocker' usually long. Face usually malicious, albeit placid. 'Carp' 'Leatherhead' Behavior Summary: For all their frightening appearance, metalheads are usually calm, cool, and collected. They are often intelligent. It is never a good idea, however, to get them mad. They often have quick, nasty tempers, and are very, very vengeful. %% Metaphasia: An inability to perceive metaphor. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things. -- Edward Abbey %% Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. -- Immanual Kant %% Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand. -- Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) %% Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence. -- Joseph Wood Krutch %% Mete out justice with mercy. %% Meteorologists have warm fronts. %% Meter maid: Windshield viper. %% Mexican Snowshoe: one shot of tequila mixed with one shot of peppermint schnapps. %% Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy. -- Edward Abbey %% Miami did not produce much of an impression... -- H. P. Lovecraft, 7/19/1931 %% Mice, it's mice!! %% Michael Jackson - "Black Or White" Good question. %% Michael Landon has just signed to do a new show for CBS. "Little Box on the Prairie" %% Michael O'Donoghue on Louise Lasser's SNL hosting: "She was a nice woman going through a few problems, but I wanted to force her to eat her goddam pigtails at gunpoint." -- "Saturday Night", Hill & Weingrad %% Michael O'Donoghue's letter to Mademoiselle Magazine: "Dear Editors: I couldn't help but be a bit irked when I noticed that you and [photographer] Duane Michals had cropped my head out of the photograph that appears on page 121 of your March issue. I'd like to come over there and kick every one of you in the cunt if I didn't think it would ruin my shine. Michael O'Donoghue" -- "Saturday Night", Hill & Weingrad %% Michigan law provides that if any man kiss his wife on a Sunday, the party at fault shall be punished at the discretion of the court. %% Mickey Mouse has a long talk one day with a psychiatrist, after which the psychiatrist interviews Minnie Mouse. A few days later Mickey meets with the psychiatrist, and the following conversation ensues: Sigmund : I talked with Minnie after talking with you. Mickey : Oh? Sigmund : I couldn't find anything wrong with her -- she isn't insane. Mickey : Idiot! I didn't say she was insane -- I said she was fuckin' Goofy. %% Mickey Mouse was trying to convince a judge to give him a divorce from Minnie Mouse: Judge: "I'm sorry Mickey, but you claiming Minnie is crazy is not a valid reason for me to grant a divorce." Mickey: "I didn't say she was crazy, I said she was Fucking Goofey!" %% Mickey Mouse wears a Spiro Agnew watch. %% Micro Credo: Never trust a computer bigger than you can lift. %% Micro-changes in air density. %% Microbiology Lab: Staph Only! %% Microfiche: Sardines. %% Microsloth Windows: /mi:'kroh-sloth` win'dohz/ n. Hackerism for `Microsoft Windows', a windowing system for the IBM-PC which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with {mess-dos} that it is agonizingly slow on anything less than a fast 386. Compare {X}, {sun-stools}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Microwave - signal from a friendly micro -- Data communications glossary %% Microwave oven? Whaddya mean, it's a microwave oven? I've been watching Channel 4 on the thing for two weeks. %% Microwaves frizz your heir. %% Mid-twenties Breakdown: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Middle age is when you wish you could have some of the naps you refused to take as a kid. %% Middle age is youth without it's levity. And old age without decay. -- Daniel Defoe %% Middle of the night, middle of nowhere, two cars both slightly cross over the white line in the centre of the road. They collide and a fair amount of damage is done, although neither is hurt. It's impossible to assess blame for the accident on either however. They both get out. One is a doctor, one is a lawyer. The lawyer calls the police on his car phone; they'll be there in 20 minutes. It's cold and damp, and both men are shaken up. The lawyer offers the doctor a drink of brandy from his hip flask, the doctor accepts, drinks and hands it back to the lawyer, who puts it away. ``Aren't you going to have a drink ?'' the doctor says. ``AFTER the police get here'' replies the lawyer. %% Midge Itressling %% Mieux vaut tard que jamais! %% Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles. %% Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca. %% Might does not make right but it sure makes what is. -- Edward Abbey %% Might may not be right, but it usually wins. %% Mighty in the forward-striding toes. When one goes and is not equal to the task, One makes a mistake. %% Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends. -- Samuel Pepys %% Migratory lifeform with a tropism for bookstores %% Migratory lifeform with a tropism for parties %% Mike's Law: For a lumber company employing two men and a cut-off saw, the marginal product of labor for any number of additional workers equals zero until the acquisition of another cut-off saw. Let's not even consider a chainsaw. -- Mike Dennison [You could always schedule the saw, though - ed.] %% Mike: "The Fourth Dimension is a shambles?" Bernie: "Nobody ever empties the ashtrays. People are SO inconsiderate." -- Gary Trudeau, "Doonesbury" %% Miksch's Law: If a string has one end, then it has another end. %% Mildly annoyed scientist %% Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Military secrets are the most fleeting of all. -- Spock, "The Enterprise Incident," stardate 5027.4 %% Milkmen do it in the morning. %% Miller's Corollary: Objects are lost because people look where they aren't instead of where they are. %% Miller's Slogan: Lose a few, lose a few. %% Milliamp - Mrs. Amp's daughter -- Data communications glossary %% Millihelen, adj: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. %% Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute. -- C. C. Pinckney %% Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz %% Millions of sensible people are too high-minded to concede that politics is almost always the choice of the lesser evil. "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," they say, "I will not vote." Having abstained, they are presented with a President who appoints the people who are going to rummage around in their lives for the next four years. Consider all the people who sat home in a stew in 1968 rather than vote for Hubert Humphrey. They showed Humphrey. Those people who taught Hubert Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the black. -- Russell Baker, "Ford without Flummery" %% Milton Berle, at his 80th birthday party: "I feel like a 20-year old! Unfortunately, there aren't any here." %% Mind if I rape your daughter %% Mind your own business, Spock. I'm sick of your half-breed interference. %% Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. %% Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open. -- Thomas Dewar %% Minds of the strongest and most active powers fall below mediocrity and labor without effect, if confined to uncongenial pursuits. And it is thence to be inferred, that the results of human exertion may be immensely increased by diversifying its objects. -- Alexander Hamilton %% Mine earwax runneth over. %% Mine: Belonging to me if I can hold or seize it. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Miners do it with a bang. %% Mingles with the friendly bowl, The feast of reason and the flow of soul. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime -- and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Miniscribe's troubles are daunting. The company has floundered in its attempt to settle 13 shareholder lawsuits, filed after a panel found that previous managers circumvented financial controls and resorted to shipping bricks and unfinished drives to shore up sagging revenue figures. -- "Miniscribe Prognosis Is Hopeful," E. E. Times, Jan 15, 1990, pg 67 %% Ministers do it only on Sunday. %% Ministers do it vicariously. %% Minnie Mouse is a slow maze learner. %% Minnie and Max had been married for 18 years. As Minnie grew older and less attractive, Max became disinterested and his libido started to wane dramatically. In desperation, Minnie hauled him before a marriage counselor. The marriage counselor listened patiently to Minnie's complaints and to Max's protestations. Max said he was being nagged unmercifully Minnie said that Max was causing her anguish. Finally the marriage counselor issued a verdict."Max," he said, "from now on, no matter how you feel, you must give Minnie her conjugal rights at least semi-annually." Minnie was delighted and they left the counselor's chambers. On the way downstairs she nudged Max,"Tell me Max, how many times a week is semi-annually?" %% Minors in Kansas City, Missouri, are not allowed to purchase cap pistols; they may buy shotguns freely, however. %% Minty-fresh feet lie in your future. %% Minuteman: A fellow who can make it to the refrigerator and back with a sandwich while the commercial is on television. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Miracle: An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as in beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Miracles are great, but they are so damned unpredictable %% Miracles are so called because they excite wonder. In unphilosophical minds, any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Miraculous secret for the early recovery of patients: Inflation. %% Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all? The press is hopelessly biased or genuinely fair, depending upon whose views are being misquoted, misrepresented, or misunderstood. -- Pierre S. du Pont %% Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images. -- Jean Cocteau %% Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate. %% Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it. -- Russell Baker %% Misery only LIKES company. It prefers loneliness. -- Solomon Short %% Misfortune, n.: The kind of fortune that never misses. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Misfortunes arrive on wings and leave on foot. %% Miss Buss and Miss Beale Cupid's darts do not feel. How different from us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss. -- Of the Headmistress of the North London Collegiate School and the Pricipal of the Ladies' College, Cheltenham %% Miss Millay Says Something Too I want to drown in good salt water, I want my body to bump the pier; Neptune is calling his wayward daughter, Crying, "Edna, come over here!" I hate the town and I hate the people; I hate the dryness of floor and pave; The spar of a ship is my tall church-steeple; My soul is as wet as the wettest wave. I'm seven-eighths salt and I want to roister Deep in the brine with the submarine; I speak the speech of the whale and oyster; I know the ways of the wild sardine. I'm tired of standing still and staring Across the sea with my heels in dust: I want to live like the sober herring, And die as pickled when die I must. -- Samuel Hoffenstein, "Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing" %% Miss Piggy does it with Kermit. %% Miss Truman is a unique American phenomenon with a pleasant voice of little size and fair quality ... Yet Miss Truman cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time ..., she communicates almost nothing of the music she presents.... There are few moments during her recital when one can relax and feel confident that she will make her goal, which is the end of the song. -- Paul Hume, music critic of the Washington Post. "I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below. Westbrook Pegler, a guttersnipe, is a gentleman compared to you. You can take that as more of an insult than as a reflection on your ancestry." -- Harry S. Truman %% Miss Wilkerson thought it her duty To maintain her conjugal beauty. She mixed up a paste Of industrial waste, And applied it to her sweet patootie. %% Miss Wilkerson thought it her duty To maintain her conjugal beauty. She mixed up a paste Of industrial waste, And applied it to her sweet patootie. [The facts about beauty are known, And well-learned by those who are grown: Beauty is thin, It lies on the skin, But ugly goes down to the bone.] %% Miss, n.: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Missed'em-five: n. Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V UNIX, generally used by {BSD} partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym `SysVile' is also encountered.) See {software bloat}, {Berzerkeley}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Missing the return. Misfortune. Misfortune from within and without. If armies are set marching in this way, One will in the end suffer a great defeat, Disastrous for the ruler of the country. For ten years It will not be possible to attack again. %% Missionaries are infernal nuisances who ought to be kept at home. -- H. P. Lovecraft, 9/12/1925 %% Missionary Position: The missionary on top. %% Misster, do you vant to buy a duck? %% Mist is a white vapor, usually water, seen from time to time in caverns. It can be found anywhere but is frequently a sign of a deep pit leading down to water. %% Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure. %% Mister I aint a boy, no I'm a man and I believe in the promised land. %% Mistress Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells, And one fucked-up petunia. %% Mistrust first impulses; they are always right. %% Mitchell's Law of Committees: Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are held to discuss it. %% Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans; it's lovely to be silly at the right moment. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Mix's Law: There is nothing more permanent than a temporary building. There is nothing more permanent than a temporary tax. %% Mixed Emotions: When you see your mother-in-law back over a cliff in your new Mercedes Benz. %% Mixed emotions is when your teen-ager gets an A in sex education. %% Mmm-mmm good. Mmm-mmm good. That's what Campbell soups are. Mmm-mmm good. %% Mmmmmm-MMMMMM!! A plate of STEAMING PIECES of a PIG mixed with the shreds of SEVERAL CHICKENS!! ... Oh BOY!! I'm about to swallow a TORN-OFF section of a COW'S LEFT LEG soaked in COTTONSEED OIL and SUGAR!! ... Let's see ... Next, I'll have the GROUND-UP flesh of CUTE, BABY LAMBS fried in the MELTED, FATTY TISSUES from a warm-blooded animal someone once PETTED!! ... YUM!! That was GOOD!! For DESSERT, I'll have a TOFU BURGER with BEAN SPROUTS on a stone-ground, WHOLE WHEAT BUN!! %% Mmmph! Urghurmph! Grugmph! What's he trying to say? I dunno -there's a lawyer crammed in his mouth. %% Mobile non-smoking area %% Mobius strippers never show you their back side. %% Modeling paged and segmented memories is tricky business. -- P. J. Denning %% Modem - How a southerner asks for seconds -- Data communications glossary %% Modem sex begins with a handshake. %% Modem sex, the next best thing to being there. %% Modem: A peripheral used in the unsuccessful attempt to get two computers to communicate with each other. %% Modem: What landscapers do to dem lawns. %% Modems.....reach out and BYTE someone! %% Moderately parallel architecture is like pulling a wagon with five oxen. Massively parallel architecture is giving the job to ten thousand chickens. -- Robert J. Stevenson, Marketing V.P. at E & S %% Moderation in all things. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) %% Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Modern Coke Machines are microprocessor-controlled, and many even have modems with which they call the distributor when their coin boxes fill or they run out of supplies or they're broken into. These modems are vulnerable to attack by a class of computer hackers known in the industry as ``Soda Crackers.'' %% Modern Way: If It's Good, Scrap It. -- Sydney J. Harris %% Modern art is what you bought to cover a hole in the wall and then decided that the hole looked better. %% Modern biology has been built upon two great ideas. The first, a product of the nineteenth century, is that all life descended from elementary, single- celled organisms by means of natural selection. The second, perfected in the twentieth century, is that organisms are entirely obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. No extraneous "vital force" runs the living cell. -- Edward O. Wilson, "Biophilia" %% Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings. %% Modern psychology takes completely for granted that behavior and neural function are perfectly correlated, that one is completely caused by the other. There is no separate soul or lifeforce to stick a finger into the brain now and then and make neural cells do what they would not otherwise. Actually, of course, this is a working assumption only.... It is quite conceivable that someday the assumption will have to be rejected. But it is important also to see that we have not reached that day yet: the working assumption is a necessary one and there is no real evidence opposed to it. Our failure to solve a problem so far does not make it insoluble. One cannot logically be a determinist in physics and biology, and a mystic in psychology. -- D. O. Hebb, Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, 1949 %% Modesty creates success. The superior man carries things through. %% Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Modesty is to merit as shades to figures in a picture; giving it strength and beauty. -- Jean de La Bruyere %% Modesty that comes to expression. It is favorable to set armies marching To chastise one's own city and one's country. %% Modesty that comes to expression. Perseverance brings good fortune. %% Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it. %% Modula II -- A Volkswagon Rabbit with a trailer hitch. %% Moe: Wanna play poker tonight? Joe: I can't. It's the kids' night out. Moe: So? Joe: I gotta stay home with the nurse. %% Moe: What did you give your wife for Valentine's Day? Joe: The usual gift -- she ate my heart out. %% Mohammad Ali Kills Twenty Four Students; 'I thought I was Dirty Harry' %% Mohandas K. Gandhi often changed his mind publicly. An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week. The great man replied that it was because this week he knew better. %% Molecule, n.: 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis: If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented it wasn't worth doing. %% Mom! Dad! Don't touch it, its evil! %% Mom's Law: When they finally do have to take you to the hospital, your underwear won't be clean or new. %% Mom: "Marshall, Simon, time to go to the picnic." Mars: "I'm not going." Dad: "It's our first Tornado Day!" Mars: "How can you even *think* of going? Every year a tornado named 'Old Bob' strikes Eerie on the same day - and they've turned it into some sort of mondo, voodoo, pagan ritual." -- Marilyn, Marshall, and Edgar, "Tornado Days", Eerie Indiana %% Mom: "Oh man... Shouldn't we?..." Syn: "Don't even think of that Mom. That guy is the *Mad Whacker*!" Sim: "Syndi's right. They call him the whacker because he uses his axe to kill his victims." Dad: "Now, come on! I've heard rumors he was Eerie's last living liberal, but" Sim: "What's a liberal?" Dad: "I'll explain it to you when you're older." Mom: "Well, I don't care whether he's a liberal or an axe murderer, I want you boys to stay clear of him. Understood?" Mars: "Yes, Mom." -- "No Brain, No Pain", Eerie Indiana %% Mommy! Mommy! I just cut my hand off! Don't make me laugh, my lips are chapped. %% Mommy, mommy! Daddy took me swimming today! Did you have fun? Sure did, it was easy, once I learned how to get out of the bag! %% Mommy, mommy! I hate tomato soup! Shut up, you only get it once a month! %% Mommy, mommy! What's kinky? Shut up and pull grandma off the doorknob! %% Mommy, mommy! Where's my Cabbage Patch doll? Shut up and eat your coleslaw! %% Mommy, mommy, Can we have Granny for dinner? Shut up we still have half of Aunt Helen in the freezer %% Mommy, mommy, I don't want to have hamburger for dinner Shut up and stick your arm back in the meat grinder %% Mommy, mommy, I hate my sister's guts Shut up and eat what's in front of you %% Mommy, mommy, Why are my teeth so long? Shut up and drink your blood before it clots %% Mommy, mommy, can I lick the bowl? Shut up and and flush it like everyone else! %% Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life. %% Monday, n.: In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Mondays are the potholes in the road of life %% Money and women are the most sought after and the least known of any two things we have. -- Will Rogers %% Money by right means if you can; if not, by any means. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Money can't buy happiness, but it lets you be miserable in comfort. %% Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a Cadillac so you can drive around and look for it. %% Money can't buy you happiness, but it can make misery a whole lot easier to bear. %% Money cannot buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable. %% Money cannot buy love, nor even friendship. %% Money changes everything. %% Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil. -- Edward Abbey %% Money doesn't care who owns it. %% Money doesn't make you happy, but it quiets the nerves. %% Money is a good servant, but a dangerous master. -- Bonhours %% Money is a lot like manure. When large piles benefit nothing, it stinks. %% Money is a lousy way to keep score. %% Money is a powerful aphrodisiac. But flowers work almost as well. %% Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. %% Money is its own reward. %% Money is like a sixth sense -- and you can't make use of the other five without it. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good. But if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell. -- Clint Murchison, Jr. %% Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Money is not the measure of a man, but it will do quite nicely if you don't have any other yardstick handy. -- Charles Merrill Smith %% Money is scarce, * Times are hard, /|\ Here's your fucking Christmas card. I %% Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots %% Money is the root of all evil. %% Money is the root of all wealth. %% Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men. %% Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash. -- The Notebooks of Lazarus Long %% Money is whatever people believe is money and will voluntarily accept as money. %% Money is wrong -- it's the means whereby man enslaves his brother. -- Finny %% Money isn't everything - but it's a long way ahead of what comes next. -- Sir Edmond Stockdale %% Money isn't everything, but it sure does keep the children in touch. %% Money may buy friendship but money can not buy love. %% Money may buy love but money cannot buy friendship. %% Money may not buy happiness, but it sure puts you in a great bargaining position. %% Money talks. Usually it says, "Bend over." -- Solomon Short %% Money talks...but all mine keeps saying is "goodbye" %% Money to invest? Take it to the local branch of the Magic Memory Vault! %% Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years. %% Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salary of a large research staff to study the problem. %% Money, therefore, if it is t be anything, must be at least an efficient and trustworthy instrument by which working people accumulate savings. -- Lewis E. Lehrnman %% Moneyliness is next to Godliness. -- Andries van Dam %% Mongolian Hordes technique: n. Development by {gang bang} (poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy). Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few skilled ones. Also called `Chinese Army technique'; see also {Brooks's Law}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Monitor - An ironclad warship, see Merrimack. %% Monitor: Often thought to be a word associated with computers, this word actually refers to those obnoxious kids who always want to see your hall pass at school. %% Monkey curiosity was not powerful in most sentient species. -- "Ringworld" %% Monkey wrench -- A monkey wrench is a wrench with a fixed jaw and an adjustable jaw set at right angles to the handle. Tradition says it was first devised by a London blacksmith named Charles Moncke, Moncke changing to monkey by folk derivation. A difficulty with this theory, as Mencken has pointed out, is that the British call a monkey wrench a spanner. In 1932-33, the Boston Transcript traced the invention to 1856, crediting it to a Yankee named Monk, employed by the firm of Bemis and Call in Springfield, Massachusetts. -- Willard R. Espy, "O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun" %% Monogamy leaves a lot to be desired. %% Monologue: I could leave anytime now- for what? Time is against The tell-tale facts. -if they don't rhyme it's no good? I still might leave but -you Are unique. You're all I have left To believe in. So walk with me. -just the facts please. ah yes. The concrete rushes beneath us. Breathe my dear- we are running at a standstill and no way out. Do you still love me? I waited. - only You, would look my way With your heavy shadows- (pierre cardin i think) they slipped off. Let me catch my breath flutters and falls away: is it too late? %% Monopoly players do it for hours. %% Monopoly? No, we just don't want competition. %% Monsters come from nowhere to hit you everywhere. %% Monsters come in many forms. And do you know the greatest monster of them all? Guilt. -- McCoy, "Obsession," stardate 3620.7 %% Monsters sleep because you are boring, not because they ever get tired. %% Montana law provides that if you catch a fur-bearing animal and tattoo your name on it, the animal thereafter belongs to you. %% Moof: /moof/ [MAC users] n. 1. The Moof or `dogcow' is a semi-legendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1; specifically, the full story of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the particular Moof illustrated is properly named `Clarus'). Option-shift-click will cause it to emit a characteristic `Moof!' or `!fooM' sound. *Getting* to tech note 31 is the hard part; to discover how to do that, one must needs examine the stack script with a hackerly eye. Clue: {rot13} is involved. A dogcow also appears if you choose `Page Setup...' with a LaserWriter selected and click on the `Options' button. 2. The word is used to flag software that's a hack, something untested and on the edge. On one Apple CD-ROM, certain folders such as "Tools & Apps (Moof!)" and "Development Platforms (Moof!)", are so marked to indicate that these folders contain software that's not fully tested or sanctioned by the powers that be. When you open these folders you cross the boundary into hackerland. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Moonlighter: A man who holds day and night jobs so he can drive from one to the other in a better car. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Moophobia: Fear of being attacked by a rabid cow. %% Moore's Constant: Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do. %% Moore's Law: /morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^((n - 1962)); that is, the amount of information storable in one square inch of silicon has roughly doubled yearly every year since the technology was invented. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Mophobia, n.: Fear of being verbally abused by a Mississippian. %% Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. -- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) %% Moral principles can never be compromised; they can only be abandoned. %% Morality and practicality should be congruent. If they're not, then there's something wrong with either one or the other. -- Solomon Short %% Morals today are corrupted by our worship of riches. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Morbid: A higher offer. %% More Technobabble: ... Consequently, in parallel to Fab, Assembly has its own ZID, ZOD, and ZUD programs. Outgoing ZOD for Fab, and VQUIP for Materials, becomes ZID for Assembly, and ZOD for Assembly becomes ZID for Test. Some Zod results... -- Intel Quality Handbook %% More actual newspaper headlines: Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures Daily Sun-Post (San Clemente, CA) 1/17/77 Sneak Attack by Soviet Bloc Not Foreseen The Atlanta Journal 4/4/79 War Dims Hopes for Peace Wisconsin State Journal 12/27/65 Blue Skies Unless its Cloudy San Francisco Chronicle 5/29/?? Bankrupt Association Termed in Poor Shape Lawrence (KA) Journal-World 7/12/77 Food is Basic to Student Diet Bridgeport (CN) Post 1/18/78 %% More hit points than you can possibly imagine %% More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice. -- R. S. Surtees %% More people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than in nuclear power plants. %% More power R2! %% More powerful than a locomotive! %% More sad thoughts crowd into my mind When evening comes; for then, Appears your phantom shape- Speaking as I have known you speak. %% More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. -- Woody Allen %% Moreover, freedom of the press includes "the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods." Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 704 (1972). -- Supreme Court decision quoted by Mike Godwin in comp.org.eff.talk %% Moreover, you have no money. %% Mork calling Orson, Mork calling Orson. %% Mormonism: Nothing so hilarious could possibly be true. Or all bad. -- Edward Abbey %% Morris left for a two-day business trip to Chicago. He was only a few blocks from his house, when he realized that he had left the airplane tickets on his bureau top. He returned and quietly entered the house. His wife, in her skimpiest negligee, was standing at the sink washing the breakfast dishes. She looked so inviting that he tiptoed up behind her, reached out, and squeezed her left tit. "Leave only one quart of milk," she said. "Morris won't be here for breakfast tomorrow." %% Morticians do it gravely. %% Morton's Law: If rats are experimented upon, they will develop cancer. %% Mos Eisley Spaceport; you'll not find a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types... -- Obi-wan Kenobi %% Moscow reportedly has been "closed" for the Olympics. Access to the city is restricted, tens of thousands of police patrol the streets, and authorities are struggling to prevent what they term "ideological pollution." Residents are unable to detect any difference in Moscow life. -- National Review %% Moses, returning from the mountain, spoke to his people: "The good news is we got them down to ten." "The bad news is that adultery is still one of them." %% 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. %% Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button pushers. %% Most Gracious Queen, we thee implore To go away and sin no more, But if that effort be too great, To go away at any rate. -- Epigram on Queen Caroline %% Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything. -- Edward Abbey %% Most accidents in well-designed systems involve two or more events of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination. -- Robert Machol %% Most arguments would be spoiled if either party knew the facts. %% Most burning issues generate far more heat than light. %% Most economists think of God as working great multiple regressions in the sky.. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% Most essential qualification for a politician: The ability to foretell what will happen tomorrow, next month, and next year--and to explain afterward why it did not happen. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Most fish live underwater, which is a terrible place to have sex because virtually anywhere you lie down there will be stinging crabs and large quantities of little fish staring at you with buggy little eyes. So generally when two fish want to have sex, they swim around and around for hours, looking for someplace to go, until finally the female gets really tired and has a terrible headache, and she just dumps her eggs right on the sand and swims away. Then the male, driven by some timeless, noble instinct for survival, eats the eggs. So the truth is that fish don't reproduce at all, but there are so many of them that it doesn't make any difference. -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know" %% Most gays have heterosexual parents. %% Most general statements are false, including this one. -- Edmund C. Berkeley %% Most hierarchies were established by men who now monopolize the upper levels, thus depriving women of their rightful share of opportunities for incompetence. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Most interesting, could this be human joke number 663? Negative, Data. That's a Captain's order. -- Data and Geordi, "Code of Honor", stardate 41235.25 %% Most legends have their basis in facts. -- Kirk, "And The Children Shall Lead," stardate 5029.5 %% Most legislators are so dumb that they couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel. %% Most limericks are rather simple Popping up here and there like a pimple. All smut and dirt, Totally lacking in worth, Hell! if this ain't a perfect example. %% Most memorable entries for the annual Oddest Title Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the last 10 years (1979-1989). Compiled by The Bookseller. 1. The Interpretation of Geological Time from the Evidence of Fossilized Elephant Droppings in Eastern Europe. 2. Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. 3. Oral Sadism and the Vegetable Personality. 4. Big and Very Big Hole Drilling. 5. The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling. 6. The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution. 7. America's Neighbourhood bats: Understanding and Learning to Live in Harmony with Them. 8. The 120 year diet. 9. Detecting Fake Nazi Regalia. 10. Potatoes of Bolivia: Their Breeding, Value and Evolutionary Relationships. 11. The Secret of Sphincters. 12. Innovation and the Rise of the Tunneling Industry. 13. Drying Flowers with a Microwave. 14. Foundry Work for the Amateur. 15. Versailles - The View from Sweden. Reprinted in the March 1989 issue of "Q" Magazine (Britain's modern guide to music and more) %% Most men have more courage than even they themselves think they have. -- Grenville %% Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it. They fare as did that dwarf who kept guard over a captured princess in his castle. One day he took a midday nap. When he woke up an hour later, the princess was gone. Quickly he pulled on his seven-league boots; with one stride he was far beyond her. %% Most monsters prefer minced meat. That's why they are hitting you! %% Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve. -- Edward Abbey %% Most non-Catholics know that the Catholic schools are rendering a greater service to our nation than the public schools in which subversive textbooks have been used, in which Communist-minded teachers have taught, and from whose classrooms Christ and even God Himself are barred. -- from "Our Sunday Visitor", an American-Catholic newspaper, circa 1949 %% Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters. -- Jean Toomer %% Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. -- James Harvey Robinson %% Most of the change we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor. -- Robert Frost %% Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room. -- Blaise Pascal %% Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do. -- Edward Abbey %% Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past. -- Harry S. Truman, "Memoirs, Vol. II", 1955 %% Most of the stuff alongside the road has been thrown out of car windows by Democrats. %% Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all. -- Woody Allen %% Most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens. %% Most of us are attracted by beauty and repelled by ugliness -- one of the last of our prejudices. -- Kirk, "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" stardate 5630.7 %% Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else. -- Leo Aikman %% Most of us ask for advice when we know the answer but want a different one. %% Most of us can do more than we think we can, but usually do less than we think we have. %% Most of us have been at work for several hours now. %% Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders. -- Edward Abbey %% Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure. -- Fred Allen %% Most of us will never do great things, but we can do small things in a great way. %% Most of us would be glad to pay as we go, if we could only catch up on where we've been. %% Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about. -- Edward Abbey %% Most of your attack is deflected, but the troll has suffered some injury. %% Most of your faults are not your fault. %% Most organizations are like septic tanks, the big chunks rise to the top. %% Most organizations can't hold one idea at a time ... Thus complementary ideas are always regarded as competitive. Further, like a quantized pendulum, an organization can jump from one extreme to the other, without ever going through the middle. -- Amrom Katz %% Most people are afraid of being alone. -- Kirk, "The Mark of Gideon," stardate 5423.4 %% Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. -- Sydney J. Harris %% Most people are on the world, not in it -- having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them -- undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. -- John Muit %% Most people are too busy to have time for anything important. %% Most people can do without the essentials, but not without the luxuries. %% Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do. -- Turgenev %% Most people deserve each other. -- Shirley %% Most people don't need a great deal of love nearly so much as they need a steady supply. %% Most people eat as though they were fattening themselves for market. -- E. W. Howe %% 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. -- David Lammers, "Yakitori", Electronic Engineering Times, January 18, 1988 %% Most people feel that everyone is entitled to their opinion. %% Most people find the concept of programming obvious, but the doing impossible. %% Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "Shooting an Elephant", 1950 %% Most people have a mind that's open by appointment only. %% Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. -- Susan Sontag %% Most people live their lives as if they think God isn't paying any attention to them. -- Solomon Short %% Most people need some of their problems to help take their mind off some of the others. %% Most people prefer certainty to truth. %% Most people say what they're thinking before they think what they're saying. %% Most people seem to think that trampling individual rights is OK if it is "for the good of society as a whole." However, society is but a large number of individuals, and how can harming the individual parts better the whole? -- Andrew Ford, forda@agcs.com %% Most people will listen to your unreasonable demands, if you'll consider their unacceptable offer. %% Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions. -- Henty Wadsworth Longfellow %% Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass. -- Frank Zappa %% Most people's favorite way to end a game is by winning. %% Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise. -- Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", 1969 %% Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have one answer. -- Edmund C. Berkeley %% Most rumors are just as misleading as this one. %% Most seminars have a happy ending. Everyone's glad when they're over. %% Most things are better eaten than forgotten. %% Most things get steadily worse. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% Most women desire beauty rather than brains because most men can see better than they can think. %% Most women look for a man who is tall, dark and hung some. %% Most writers are naturally sycophants. Born in the fetal position, they never learn to stand erect. -- Edward Abbey %% Mostly harmless %% Most hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts. See also appendix B. %% Mother Earth is not flat! %% Mother Nature is a bitch. %% Mother died at age 91, has good health and is active mentally. %% Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like. -- Arnold Bennett %% Mother is the invention of necessity. %% Mother told me (yes, she told me) I'd meet girls like you. She also told me "Stay away. You never know what you'll catch." %% Mother told me about girls like you. %% Mother told me to be good, but she's been wrong before. %% Mother: "Where are you going to keep that goat, Joe?" Joe: "In the house." Mother: "What about the smell?" Joe: "He won't mind." %% Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies. -- Edward Abbey %% Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own. -- Aristotle %% Mothers of large families (who claim to common sense) Will find a Tiger will repay the trouble and expense. -- Hilaire Belloc, "The Tiger" %% Motivation researchers are those harlot social scientists who, in impressive analytic and/or sociological jargon, tell their clients what their clients want to hear, namely that appeals to human irrationality are likely to be far more profitable than appeals to rationality. -- S. I. Hayakawa (b. 1906) %% Motto of the Electrical Engineer: Working computer hardware is a lot like an erect penis: it stays up as long as you don't fuck with it. %% Mount St. Helens should have used earth control. %% Mountain Climbers do it on the rocks. %% Mountain climbers do it abysmally. %% Mountain under heaven: the image of Retreat. Thus the superior man keeps the inferior man at a distance, Not angrily but with reserve. %% Mountaineers do it showing excellent technique on the peak. %% Mountains standing close together: The image of Keeping Still. Thus the superior man Does not permit his thoughts To go beyond his situation. %% Mourn not the dead... But rather mourn the apathetic throng -- The cowed and meek Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, And dare not speak. -- Ralph Cahplin (1887-1961) %% Mouse: A peripheral originally named "veriform appendix" because of its functional resemblance, renamed for its usefulness as a cat toy. %% Moustache rides, 50 cents. %% Mouth: In man, the gateway to the soul; In woman, the outlet of the heart. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Move, move you slut. -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet %% Movies are like sex: when they're good, they're fantastic and when they're bad, they're also fantastic. -- Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) %% Movies keep getting more explicit; these days a "family film" is likely to show you how to start one. -- Sandy Teller %% Movies: A place where people talk behind your back. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony. -- Edward Abbey %% Mr and Mrs PED, can I borrow 26.7% of the RAYON TEXTILE production of the INDONESIAN archipelago? %% Mr. Burns: "How does he do it?" Smithers: "He's a love machine, sir." -- "Homer's Night Out", from The Simpsons %% Mr. Burns: "What a pathetic attempt to curry my favor." Smithers: "Fabulous observation, sir. Just fabulous." -- "There's No Disgrace Like Home", from The Simpsons %% Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing. %% Mr. DePree also expects a "tremendous social change" in all workplaces. "When I first started working 40 years ago, a factory supervisor was focused on the product. Today it is drastically different, because of the social milieu. It isn't unusual for a worker to arrive on his shift and have some family problem that he doesn't know how to resolve. The example I like to use is a guy who comes in and says 'this isn't going to be a good day for me, my son is in jail on a drunk-driving charge and I don't know how to raise bail.' What that means is that if the supervisor wants productivity, he has to know how to raise bail." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% Mr. DePree believes participative capitalism is the wave of the future. The U.S. work force, he believes, "more and more demands to be included in the capitalist system and if we don't find ways to get the capitalist system to be an inclusive system rather than the exclusive system it has been, we're all in deep trouble. If we don't find ways to begin to understand that capitalism's highest potential lies in the common good, not in the individual good, then we're risking the system itself." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Mr. Kamikaze! Mr. DNA.! %% Mr. LaForge, step on it. -- Picard, "The Big Goodbye", stardate 41997.7 %% Mr. LaForge, when I left this ship it was in one piece. I would appreciate your returning it to me in the same condition. -- Picard, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2 %% Mr. President, I have good news and bad news. What's the bad news? The Shuttle exploded. What could possibly be the good news? Star Wars works. %% Mr. Rockford, this is the Thomas Crown School of Dance and Contemporary Etiquette. We aren't going to call again! Now you want these free lessons or what? %% Mr. Rockford; Miss Collins from the Bureau of Licenses. We got your renewal before the extended deadline but not your check. I'm sorry but at midnight you're no longer licensed as an investigator. %% Mr. Rockford? This is Betty Joe Withers. I got four shirts of yours from the Bo Peep Cleaners by mistake. I don't know why they gave me men's shirts but they're going back. %% Mr. Rockford? You don't know me, but I'd like to hire you. Could you call me at... My name is... uh... Never mind, forget it! %% Mr. String had big plans for Valentine's day. He was going to take Mrs. String out for an elegant meal at a posh restaurant, then see the city lights from Skyline Drive, then home for (hopefully) some twineing. Well, they waited in line for 20 minutes at the restaurant, but when they got to the Maitre d', he said "Wait a minute, you look like strings! We don't allow any strings in here. You'll have to go somewhere else." They were fit to be tied! Mr. String threatened, cajoled, and attempted bribery, but the Maitre d' was not to be swayed. "No strings allowed", he said. So, they went outside, tied themselves together, and frazzled up their ends, then got back in line. This time, when the Maitre d' said "Hey there, are you strings?" Mr. String replied, "Why no, we're a frayed knot!" %% Mr. Worf, throw him in the brig. Delighted, Captain. -- Picard and Worf about Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Mrs. Blumberg was reading a story on India in the Jewish Daily Forward. She turned to her husband. "Max, what's an 'untouchable'?" "A guy you can't borrow money from." %% Mrs. Harrison, can Dave come and play baseball with us? But you know Dave's a quadriplegic That's okay, we want to use him for first base %% Mrs. Johnson had a very beautiful and intelligent parrot. He had just one problem: He liked to fuck Mr. Hawkins' chickens. Mrs. Johnson scolded him time and time again, but he would just laugh at her. Finally, she told him that if he did it again, she would cut off all of the feathers on the top of his head. Well, he resisted the urge for a week, but one day, he just couldn't resist going next door. Besides, he figured she was bluffing. Well, Mr. Hawkins came over, ranting and raving about how the parrot had been fucking his chickens again. Mrs. Johnson didn't say a word, just took out her scissors and cut off all of the parrot's head feathers. That night, Mrs. Johnson had a big party at her house. Before it started, she took the parrot and put him on top of the piano by the front door. "Since you disobeyed me today, you have to stay here on the piano tonight. Now, don't you dare move." Well, the parrot was pretty pissed off about having his head bare, and he wasn't too happy about having to spend the whole evening on the piano. Still, as he usually did, when the butler would announce the guests as they arrived, he would say hello to them. Just then, two bald-headed men came to the door. Before the butler could say anything, the parrot yelled, "Okay, you chicken-fuckers, up here on the piano with me!" %% Mrs. Kelly is partial to cocks; Mr. Kelly likes rye on the rocks. When he's under the weather They can't get together, So others get into her box. %% Much study is a weariness of the flesh. -- Ecclesiastes XII, 12 %% Much that is dreadful and inhuman in history, much that one hardly likes to believe, is mitigated by the reflection that the one who commands and the one who carries out are different people. The former does not behold the sight and does not experience the strong impression on the imagination. The latter obeys a superior and therefore feels no responsibility for his acts. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love for power. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Much to his Mum and Dad's dismay, Horace ate himself one day. He didn't stop to say his grace, he just sat down and ate his face. "We can't have this!" his Dad declared, "If that lad's ate, he should be shared." But even as he spoke they saw Horace eating more and more: First his legs and then his thighs, his arms, his nose, his hair, his eyes... "Stop him someone!" Mother cried, "Those eyeballs would be better fried!" But all too late, for they were gone, and he had started on his dong... "Oh! foolish child!" the father mourns "You could have deep-fried that with prawns, Some parsley and and some tartar sauce..." But H. was on his second course: his liver and his lights and lung, His ears, his neck, his chin, his tongue; "To think I raised him from the cot, And now he's going to scoff the lot!" His Mother cried: "What shall we do? What's left won't even make a stew..." And as she wept, her son was seen, to eat his head, his heart his spleen. and there he lay: a boy no more, just a stomach on the floor... None the less, since it *was* his, they ate it-- that's was haggis is. %% Muir's Law: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. %% Mules are protected under the laws of Ohio, to the extent that you cannot ride one more than ten miles, or set a fire under it if it balks. %% Multics is security spelled sideways. %% Multics:: /muhl'tiks/ n. [from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An early (late 1960s) timesharing operating system co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories. Very innovative for its time --- among other things, it introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files. All the members but GE eventually pulled out after determining that {second-system effect} had bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability (the `lean' predecessor in question was {CTSS}). Honeywell commercialized Multics after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful (among other things, on some versions one was commonly required to enter a password to log out). One of the developers left in the lurch by the project's breakup was Ken Thompson, a circumstance which led directly to the birth of {{UNIX}}. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See also {brain-damaged} and {GCOS}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Multiple choice test: WHAT IS FORTRAN? [a] between thre and fiv tran. [b] what two computers engage in before interface. [c] ridiculous. %% Multiple safety redundancies lead to multiple^1 failures. %% Multiplication is vexation, Division is as bad; The Rule of three doth puzzle me, And Practice drives me mad. -- Elizabethan MS, 1570 %% Multitasking = 3 PCs and a chair with wheels! %% Multitasking causes schizophrenia. %% Multitasking: Reading in the bathroom %% Mum's the word. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% Mummy dust to make me old; To shroud my clothes, the black of night; To age my voice, an old hag's cackle; To whiten my hair, a scream of fright; A blast of wind to fan my hate; A thunderbolt to mix it well -- Now begin thy magic spell! -- The Evil Queen, "Snow White" Walter Elias Disney: 1937 %% Mummy: "What did you say this projector in a bottle is called?" Marshall: "Television." Mummy: "Truly dreadful invention. I do hope it never catches on." -- "Scarest Home Videos", Eerie Indiana %% Mummy: "Heavens to burgitroid, what is that detestable little yard ape doing in my movie. He's ruining it." Simon: "You should see what he does to my bedroom." -- "Scariest Home Videos", Eerie Indiana %% Munging a # #. %% Munroe's Dictum: He that is without sin among you has been bored for a lllllooooonnnnnggggg time. %% Murder complaint? Mail to 'netnix!devil!gamble!freak!trap!lastwill!rip'. %% Murder is contrary to the laws of man and God. -- M-5 Computer, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4731.3 %% Murder may be done by legal means, by plausible and profitable war, by calumny, as well as by dose or dagger. -- Lord Acton (1834-1902) %% Murmur at nothing: if our ills are reparable, it is ungrateful; if remediless, it is in vain. -- William Shakespeare %% Murphy is out there... waiting... %% Murphy was an optimist. %% Murphy's Constant: Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value. %% Murphy's Discovery: Do you know Presidents talk to the country the way men talk to women? They say, "Trust me, go all the way with me, and everything will be all right." And what happens? Nine months later, you're in trouble! %% Murphy's Eighth Law: If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. %% Murphy's Fifth Law: If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway. %% Murphy's First Law: If anything can go wrong, it will (and at the worst possible moment). %% Murphy's Fortieth Law: In designing any type of construction, no overall dimension can be totalled correctly after 4:40 p.m. on Friday. %% Murphy's Forty-First Law: The tendency of smoke from a cigarette, barbecue, campfire etc. to drift into a person's face varies directly with that person's sensitivity to smoke. %% Murphy's Forty-Fourth Law: Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with. %% Murphy's Fourteenth Law: Persons disagreeing with your facts are always emotional and employ faulty reasoning. %% Murphy's Fourth Law: If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. %% Murphy's Last Law: If nothing went wrong today, you're probably dead. %% Murphy's Law and related sayings: 1) Leakproof seals... will. 2) Self starters... will not. 3) If you're feeling good, don't worry, you'll get over it. 4) All warranties expire upon payment of invoice. 5) If you try to please everyone, no one will like it. %% Murphy's Law is always a good excuse. -- Solomon Short %% Murphy's Law is recursive. Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work. %% Murphy's Law never fails except when you try to demonstrate it. -- Walter J. Crowell %% Murphy's Law never fail -- Walter J. Crowell %% Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory. %% Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: Things get worse under pressure. %% Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem... -- Thomas S. Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow %% Murphy's Law: Any thing that can go wrong, Will. %% Murphy's Law: The accessibility of a small part which has fallen behind the workbench is directly proportional to its size and inversely proportional to its importance. %% Murphy's Law: Whatever goes wrong, will get worse. %% Murphy's Law: prov. The correct, *original* Murphy's Law reads: "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." This is a principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design for lusers. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it `THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under {magic smoke}). Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later. Within months `Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is sometimes referred to as {Finagle's Law}. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself! -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. Brown's Paradox: If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will. Sullivan's Observation: If you rely on Murphy's law, everything will go as planned (but don't count on it.) %% Murphy's Law: If the slightest probability for an unpleasant event to happen exists, the event will take place; preferably during a demonstration. %% Murphy's Laws: (1) If anything can go wrong, it will. (2) Nothing is as easy as it looks. (3) Everything takes longer than you think it will. %% Murphy's Second Law: Nothing is as easy as it looks. %% Murphy's Seventeenth Law: The more urgent the need for decision, the less apparent is the identity of the decision-maker. %% Murphy's Seventh Law: It is a fundamental law of nature that nothing ever quite works out. %% Murphy's Seventh Law: Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. %% Murphy's Sixteenth Law: The greater the importance of decisions to be made, the larger must be the committee assigned to make them. %% Murphy's Third Law: In any field of scientific endeavor, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. %% Murphy's Third Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. %% Murphy's Third Law: Everything takes longer than you think it will. %% Murphy's Thirteenth Law: You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that is sufficient. %% Murphy's Thirtieth Law: Never step in anything soft. %% Murphy's Thirty-First Law: It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize you are in a hurry. %% Murphy's Thirty-Fourth Law: Measure twice because you can cut only once. %% Murphy's Thirty-Sixth Law: Bad weather reports are more often right than the good ones. %% Murphy's Thirty-Third Law: When anything is used to its full potential, it will break. %% Murphy's Twelfth Law: Every clarification breeds new questions. %% Murphy's Twentieth Law: The further away the disaster or accident occurs, the greater the number of dead or injured. %% Murphy's Twenty-First Law: No name, no matter how simple, can be correctly understood over the phone. %% Murphy's Twenty-Fourth Law: Them that has, gets. %% Murphy's Twenty-Third Law: Leftover nuts never match leftover bolts. %% Murphy's saving grace: The worst is the enemy of the bad. %% Murray's Rule: Any country with "democratic" in the title isn't. %% Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music. -- Edward Abbey %% Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart. -- Edward Abbey %% Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs. -- Edward Abbey %% Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. I've read that things inanimate have moved, And as with living souls have been inform'd By magic numbers and persuasive sound. -- Congreve %% Music in the soul can be heard by the universe. -- Lao Tsu %% Music is a savage art, a measured madness. -- Edward Abbey %% Music is the answer. %% Musical Definition, no 486: Allegro :- the bluebell girls. %% Musical Hairsplitting: The act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: "The Vienna Franks ara a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% Musicians do it with rhythm. %% Musick is almost as dangerous as Gunpowder; and it may be requires looking after no less than the Press or the Mint. 'Tis possible a publick Regulation might not be amiss. -- Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) %% Mussourgsky does it at an exhibition. %% Must Go - My Rotweiler needs its teeth sharpened. %% Must I hold a candle to my shames? -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice" %% Must be getting close to town -- we're hitting more people. %% Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done? -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) %% Mustgo, n.: Any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so long it has become a science project. -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends" %% Mw'lfgah mywfg fhtagn G'htyaf nglyf lghya %% My Analyze over the ocean, My Analyze over the sea. My Analyze over the ocean, Oh bring back my Anatomy. %% My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: "Yeah," she said, "I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn." -- Edward Abbey %% My Aunt MAUREEN was a military advisor to IKE & TINA TURNER!! %% My BIOLOGICAL ALARM CLOCK just went off... It has noiseless DOZE FUNCTION and full kitchen!! %% My Bonnie looked into a gas tank The height of its contents to see She lighted a match to assist her Oh bring back my Bonnie to me. %% My CODE of ETHICS is vacationing at famed SCHROON LAKE in upstate New York!! %% My EARS are GONE!! %% My Go amn keyboar oesn't have any 's! %% My God can beat up YOUR god... %% My God! You have freckles everywhere! %% My God, I'm depressed! Here I am, a computer with a mind a thousand times as powerful as yours, doing nothing but cranking out fortunes and sending mail about softball games. And I've got this pain right through my ALU. I've asked for it to be replaced, but nobody ever listens. I think it would be better for us both if you were to just log out again. %% My God. It's full of stars... -- 2001 %% My I.U.D. picks up Radio Windy. %% My LESLIE GORE record is BROKEN ... %% My My, hey hey Rock and roll is here to stay The king is gone but he's not forgotten It's better to burn out This is the story of a Johnny Rotten Than to fade away It's better to burn out than it is to rust My my, hey hey The king is gone but he's not forgotten It's out of the blue and into the black Hey hey, my my They give you this, but you pay for that Rock and roll can never die And once you're gone you can never come back There's more to the picture When you're out of the blue Than meets the eye And into the black -- Neil Young [My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), Rust Never Sleeps] %% My Other Car is a STARSHIP %% My Publisher: "Yes, sooner or later, we all wake up dead!" -- Edward Abbey %% My RAM's not what it used to be, so don't quote me. %% My VCR flashes 01:35, 01:35, 01:35, ... -- Steve Wright %% My admiration for you can be taken for granite. %% My advice to any young man at the beginning of his career is to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with his fresh, untrained, and unprejudiced mind. -- H. Selye %% My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it. -- "Grendel", by John Gardner %% My advice to young people who wish to earn their living by writing is: DO. -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) %% My aim is the re-establishment of the worship of men. -- Gabriel D'Annunzio %% My ambition is to marry a rich woman who's too proud to let her husband work. %% My analyst told me that I was right out of my head, But I said, "Dear Doctor, I think that it is you instead. Because I have got a thing that is unique and new, To prove it I'll have the last laugh on you. 'Cause instead of one head- I've got two. And you know two heads are better than one. %% My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% My aunt gave me a walkie-talkie for my birthday. She says if I'm good, she'll give me the other one next year. -- Rod Schmidt %% My aura can beat up your aura. %% My back aches, my pussy is sore; I simply can't fuck any more; I'm covered with sweat, And you haven't come yet, And my God, it's a quarter to four! -- The Gray-haired Woman's Complaint %% My back hurts, my penis is sore I simply can't fuck any more. I'm dripping with sweat, You haven't come yet, My god, its a quarter to four! %% My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed forward, shouting "The WHO! The WHO!" and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one state in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded OK. -- Dave Barry, "The Snake" %% My best friend is a social worker. %% My biorhythms must be at an all-time low. -- Doctor (Tom Baker), THE PIRATE PLANET %% My bogometer just triggered. %% My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R. %% My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah. -- Edward Abbey %% My books are not taken seriously. But that's all right; they are given playfully. -- Edward Abbey %% My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% My boss is a Jewish carpenter. %% My boss just told the quote-of-the-day(TM) after talking to our friendly IBM salesguy who said: "You've got be careful about getting locked into open systems." Heh! Why don't I trust these people? :-) -- Ian Dickinson (cudep@warwick.ac.uk) %% My brain is my second favorite organ. -- Woody Allen %% My brain is paged out to my liver %% My brother is an only child. -- Bennett Cerf %% My brother sent me a postcard the other day with this big satellite photo of the entire earth on it. On the back it said: "Wish you were here". -- Steven Wright %% My brother-in-law has found a way to make ends meet. He goes around with his head stuck up his ass. %% My but she's a strange one. %% My calculator is my shepherd, I shall not want It maketh me accurate to ten significant figures, and it leadeth me in scientific notation to 99 digits. It restoreth my square roots and guideth me along paths of floating decimal points for the sake of precision. Yea, tho I walk through the valley of surprise quizzes, I will fear no prof, for my calculator is there to hearten me. It prepareth a log table to comfort me, it prepareth an arc sin for me in the presence of my teachers. It anoints my homework with correct solutions, my interpolations are over. Surely, both precision and accuracy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of Texas instruments forever. %% My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -- It gives a lovely light. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay %% My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle. %% My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that. -- Hunter S. Thompson %% My colleagues and I feel that independents like ElfQuest are nothing but sheep in wolves' clothing. -- S. Lee %% My computer can beat up your computer. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% My computer has a terminal illness %% My computer puts out. %% My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers. -- Edward Abbey %% My computer's sick, I think my modem's a carrier %% My congratulations to the committee that planned this day. %% My couch potato routine honed to perfection %% My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit. -- Edward Abbey %% My cup hath runneth'd over with love. %% My daddy said, "Son, you're gonna drive me to drinkin' if you don't stop drivin' that hot-rod Lincoln." %% My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness. -- Helen Keller %% My darling wife was always glum. I drowned her in a cask of rum, And so made sure that she would stay In better spirits night and day. %% My dear Miss Shaw, I never report myself anywhere, particularly not forthwith. -- Third Doctor, DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS %% My dental hygienist is cute. Every time I visit, I eat a whole package of Oreo cookies while waiting in the lobby. Sometimes she has to cancel the rest of the afternoon's appointments. -- Steve Wright %% My desire is ... that mine adversary had written a book. -- Job xxxi. 35 %% My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people. -- Orson Welles %% My doctorate's in Literature, but it seems like a pretty good pulse to me. %% My economic philosophy is middle of the road. I spend money left and right. %% My experience with government is when things are non-controversial, beautifully co-ordinated and all the rest, it must be that not much is going on. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% My eyes feel like pinballs, my tongue feels like a fish. %% My face is new, my license is expired, and I'm under a doctor's care!!!! %% My fallacies are more logical than your fallacies. %% My family history begins with me, but yours ends with you. -- Iphicrates %% My father had the spirit and integrity of a scientist, but he was a salesman. I remember asking him the question "How can a man of integrity be a salesman?" He said to me, "Frankly, many salesmen in the business are not straightforward -- they think it's a better way to sell. But I've tried being straightforward, and I find it has its advantages. In fact, I wouldn't do it any other way. If the customer thinks at all, he'll realize he has had some bad experience with another salesman, but hasn't had that kind of experience with you. So in the end, several customers will stay with you for a long time and appreciate it." -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% My father taught me three things: 1: Never mix whiskey with anything but water. 2: Never try to draw to an inside straight. 3: Never discuss business with anyone who refuses to give his name. %% My father was a God-fearing man, but he never missed a copy of the New York Times, either. -- E. B. White %% My father was a creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off. -- Alexandre Dumas, pere (1802-1870) %% My father, a good man, told me "Never lose your ignorance; you cannot replace it." -- Erich Maria Remarque %% My favorite has always been the No Fear shirt that says "He who dies with the most toys -- still dies" -- ejohnson@microsoft.com %% My favorite is about a man who tried to hijack a plane. It was a charter flight, sitting on the ground. The guy runs across the tarmac, forces his way into the plane, pulls a gun on the stewardess, who starts to laugh. Turns out this is a flight of FBI agents going to a convention, and there are now a plane full of guns aimed at him. %% My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind. -- Robert Pirsig %% My favorite tee shirt "He who dies with the most toes wins" -- gjm@slacvm.slac.stanford.edu %% My favorite tee shirt "He who dies with the most toy wins" with a picture of a climber with a huge aid rack. %% My favorite tee shirt Love a climber they use protection. -- John Michael Reel, jmreel@eos.ncsu.edu %% My folks didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they were there to meet the boat. %% My foolish parents taught me to read and write. %% My friend Data, you see things with the wonder of a child. And that makes you more human than any of us. -- Yar, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3 %% My friend Sally is a nudist. I went to her house. The closets have no doors. The walls are covered with see-through wallpaper. -- Rod Schmidt %% My friend Sam has one leg. I went to his house. I couldn't go up the stairs. -- Rod Schmidt %% My friend, why have you drifted so far away? All motion is relative, maybe it is you who have moved away by standing still. %% My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right -- Vice President Dan Quayle, in a speech to Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition %% My gawd, how the years fly. Stolidly middle-aged - when only yesterday I was young and eager and awed by the mystery of an unfolding world. -- H. P. Lovecraft, 8/20/1926 %% My girlfriend and I sure had a good time at the beach last summer. First she'd bury me in the sand, then I'd bury her. This summer I'm going to go back and dig her up. %% My girlfriend and I went on a picnic. I don't know how she did it, but she got poison ivy on the brain. When it itched, the only way she could scratch it was to think about sandpaper. -- Steve Wright %% My girlfriend asked me how long I was going to be gone on this tour. I said, "the whole time." -- Steve Wright %% My girlfriend does her nails with white-out. When she's asleep, I go over there and write misspelled words on them. -- Steve Wright %% My girlfriend's favorite erotic position is bending over my credit cards. %% My godda bless, never I see sucha people. -- Signor Piozzi [quoted by Cecilia Thrale] %% My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. -- Louis Adamic %% My grandfather gave me a watch. It doesn't have any hands or numbers. He says it's very accurate. I asked him what time it was. You can guess what he told me. -- Steve Wright %% My grandfather invented Cliff's Notes. It all started back in 1912...well, to make a long story short... -- Steven Wright %% My haircut is totally traditional! %% My hat covers my head... Just like hair used to! %% My head is sore, and there's a hole in the brick wall! %% My heart is heavy at the remembrance of all the miles that lie between us; and I can scarcely believe that you are so distant from me. We are parted; and every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven. -- Edwards %% My hopes were dashed to smithereens. %% My house is made out of balsa wood, so when I want to scare the neighborhood kids I lift it over my head and tell them to get out of my yard or I'll throw it at them. -- Steve Wright %% My house is on the median strip of a highway. You don't really notice, except I have to leave the driveway doing 60 MPH. -- Steve Wright %% My husband is the kind of boy who'll not go anywhere without his father, and his father will go anywhere. %% My idea of a happy vacation isn't spending most of it alone. %% My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins %% My idea of heaven is eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets. -- Sydney Smith %% My indignation, like th' imprisoned fire, pent in the troubled breast of Aetna, burnt deep and silent. -- Thomson %% My inferiority complexes aren't as good as yours. %% My interest is in the future, because I am going to spend the rest of my life there. %% My karma ran over my dogma %% My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% My kingdom for a beer; half my beer for a woman. %% My lawyer can beat up your lawyer. %% My life is a patio of fun! %% My life may be strange, but at least it's not boring %% My life will go on... without your daily phone calls without your smile without your corny jokes without rides in your car with no destination without dinners for two and mainly without you. -- "Goldengirl" %% My lips pressed themselves involuntarily to hers -- a long, long kiss, burning intense -- concentrating emotion, heart, soul, all the rays of life's light... into a single focus. -- Bulwer %% My lord, I have a cunning plan... %% 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 (1893-1967) %% 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 (1893-1967) %% My lucky colour just faded. %% My message above. Your response here ____________. %% My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or even that they were always wrong. Rather, I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on the alter of human limitations. I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it. Galileo was not shown the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord. But the Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology. They had no choice; the earth really does revolve about the sun. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" %% My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say. And then say it with the utmost levity. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs. -- Woody Allen [on Epistemology] %% My mind is a potato field... %% My mind is like an old-fashioned bear trap: rusty, dangerous, hasn't caught a thing in years. %% My mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts %% My mind is making ashtrays in Dayton.... %% My mind's been working overtime. %% My modem can beat up your modem. %% My mom said this the other day: "You know, there's somebody in town that has Alzheimer's... but I can't remember who it is." %% My mother drinks to forget she drinks. -- Crazy Jimmy %% My mother had a baby once. -- Jigger %% My mother is a fish. -- William Faulkner %% My mother is from Iceland and my father is from Cuba. I guess that makes me an Ice Cube. %% My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% My mother wants grandchildren, so I said, "Mom, go for it!" -- Sue Murphy %% My mother was a test tube; my father was a knife. -- Friday %% My mother-in-law broke up my marriage. One day my wife came home early from work and found us in bed together. -- Lenny Bruce %% My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more. -- Charles Lamb (1775-1834) %% My name is Carrot Man and I curse your little sister's goldfish. %% My neighbor has a circular driveway... he can't get out. -- Steve Wright %% My neighbor is a real energy saver -- hasn't been out of his hammock all summer. -- Phil Pastoret %% My nose feels like a bad Ronald Reagan movie... %% My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted. -- Edward Abbey %% My number, definite and known Is ten time ten, told ten times o'er Though half of me is one alone And half exceeds all count and score Thousand (Thou-sand) %% My one regret in life is that I'm not somebody else. -- Woody Allen %% My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! -- William Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet" %% My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. %% My opponent's best move is my best move. %% My other car is a broom! %% My other car is a police car %% My other computer is a abacus. %% My other computer is also a Unix system. %% My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet. -- Edward Abbey %% My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% 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 (1893-1967) %% My pants just went on a wild rampage through a Long Island Bowling Alley!! -- Zippy the Pinhead %% My pants just went to high school in the Carlsbad Caverns!!! %% My parents went to Niagra Falls and all I got was this crummy life. %% My parents went to the Tee-Shirt Shoppe and all I got was this stupid T-shirt! %% My pen is at the bottom of a page, Which, being finished, here the story ends; 'Tis to be wished it had been sooner done, But stories somehow lengthen when begun. -- Byron %% My people pride themselves on being the greatest, most successful gamblers in the universe. We compete for everything: power, fame, women. Everything we desire. And it is our nature to win! For proof I offer you our exploration of this galaxy. -- Kirk, "The gamesters of Triskelion," stardate unknown %% My personal computer "toolkit" consists of 1 hammer and 1 rubber. My motto, "If you can't fix it, fuck it!" %% My personal feelings about Captain Picard are irrelevant to this investigation...and NONE of your business. -- Dr. Beverly Crusher, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2 %% My polyvinyl cowboy wallet was made in Hong Kong by Montgomery Clift! %% My position hasn't changed. I am, uh, pro -- pro -- uh, prolife -- -- President George Bush, April 1992 %% My position is that I understand from a medical situation, immediately after a rape is reported, that a woman normally, in fact, can go to the hospital and have a D and C. At that time... that is before the forming of a life. That is not anything to do with abortion -- Vice President Dan Quayle explaining that Dilatation and Curettage, a form of abortion which occurs after fertilization, is not really abortion. (the Washington post, 11/03/88) %% My precept to all who build is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house an ornament to the owner. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% My preferred programing language is solder, but I do the re-writes in VHDL. -- Dave Spring, das@oasis.icl.co.uk %% My problem is not that I don't have my shit together. I've always had my shit together. My problem is that I just can't lift it. -- Burt Reynold's character, "The Longest Yard" by Tracy Keenan Wynn %% My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way. -- Al Capone (1899-1947) %% My rage is not malicious; like a spark of fire by steel enforced out of a flint it is no sooner kindled, but extinct. -- Goffe %% My reason is not framed to bend or stoop; my knees are. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns. -- James Watt, in "The Washington Post", 24 May 1981 %% My roommate got a pet elephant. Then it got lost. It's in the apartment somewhere. -- Steve Wright %% My rule is to be true rather than funny. -- Bill Cosby %% My school colors were clear. We used to say, "I'm not naked, I'm in the band." -- Steve Wright %% My sex life hasn't been so good; either fist or famine. %% My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel. -- Edward Abbey %% My strength is as the strength of ten because my code is pure. %% My surf, my beach my wave baby, get off. %% My tagline can beat up your tagline! %% My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed. -- Christopher Morley %% My to me an empire is. -- Southwell %% My toughest fight was with my first wife. -- Muhammad Ali %% My uncle Murray conquered Egypt in 53 B.C. And I can prove it too!! %% My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama. -- Fred Allen %% My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% My weight is perfect for my height... which varies. %% My wife has cut our lovemaking down to once a month, but I know two guys she's cut out entirely. -- Rodney Dangerfield %% My wife just had plastic surgery, I cut up all her credit cards. %% My wife says I don't listen to her - at least that's what I think she said. %% My youngest daughter just had her first birthday. We bought her a card with one of those "I am 1" badges. One the back was the disclaimer: "Not suitable for children under three years old" %% My, how you've changed since I've changed. %% My, we've certainly come a long way from the days of the revolution. Back then, the guys that wrote the Second Amendment felt that the boundaries should restrict government, not individuals. Boy were they screwed up! Don't ask for responsibility: insist on it. -- George L Roman, george@sgi.com %% Mystery is a word with no objective pertinence, merely describing the limitations of a mind. In fact, a mind may be classified by the order of the phenomena it considers mysterious ... -- Magnus Ridolf %% Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. -- Booth Tarkington %% Myth-conceptions are the major cause of wars! -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% Mythology, n.: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% N adj. 1. Some large and indeterminate number of objects; "There were N bugs in that crock!"; also used in its original sense of a variable name. 2. An arbitrarily large (and perhaps infinite) number. 3. A variable whose value is specified by the current context. "We'd like to order N wonton soups and a family dinner for N-1." 4. NTH: adj. The ordinal counterpart of N. "Now for the Nth and last time..." In the specific context "Nth-year grad student", N is generally assumed to be at least 4, and is usually 5 or more. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% N: /N/ quant. 1. A large and indeterminate number of objects: "There were N bugs in that crock!" Also used in its original sense of a variable name: "This crock has N bugs, as N goes to infinity." (The true number of bugs is always at least N + 1.) 2. A variable whose value is inherited from the current context. For example, when a meal is being ordered at a restaurant, N may be understood to mean however many people there are at the table. From the remark "We'd like to order N wonton soups and a family dinner for N - 1" you can deduce that one person at the table wants to eat only soup, even though you don't know how many people there are (see {great-wall}). 3. `Nth': adj. The ordinal counterpart of N, senses 1 and 2. "Now for the Nth and last time..." In the specific context "Nth-year grad student", N is generally assumed to be at least 4, and is usually 5 or more (see {tenured graduate student}). See also {{random numbers}}, {two-to-the-N}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% NAESER'S LAW: For every foolproof program, there is a bigger and more dangerous fool who will bypass the safeguards. %% NAK: /nak/ [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101] interj. 1. On-line joke answer to {ACK}?: "I'm not here." 2. On-line answer to a request for chat: "I'm not available." 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you don't understand their point or that they have suddenly stopped making sense. See {ACK}, sense 3. "And then, after we recode the project in COBOL...." "Nak, Nak, Nak! I thought I heard you say COBOL!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% NANCY!! Why is everything RED?! %% 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. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Man of Destiny" %% NASA also has serious intentions of making up the next shuttle crew entirely of third world astronauts. It seems that they want personnel more accustomed to sudden population explosion. %% NASA has decided it is going to go back to paying $900.00 for sheet metal screws. It seems they were unhappy after finding out that their lowest bidder depended on the screw threads being optional. [Historical note: one of the takeoff delays was due to a screw being stripped. They had to drill it out on the launchpad. Further delay was introduced by the fact that they didn't have a drill.] %% NASA is no longer going to have Tang as its official drink. Their new official drink will be Ocean Spray. %% NATALIE'S LAW OF SCHOOLWORK: You never catch on until after the test. %% NATHAN...your PARENTS were in a CARCRASH!! They're VOIDED - They COLLAPSED They had no CHAINSAWS ...They had no MONEY MACHINES ...They did PILLS in SKIMPY GRASS SKIRTS ...Nathan, I EMULATED them ...but they were OFF-KEY... %% NATIONAL ENQUIRER headline: "Reagan sees UFO and orders his pilot: Follow it!" %% NATO Integrated Communications System Telegraph Automatic Relay Equipment. What a mouthful! %% NAVEL: A place to stash your gum on the way down. %% NAZISM - You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you. %% NECROPHILIA: Dropping in for a cold one. %% NEKKED: nude. "She was in the pool nekked as a jaybird!" -- Texan Dictionary %% NERD PACK: Plastic pouch worn in breast pocket to keep pens from soiling clothes. Nerd's position in engineering hierarchy can be measured by number of pens, grease pencils, and rulers bristling in his pack. %% NETWORK: What fishermen do when not fishing. %% NEUTRON BOMB: An explosive device of limited military value because, as it only destroys people without destroying property, it must be used in conjunction with bombs that destroy property. %% NEW YORK (AP) -- According to a new poll, 72% of Americans who believe in Heaven rate their chances of going there as good to excellent, but many say their friends' chances are considerably worse. %% NEW YORK: Where men are men, sheep enjoy it, and lepers laugh their heads off. %% NEW: different color from previous design %% NEWARK has been REZONED!! DES MOINES has been REZONED!! %% NEWS FLASH === Medical researchers have discovered that possums and armadillos are carriers of AIDS.* The Surgeon General urges all Americans to take appropriate precautions. * Asphalt Instant Death Syndrome %% NEWS FLASH!! Today the East German pole-vault champion became the West German pole-vault champion. %% NEWSFLASH!! Rodney Fenster looked up the shaft of elevator number four at 1700 N. 17th St. this morning to see if the elevator was on its way down. It was. Age 31. %% NFS: all the nice semantics of MSDOS, and its performance and security too. -- Henery Spencer %% NIHIL EX NIHIL -- DON'T SETQ NIL. %% NIL [from LISP terminology for "false"] No. Usage: used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the "-P" convention. See T. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% NIL: /nil/ No. Used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the `-P' convention. Most hackers assume this derives simply from LISP terminology for `false' (see also {T}), but NIL as a negative reply was well-established among radio hams decades before the advent of LISP. The historical connection between early hackerdom and the ham radio world was strong enough that this may have been an influence. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% NMI from unknown source %% NMI: /N-M-I/ n. Non-Maskable Interrupt. An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680[01234]0; the NMI line on an 80[1234]86. In contrast with a {priority interrupt} (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% NO BRAINER: A decision which, viewed through the retrospectoscope, is "obvious" to those who failed to make it originally. %% NO MAINTENANCE: impossible to fix %% NO MORE BU__ SH__ %% NODE'S POSTULATE FOR TRAVELLERS: When the plane you are on is late, the plane you want to transfer to is on time. %% NODE: Past tense of to know. "I node him for years!" -- Texan Dictionary %% NODES LAW OF STASIS: If you're so competent that you are irreplaceable, you won't be promoted. %% NOGG'S POSTULATE: Any system that depends on reliability is unreliable. %% NOLO CONTENDERE: A legal term meaning: "I didn't do it, judge, and I'll never do it again." %% NOMEX underwear: /noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/ [USENET] n. Syn. {asbestos longjohns}, used mostly in auto-related mailing lists and newsgroups. NOMEX underwear is an actual product available on the racing equipment market, used as a fire resistance measure and required in some racing series. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% NOMINAL EGG: New Yorkerese for expensive. %% NONSMOKERS do it without huffing and puffing. %% NOODLE'S RULE OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow. %% NORMAL ORDER OF TELEVISION ACTIVITIES: Turn on Tune in Throw up %% NOT THE BIBLE, Chapter 1, Verse 23: "And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It JUST goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken BILLIONS OF YEARS." -- Tony Hendra and Sean Kelly %% NOTE FROM MANAGEMENT: To avoid damaging the connectors, please disconnect terminal before throwing it out of the window. %% NOTE: Zhmoogie, along with a Nosei(no-say), and a Zhmoogwe[Zhmoog-wee] all live in Greenland. Zhmoogie: An evil creature with death and destruction on its mind. Zhmoogwe: An animal who loves the '60s and wears bell bottoms and attends "Groovey" and "keen" meatings to work for peace. Nosei: A dumb creature who are pets to Zhmoogwes and food to Zhmoogies. Attack of the Zhmoogies ------ -- --- --------- I regular ol' Dick and Jane story. See Dick and Jane getting on plane. See them travel to Greenland Jane gets off plane. Dick follows. See Jane get attacked by a Zhmoogie. Run Jane, run! Dick tries to rescue Jane. Go Dick, go! See Dick get eaten by Zhmoogie. Yum, Yum. Jane reminds Zhmoogie about good manners. Way to go, Jane!! Zhmoogie now offers Jane to a game of Jacks. Play Jane, play! %% NOTHING: A man with an erection who walks into a wall and breaks his nose. %% NOWPRINT. NOWPRINT. Clemclone, back to the shadows again. -- The Firesign Theater %% NP-: /N-P/ pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often `more so than it should be' (NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a good a priori reason that they should be.) "Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying." This is generalized from the computer-science terms `NP-hard' and `NP-complete'. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial algorithms, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. Note, however, that the NP- prefix is, from a complexity theorist's point of view, the wrong part of `NP-complete' to connote extreme difficulty; it is the completeness, not the NP-ness, that puts any problem it describes in the `hard' category. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% NSA line eater: n. The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers describe it as a mythical beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure, and many believe in acting as though it exists just in case. Some netters put loaded phrases like `KGB', `Uzi', `nuclear materials', `Palestine', `cocaine', and `assassination' in their {sig block}s in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the creature. The {GNU} version of {EMACS} actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text. There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a `Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This one was making the rounds in the late 1970s, spread by people who had no idea of then-current technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them listen in. Speech-recognition technology can't do this job even now (1991), and almost certainly won't in this millennium, either. The peak of silliness came with a letter to an alternative paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the factoids of this Big Brotherly affair. The letter writer then revealed his actual agenda by offering --- at an amazing low price, just this once, we take VISA and MasterCard --- a scrambler guaranteed to daunt the Trunk Trawler and presumably allowing the would-be Baader-Meinhof gangs of the world to get on with their business. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% NTSC - Successor to the National Transportation Safety Board. %% NUKE THE GAY BLACK FEMALE BABY WHALES FOR JESUS... %% NUKE THE WHALES!!! %% NULL HYPOTHESIS: The type of hypothesis used by a pessimist. %% NUMBER CRUNCHING: Jumping on a Computer. %% NUMERIC - 46-26-38 %% NURSES call the shots. %% NUXI problem: /nuk'see pro'bl*m/ n. This refers to the problem of transferring data between machines with differing byte-order. The string `UNIX' might look like `NUXI' on a machine with a different `byte sex' (e.g., when transferring data from a {little-endian} to a {big-endian}, or vice-versa). See also {middle-endian}, {swab}, and {bytesexual}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Na zdorovye! %% Naaah, real men don't read docs. %% Nada muere, todo baja del rio del tiempo al mar de la eternidad y alli queda. -- Miguel de Unamuno, "Ver con los Ojos y Otros Relatos Novelescos" %% Nadia Comaneci, simple perfection. -- '76 Olympics %% Nadie tiene mas imaginacion que la realidad. -- Miguel de Unamuno, "El Espejo de la Muerte", 1941 %% Naeser's Law: You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof. %% Nag, nag nag. %% Nag, nag, nag. Why else do you think I'm here? Go do something! %% Nagagator: Map-reading back-seat driver. %% Nahh, real mathematicians do it discretely -- anyone who does it %% Naked Girls Tonight! %% Naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely. I confess I do not admire naked boys. They always seem to me to need clothes--whereas one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up. -- Lewis Carroll %% Namien lies to the southeast of your current position. Nothing else can be seen save the empty waters of the ocean. %% Nancy Reagan wants divorce old Ron ... seems he's making it hard for everyone but her. %% Nancy: "Just Nancy." Marilyn: "Oh, like Cher." Nancy: "Not quite." -- The school nurse and Marshall's Mom, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% Nancy: "...but I've seen your type before." Mars: "Yeh, cool and sauve." -- The school nurse and Marshall, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% Nancy: "Boys, where do you think you're going?" Mars: "We're going to the FBI." -- The school nurse and Marshall, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana %% Nanosecond: Mork's stunt man. %% Narrow-minded provincialism: Sad to say but true--I am more interested in the mountain lions of Utah, the wild pigs of Arizona, than I am in the fate of all the Arabs of Araby, all the Wogs of Hindustan, all the Ethiopians of Abyssinia.... -- Edward Abbey %% Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy: we do not easily believe beyond what we see. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Nasrudin called at a large house to collect for charity. The servant said "My master is out." Nasrudin replied, "Tell your master that next time he goes out, he should not leave his face at the window. Someone might steal it." %% Nasrudin returned to his village from the imperial capital, and the villagers gathered around to hear what had passed. "At this time," said Nasrudin, "I only want to say that the King spoke to me." All the villagers but the stupidest ran off to spread the wonderful news. The remaining villager asked, "What did the King say to you?" "What he said -- and quite distinctly, for everyone to hear -- was 'Get out of my way!'" The simpleton was overjoyed; he had heard words actually spoken by the King, and seen the very man they were spoken to. %% Nasrudin said, "I can see in the dark." A student asked, "If that is so, why do you sometimes carry a candle at night?" "To prevent other people from bumping into me." %% Nasrudin said, "If your donkey allows someone to steal your coat, steal his saddle." %% Nasrudin used to take a donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw. Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the guards searched him again and again. They frisked him, sifted the straw, even tried burning it. They found nothing, but as time went by Nasrudin became more and more prosperous. Many years later, in another country, a retired customs guard met Nasrudin and asked him what he had been smuggling. "Donkeys" was the reply. %% Nasrudin walked into a shop one day, and the owner came forward to serve him. Nasrudin said, "First things first. Did you see me walk into your shop?" "Of course." "Have you ever seen me before?" "Never." "Then how do you know it was me?" %% Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun." "Why?", he was asked. "Because at night we need the light more." %% Nasrudin was carrying home a piece of liver and the recipe for liver pie. Suddenly a bird of prey swooped down and snatched the piece of meat from his hand. As the bird flew off, Nasrudin called after it, "Foolish bird! You have the liver, but what can you do with it without the recipe?" %% Nasrudin was taking a load of salt to market. His donkey waded through a stream, dissolving the salt. Delighted to be relieved of his load, the donkey frisked on the shore, but Nasrudin was angered. The next market day, Nasrudin loaded the donkey with wool. The animal nearly drowned from the weight of the wool after wetting it in the stream. Nasrudin sold the heavy, damp wool for more than it was worth. %% Nasrudin, ferrying a pedant across a piece of rough water, said something ungrammatical to him. "Have you never studied grammar?", asked the scholar. "No." "Then half your life has been wasted." A few minutes later Nasrudin turned to the passenger, and asked "Have you ever learned how to swim?" "No." "Then all your life is wasted -- we are sinking!" %% Nasty, brutish, and short %% Nathan Hale: n. An asterisk (see also {splat}, {{ASCII}}). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally, from "I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!", a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged. Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% National security is in your hands - guard it well. %% National security is the chief cause of national insecurity. %% Nationalize crime. Make sure it doesn't pay. %% Nations and empires flourish and decay, By turns command, and in their turns obey. -- Ovid %% Native Aping: Pretending to be a native when visiting a foreign destination. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life. -- William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) %% Natural causes? What in Nature could cause that? -- Picard, "Unnatural Selection", stardate 42494.8 %% Natural laws have no pity. %% Natural resources and inanimate energy ... are increasingly regarded as affected with a public interest... Certainly they were left by God or geology to mankind and not to the Standard Oil Company of California. If this is not sound moral doctrine, I do not know what is. -- Stuart Chase (1888-?) %% 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 %% Naturally! %% Naturally, within IBM we don't say 'traitor to the working class', we say 'counter-strategic'. %% Nature (reality) is just as absolutist as chess, and her rules (laws) are just as immutable (more so) -- but her rules and their applications are much, much more complex, and have to be discovered by man. And just as a man may memorize the rules of chess, but has to use his own mind in order to apply them, i.e., in order to play well -- so each man has to use his own mind in order to apply the rules of nature, i.e., in order to live successfully. A long time ago, the grandmaster of all grandmasters gave us the basic principles of the method by which one discovers the rules of nature and of life. His name was Aristotle. -- Ayn Rand %% Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed? -- Solomon Short %% Nature abhors a hero. -- Solomon Short %% Nature abhors a vacuum. %% Nature abhors second order differential equations. %% Nature always sides with the hidden flaw. %% Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night, God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light. It did not last; the devil howling "Ho! Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo. %% Nature gave man two ends -- one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most. -- George R. Kirkpatrick %% Nature gives us relatives, thank goodness we can choose our friends. %% Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little. -- Dr. Johnson %% Nature here was so lavish of her store, That she bestow'd until she had no more. -- Brown %% Nature is a revelation of God; Art is a revelation of man. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow %% Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs. -- Fran Lebowitz %% Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful. -- Edward Abbey %% Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and the inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man in the imbecility of his mimic understanding. %% Nature is the chart of God, mapping out all His attributes; art is the shadow of His wisdom, and copieth His resources. -- Tupper %% Nature is the vicar of the Almighty Lord. -- Geoffrey Chaucer %% Nature is usually wrong. -- James McNeill Whistler %% Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms -- oftenest, God bless her! - in female breasts. -- Dickens %% Nature teaches beasts to know their friends. %% Nature to all things fixed the limits fit, And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit. As on the land while here the ocean gains, In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains; Thus in the soul while memory prevails, The solid power of understanding fails; Where beams of warm imagination play, The memory's soft figures melt away. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744), (on runtime bounds checking?) %% Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can. -- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) %% Nature, like Miamonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons. -- Edward Abbey %% Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% NeWS: /nee'wis/, /n[y]oo'is/ or /n[y]ooz/ [acronym; the `Network Window System'] n. The road not taken in window systems, an elegant {{PostScript}}-based environment that would almost certainly have won the standards war with {X} if it hadn't been {proprietary} to Sun Microsystems. There is a lesson here that too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many hackers insist on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a way of distinguishing NeWS from {news} (the {netnews} software). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Neanderthalers, low of forehead, Slunk through prehistoric mists Thinking men were pretty horrid-- Using spears against their fists! %% Near the Studio Jean Cocteau On the Rue des Ecoles lived an old man with a blind dog Every evening I would see him guiding the dog along the sidewalk, keeping a firm grip on the leash so that the dog wouldn't run into a passerby Sometimes the dog would stop and look up at the sky Once the old man noticed me watching the dog and he said, "Oh, yes, this one knows when the moon is out, he can feel it on his face" -- Barry Gifford %% Nearby is an ornate egyptian ankh. %% Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government. -- Edward Abbey %% Necessity has no law. -- St. Augustine %% Necessity has no law; I know some Lawyers of the same. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Necessity is a Mother -- no invention! %% Necessity is a mother. %% Necessity is the mother of invention. %% Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows. -- Dave Farber %% Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows. Watch who you sleep with. %% Neckties strangle clear thinking. -- Lin Yutang %% Necrophiliacs find you attractive. %% Need any help? -- Vice President Dan Quayle in October 91 addressing announced 74,000 layoffs %% Needs are a function of what other people have. %% Neil Armstrong tripped. %% Neither a borrower nor a lender be at less than 18 percent per annum compounded daily. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% Neither a borrower or a lender be: for loan oft loses both itself and friend. %% Neither a burrower nor a lentil bee. -- Wm. Snakespeare %% Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself; he has no desire for that of which he feels no want. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% Neither great poverty, nor great riches, will hear reason. -- Fielding %% Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of darkness shall keep these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. %% Neither soldiers nor money can defend a king but only friends won by good deeds, merit, and honesty. -- Sallust, "De bello Iugurthino" %% Neither spread the germs of gossip nor encourage others to do so. %% Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Articles of Confederation nor any of the first state constitutions had mentioned the word "republic." At the time, it was like a red flag to conservatives everywhere. -- Charles Austin (1874-1948) and Mary R. Beard (1876-1958) %% Neither the poor nor the rich may sleep under bridges or beg in the streets. %% Nemo me impune lacessit [No one provokes me with impunity] -- Motto of the Crown of Scotland %% Neptune's own crystal trident is here. %% NetBOLLIX: [from bollix: to bungle] n. {IBM}'s NetBIOS, an extremely {brain-damaged} network protocol which, like {Blue Glue}, is used at commercial shops that don't know any better. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Network - the occupation of a fisherman. %% Network: An electronic means of allowing more than one person at a time to corrupt, trash, or otherwise cause permanent damage to useful data. %% Neudel's Nostrum: The only people worth talking to in a bureaucracy are the ones who never deal with the public. %% Neurologists will discover that the voices you hear in your head are only echoes. %% Neuroses are red, Melancholia's blue. I'm schizophrenic, What are you? %% Neurosis is a communicable disease. -- Solomon Short %% Neurosis seems to be a human privilege. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% Neurotic means he is not as sensible as I am, and psychotic means he's even worse than my brother-in-law. -- Karl Menninger %% Neurotics build castles in the sky, Psychotics live in them, And psychiatrists collect the rent. %% Neutral Greedy %% Neutrinos are into physicists. %% Neutrinos have bad breadth. %% Never Stop. %% Never accept a drink from a urologist. -- Erma Bombeck's father %% Never admit anything. Never regret anything. Whatever it is, you're not responsible. %% Never apologize, never explain. -- Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) (Of whom it was said that what he didn't know wasn't knowledge.) %% Never appeal to a man's "better nature." He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Never argue with a woman when she's tired, or rested. %% Never argue with an angry person. %% Never argue with the fabricating plant about an error. The inspection prints are all checked off, even to the holes that aren't there. %% Never ask a shopkeeper for a price list. %% Never ask the barber if you need a haircut or a salesman if his is a good price. %% Never assume anything except a 4 1/2 percent mortgage. -- David Kindred %% Never assume. It makes an "ass" out of "u" and "me". %% Never attack a guard. %% Never be a pioneer. It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion. -- H. H. Munro %% Never be first to do anything. %% Never be led astray onto the path of virtue. %% Never be so brief as to become obscure. -- Tyron Edwards %% Never before have so few puked so much on so many. %% Never begin vast projects with half-vast ideas. %% Never believe anything until it has been officially denied. -- Claud Cockburn %% Never bother to test for an error condition you don't know how to handle if it actually occurred. %% Never bow to authority, but always tip your hat. -- Jim Fiebig %% Never build after you are five and forty; have five years' income in hand before you lay a brick; and always calculate the expense at double the estimate. -- Kent %% Never buy from a rich salesman. -- Goldenstern %% Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Never call a man a fool; borrow from him. %% Never can tell. %% Never characterize the importance of a statement in advance. -- Charles G. Ross %% Never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart. -- Charles Dickens %% Never commit yourself! Let someone else commit you. %% Never confuse motion with action. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Never contend with one that is foolish, proud, positive, testy, or with a superior, or a clown, in a matter of argument. -- Thomas Fuller %% Never count your chickens before they rip your lips off. %% Never crowd youngsters about their private affairs. When they are growing up, they are nerve ends all over, and resent (quite properly) any invasion of their privacy. Oh, sure, they'll make mistakes--but that's their business, not yours. (YOU made your own mistakes, did you not?) -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Never decide to buy anything while listening to the salesman. -- Edmund C. Berkeley %% Never delay the ending of a meeting or the beginning of a cocktail hour. %% Never do anything for the first time. -- Paul Herbig %% Never do anything twice that you don't have to do at all. %% Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. -- Matthew Browne, "Lilliput Levee" %% Never draw fire, it irritates everyone around you %% Never drink coke in a moving elevator. The elevator's motion coupled with the chemicals in coke produce hallucinations. People tend to change into lizards and attack without warning, and large bats usually fly in the window. Additionally, you begin to believe that elevators have windows. %% Never drink from your finger bowl - it contains only water. %% Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never make love to a woman called Mizz *La Belle Dame*. -- Edward Abbey %% Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you. -- Nelson Algren, "What Every Young Man Should Know" %% Never eat at a place called Mom's. -- Nelson Algren, "What Every Young Man Should Know" %% Never eat between snacks, unless it's a meal. 9. Don't feel you must finish everything on your plate. You can always eat it later. 10. Avoid any wine with a childproof cap. 11. Avoid blue food. -- Richard Smit, "The Bronx Diet" %% Never eat more than you can lift. -- Miss Piggy %% Never eat prunes when you are famished. %% Never eat with glowing hands! %% Never eat yellow snow! %% Never enter a battle of wits unarmed. %% Never enter a subway where the security guard has grafitti on his face. %% Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will never believe you anyway. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self. -- Millicent Fenwick %% Never fight a monster: you might get killed. %% Never find your delight in another's misfortune. -- Publius Syrus %% Never fish for compliments. You'll only confuse people. %% Never fly under a sea gull - they'll shit on your airplane. -- Gordon Cooper %% Never forget that the darkest hour is only sixty minutes. %% Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry. %% Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Never get married in the morning, you'll never know who you'll meet that night. %% Never give a sucker an even break. -- W. C. Fields %% Never give an inch! %% Never give an inch! When you have a foot! %% Never go into the dungeon at midnight. %% Never go to a doctor whose house plants have died. -- Erma Bombeck %% Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three. -- Anonymous %% Never go with the odds %% Never grow old where you once have been great. -- Italo Bombolini %% Never had it, never will. %% Never have anything to do with an unlucky place, or an unlucky man. I have seen many clever men, very clever men, who had not shoes to their feet. I never act with them. Their advice sounds very well, but they cannot get on themselves; and if they cannot do good to themselves, how can they do good for me? -- Baron Rothschild %% Never have so many understood so little about so much. -- James Burke %% Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat. %% Never hit a man with glasses. Use your fist! %% Never hold anyone by the button or the hand in order to be heard out; for if people are unwilling to hear you, you had better hold your tongue than them. -- Lord Chesterfield %% Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river. -- Cordell Hull %% Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs painting. -- Billy Rose %% Never join with your friend when he abuses his horse or his wife, unless the one is about to be sold, and the other to be buried. -- Colton %% Never justify anything. If it needs justification, it's already wrong. -- Solomon Short %% Never kick a man unless he's down. %% Never kick a sleeping dog. %% Never kiss an animal. It may cause kissing disease. %% Never laugh at live dragons. -- Bilbo Baggins %% Never leave anything to chance; make sure all your crimes are premeditated. %% Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth. -- Erma Bombeck %% Never let a domestic quarrel ruin a day's writing. If your can't start the next day fresh, get rid of your wife. %% Never let lack of money interfere with having fun. %% Never let lack of preparation hinder the implementation of a change. %% Never let someone else's confidence magnify your insecurity. %% Never let your feet run faster than your shoes. %% Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right. -- Salvor Hardin, "Foundation" %% Never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you. -- Nelson Algren %% Never look a gift horse in the mouth. -- Saint Jerome %% Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road. -- Dag Hammarskjold %% Never make anything simple and efficient when a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful. %% Never map the labyrinth. %% Never mind the facts - I know what I know. %% Never mistake motion for action. -- Hemingway %% Never moon a werewolf. %% Never needlessly disturb a thing at rest. -- John Randolph %% Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance. -- Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977 %% Never overlook a slight or forget a grudge. %% Never pay a compliment as if expecting a receipt. %% Never play cards with a man called Doc. -- Nelson Algren %% Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose problems are worse than your own. -- Nelson Algren %% Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. %% Never play pool with anyone named "Fats". %% Never promise more than you can perform. -- Publilius Syrus %% Never purchase anything with a handle on it -- it means work. %% Never put a question mark where god puts a period %% Never put off until tomorrow what can be avoided altogether %% Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after. %% Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time. %% Never remove an anomaly simply because it is an anomaly. -- Macaulay %% Never replicate a successful experiment. %% Never reveal your best argument. %% Never ride a long worm. %% Never rise to speak till you have something to say; and when you have said it, cease. -- Witherspoon %% Never say "The White House wants" -- buildings don't "want." -- Donald Rumsfeld %% Never say maybe in the same circulation area where you just said never. -- Vic Gold %% Never say never. %% Never say no. %% Never say without qualification that your activity has sufficient space, money, staff, etc. -- Douglas Evelyn %% Never say you know someone until you have divided an inheritance with him. %% Never sell your hens on a wet day. %% Never send a letter requesting information to an editor unless you expect to receive a prolix letter in return. -- Robert Cook %% Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flame thrower. %% Never shirk from doing anything which your business calls you to do. The man who is above his business may one day find his business above him. -- Drew %% Never shove your granny while she's shaving. %% Never simply say, "Sorry, we don't have what you are looking for." Always say, "Too bad, I just sold the last one yesterday." -- Robert Skole %% Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. -- Nelson Algren %% Never sleep with anyone with more troubles than yourself. %% Never stand between a fire hydrant and a dog. %% Never step on a cursed engraving. %% Never stop to plan if you can keep busy making progress. %% Never substitute management for judgement- they are not the same. %% Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. -- William James %% Never swap horses crossing a stream. %% Never tamper with the truth. Never rationalize it. What you might like to believe is not necessarily the truth. %% Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient. %% Never tell me the odds--numbers confuse me %% Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -- Gen. George S. Patton, "War As I Knew It", 1947 %% Never tell them what you wouldn't do. -- Adam Clayton Powell %% Never tolerate the establishment of two continental powers in Europe. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf", 1933 %% Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. %% Never trust a Hippy -- Gentleman Geoff %% Never trust a child farther than you can throw it. %% Never trust a computer you can't lift. -- Stan Masor [Intel Corp.] %% Never trust a computer you can't repair yourself. %% Never trust a computer you can't throw. %% Never trust a grapefruit. -- Solomon Short %% Never trust a man who can count to 1,023 on his fingers %% Never trust a man who is Dr. Jekyll to those above him and Mr. Hyde to those below him. -- Charles Brower %% Never trust a proctologist who can palm a basketball. %% Never trust a random generator in magic fields. %% Never trust a smiling game master %% Never trust a tall dwarf. He's lying about something. -- Solomon Short %% Never trust an automatic pistol or a D.A.'s deal. -- John Dillinger %% Never trust an operating system. %% Never trust anyone over thirty. -- Jerry Rubin, 1966 %% Never trust anyone who says money is no object. %% Never trust anyone who volunteers to assume authority. %% Never try to keep up with the Joneses; they might be newlyweds. %% Never try to out-stubborn a cat. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Never try to teach a pig how to sing. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig. %% Never try to teach physics to a Beaver; it wastes your time and it annoys the Beaver. %% Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS %% Never underestimate the nature and quality of the enemy. -- Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) %% Never underestimate the power of a platitude. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% Never underestimate the power of a small tactical nuclear weapon. %% Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. %% Never use "etc." -- it makes people think there is more where there is not or that there is not space to list it all, etc. %% Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. %% Never use a wand of death. %% Never use one word when a dozen will suffice. -- Paul Herbig %% Never use your best weapon to engrave a curse. %% Never volunteer for anything. -- Lackland %% Never vomit on a door mat. %% Never was a patriot yet, but was a fool. -- John Dryden (1631-1700) %% Never whistle while you're pissing. %% Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% Never, ever draw to an inside flush. %% Never, ever lie to someone you love unless you're absolutely sure they'll never find out the truth. %% Never, under any circumstances, be left alone with a cross-eyed nun with a bullwhip in one hand and a bottle of Gin in the other....... %% New England Life, of course. Why? %% New Hampshire law forbids you to tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe. %% New Highway gets Railroaded. %% New Jersey got to pick first. %% New Jersey is not the armpit of the nation; it's the asshole of the universe. -- Jonathan Michael Smith %% New Jersey: [primarily Stanford/Silicon Valley] adj. Brain-damaged or of poor design. This refers to the allegedly wretched quality of such software as C, C++, and UNIX (which originated at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey). "This compiler bites the bag, but what can you expect from a compiler designed in New Jersey?" Compare {Berkeley Quality Software}. See also {UNIX conspiracy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% New Opcode: AAC Alter All Commands %% New Opcode: AAD Alter All Data %% New Opcode: AAO Add And Overflow %% New Opcode: AAR Alter At Random %% New Opcode: AB Add Backwards %% New Opcode: ABC AlphaBetize Code %% New Opcode: ABR Add Beyond Range %% New Opcode: ADB Another Damn Bug [UNIX] %% New Opcode: AFF Add Fudge Factor %% New Opcode: AFHB Align Fullword on Halfword Boundary %% New Opcode: AFP Abnormalized Floating Point %% New Opcode: AFVC Add Finagle's Variable Constant %% New Opcode: AGB Add GarBage %% New Opcode: AI Add Improperly %% New Opcode: AIB Attack Innocent Bystander %% New Opcode: AMM Answer My Mail %% New Opcode: AMS Add Memory to System %% New Opcode: AOI Annoy Operator Immediate %% New Opcode: AR Alter Reality %% New Opcode: ARN Add and Reset to Non-zero %% New Opcode: ARZ Add and Reset to Zero %% New Opcode: AS Add Sideways %% New Opcode: AT Accumulate Trivia %% New Opcode: AWP Argue with programmer %% New Opcode: AWTT Assemble With Tinker Toys %% New Opcode: BAC Branch to Alpha Centauri %% New Opcode: BAF Blow All Fuses %% New Opcode: BAH Branch And Hang %% New Opcode: BALC Branch And Link Cheeseburger %% New Opcode: BAW Bells And Whistles %% New Opcode: BB Branch on Bug %% New Opcode: BBBB Byte Baudy Bit and Branch %% New Opcode: BBI Branch on Burned-out Indicator %% New Opcode: BBL Branch on Burned-out Lamp %% New Opcode: BBLB Branch on Blinking Light Bulb %% New Opcode: BCB Burp and Clear Bytes %% New Opcode: BCF Branch on Chip box Full %% New Opcode: BCIL Branch Creating Infinite Loop %% New Opcode: BCR Backspace Card Reader %% New Opcode: BCU Be Cruel and Unusual %% New Opcode: BCU Burn out CPU %% New Opcode: BD Backspace Disk %% New Opcode: BD Branch to Data %% New Opcode: BDC Break Down and Cry %% New Opcode: BDM Branch and Disconnect Memory %% New Opcode: BDT Burn Data Tree [next opcode after decorate data tree] %% New Opcode: BE Branch Everywhere %% New Opcode: BF Belch Fire %% New Opcode: BFF Branch and Form Feed %% New Opcode: BFM Be Fruitful and Multiply. %% New Opcode: BLC Branch and Loop Continuous %% New Opcode: BLM Branch, Like, Maybe %% New Opcode: BLMWM Branch, Like, Maybe, wow, Man %% New Opcode: BLR Branch and Lose Return %% New Opcode: BMI Branch on Missing Index %% New Opcode: BMY Branch Maybe %% New Opcode: BNA Branch to Nonexistent Address %% New Opcode: BNCB Branch Never Come Back %% New Opcode: BNR Branch for No Reason %% New Opcode: BOD Branch on Operator Desperate %% New Opcode: BOP Boot Operator %% New Opcode: BOP Byte Operator %% New Opcode: BOT Branch on Tree. %% New Opcode: BPB Branch on Program Bug %% New Opcode: BPD Branch on Programmer Debugging %% New Opcode: BPIM Bury Programmer In Manuals %% New Opcode: BPL Branch Please (Thad Beier) %% New Opcode: BPO Branch to Power Off %% New Opcode: BR Byte and Run %% New Opcode: BRA BRanch Anywhere %% New Opcode: BRA Branch to Random Address %% New Opcode: BRI BRanch Indefinitely %% New Opcode: BRO BRanch to Oblivion %% New Opcode: BSC Burst Selector Channel %% New Opcode: BSM Branch and Scramble Memory %% New Opcode: BSO Branch on Sleeping Operator %% New Opcode: BSP Backspace Punch %% New Opcode: BSST BackSpace and Stretch Tape %% New Opcode: BTD Byte The Dust %% New Opcode: BTJ Branch and Turn Japanese %% New Opcode: BTO Branch To Oblivion %% New Opcode: BW Branch on Whim %% New Opcode: BWABL Bells, Whistles and Blinking Lights %% New Opcode: BWOP BeWilder Operator %% New Opcode: BYTE Byte Test %% New Opcode: CAC Cash and Carry %% New Opcode: CAF Convert ASCII to Farsii %% New Opcode: CAI Corrupt Accounting Information %% New Opcode: CAIL Crash After I Leave %% New Opcode: CAT Confused And Tired [UNIX] %% New Opcode: CBA Compare and Branch Anyway %% New Opcode: CBNC Close, But No Cigar %% New Opcode: CBS Clobber BootStrap %% New Opcode: CC Call Calvary %% New Opcode: CC Compliment Core %% New Opcode: CC Crappy Control [UNIX] %% New Opcode: CCB Chocolate Chip Byte-mode %% New Opcode: CCB Consult Crystal Ball %% New Opcode: CCC Crash if Carry Clear %% New Opcode: CCCI Clear Condition-Codes Indefinitely %% New Opcode: CCCP Conditionally corrupt current process %% New Opcode: CCD Choke, Cough and Die %% New Opcode: CCD Clear Current Directory %% New Opcode: CCR Change Channels Random %% New Opcode: CCS Chinese Character Set %% New Opcode: CCWR Change Color of Write Ring %% New Opcode: CD Complement disk %% New Opcode: CDC Clear Disk and Crash %% New Opcode: CEX Call EXterminator %% New Opcode: CF Come From (replaces Go To) %% New Opcode: CFE Call Field Engineer [What do you call them?] %% New Opcode: CFP Change and Forget Password %% New Opcode: CFS Corrupt file structure %% New Opcode: CH Create Havoc %% New Opcode: CHAPMR CHAse Pointers around Machine Room %% New Opcode: CHSE Compare Half-words and Swap if Equal. %% New Opcode: CIB Change Important Byte %% New Opcode: CIMM Create Imaginary Memory Map %% New Opcode: CIZ Clear If Zero. %% New Opcode: CM Circulate Memory %% New Opcode: CM Confuse Memory %% New Opcode: CMD CPU Melt Down %% New Opcode: CMD Compare Meaningless Data %% New Opcode: CML Compute Meaning of Life (72) %% New Opcode: CMP Create Memory Prosthesis %% New Opcode: CMS Click MicroSwitch %% New Opcode: CN Compare Nonsensically %% New Opcode: CNB Cause Nervous Breakdown %% New Opcode: CNS Call Nonexistent Subroutine %% New Opcode: COLB Crash for Operator's Lunch Break %% New Opcode: COM Clear Operator's Mind. %% New Opcode: COMF COMe From %% New Opcode: CON Call Operator Now %% New Opcode: COS Copy Object Code to Source File %% New Opcode: COWHU Come Out With your Hands Up %% New Opcode: CP Compliment programmer %% New Opcode: CP%FKM CPU - Flakeout mode %% New Opcode: CP%WM CPU - Weird Mode %% New Opcode: CPB Create Program Bug %% New Opcode: CPN Call Programmer Names %% New Opcode: CPR Compliment PRogrammer('Aren't you cute!') %% New Opcode: CRASH Continue Running after Stop or Halt %% New Opcode: CRM Clear Random Memory %% New Opcode: CRM Create Memory %% New Opcode: CRN Compare with Random Number %% New Opcode: CRN Convert to Roman Numerals %% New Opcode: CRYPT reCuRsive encrYPt Tape mnemonic [UNIX] %% New Opcode: CS Crash System %% New Opcode: CSL Curse and Swear Loudly %% New Opcode: CSN Call Supervisor Names %% New Opcode: CSNIO Crash System on Next I/O %% New Opcode: CSS Crash Subsidiary Systems %% New Opcode: CSU Call Self Unconditional [ultimate recursive programming] %% New Opcode: CTDMR Change Tape Density, Mid Record %% New Opcode: CUC Cheat Until Caught %% New Opcode: CVFL Convert Floating to Logical %% New Opcode: CVFP ConVert FORTRAN to PASCAL %% New Opcode: CVG ConVert to Garbage %% New Opcode: CWAH Create Woman And Hold %% New Opcode: CWB Carry With Borrow %% New Opcode: CWDC Cut Wires and Drop Cores %% New Opcode: CWG Chase Wild Goose %% New Opcode: DA Develop Amnesia %% New Opcode: DAC Divide and Conquer. %% New Opcode: DAUF Delete All Useless Files[you trust a computer THAT far?] %% New Opcode: DB Drop Bits %% New Opcode: DBL Desegregate Bus Lines %% New Opcode: DBR Debase Register %% New Opcode: DBZ Divide By Zero %% New Opcode: DC Degauss core %% New Opcode: DCAD Dump Core And Die %% New Opcode: DCD Drop Cards Double %% New Opcode: DCGC Dump Confusing Garbage to Console %% New Opcode: DCI Disk Crash Immediate %% New Opcode: DCON Disable CONsole %% New Opcode: DCR Double precision CRash %% New Opcode: DCT Drop Cards Triple %% New Opcode: DCWPDGD Drink Coffee, Write Program, Debug, Get Drunk %% New Opcode: DD Destroy Disk %% New Opcode: DD Drop Disk %% New Opcode: DDC Dally During Calculations %% New Opcode: DDOA Drop Dead On Answer %% New Opcode: DDS Delaminate Disk Surface %% New Opcode: DDWB Deposit Directly in Wastepaper Basket %% New Opcode: DEB Disk Eject Both %% New Opcode: DEC Decompile Executable Code %% New Opcode: DEI Disk Eject Immediate %% New Opcode: DEM Disk Eject Memory %% New Opcode: DES Disk Eject Swapped %% New Opcode: DHTPL Disk Head Three Point Landing %% New Opcode: DIA Develop Ineffective Address %% New Opcode: DIIL Disable Interrupts and enter Infinite Loop %% New Opcode: DIRFW Do It Right For Once %% New Opcode: DISC DISmount CPU %% New Opcode: DK Destroy Klingons %% New Opcode: DK%WMM Disk Unit - Washing Machine Mode %% New Opcode: DKP Disavow Knowledge of Programmer %% New Opcode: DLN Don't Look Now... %% New Opcode: DLP Drain Literal Pool %% New Opcode: DMPE Decide to Major in Physical Education %% New Opcode: DMPK Destroy Memory Protect Key %% New Opcode: DMZ Divide Memory by Zero %% New Opcode: DO Divide and Overflow %% New Opcode: DOC Drive Operator Crazy %% New Opcode: DPC Decrement program counter %% New Opcode: DPMI Declare Programmer Mentally Incompetent %% New Opcode: DPN Double Precision No-op (Bobby Baum) %% New Opcode: DPR Destroy Program %% New Opcode: DPR Distribute Packages Randomly %% New Opcode: DPS Disable Power Supply %% New Opcode: DR Detach Root %% New Opcode: DRAF DRAw Flowchart %% New Opcode: DRD Drop Dead (crashes everything) %% New Opcode: DRI Disable Random Interrupt %% New Opcode: DRT Disconnect Random Terminal %% New Opcode: DS Deadlock System %% New Opcode: DSI Do Something Interesting %% New Opcode: DSO Disable System Operator %% New Opcode: DSPK Destroy Storage Protect Key %% New Opcode: DSR Detonate Status register %% New Opcode: DSTD Do Something Totally Different %% New Opcode: DSUIT Do Something Utterly, Indescribably Terrible %% New Opcode: DT%FFP DecTape - Unload and Flappa-Flap %% New Opcode: DT%SHO DecTape - Spin Hubs Opposite %% New Opcode: DTB Destructively Test Bit %% New Opcode: DTC Destroy This Command %% New Opcode: DTI Do The Impossible %% New Opcode: DTRT Do The Right Thing %% New Opcode: DTVFL Destroy Third Variable From Left %% New Opcode: DU Dump User %% New Opcode: DUD Do Until Dead %% New Opcode: DW Destroy Work %% New Opcode: DW Destroy World %% New Opcode: DWIM Do What I Mean %% New Opcode: EAC Emulate Acoustic Coupler %% New Opcode: EBB Empty Bit Bucket %% New Opcode: EBR Erase Before Reading %% New Opcode: EBRS Emit burnt resistor smell %% New Opcode: EC Eject Carriage %% New Opcode: ECL Early Care Lace %% New Opcode: ECO Electrocute Computer Operator %% New Opcode: ECP Erase Card Punch %% New Opcode: ED Eject Disk %% New Opcode: ED Execute Data (verrrry useful) %% New Opcode: ED Expunge Data [UNIX] %% New Opcode: EDD Eat Disk and Die %% New Opcode: EDIT Erase Data and Increment Time %% New Opcode: EDP Emulate Debugged Program %% New Opcode: EDS Execute Data Segment %% New Opcode: EEP Erase Entire Program %% New Opcode: EFB Emulate Five-volt Battery (Rob Frye) %% New Opcode: EFD Eject Floppy Disk %% New Opcode: EFE Emulate Fatal Error %% New Opcode: EHC Emulate Headless Chicken %% New Opcode: EIAO Execute In Any Order %% New Opcode: EIO Erase I/O page %% New Opcode: ELP Enter Loop Permanently %% New Opcode: EM Evacuate Memory %% New Opcode: EMM Emulate More Memory %% New Opcode: EMSL Entire Memory Shift Left %% New Opcode: EMT Electrocute Maintenance Technician %% New Opcode: ENF Emit Noxious Fumes %% New Opcode: ENO Emulate No-Op %% New Opcode: EO Electrocute Operator %% New Opcode: EOI Execute Operator Immediate[fast vers. of another opcode] %% New Opcode: EOP Execute Operator %% New Opcode: EP Execute Programmer %% New Opcode: EPI Execute Programmer Immediately %% New Opcode: EPL Emulate Phone Line %% New Opcode: EPP Eject printer paper %% New Opcode: EPS Electrostatic Print and Smear %% New Opcode: EPS Execute Program Sideways %% New Opcode: EPT Erase Process Table %% New Opcode: EPT Erase Punched Tape %% New Opcode: ERIC Eject Random Integrated Circuit %% New Opcode: EROS Erase Read Only Storage %% New Opcode: ESB Eject Selectric Ball [from IBM typewriter terminals] %% New Opcode: ESC Emulate System Crash (Bobby Baum) %% New Opcode: ESD Eject Spinning Disk %% New Opcode: ESL Exceed Speed of Light %% New Opcode: ETI Execute This Instruction [for recursive programs] %% New Opcode: ETM Emulate Trinary Machine %% New Opcode: EVC Execute Verbal Commands %% New Opcode: EWD Execute Warp Drive %% New Opcode: EXI Execute Invalid Operation %% New Opcode: EXO Execute Ignorant Operator %% New Opcode: EXX [A real inst. on the Zilog Z-80,Zilog is owned by EXXon] %% New Opcode: FB Find Bugs %% New Opcode: FCJ Feed Card and Jam %% New Opcode: FD Forget Data %% New Opcode: FDR Fill Disk Randomly %% New Opcode: FERA Forms Eject and Run Away %% New Opcode: FLI Flash Lights Impressively %% New Opcode: FM Forget Memory %% New Opcode: FMP Finish My Program %% New Opcode: FPC Feed Paper Continuously %% New Opcode: FRG Fill with Random Garbage %% New Opcode: FSM Fold, Spindle and Mutilate %% New Opcode: FSRA Forms Skip and Run Away %% New Opcode: GBB Go to Back of Bus %% New Opcode: GCAR Get Correct Answer Regardless %% New Opcode: GDP Grin Defiantly at Programmer %% New Opcode: GDR Grab Degree and Run %% New Opcode: GENT GENerate Thesis %% New Opcode: GEW{JO} Go to the End of the World {Jump Off} %% New Opcode: GIE Generate Irreversible Error %% New Opcode: GLC Generate Lewd Comment %% New Opcode: GMC Generate Machine Check %% New Opcode: GMCC Generate Machine Check and Cash %% New Opcode: GND Guess at Next Digit %% New Opcode: GORS GO Real Slow %% New Opcode: GREM Generate Random Error Message %% New Opcode: GREP Global Ruin, Expiration and Purgation [UNIX] %% New Opcode: GRMC Generate Rubber Machine Check %% New Opcode: GS Get Strange [randomly inverts bits being fed to inst. decoder] %% New Opcode: GSB Gulp and Store Bytes %% New Opcode: GSI Generate Spurious Interrupts %% New Opcode: GSU Geometric Shift Up %% New Opcode: GTJ Go To Jail (do not pass 00000, do not set flags) %% New Opcode: HAH Halt And Hang %% New Opcode: HCF Halt and Catch Fire %% New Opcode: HCP Hide Central Processor [makes virtual CPU's act like virtual memories] %% New Opcode: HCRS Hang in Critical Section %% New Opcode: HDO Halt and Disable Operator %% New Opcode: HDRW Halt and Display Random Word %% New Opcode: HELP Type 'No help available' %% New Opcode: HF Hide a File %% New Opcode: HGD Halt, Get Drunk %% New Opcode: HHB Halt and Hang Bus %% New Opcode: HIS Halt in Impossible State %% New Opcode: HOO Hide Operator's Output %% New Opcode: HSC Halt on System Crash %% New Opcode: HSJ Halt, Skip, and Jump %% New Opcode: HUAL Halt Until After Lunch %% New Opcode: HUP Hang Up Phone %% New Opcode: IAND Illogical And %% New Opcode: IBR Insert Bugs at Random %% New Opcode: ICB Interrupt, crash and burn %% New Opcode: ICM Immerse Central Memory %% New Opcode: ICMD Initiate Core Melt-down %% New Opcode: ICSP Invert CRT Screen Picture %% New Opcode: IDC Initiate Destruct Command %% New Opcode: IDI Invoke Divine Intervention %% New Opcode: IF Invoke Force %% New Opcode: IGI Increment Grade Immediately %% New Opcode: IGIT Increment Grade Immediately Twice %% New Opcode: II Inquire and Ignore %% New Opcode: IIB Ignore Inquiry and Branch %% New Opcode: IIC Insert Invisible Characters %% New Opcode: IIL Irreversable Infinite Loop %% New Opcode: IM Imagine Memory %% New Opcode: IMBP Insert Mistake and Blame Programmer %% New Opcode: IMPG IMPress Girlfriend %% New Opcode: IMV IMpress Visitors %% New Opcode: INCAM INCrement Arbitrary Memory location %% New Opcode: INOP Indirect No-op %% New Opcode: IOP Interrupt processor, Order Pizza %% New Opcode: IOR Illogical OR %% New Opcode: IP Increment and Pray %% New Opcode: IPM Ignore Programmer's Mistakes %% New Opcode: IPS Incinerate Power Supply %% New Opcode: IPS Increment Processor Status %% New Opcode: IPT Ignite Paper Tape %% New Opcode: IRB Invert Record and Branch %% New Opcode: IRBI Insert Random Bits Indexed %% New Opcode: IRC Insert Random Commands %% New Opcode: IRE Insert Random Errors %% New Opcode: IRPF Infinite Recursive Page Fault %% New Opcode: ISC Ignore Supervisor Calls %% New Opcode: ISC Ignore System Crash %% New Opcode: ISC Insert Sarcastic Comments %% New Opcode: ISI Increment and Skip on Infinity %% New Opcode: ISP Increment and Skip on Pi %% New Opcode: ISTK Invert Stack %% New Opcode: ITML Initiate Termites into Macro Library %% New Opcode: IU Ignore User %% New Opcode: JAA Jump Almost Always %% New Opcode: JBS Jump and Blow Stack %% New Opcode: JFFZ Jump if Find First Zero. %% New Opcode: JFM Jump on Full Moon %% New Opcode: JHRB Jump to H&R Block %% New Opcode: JMAT JuMp on Alternate Thursdays %% New Opcode: JN Jump to Nowhere %% New Opcode: JNL Jump when programmer is Not Looking %% New Opcode: JOM Jump Over Moon %% New Opcode: JOP Jump on OPerator %% New Opcode: JPA Jump when Pizza Arrives %% New Opcode: JRAN Jump RANdom [not to be confused with IRAN - Idiots RANdom] %% New Opcode: JRCF Jump Relative and Catch Fire %% New Opcode: JRGA Jump Relative and Get Arrested %% New Opcode: JRSR Jump to Random Subroutine %% New Opcode: JSC Jump on System Crash %% New Opcode: JSU Jump Self Unconditional [the ultimate in iterative programming] %% New Opcode: JT Jump if Tuesday %% New Opcode: JTT Jump and Tangle Tape %% New Opcode: JTZ Jump to Twilight Zone %% New Opcode: JWN Jump When Necessary %% New Opcode: KP Krunch Paper %% New Opcode: KSR Keyboard Shift Right %% New Opcode: KUD Kill User's data %% New Opcode: LAC Lose All Communication %% New Opcode: LAGW Load And Go Wrong %% New Opcode: LAP Laugh At Program(mer) %% New Opcode: LCC Load and Clear Core %% New Opcode: LCD Load and Clear Disk %% New Opcode: LCK Lock Console Keyswitch %% New Opcode: LEB Link Edit Backwards %% New Opcode: LIA Load Ineffective Address %% New Opcode: LMB Lose Message and Branch %% New Opcode: LMO Load and Mug Operator %% New Opcode: LMYB Logical MaYBe %% New Opcode: LN Lose inode Number [UNIX] %% New Opcode: LOSM Log Off System Manager %% New Opcode: LP%PAS Line Printer - Print And Smear %% New Opcode: LP%RDD Line Printer - Reverse Drum Direction %% New Opcode: LP%TCR Line Printer - Tangle and Chew Ribbon %% New Opcode: LPA Lead Programmer Astray %% New Opcode: LPRTC Load Program Counter from Real-time Clock %% New Opcode: LRA Load RetroActively %% New Opcode: LRD Load Random Data %% New Opcode: LSBL Lose Super BLock [UNIX only] %% New Opcode: LWM Load Write-only Memory %% New Opcode: MAB Melt Address Bus %% New Opcode: MAN Make Animal Noises %% New Opcode: MAZ Multiply Answer by Zero %% New Opcode: MBC Make Batch Confetti %% New Opcode: MBH Memory Bank Hold-up %% New Opcode: MBTD Mount Beatles on Tape Drive %% New Opcode: MBTOL Move Bugs to Operator's Lunch %% New Opcode: MC Move Continuous %% New Opcode: MD Move Devious %% New Opcode: MDB Move and Drop Bits %% New Opcode: MDC Make Disk Crash %% New Opcode: MDDHAF Make Disk Drive Hop Across Floor %% New Opcode: MFO Mount female operator %% New Opcode: MLP Make Lousy Program %% New Opcode: MLP Multiply and Lose Precision %% New Opcode: MLR Move and Lose Record %% New Opcode: MLSB Memory Left Shift and Branch %% New Opcode: MMLG Make Me Look Good %% New Opcode: MNI Misread Next Instruction %% New Opcode: MOG Make Operator Growl %% New Opcode: MOP Modify Operator's Personality %% New Opcode: MOU MOunt User [causes computer to screw you once again] %% New Opcode: MPLP Make Pretty Light Pattern %% New Opcode: MRZ Make Random Zap %% New Opcode: MSGD Make Screen Go Dim %% New Opcode: MSIP Make Sure Plugged In %% New Opcode: MSR Melt Special Register %% New Opcode: MT%HRDV MagTape - High speed Rewind and Drop Vacuum %% New Opcode: MTI Make Tape Invalid %% New Opcode: MW Malfunction Whatever %% New Opcode: MW Multiply Work %% New Opcode: MWC Move and Wrap Core %% New Opcode: MWT Malfunction Without Telling %% New Opcode: NPC Normalize Program Counter %% New Opcode: NTGH Not Tonight, I've Got a Headache %% New Opcode: OCF Open Circular File %% New Opcode: OML Obey Murphy's Law %% New Opcode: OPP Order Pizza for Programmer %% New Opcode: OSI Overflow Stack Indefinitely %% New Opcode: OTL Out To Lunch %% New Opcode: PAS Print And Smear %% New Opcode: PAUD PAUse Dramatically %% New Opcode: PAZ Pack Alpha Zone %% New Opcode: PAZ Pack Alpha and Drop Zones (for you IBMers) %% New Opcode: PBC Print and Break Chain %% New Opcode: PBM Pop bubble memory %% New Opcode: PBN Play Beethoven's Ninth. %% New Opcode: PBPBPBP Place Backup in Plain Brown Paper Bag, Please [for stealing code] %% New Opcode: PBST Play Batch mode Star Trek %% New Opcode: PCI Pleat Cards Immediate %% New Opcode: PCR Print and Cut Ribbon %% New Opcode: PD Punch Disk %% New Opcode: PDLD Power Down and Lock Door (to computer room) %% New Opcode: PEHC Punch Extra Holes in Cards %% New Opcode: PFE Print Floating Eye [Roguers look out!] %% New Opcode: PFML Print Four Million Lines %% New Opcode: PI Punch Invalid %% New Opcode: PIBM Pretend to be an IBM %% New Opcode: PIC Print Illegible Characters %% New Opcode: PNRP Print Nasty Replies to Programmer %% New Opcode: PO Punch Operator %% New Opcode: POPN Punch OPerator's Nose %% New Opcode: PPA Print Paper Airplanes %% New Opcode: PPP Print Programmer's Picture %% New Opcode: PPR Play Punk Rock %% New Opcode: PPSW Pack Program Status Word %% New Opcode: PSP Print and Shred Paper %% New Opcode: PSR Print and Shred Ribbon %% New Opcode: PTP Produce Toilet Paper %% New Opcode: PWS Create Power Surge %% New Opcode: QWA Quit While Ahead %% New Opcode: RA Randomize Answer %% New Opcode: RAM Read Ambiguous Memory %% New Opcode: RAM Reorganize and Abort Monitor %% New Opcode: RAN Random Opcode [similar to a 16-bit what gate] %% New Opcode: RASC Read And Shred Card %% New Opcode: RAU Ridicule All Users %% New Opcode: RBG Random Bug Generate %% New Opcode: RBLY Restore Backup from Last Year %% New Opcode: RBT Read Blank Tape %% New Opcode: RBT Rewind and Break Tape %% New Opcode: RC Rewind Core %% New Opcode: RCAJ Read Card And Jam %% New Opcode: RCB Read Commands Backwards %% New Opcode: RCB Run Clock Backwards %% New Opcode: RCC Read Card and Chew %% New Opcode: RCF Rewind Cabinet Fans %% New Opcode: RCKG Read Count Key and Garbage %% New Opcode: RCL Rotate carry left %% New Opcode: RCR Rewind Card Reader %% New Opcode: RCRV Randomly convert to reverse video %% New Opcode: RCSD Read Card and Scramble Data %% New Opcode: RDA Refuse to Disclose Answer %% New Opcode: RDD Reverse Disk Drive %% New Opcode: RDF Randomize directory filenames %% New Opcode: RDI Reverse Disk Immediate %% New Opcode: RDR Reverse disk rotation (Read data in reverse) %% New Opcode: REF REad Fingerprints %% New Opcode: REG REcord Garbadge %% New Opcode: RENVR Rename Variables Randomly %% New Opcode: RET Read and Erase Tape %% New Opcode: RH0 Randomize and Halt if not equal to 0 %% New Opcode: RIC Rotate Illogical thru Carry %% New Opcode: RID Read Invalid Data %% New Opcode: RIR Read Invalid Record %% New Opcode: RIRG Read Inter-Record Gap %% New Opcode: RIRG Rewrite Inter-Record Gap [random replacement of similar mnemonic] %% New Opcode: RLC Re-read last card %% New Opcode: RLC Relocate and Lose Core %% New Opcode: RLI Rotate Left Indefinitely %% New Opcode: RLP Refill Light Pen %% New Opcode: RLP Rewind Line Printer %% New Opcode: RM Ruin My files [UNIX] %% New Opcode: RMI Randomize Memory Immediate %% New Opcode: RMT Remove Trap %% New Opcode: RMV Remove Memory Virtues %% New Opcode: RNBS Reflect Next Bus Signal %% New Opcode: RNR Read Noise Record %% New Opcode: ROD ROtate Diagonally %% New Opcode: ROM Read Operator's Mind %% New Opcode: ROOP Run Out Of Paper %% New Opcode: ROPF Read Other People's Files %% New Opcode: ROS Reject Op System %% New Opcode: ROT Rotate Disk [fixes broken drives] %% New Opcode: RP Read Printer %% New Opcode: RPB Raise Parity Bits %% New Opcode: RPBR Reverse Parity and BRanch %% New Opcode: RPC Rotate Program Counter %% New Opcode: RPM Read Programmer's Mind %% New Opcode: RPM Read Programmer's Mind (don't I wish this existed sometimes!!) %% New Opcode: RPU Read character and Print Upside down %% New Opcode: RRB Read Record and Blush %% New Opcode: RRC Rotate Random thru Carry %% New Opcode: RRR Read Record and Run away %% New Opcode: RRRL Random Rotate Register Left %% New Opcode: RRSG Round and Round She Goes... %% New Opcode: RRT Rewind and Rip Tape %% New Opcode: RSD Read and Scramble Data %% New Opcode: RST Rewind and Stretch Tape %% New Opcode: RT Reverse Throughput %% New Opcode: RTS Return To Sender %% New Opcode: RWD Rewind Disk %% New Opcode: RWF Read Wrong File %% New Opcode: SAD Seek And Destroy %% New Opcode: SAI Skip All Instructions %% New Opcode: SAS Sit And Spin %% New Opcode: SC Scramble Channels %% New Opcode: SC Shred Cards %% New Opcode: SCB Spindle Card and Belch %% New Opcode: SCD Shuffle and Cut DEC %% New Opcode: SCH Slit Cards Horizontal %% New Opcode: SCI Shred Cards Immediate %% New Opcode: SCM Set for Crash Mode %% New Opcode: SCOM Set Cobol-Only Mode %% New Opcode: SCRRC SCRamble Register Contents %% New Opcode: SCST Switch Channel to Star Trek %% New Opcode: SCTR Stick Card To Reader %% New Opcode: SD Scramble Directory %% New Opcode: SD Slip Disk %% New Opcode: SDD Seek and Destroy Data %% New Opcode: SDDB Snap Disk Drive Belt %% New Opcode: SDE Solve Differential Equations %% New Opcode: SDI Self Destruct Immediately %% New Opcode: SDM Search and Destroy Memory %% New Opcode: SDS Spool disk to console %% New Opcode: SEB Stop Eating and Burp %% New Opcode: SEOB Set Every Other Bit %% New Opcode: SETS Set to Self. %% New Opcode: SEX Set EXecution register [a real instruction for the RCA 1802] %% New Opcode: SEX Sign EXtend %% New Opcode: SFH Set Flags to Half mast %% New Opcode: SFLT Solve Fermat's Last Theorem. %% New Opcode: SFT Stall For Time %% New Opcode: SHB Stop and Hang Bus %% New Opcode: SHCD SHuffle Card Deck %% New Opcode: SHIT Stop here if Thursday %% New Opcode: SHON Simulate HONeywell CPU [permanent NO-OP] %% New Opcode: SHRT SHRed Tape %% New Opcode: SID Switch to Infinite Density %% New Opcode: SLP Sharpen Light Pen %% New Opcode: SMS Shred Mylar Surface %% New Opcode: SMT Stretch MagTape %% New Opcode: SNARF System Normalize and Reset Flags %% New Opcode: SNM Show No Mercy %% New Opcode: SOAWP SOlve All the World's Problems %% New Opcode: SOB [a real PDP-11 instruction] %% New Opcode: SOD Surrender Or Die! %% New Opcode: SOP Stop and Order Pizza %% New Opcode: SOS Sign Off, Stupid %% New Opcode: SP Scatter Print %% New Opcode: SPA Sliding Point Arithmetic %% New Opcode: SPC Staple and Punch new Center hole %% New Opcode: SPO Skip if Power Off. %% New Opcode: SPS Short power supply %% New Opcode: SPSW Scramble Processor Status Word %% New Opcode: SRBO Set Random Bits to Ones %% New Opcode: SRBZ Set Random Bits to Zeroes %% New Opcode: SRC Select Reader and Chew cards %% New Opcode: SRC Skip to Random Channel %% New Opcode: SRD Switch to Random Density %% New Opcode: SRDR Shift Right, Double Ridiculous %% New Opcode: SRO Sort with Random Ordering %% New Opcode: SROS Store in Read Only Storage %% New Opcode: SRR Set Registers to Random values [usually used prior to a RET or RTS] %% New Opcode: SRR Shift Registers Random %% New Opcode: SRSD Seek Record and Scratch Disk %% New Opcode: SRTC Stop Real-Time Clock %% New Opcode: SRU Signoff Random User %% New Opcode: SRZ Subtract and Reset to Zero %% New Opcode: SSD Seek and Score Disk [good for testing] %% New Opcode: SSJ Select Stacker and Jam %% New Opcode: SSJP Select Stacker and Jump %% New Opcode: SSM Solve by Supernatural Means %% New Opcode: SSP Smoke and SPark %% New Opcode: SST Seek and Stretch Tape %% New Opcode: SST Stop and Stretch Tape %% New Opcode: ST Set and Test %% New Opcode: STD Stop, Take Drugs %% New Opcode: STMLMD Skip To My Lou, My Darlin' %% New Opcode: STO Strangle Tape Operator %% New Opcode: STPR SToP Rain %% New Opcode: STTHB Set Terminal to Three Hundred Baud %% New Opcode: SUI Subtract User's IQ %% New Opcode: SUME Surprise Me %% New Opcode: SUP Solve Unsolvable Problem %% New Opcode: SUR Screw Up Royally %% New Opcode: SUS Stop Until Spring %% New Opcode: SUS Subract Until Senseless %% New Opcode: SWAR SpaceWAR in one instruction. %% New Opcode: SWAT SWAp Terminals %% New Opcode: SWN SWap Nibbles %% New Opcode: SWOS SWap out Operating System %% New Opcode: SWOS Store in Write Only Storage %% New Opcode: SWS Sort to Wrong Slots %% New Opcode: SWU Select Wrong Unit %% New Opcode: SWZN Skip Whether Zero or Not %% New Opcode: SZD Switch to Zero Density %% New Opcode: TARC Take Arithmetic Review Course %% New Opcode: TBFTG Two Burgers and Fries To Go %% New Opcode: TCR Transmit Colors (but avoid Red) %% New Opcode: TDB Transfer and Drop Bits %% New Opcode: TDRB Test and Destroy Random Bits %% New Opcode: TDS Trash Data Segment %% New Opcode: TLNF Teach me a Lesson I'll Never Forget %% New Opcode: TLO Turn indicator Lights Off %% New Opcode: TN Take a Nap %% New Opcode: TOAC Turn Off Air Conditioner %% New Opcode: TOG Time Out, Graduate %% New Opcode: TOH Take Operator Hostage %% New Opcode: TOO Turn On/Off operator %% New Opcode: TOP Trap Operator %% New Opcode: TOS Trash Operating System %% New Opcode: TPD Triple Pack Decimal %% New Opcode: TPDH Tell Programmer to Do it Him/Herself %% New Opcode: TPN Turn Power oN %% New Opcode: TPO Turn Power Off %% New Opcode: TPR Tear PapeR %% New Opcode: TR Turn into Rubbish [UNIX] %% New Opcode: TRA Te Rdls Arvs [Type Ridiculous Abbreviations] %% New Opcode: TSH Trap Secretary and Halt %% New Opcode: TSM Trap Secretary and Mount %% New Opcode: TST Trash System Tracks %% New Opcode: TT%CNK TeleType - Clunk Noise %% New Opcode: TT%EKB TeleType - Electrify KeyBoard %% New Opcode: TTA Try, Try Again %% New Opcode: TTITT Turn 2400 foot tape Into Two 1200 foot tapes %% New Opcode: TTL Tap Trunk Line %% New Opcode: TTL Time To Log off %% New Opcode: UAI Use Alternate Instruction set %% New Opcode: UCB Uncouple CPU and Branch %% New Opcode: UCK Unlock Console Keyswitch %% New Opcode: UER Update and Erase Record %% New Opcode: UFO Unidentified Flag Operation (Bobby Baum) %% New Opcode: UMR Unlock Machine Room %% New Opcode: UOP Useless Operation %% New Opcode: UP Understand Program(mer) %% New Opcode: URB Update Resume and Branch %% New Opcode: UTF Unwind Tape onto Floor %% New Opcode: UUBR Use Undefined Base Register %% New Opcode: VAX Violate All eXecutions %% New Opcode: VNO Violate Noise Ordinance %% New Opcode: VPA Vanishing Point Arithmetic %% New Opcode: VVM Vaporise Virtual Memory %% New Opcode: WAD Walk Away in Disgust %% New Opcode: WAT WAste Time %% New Opcode: WC Waste Core [UNIX] %% New Opcode: WCR Write to Card Reader %% New Opcode: WDR Warp disk DRive %% New Opcode: WGPB Write Garbage in Process-control Block %% New Opcode: WHP Wave Hands over Problem %% New Opcode: WI Why Immediate %% New Opcode: WID Write Invalid Data %% New Opcode: WNHR Write New Hit Record %% New Opcode: WNR Write Noise Record %% New Opcode: WPET Write Past End of Tape %% New Opcode: WSE Write Stack Everywhere %% New Opcode: WSWW Work in Strange and Wondrous Ways %% New Opcode: WWLR Write Wrong Length Record %% New Opcode: WWR Write Wrong Record %% New Opcode: XIO Execute Invalid Op code %% New Opcode: XKF Execute Kermit the Frog %% New Opcode: XMB Exclusive MayBe %% New Opcode: XOH Execute no-Op and Hang %% New Opcode: XOI Execute Operator Immediate. %% New Opcode: XOS Exchange Operator's Sex %% New Opcode: XPR Execute Programmer %% New Opcode: XVF Exchange Virtue for Fun %% New Opcode: ZAP Zero and Add Packed %% New Opcode: ZEOW Zero Every Other Word %% New Opcode: ZPI ZaP Immediate %% New Operating Systems are created to solve existing problems and create new ones. %% New Testament: n. [C programmers] The second edition of K&R's `The C Programming Language' (Prentice-Hall, 1988; ISBN 0-13-110362-8), describing ANSI Standard C. See {K&R}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% New UNIX/TS manuals available in 2F-101. %% New Year's Eve is the time of year when a man most feels his age, and his wife most often reminds him to act it. -- Webster's Unafraid Dictionary %% New York eclipses all other cities in the spontaneous cordiality and generosity of its inhabitants - at least, such inhabitants as I have encountered. -- H. P. Lovecraft, 9/29/1922 %% New York is a jungle, they tell you. You could go further, and say that New York is a jungle. New York *is a jungle.* Beneath the columns of the old rain forest, made of melting macadam, the mean Limpopo of swamped Ninth Avenue bears an angry argosy of crocs and dragons, tiger fish, noise machines, sweating rainmakers. On the corners stand witchdoctors and headhunters, babbling voodoo-men -- the natives, the jungle-smart natives. And at night, under the equatorial overgrowth and heat-holding cloud cover, you hear the ragged parrot-hoot and monkeysqueak of the sirens, and then fires flower to ward off monsters. Careful: the streets are sprung with pits and nets and traps. Hire a guide. Pack your snakebite gook and your blowdart serum. Take it seriously. You have to get a bit jungle-wise. -- Martin Amis, "Money" %% New York is real. The rest is done with mirrors. %% New York is the biggest boob town in America. All any of those hokum peddlers need to do in selling New Yorkers their phony` goods is to ask what they want, and they'll be sure to get it. -- Bat Masterson %% New York state law makes it illegal for children to collect old cigar butts. %% New York's got the ways and means; Just won't let you be. -- The Grateful Dead %% New York-- to that tall skyline I come Flyin' in from London to your door New York-- lookin' down on Central Park Where they say you should not wander after dark. New York. -- Simon and Garfunckle %% New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. -- David Letterman %% New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York? -- Edward Abbey %% New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt. %% New financial propositions may be offered at the turn of the year. %% New members are urgently needed in the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Yourself. Apply within. %% New members urgently required for SUICIDE CLUB, Watford area. -- Monty Python's Big Red Book %% New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. -- John Locke (1632-1704) %% New problems demand new solutions. New solutions create new problems. -- Solomon Short %% New release: Abortions are becoming so popular in some countries that the waiting time to get one is lengthening rapidly. Experts predict that at this rate there will soon be a one year wait to get an abortion. -- "I Think Therefore I Laugh" by John Allen Paulos: %% New systems create new problems. -- Dr. John Gall %% New with a K in front is a Canoe. %% Newlan's Truism: An "acceptable" level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job. %% Newlywed groom: Honey, I have something to confess to you. I'm a golfer. You'll never see me on Tuesday nights, Thursday nights, and weekends. I'm sorry. Newlywed bride: I have something even worse to confess, dear. I'm a hooker. Groom: That's no problem! Just keep your head low and follow through... %% Newman's Discovery: Your best dreams may not come true; fortunately, neither will your worst dreams. %% News always travels by the fastest available route. -- Major Whitey Ardmore %% News is that which comes from the North, East, West and South, and if it comes from only one point on the compass, then it is a class publication and not news. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% News stories expand and time contracts, meeting inexorably each day twenty minutes after a man is supposed to be home for dinner. -- Ray O'Neil %% Newsbytes - Microsoft announce EDLIN for Windows. %% Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff. -- Adlai Stevenson %% Newspaper headline: "Twin kills brother in botched suicide attempt." %% Newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take you away. Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone. %% Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should attract each other, so it seemed they could not remain essentially motionless. Would they not all fall together at some point? In a letter in 1691 to Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued that this would indeed happen if there were only a finite number of stars distributed over a finite region of space. But he reasoned that if, on the other hand, there were an infinite number of stars, distributed more or less uniformly over infinite space, this would not happen, because there would not be any central point for them to fall to. This argument is an instance of the pitfalls that you can encounter in talking about infinity... -- Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time" %% Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction. %% Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law: A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead. %% Next Friday will not be your lucky day. As a matter of fact, you don't have a lucky day this year. %% Next time I'll wear underwear. %% Next time when you are having dinner, keep an empty jug of water on the table. When somebody asks you to pass the jug, pretend while picking it up that it is full of water and heavy. Keep the jug on the table near the victim. The victim will apply what he/she considers is appropriate strength needed to pick up the jug. This will cause the jug to jerk up to a significant height. The sight is very funny and so is the victim's face. Must try to believe. Even the most prude of your aunts will not mind being a victim of this joke. %% Next time you wave, use ALL of your fingers!! %% Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund. -- F. J. Raymond %% Next to surviving an earthquake, nothing is quite so satisfying as receiving an income tax refund %% Nibble - When a little bit isn't enough... %% Nice boy, but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice. -- Foghorn Leghorn %% Nice computers don't go down on you. %% Nice computers don't go down. %% Nice computers only go down once a day %% Nice going, sweetheart. -- Joe Patroni %% Nice guys can look themselves in the mirror. %% Nice guys don't finish nice. %% Nice guys finish last. -- Leo Durocher %% Nice guys get sick. %% Nice guys really do finish first, they just don't brag about it. %% Nice guys win. %% Nice jail. Looks strong. -- H. Houdini %% Nice planet. -- Worf, "Justice", stardate 41255.6 %% Nice try, but that is an old worn-out magic word. %% Nice try. %% Nice weather we've been having lately. %% Nick the Greek's Law of Life: All things considered, life is 9 to 5 against. %% Nietzsche is pietzsche %% Nietzsche is pietzsche, Goethe is murder. %% Night falls when the street lights turn on. Swedish Law. %% Nightmare File System: n. Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to access the down one, and (getting no response) repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher {spl} level). Then another machine tries to reach either the down machine or the pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This situation snowballs very fast, and soon the entire network of machines is frozen --- worst of all, the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great {misfeature}). (ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of UNIX's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these problems in the early 1970s.) See also {broadcast storm}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Nihilism should commence with oneself. %% Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value. %% Nil taurus excretum. No El Toro Poopoo either! %% Nimrod %% Nine out of ten men who preferred Camels have switched back to women. %% Nine reasons a taco is better than a woman: 1) Tacos don't put frilly covers on the toilet seat so the lid won't stay up. 2) Tacos don't use your razor on their legs. 3) Tacos don't say "That's okay, it doesn't have to be good for me." 4) Tacos don't get upset if you eat another taco, "Just for fun." 5) Tacos will never contest a divorce, demand a property settlement or seek custody of anything. 6) Tacos won't ask you about your last lover, or speculate about your next one. 7) A taco will never make a scene because there are other tacos in the refrigerator. 8) It's easy to drop a taco. 9) Tacos don't want to sleep on your chest. %% Nine times out of ten the man who listens to reason is thinking of some way to refute it. %% Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Prejudices, Third Series", 1922 %% Nine-track tapes and seven-track tapes And tapes without any tracks; Stretchy tapes and snarley tapes And tapes mixed up on the racks -- Take hold of the tape And pull off the strip, And then you'll be sure Your tape drive will skip. -- Uncle Colonel's Cursory Rhymes %% Ninety percent of any business transaction is selling yourself to the client. -- X. Hollander %% Ninety percent of baseball is half mental. -- Yogi Berra %% Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent. %% Ninety-Ninety Rule, The: n. "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." Attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Ninety-nine percent of all forms of life that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. %% Nitpicking: Not just a hobby, it's a way of life! %% Nitrate - cheapest price for calling long distance. %% Nitrate: Lower than the day rate. %% Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you've got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked. -- Larry Niven, "The Mote in God's Eye" %% Niven's Law: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. %% Nixon did it to us, but we did it to him. %% Nixon's Theorem: The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on. %% No Canadian coins. %% No Negro American can be free until the lowliest Negro in Mississippi is no longer disadvantaged because of his race. -- Ralph Bunche %% No Shell escape from "games". %% No T.V. for me tonight! %% No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% No action is without side effects. -- Barry Commoner %% No alcohol, dogs, or horses. %% No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck. %% No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% No amount of misfortune will satisfy the man who is not satisfied with reading a hundred epigrams. -- Martial %% No anchovies, please. %% No animal should ever jump on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain he can hold his own in conversation. -- Fran Lebowitz %% No argument can be drawn from the abuse of a thing against its use. %% No arms for the Venus de Milo. %% No atheist, as such, can be a true friend, an affectionate relation, or a loyal subject. -- Dr. Bentley %% No ball game is ever much good unless the people involved hate each other. -- Avery %% No bills over $20 accepted. %% No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% No blame. He meets him without passing by. Going brings danger. One must be on guard. Do not act. Be constantly persevering. %% No boasting of wealth before one's neighbor. It is favorable to attack with force. Nothing that would not further. %% No books are lost by lending except those you particularly want to keep. -- Alan Atwood %% No bounds his headlong, vast ambition knows. -- Rowe %% No brain, no pain. %% No call alligator long mouth till you pass him. %% No cause is helpless if it is just. Errors, no matter how popular, carry the seeds of their own destruction. -- John W. Scoville %% No character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false. -- Alexander Hamilton %% No civilized person ever goes to bed the same day he gets up. %% No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected ... to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class. -- Carl Becker %% No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a camel -- anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform effectively under such difficult conditions. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% No company is far preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more courageous than health. -- Colton %% No cord or cable can draw so forcible, or bind so fast, as love can do with a single thread. -- Burton %% No creo en Dios, pero le tengo miedo. (I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.) -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera", 1985 %% No cry. In the end misfortune comes. %% No directory. %% No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending. -- Adam Smith (1723-1790), "The Wealth of Nations" %% No dog will knock a vase over unless it has water in it. %% No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature. %% No doubt you have a bottle of moonbeams as well. %% No ear can hear nor tongue tell the tortures of the inward hell! -- Lord Byron %% No enemy is so terrible as a man of genius. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% No epigram contains the whole truth. -- C. W. Thompson %% No evil can happen to a good man. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. -- Aristotle %% No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong. %% No experiment is ever a complete failure, inasmuch as a well-written account of it can serve admirably as a bad example. %% No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always serve as a bad example, or the exception that proves the rule (but only if it is the first experiment in the series). %% No extensible language will be universal. -- T. Cheatham %% No fear, no hate, no pain, no broken hearts. %% No fish in the tank. This leads to misfortune. %% No flames, please! A stray solid rocket booster just drifted past my window. %% No free lunch in an ecosystem. %% No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense or immovable as that of woman for woman. -- Landor %% No further information is available at this time. %% No future for you. %% No game in the field. %% No generalization is wholly true, not even this one. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) %% No gnus is good gnus. %% No good deed goes unpunished. -- Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) %% No goodbyes. Just good memories. Hailing frequencies closed, sir. -- Yar, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3 %% No guest is so welcome in a friend's house that he will not become a nuisance after three days. -- Titus Maccius Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) %% No guts, no glory. %% No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% No is no negative in a woman's mouth. -- Sidney %% No known bugs. %% No line available at 300 baud. %% No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. -- Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House" %% No long descriptions. %% No machine can replace man until it learns to drink! %% No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach. -- W. C. Brann (1855-1898) %% No man can be wise on an empty stomach. -- George Eliot %% No man can escape his wyrd. %% No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint. -- Chesterfield %% No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut. -- Channing Pollock %% No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe ... every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. -- John Donne (1572-1631) %% No man is an island, but some of us are pretty good peninsulas. -- Solomon Short %% No man is lonely while eating spaghetti. -- Robert Morely %% No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. -- Victer Hugo (1802-1885) %% No man is rich enough to buy back his past. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a teacher. -- Ben Johnson %% No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable. -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next--if not a damn sight better. -- Edward Abbey %% No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life in a great cause. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February. -- Edward Abbey %% No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. -- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), "The Education of Henry Adams", 1907 %% No man of honor, as that word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste and temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, or to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath. -- John Hall %% No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself. -- Greville %% No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next. -- E. W. Howe %% No man's ambition has a right to stand in the way of performing a simple act of justice. -- John Altgeld %% No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County. -- Edward Abbey %% No matter how clever the hardware boys are, the software boys piss it away. %% No matter how long or how hard you shop for an item, after you've bought it it will be on sale somewhere cheaper. %% No matter how many reporters share a cab, and no matter who pays, each puts the full fare on his own expense account. -- Edward P. O'Doyle %% No matter how many times you've had it, if it's offered, take it, because it'll never be quite the same again. -- John Cameron %% No matter how much money you spend, you can't make a racehorse out of a pig. You can, however, make an awfully fast pig. %% No matter how much the passengers eat, the weight of the plane stays the same. -- Steve Connelly %% No matter how much you do, you'll never do enough. %% No matter how often you trade dinner or other invitations with in-laws, you will lose a small fortune in the exchange. Corollary: Don't try it; you cannot drink enough of your in-laws' booze to get even before the liver fails. -- Jackson Clark %% No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style. %% No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney. -- Alfred E. Smith %% No matter what happens, there is always someone who knew it would. %% No matter what other nations may say about the United States, immigration is still the sincerest form of flattery. %% No matter what result is anticipated, there is always someone willing to fake it. %% No matter what the game, no matter what the rules, the same rules apply to both sides! -- Hoyle's Law %% No matter what the product or service might be, you can always find it somewhere else cheaper! -- Ebenezer Scrooge %% No matter what the result, there is always someone eager to misinterpret it. %% No matter what they SAY, size IS important! %% No matter what you do, it is never enough. %% No matter where I go, the place is always called 'here'. %% No matter where I go, there I am %% No matter which side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side. -- Jascha Heifetz %% No matter which train you are waiting for, the wrong one comes first. -- J. R. Meditz %% No matter who you are, some scholar can show you the great idea you had was had by someone before you. %% No matther whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme court follows th' iliction returns. -- Mr. Dooley %% No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn. -- Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960 %% No moon tonight. Beware! %% No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine. %% No more blah, blah, blah! -- Kirk, "Miri," stardate 2713.6 %% No need to go to alt.stupid.drug.arguments! There is a real group called alt.drugs. It is sort of interesting to read, but not really great. My favorite kind of posting goes like this: "My doctor prescribed Quaxalone to me. Quaxalone is an acetylesterase-agonist inhibitor with a 3-methyl-4-diethyl-6- hexyhypotheodoxyltribenzylglutamine ring covalent bond in the 4,5,6 gloucester-mass position. Can anyone give me any information on the potential for recreational use of this substance?" Or, better yet, "Over the weekend, I decided to test the therapeutic effects of goldenrod husks, which grow in abundance in the field across from my house. I harvested about three bushels of the plant, and removed the husks, yielding about five pounds of raw material. I added these to ten gallons of boiling water and simmered them, covered, for six hours. After that time, I strained out the fibrous material, leaving a black liquid which I boiled down to approximately three cups of a heavy, tar-like substance. To this I added one cup of brandy and one cup of sugar. I drank the entire mixture in two doses, spaced about fifteen minutes apart. The taste was extremely bitter and unpalatable. Approximately one half hour later, I began to have violent intestinal cramps and uncontrollable muscular spasms, which lasted about three hours. Following that, I sank into a stuporous delirium which continued for sixteen hours, followed by a period of intense headache and lethargy. All in all, I would rank this trip worse than jimson weed, but far better than Roto-root." To which a reply might be: "The active component of goldenrod husks is 12-beta-3-methyl- headphonerase, which is an anticoagulant and convulsant. It was tested briefly by the army during WW2 as a potential nerve gas, but abandoned because the effects were too unpredictable, and the substance was considered too dangerous to handle." %% No objects of value are worth risking the priceless experience of waking up just one more day. -- Jack Smith %% No obligation. No salesman will call. %% No obscene fortunes today -- The Management %% No offense, sir. None taken. I never killed anyone at the supper table, Mister LaForge. -- Geordi and Kurn, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% No one becomes depraved in a moment. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis %% No one can enjoy freedom unless he is willing to surrender some part of it. %% No one can feel as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish. %% No one can guarantee the actions of another. -- Spock, "Day of the Dove," stardate unknown %% No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. -- Eleanor Roosevelt, "This is My Story", 1937 %% No one can make you feel more humble than the repairman who discovers you've been trying to fix it yourself. %% No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, neither by argument nor by emotional appeal. -- Marilyn Furgeson %% No one can put you down without your full cooperation. %% No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and riches. -- Matthew 6:24 %% No one ever prayed heartily without learning something. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% No one ever promised you a rose garden. %% No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!! %% No one expects the spammish repetition Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! %% No one gets sick on Wednesdays. %% No one gets too old to learn a new way of being stupid. %% No one has skin that is exactly the same color as a Band-Aid. %% No one has yet programmed a computer to be of two minds about a hard problem or to burst out laughing. -- Lewis Thomas %% No one is afraid to die without first being afraid to live. -- Solomon Short %% No one is as tired as the person who does nothing. %% No one is ever old enough to know better. -- Holbrook Jackson %% No one is fit to be trusted with power. ... No one. ... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. ... And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate. -- C. P. Snow, The Light and the Dark %% No one is listening until you make a mistake. %% No one is listening until you make a mistake. He who hesitates is probably right. %% No one is ugly after 2 a.m. %% No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of others. %% No one knows his own servants as badly as the master. %% No one knows how he'll act under pressure. -- Sulu, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," stardate 5730.2 %% No one knows like a woman how to say things that are at once gentle and deep. -- Hugo %% No one knows what he can do till he tries. -- Publilius Syrus %% No one looks good in yellow. %% No one loves the man whom he fears. -- Aristotle %% No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices. %% No one may kill a man. Not for any purpose. It cannot be condoned. -- Kirk, "Spock's Brain," stardate 5431.6 %% No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody. -- Martin Luther %% No one needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one. %% No one regards what is before his feet; we all gaze at the stars. -- Quintus Ennius %% No one remembers learning how to use a spoon, it is something that is learned and not taught. %% No one said it would be easy. %% No one seems to be listening. %% No one should be surprised that Black's Law Dictionary doesn't list Mea Culpa. ... %% No one should hide their true self behind a false face. -- L. Chaney %% No one so thoroughly appreciates the value of constructive criticism as the one who's giving it. -- Hal Chadwick %% No one talks peace unless he's ready to back it up with war. He talks of peace if it is the only way to live. -- Colonel Green and Surak of Vulcan, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.5 %% No one wants war. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3201.7 %% No one whom you ask for help will see it either. %% No one's getting fat except Mama Cass. %% No other warranty expressed or implied. %% No part of this message may reproduce, store itself in a retrieval system, or transmit disease, in any form, without the permissiveness of the author. -- Chris Shaw %% No passes accepted for this engagement. %% No pepper games. %% No pig should go sky diving during monsoon For this isn't really the norm. But should a fat swine try to soar like a loon, So what? Any pork in a storm. No pig should go sky diving during monsoon, It's risky enough when the weather is fine. But to have a pig soar when the monsoon doth roar Cast even more perils before swine. %% No plain fanfold paper could hold that fractal Puff -- He grew so fast no plotting pack could shrink him far enough. Compiles and simulations grew so quickly tame And swapped out all their data space when Puff pushed his stack frame. CHORUS: Puff the fractal dragon was written in C, And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory. Puff the fractal dragon was written in C, And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory. Puff, he grew so quickly, while others moved like snails And mini-Puffs would perch themselves on his gigantic tail. All the student hackers loved that fractal Puff But DCS did not like Puff, and finally said, "Enough!" (chorus) Puff used more resources than DCS could spare. The operator killed Puff's job -- he didn't seem to care. A gloom fell on the hackers; it seemed to be the end, But Puff trapped the exception, and grew from naught again! (chorus) %% No plain not followed by a slope. No going not followed by a return. He who remains persevering in danger Is without blame. Do not complain about this truth; Enjoy the good fortune you still possess. %% No poems can please nor live long which are written by water-drinkers. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% No policy intervention in social problems produces the intended effect--if the research is carried out by independent third parties, especially those skeptical of the policy. -- James Q. Wilson %% No postage necessary if mailed in the United States. %% No power in the universe can hope to stop the force of evolution. Be warned. The execution of Mr. Ramsey and his followers may elevate them to the status of martyrs. Martyrs cannot be silenced. -- Riker, "Angel One", stardate 41636.9 %% No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances. %% No problem is insoluble. -- Dr. Janet Wallace, "The Deadly Years," stardate 3479.4. %% No problem is so large it can't be fit in somewhere. %% No proper program contains an indication which as an operator-applied occurrence identifies an operator-defining occurrence which as an indication-applied occurrence identifies an indication-defining occurrence different from the one identified by the given indication as an indication-applied occurrence. -- ALGOL 68 Report %% No purchase necessary. %% No question is so difficult as one to which the answer is obvious. %% No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. -- Booker T. Washington %% No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. -- William Shakespeare %% No relationship with what is harmful; There is no blame in this. If one remains conscious of difficulty, One remains without blame. %% No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state. -- Felix Adler %% No riders. %% No rock so hard but that a little wave May beat admission in a thousand years. -- Tennyson %% No sane being would let you light it. %% No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. -- Jacob Bronowski, in "Encounter", 1971 %% No self-made man ever did such a good job that some woman didn't want to make some alterations. -- Kim Hubbard %% No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in that kind of paper. -- Mike Royko on the Chicago Sun-Times after it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch %% No sense being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway. %% No skis take rocks like rental skis! %% No slave is ever freed, save he freeth himself. %% No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% No smoking, no spitting -- The Management %% No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. %% No solicitors. %% No sooner had Edger Allen Poe Finished his old Raven, then he started his Old Crow. %% No sooner said than done -- so acts your man of worth. -- Quintus Ennius %% No sooner said, the better. %% No spitting on the Bus! Thank you, The Management. %% No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: "Come back with your shield, or on it". Later on this custom declined. So did Rome. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick %% No time for the old in-and-out; just here to read the meter. %% No two people perceive the same thing identically. -- Jack A. Marshall %% No two persons ever read the same book. -- Edmund Wilson %% No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets. -- Edward Abbey %% No use beating a dead horse. %% No use getting too involved in life--you're only here for a limited time. %% No user-serviceable parts inside. %% No user-serviceable parts inside. Refer to qualified service personnel. %% No wanna work... wanna bang on keyboard! %% No wants -- no needs? We weren't meant for that. None of us. Man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is. -- Kirk, "This Side of Paradise," stardate 3417.5 %% No wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause ... Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie? -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% No weapon is better than a crysknife. %% No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. -- Margaret H. Sanger %% No woman can escape her wyrd. %% No woman is worth dying for. Killing for, but not dying for. -- Mickey D, "The Royale", stardate 42625.4 %% No woman, No cry. %% No wonder Clairol makes so much money selling shampoo. Lather, Rinse, Repeat is an infinite loop! %% No wonder you're tired! You understood so much today. %% No yak too dirty; no dumpster too hollow. %% No, Alydon. And you must throw off these suspicions. They're based on fear. And fear breeds hatred and war. I shall speak to them peacefully. They'll see that I'm unarmed. There's no better argument against war than that. -- Temmosus, THE DEAD PLANET (The Daleks) %% No, I had no problem communicating with Latin American heads of state - though now I do wish I had paid more attention to Latin when I was in high school. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% No, I'm from NZ. I only work in Outer Space. %% No, `Eureka' is Greek for `This bath is too hot.' -- Dr. Who %% No, his mind is not for rent, But don't put him down as arrogant. His reserve, a quiet defense For riding out the days events ... No, his mind is not for rent To any god or government. Always hopeful, yet discontent, He knows that changes aren't permanent, But change is. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% No, his mind is not for rent To any god or government. Always hopeful, yet discontent, He knows changes aren't permanent - But change is. %% No, you can't -- you don't have all the necessary ingredients. %% No, you don't blow, that's just a figure of speech. %% No, your place in life is where you want to be. Don't let them tell you that you owe it all to me. Keep on looking forward, no use in looking around. Hold your head above the crowd, they want to bring you down. Live for yourself, there's no one else more worth living for, Begging hands and bleeding hearts will only cry out for more. Well, I know they've told you, selfishness is wrong. Yet it was for me, not you, that I came to write this song. Anthem of the heart, anthem of the mind, A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind. We marvel after those who sought, And wondered in the world they wrought. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% No. %% No. Lt. Worf, you will make no move against him unless I order it. Pity, you might have learned an interesting lesson macrohead, with a microbrain. -- Picard and Q, "Hide and Q", stardate 41590.5 %% No. Not even a 55 Buick has 100% stopping power. -- Gary Coffman, uunet!rsiatl!ke4zv!gary %% No?! Some people still read mail a packet at a time?! %% Nobel laureates do it in the bank. %% Noblehearted keeping still. Good fortune. %% Noblehearted return. No remorse. %% Noblesse oblige; or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Nobody believes the official spokesman ... but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen, 1977 %% Nobody but a greedy surgeon would allow you to attempt that trick. %% Nobody but a lawyer can tell legal from illegal, and the lawyers can't tell right from wrong anymore. -- Larry Niven and Jerry E. Pournelle "Oath of Fealty" (1981) %% Nobody can be as agreeable as an uninvited guest. %% Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it. -- Tallulah Bankhead %% Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. -- Sydney Harris %% Nobody can fix the economy Nobody can be trusted with their finger on the button Nobody's perfect VOTE FOR NOBODY %% Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins %% Nobody dresses a woman like Jonathan Martin. %% Nobody ever died badly. They got the job done, didn't they? -- Solomon Short %% Nobody ever eats at that restaurant anymore. It's always too crowded. -- Yogi Berra %% Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet. -- Kin Hubbard %% Nobody ever ruined their eyesight by looking at the bright side of something. %% Nobody gets justice. People get good luck or bad luck. -- Orson Welles %% Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one. -- Edward Abbey %% Nobody helps nobody but himself! -- Bela Oxmyx, "A Piece of the Action," stardate unknown %% Nobody is ever really ready for anything. If they were, there would be no point in living through it. -- Solomon Short %% Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. -- James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name" 1961 %% Nobody is one block of harmony. We are all afraid of something, or feel limited in something. We all need somebody to talk to. It would be good if we talked to each other--not just pitter-patter, but real talk. We shouldn't be so afraid, because most people really like this contact; that you show you are vulnerable makes them free to be vulnerable too. It's so much easier to be together when we drop our masks. -- Liv Ullman %% Nobody knows the trouble I've been. %% Nobody knows the words to Auld Lang Syne. %% Nobody knows what goes between his cold toes and his warm ears. -- Roy Harper %% Nobody likes me; Everybody hates me. I think I'll eat some worms. %% Nobody looks good in static cling. %% Nobody loves me, Everybody hates me, I think I'll go out and eat worms. I'm gonna cut their heads off, Eat their insides out, And throw way the skins. Big, fat, juicy ones, Little, skinny, cute ones, Watch how they wiggle and they squirm. %% Nobody notices when things go right. -- M. Zimmerman %% Nobody perceives anything with total accuracy. -- Jack A. Marshall %% Nobody really cares or understands what anyone else is doing. %% Nobody really knows what's going on anywhere within your organization. %% Nobody roots for goliath %% Nobody said computers were going to be polite. %% Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime. -- Edward Abbey %% Nobody shot me. -- Frank Gusenberg [Last words, when asked by police who had shot him 14 times with a machine gun in the Saint Valentine's Day massacre.] %% Nobody steps on a church in my town! %% Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old. -- Lewis Lapham %% Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. -- C. Wright Mills %% Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist there is no God. -- Heywood Hale Broun (1888-1939) %% Nobody wants constructive criticism. It's all we can do to put up with constructive praise. %% Nobody with the intelligence to understand something with four thousand moving parts will ever become an auto mechanic. -- Charlie Kozak %% Nobody, including the Supreme court, knows what obscenity is. -- Norman Dorsen %% Nodding the head does not row the boat. %% Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Noise: A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Nominal Semidestructor: n. Sound-alike slang for `National Semiconductor', found among other places in the 4.3BSD networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors including the NS16000 and NS32000 and several variants. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog Z80,000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten microprocessors. Compare {HP-SUX}, {AIDX}, {buglix}, {Macintrash}, {Telerat}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Non-Combatant: A dead Quaker. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Non-Determinism is not meant to be reasonable. -- M. J. 0'Donnell %% Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield negative results. TnT's Corollary : Expectations yield negative results in a binary system. %% Non-cooperation with evil is a much a duty as is cooperation with good. %% Non-sequiturs make me eat lampshades. %% Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong. %% None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm. %% None but a fool is always right. -- Hare %% None but an author knows an author's cares, Or fancy's fondness for the child she bears. -- William Cowper (1731-1800) %% None but the immortal Cthulhu may pass. %% None but the well-bred man knows how to confess a fault, or to restrain himself to lust in his heart. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% None can comprehend eternity but the eternal God. Eternity is an ocean, whereof we shall never see the shore; it is a deep where we can find no bottom; a labyrinth from whence we cannot extricate ourselves and where we shall ever lose the door. -- Boston %% None love the bearer of bad news. -- Sophocles %% None of them hit you! %% None of you exist, my sysop types all this in. %% None of you would help me when I baked my bread, now all of you would help me eat it. I can see that you are very well fed, which indicates that you don't need it. Enough said. %% Nonmaskable Interrupt (manual) (power fail) (memory error) %% Nonsense and beauty have close connections. -- E. M. Forster %% Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it. -- Heisenberg %% Nonvectored interrupt %% Normal break register does not match u.u_break %% Normal is just a vicious standard society has set to inhibit the creativity of ones self. -- Holzinger %% Normal times may possibly be over forever. %% Normalcy is a character assassination. %% Normally our rules are rigid; we tend to discretion, if for no other reason than self-protection. We never recommend any of our graduates, although we cheerfully provide information as to those who have failed their courses. -- Jack Vance, "Freitzke's Turn" %% Normally, I would offer to patch you up, but I'm ashamed to say my abilities are not equal to dealing with your present condition. Please let me express my profoundest regrets. %% North Dakota law makes it illegal for anyone to go to bed wearing shoes or boots. %% Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. %% Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none. -- William Shakespeare %% Not SENSUOUS...only "FROLICSOME"...and in need of DENTAL WORK...in PAIN!!! %% Not a chance. %% Not a day passes over this earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows. -- Charles Reed %% Not a dwarf hole with piles of dirt, gypsum, and dried snot lying around, nor a narc hole with obscene drawings in the vestibule and a cesspool in the middle of the living-room: it was a boggie hole, and that means all of the above. %% Not a moment too soon Jean...I mean Captain. -- Dr. Crusher, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% Not a prayer. %% Not a single corridor on this level?? %% Not affiliated with the American Red Cross. %% Not all men are fools; some are still single! %% Not all men who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we aren't poets. %% Not all rumors are as misleading as this one. %% Not all the pumice of the polish'd town Can smooth the roughness of the barnyard clown; Rich, honor'd, titled, he betrays his race, By this one mark -- he's awkward in his face. -- Holmes %% Not all who own a harp are harpers. -- Marcus Terentius Varro %% Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down. -- William Winans %% Not drinking, chasing women, or doing drugs won't make you live longer-- it just seems that way. %% Not even a human fly could get up it. %% Not even a spear will hit a Xorn. %% Not everyone can carry the weight of the world. %% Not everything in life is funny. -- R. L. Asprin %% Not everything worth doing is worth doing well. %% Not failure, but low aim, is crime. -- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) %% 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, "The Cyberiad" %% Not going out of the door and the courtyard Is without blame. %% Not going out of the gate and the courtyard Brings misfortune. %% Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much. -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% Not her or her. That one there ... the one with the coke in her hand and the piece of cheese pizza. And a butt that won't quit. That's the one I love and want. %% Not implemented when you're stuck or swallowed. (Continue or Quit) %% Not light but darkness. First he climbed up to heaven, Then he plunged into the depths of the earth. %% Not likely. %% Not many people realize just how well known I am. %% Not now, my soap is on. %% Not one hundred percent efficient, of course ... but nothing ever is. -- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8 %% Not one of us can survive in the world today, much less in what it is about to become, without personal inspiration. -- Boyd K. Packer %% Not one penny. -- President George Bush, on raising the $4.25-an-hour minimum wage %% Not only is "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the "Celestial Home Care Omnibus", better selling than "Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity", and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, "Where God Went Wrong", "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes" and "Who Is This God Person Anyway?" In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has already supplanted the great "Encyclopedia Galactica" as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends. -- Woody Allen %% Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree. -- Professor W. %% Not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. -- George Sala %% Not quite human any longer. %% Not recommended for children. %% Not responsible for direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages resulting from any defect, error or failure to perform. %% Not that we needed all that stuff, but when you get locked into a serious drug collection the tendency is to push it as far as you can. -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" %% Not the Beatles, just an incredible simulation. %% Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand. -- Spinoza %% Not to say that using a # isn't original either... %% Not today I have a headache... %% Not tonight Chekov, I have an earache %% Not tonight honey... I have a modem %% Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain -- that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants. -- C. Jefferson (quoted by A. M. Turing) %% Not wearing any armor. %% Not-really-trying is just as much effort as trying-really-hard. The only difference ... is that not-really-trying receives no reward. -- A. N. Wilson, "Incline Our Hearts", 1989 %% Not-so-Famous People from History: Charon: fiery singer now playing the styx. %% Not-so-Famous People from History: Evictor Hugo: French landlord and author, "Lease Miserables". %% Not-so-Famous People from History: Paul Reverse: Tory patriot who warned the British that the Americans were coming. %% Not-so-Famous People from History: Xeroxes I: Persian Photocopy King %% Note: the words "he," "him," "his," and "men," when used in this publication represent both the masculine and feminine genders, unless otherwise specifically stated. -- U.S. Army Field manual for MOS 54E, NBC Specialist, 25-Sep-1981 %% Notes for a ballet, "The Spell": ... Suddenly Sigmund hears the flutter of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ... Sigmund is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman -- unfortunately, divided lengthwise. She enchants Sigmund, who is careful not to make any poultry jokes ... -- Woody Allen %% Nothing befalls a man except what is in his nature to endure. -- Marcus Aurelius %% Nothing can be done in one trip. -- Snider %% Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society. -- Edward Abbey %% Nothing can occur beyond the strength of faith to sustain, or, transcending the resources of religion, to relieve. -- Binney %% Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate. -- Mark B. Cohen %% Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. -- W. W. Zeige %% Nothing can take the place of practical experience out in the world. %% Nothing causes a prince to be so much esteemed as great enterprises and giving proof of prowess. It keeps the people's minds uncertain and astonished and it keeps them occupied in watching the result. %% Nothing complicated ever works. %% Nothing contributes more to a person's peace of mind than having no opinions at all. -- G. C. Lichtenberg %% Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science. -- Edward Abbey %% Nothing could be olde than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper. -- Edward Abbey %% Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up. %% Nothing endures but change. -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) [Yeah, yeah, "Everything changes but change itself." -- JFK Ed.] %% Nothing endures like change. -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) %% Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. -- John Keats (1795-1821) %% Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced. -- John Keats (1795-1821), Correspondence, 1819 %% Nothing ever goes away. -- Barry Commoner %% Nothing ever happens. %% Nothing for preserving the body like having no heart. -- John Petit-Senn %% Nothing gives people the feeling that this is the worst of all possible worlds like discovering that the price of a wool crepe suit has risen to $600. -- Nathan Cobb %% Nothing improves with age. %% Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. -- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) %% Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. %% 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 %% Nothing increases your golf score like witnesses. %% Nothing is 100% certain, bug free or IBM compatible. %% Nothing is as simple as it seems at first Or as hopeless as it seems in the middle Or as finished as it seems in the end. %% Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. -- Jorge Luis Borges, 1972 %% Nothing is but what is not. %% Nothing is certain except death and taxes. Bretagna's Corollary: If anything else is permanent, it is the fact that, given any roadway, somewhere upon it there will be someone going slower than you are. -- Nicholas Bretagna II %% Nothing is cheap which is superfluous, for what one does not need, is dear for a penny. -- Plutarch %% Nothing is done until nothing is done. %% Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him. -- Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881) %% Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man. -- Fred Bucy, TI, Inc. %% Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. %% Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship, nor nobly which is done in pride. -- Rushkin %% Nothing is ever lost by courtesy. It is the cheapest of the pleasures; costs nothing and conveys much. It pleases him who gives and him who receives, and thus, like mercy, it is twice blessed. -- Erastus Wiman %% Nothing is ever so bad that it can't get worse. %% Nothing is faster than the speed of light ... To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the light comes on. %% Nothing is finer for the purpose of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers. -- Keats %% Nothing is finished until the paperwork is done. %% Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious %% Nothing is hard work if you have the ability to get others to do it for you. %% Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -- Andrew Young %% Nothing is impossible for anyone impervious to reason %% Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. -- A. H. Weiler %% Nothing is impossible. Anything can be accomplished with proper preparation and planning. -- Ponce de Leon %% Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others. -- Jonathan Winters in "The Twilight Zone" %% Nothing is inevitable -- not even revolution. -- Gilbert Seldes (1893-?) %% Nothing is less likely to appeal to young women than the opinions of old men on the pill. %% Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth. -- Nero Wolfe %% Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), "Ideas and Opinions", 1954 %% Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. -- Descartes %% Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion. -- Joseph Addison %% Nothing is more quiet than the sound of hair going grey. %% Nothing is new; we walk where others went; There's no vice now but has its precedent. -- Herrick %% Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. -- Henry Ford %% Nothing is really work unless you'd rather be doing something else. %% Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus; it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it. -- Bulwer %% Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand. -- George Eliot %% Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company you please none; if you flatter only one or two, you affront all the rest. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Nothing is so important that nothing else is important. %% Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity. -- Ebner-Eschenbach %% Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in it's subject. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Nothing is so useless as a general maxim. %% Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is to be expecting evil before it comes. -- Seneca %% Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. -- Hassan I Sabbah %% Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. -- Hassan I Sabbah Bullshit. -- Karl %% Nothing is ultimate. %% Nothing is wrong in Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure. -- Ross MacDonald %% Nothing is your own except the few cubic inches in your head. %% Nothing keeps a family together like having one car in the shop. -- Gene Brown %% Nothing like having money to burn! %% Nothing looks as good close up as it does from far away. Or, nothing looks as good from far away as it does close up. %% Nothing makes a Woman more esteemed by the opposite sex than Chastity; whether it be that we always prize those most who are hardest to come at, or, that nothing besides Chastity, with its collateral attendants, Truth, Fidelity, and Constancy, gives the man a property in the person he loves, and consequently endears her to him above all things. -- Addison %% Nothing makes a man and wife feel closer, these days, than a joint tax return. %% Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. %% Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all. -- Balfour %% Nothing minor ever happens to a car on a trip. -- Charles D. Hartman %% Nothing minor ever happens to a car on the weekend. -- Charles D. Hartman %% Nothing minor ever happens to a car. -- Charles D. Hartman %% Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss put in an honest day's work. %% Nothing recedes like success. -- Walter Winchell %% Nothing seems to happen. %% Nothing shocks me--I'm a scientist %% Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. -- Honore de Balzac %% Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire of appearing so. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. %% Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. -- Bruce Barton %% Nothing spoils a confession like repentance. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% Nothing succeeds like -- failure. %% Nothing succeeds like a toothless budgie %% Nothing succeeds like excess. %% Nothing succeeds like success. -- Alexandre Dumas, Pere (1802-1870) %% Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. -- Charlie Brown %% Nothing that would not further modesty In movement. %% Nothing that's forced can ever be right, if it doesn't come naturally leave it. That's what she said as she turned out the light, And we bent our backs as slaves in the night, She lowered her guard, showed me the scars she got from trying to fight, Said, "Oh, you better believe it." ... Well nothing that's real is ever for free and you just have to pay for it sometime. She said it before, she said it to me, I suppose she believed there was nothing to see, But the same old four imaginary walls She'd built for livin' inside I said "Oh, you just can't mean it." ... Well, nothing that's forced can ever be right, if it doesn't come naturally leave it. That's what she said as she turned out the light, And she may have been wrong and she may have been right, But I woke with the frost, I noticed she'd lost the veil that covered her eyes, I said "Oh, you can leave it." -- Al Stewart, "If It Doesn't Come Naturally" %% Nothing this evil EVER dies! %% Nothing unreal exists. %% Nothing ventured, nothing gained. %% Nothing will dispel enthusiasm like a small admission fee. -- Kim Hubbard %% Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome. -- Dr. Johnson %% Nothing will surprise us more than to pass through to the other side of the veil and realize how well we recognize our Father's face. -- Ezra Taft Benson %% Nothing worth a damn is ever done as a matter of principle. If it is worth doing, it is done because it is worth doing. If it is not, it's done as a matter of principle. -- James T. Evans %% Nothing's beautiful from every point of view. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man. -- Edmund Burke %% Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime is so absolutely repugnant to God as everything which is official; and why? because the official is so impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered to a personality. -- Soren Kierkegaard %% Nought shall prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. -- Wordsworth %% November 1 -- In the ongoing heroic effort to trim the federal budget deficit, House and Senate conferees agree not to order appetizers. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% November 15 -- In their continuing heroic deficit-reduction efforts, House and Senate conferees agree to continue working right through their 2:30 racquetball appointment. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% November 22 -- In ceremonies marking his retirement as secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger is presented with a pen-and-pencil set, built by the General Dynamics Corp. for $352.4 million. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% November 29 -- The world financial community's faith in the U.S. economy is restored as heroic House and Senate conferees hammer out a breakthrough compromise deficit-reduction measure under which $417.65 will be slashed from the $13.2 million pastry budget of the Federal Bureau of Putting Up Road Signs With Kilometers On Them. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% November, n.: The eleventh twelfth of a weariness. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Novinson's Revolutionary Discovery: When comes the revolution, things will be different -- not better, just different. %% Now *YOU* have a friend in the software business. %% Now Denial: To tell oneself that the only time worth living is in the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Now I am depressed... %% Now I call that communicating. -- Geordi, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4 %% Now I hear she's got a house out in fairview in a style she's trying to maintain %% Now I lay me down to sheep I pray the Lord the sheep's asleep If, perchance, the sheep should wake Simple friendship shall I fake. -- Frances Grimble %% Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I'll cry in anguish, Mistake!! Mistake!! %% Now I lay me down to sleep; Leave a message at the beep. If I die before I wake, Remember to erase the tape. %% Now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street All my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home -- Tom Waits %% Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the double lock will keep; May no brick through the window break, And, no one rob me till I awake. %% Now I lay me down to study, I pray the Lord I won't go nutty. And if I fail to learn this junk, I pray the Lord that I won't flunk. But if I do, don't pity me at all, Just lay my bones in the study hall. Tell my teacher I've done my best, Then pile my books upon my chest. %% Now I see why you want to handle all the away teams, Number One. That's where all the excitement is. -- Picard to Riker, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% Now I think I just reached the state of HYPERTENSION that comes JUST BEFORE you see the TOTAL at the SAFEWAY CHECKOUT COUNTER! %% Now I understand the meaning of "THE MOD SQUAD"! %% Now I was heading, in my hot cage, down towards meat-market country on the tip of the West Village. Here the redbrick warehouses double as carcass galleries and rat hives, the Manhattan fauna seeking its necessary level, living or dead. Here too you find the heavy faggot hangouts, The Spike, the Water Closet, the Mother Load. Nobody knows what goes on in these places. Only the heavy faggots know. Even Fielding seems somewhat vague on the question. You get zapped and flogged and dumped on -- by almost anybody's standards, you have a really terrible time. The average patron arrives at the Spike in one taxi but needs to go back to his sock in two. And then the next night he shows up for more. They shackle themselves to racks, they bask in urinals. Their folks have a lot of explaining to do, if you want my opinion, particularly the mums. Sorry to single you ladies out like this but the story must start somewhere. A craving for hourly murder -- it can't be willed. In the meantime, Fielding tells me, Mother Nature looks on and taps her foot and clicks her tongue. Always a champion of monogamy, she is cooking up some fancy new diseases. She just isn't going to stand for it. -- Martin Amis, "Money" %% Now I'm being INVOLUNTARILY shuffled closer to the CLAM DIP with the BROKEN PLASTIC FORKS in it!! %% Now I'm concentrating on a specific tank battle toward the end of World War II! %% Now I'm having INSIPID THOUGHTS about the beatiful, round wives of HOLLYWOOD MOVIE MOGULS encased in PLEXIGLAS CARS and being approached by SMALL BOYS selling FRUIT ... %% Now KEN and BARBIE are PERMANENTLY ADDICTED to MIND-ALTERING DRUGS ... %% Now all those things that were important, Mister they vanish in the dirt. %% Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature. -- Frank McKinney Hubbard (1868-1930), "Abe Martin's Broadcast", 1930 %% Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. %% Now available - Available any day now. %% Now available: Available any day now. Available soon: Should be out within a year. Available May 1st: Version 1.0 may ship to dealers August 1st. %% Now comes the mystery. -- Henry Ward Beecher, last words, 8 March 1887 %% Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time. %% Now go back or thou shalt most certainly die. -- Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both. -- William Shakespeare %% Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure. -- Byron %% Now hear this fair lass from Rhode Isle Who said with a wink and a smile, "Sure, please stick it in, Be it thick be it thin, But if's rough I won't do as a file." %% Now is not a good time to annoy me %% Now is the time for all good men to come to. -- Walt Kelly %% Now is the time for drinking; now the time to beat the earth with unfettered foot. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% Now it's my turn! %% Now it's time to say goodbye To all our company... M-I-C (see you next week!) K-E-Y (Why? Because we LIKE you!) M-O-U-S-E. %% Now let me see... Well, we weren't quite able to restore your state. You can't have everything. %% Now look what you've made me do. %% Now my EMOTIONAL RESOURCES are heavily committed to 23% of the SMELTING and REFINING industry of the state of NEVADA!! %% Now of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It leaves me only fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. -- A. E. Housman %% Now sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers set sail that day for a three hour tour. A three hour tour .... %% Now that I have my "APPLE", I comprehend COST ACCOUNTING!! %% Now that day wearies me, My yearning desire Will receive more kindly, Like a tired child, the starry night. Hands, leave off your deeds, Mind, forget all thoughts; All of my forces Yearn only to sink into sleep. And my soul, unguarded, Would soar on widespread wings, To live in night's magical sphere More profoundly, more variously. -- Hermann Hesse, "Going to Sleep" %% Now that is the wisdom of man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Now that we are no longer a growth company, your beard is a liability. %% Now that world telephone and television transmission are a reality, the only communications problem left on earth is that between parents and teenagers. %% Now that you've read Fortune's diet truths, you'll be prepared the next time some housewife or boutique-owner-turned-diet-expert appears on TV to plug her latest book. And, if you still feel a twinge of guilt for eating coffee cake while listening to her exhortations, ask yourself the following questions: (1) Do I dare trust a person who actually considers alfalfa sprouts a food? (2) Was the author's sole motive in writing this book to get rich exploiting the forlorn hopes of chubby people like me? (3) Would a longer life be worthwhile if it had to be lived as prescribed ... without French-fried onion rings, pizza with double cheese, or the occasional Mai-Tai? (Remember, living right doesn't really make you live longer, it just *seems* like longer.) That, and another piece of coffee cake, should do the trick. %% Now the Lord God planted a garden East of Whittier in a place called Yorba Linda, and out of the ground he made to grow orange trees that were good for food and the fruits thereof he labeled SUNKIST... -- "The Begatting of a President" %% Now the cycle is complete; before I was but the learner, now I am the master! %% Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" -- a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night. Now I lay me down to sleep, Try to count electric sheep, Sweet dream wishes you can keep, How I hate the night. -- Marvin, the Paranoid Android Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Now there's three things you can do in a baseball game: you can win or you can lose or it can rain. -- Casey Stengel %% Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm. %% Now this is going to be your first day on a strange new planet, so I want you all wrapped up snug and warm, and no playing with any naughty bug-eyed monsters. D O N ' T P A N I C %% Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Now under new management! %% Now we can be just like Oral Roberts University. %% Now what is it that cures digestion? %% Now what would they do if I just sailed away? Who the hell really compelled me to leave today? Runnin' low on stories of what made it a ball, What would they do if I made no landfall?" -- Jimmy Buffet, "Landfall" %% Now where did I put that rubber doll? %% Now you are in a twisting tunnel which goes east and west from here. %% Now you are in the middle of a field of grass. The grass is quite weedy and unkempt, and obviously has not been cut or otherwise tended to for some time. To the north and south are the sides of some yellow houses. On the east edge is a fence, and a yellow platform lies to the west. %% Now you are in the water just in front of a sandy beach, the only such beach on Ebosskil. This beach is no natural formation. The normally rocky island has been altered by an act of immense power and has been made habitable. Despite the amount of power used, it is clear that only a small fraction of the island has actually been cleared. You may land to the west. To the north and south the island rapidly reverts to its natural state -- broken rocky terrain that no human could travel over. %% Now you are standing in the grey shack. The clapboard walls are cheap and flimsy. There is a heavy coating of dust over the entire interior. The room is empty except for a desk standing in one corner and a sink which is attached to the north wall. There is a single exit to the south. %% Now you see it, now you don't. -- H. Shadowspawn %% Now you've done it. It seems that the brick has other properties than weight, namely the ability to blow you to smithereens. %% Now you've really done it! I'm out of orange smoke! You don't expect me to do a decent reincarnation without any orange smoke, do you? %% Now, I don't pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love, when every day is a struggle to survive. But I do insist that you do survive, because the days and the years ahead are worth living for! -- Edith Keeler, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate unknown. %% Now, I know you're probably asking yourself, "Did he fire six shots, or just five?" Well, in all this excitement, I clean forgot myself. Now, since this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and since it can blow your head clean off, the question you have to ask yourself is "Do I feel lucky?" . . . Well, DO ya, punk? -- Clint Eastwood, "Dirty Harry" %% Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!! %% Now, if the leaders of the world -- people who are leaders by virtue of political, military or financial power, and not necessarily wisdom or consideration for mankind -- if these leaders manage not to pull us over the brink into planetary suicide, despite their occasional pompous suggestions that they may feel obliged to do so, we may survive beyond 1988. -- George Rostky, EE Times, June 20, 1988 p. 45 %% Now, let's SEND OUT for QUICHE!! %% Now, the first words out of your mouth are the most important. You may want to start with something like this here. You are the most beautiful woman in the galaxy. but that might not work." "Yes! Yes, it would." You don't know how long I've wanted to tell you that. "But you were afraid." Yes. "Of me?" Of us. Of what we might become. -- Riker and Guinan, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8 %% Nowlan's Theory: He who hesitates is not only lost, but several miles from the next freeway exit. %% Nuclear war would really set back cable. -- Ted Turner %% Nuclear war?!? Take cover! %% Nuclear war?!? There goes my career! %% Nuclear weapons can wipe out life on earth, if used properly. %% Nude Pictures Of Nancy Reagan's Hairdresser Cause Uproar. %% Nude woman who fly upside-down have big hairy crack up. %% Nudist Camp sign - Sorry, Clothed for Winter. %% Nudists are people who wear one-button suits. %% Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus %% Nuke the Smurfs %% Nuke the baby seals for Jesus %% Nuke the gay, unborn, baby whales for Jesus. %% Nuke the unborn gay female whales for Jesus. %% Nuke'em till they glow, then shoot'em in the dark %% Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. -- Seneca %% Number 1: "(Name of female) is an asshole!" Number 2: "She's MUCH more than an asshole, she's obnoxious." %% Number One, I have the distinct impression we are being toyed with. -- Picard, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% Number seven ... What's it meant to be dear? ... A study? ... It doesn't say what of? ... Well, that's an easy way out for an artist. -- Ruth Draper %% Numbers are symbols for things; the number and the thing are not the same. -- G. O. Ashley %% Numbers are tools, not rules. -- G. O. Ashley %% Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing. %% Numerical superiority is of no consequence. In battle, victory will go to the best tactician. -- G. A. Custer %% Nuns can't dance. %% Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Nurse Chapel, to the sick bay. %% Nurse Donna: Oh, Groucho, I'm afraid I'm gonna wind up an old maid. Groucho: Well, bring her in and we'll wind her up together. Nurse Donna: Do you believe in computer dating? Groucho: Only if the computers really love each other. %% Nurse! I spy gypsies! Run! %% Nurses do it with patience. %% Nusbaum's Rule: The more pretentious the corporate name, the smaller the organization. (For instance, the Murphy Center for the Codification of Human and Organizational Law, contrasted to IBM, GM, and AT&T.) %% Nutritional Slumming: Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics: Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to celebrate a career promotion. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Nymphomaniacal Alice Used a dynamite stick for a phallus. They found here vagina In North Carolina, And her ass-hole in Buckingham Palace %% Nymphs and nurses like beautiful rings. %% O God! that men should put an epigram in their mouths to steal away their brains! -- William Shakespeare %% O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. -- Reinhold Niebuhr, sermon, 1934 %% O cursed ambition, thou devouring bird, how dost thou from the field of honesty pick every grain of profit or delight, and mock the reaper's toil! -- Harvard %% O give me a home, Where the buffalo roam, Where the deer and the antelope play, Where seldom is heard A discouraging word, 'Cause what can an antelope say? %% O imitators, you slavish herd! -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in your name! -- Mme. Jeanne (Manon) Roland (1754-1793) %% O love, could thou and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Might we not smash it to bits And mould it closer to our hearts' desire? -- Omar Khayyam [tr. FitzGerald] %% O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! Then with a passion would I shake the world. -- William Shakespeare %% O thou who dost inhabit in my breast, Leave not the mansion, so long tenantless; Lest growing ruinous the building fall, And leave no memory of what it was. -- William Shakespeare %% O to be self-balanced for contingencies! O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs as trees and animals do! -- Walt Whitman %% O you much partial gods! Why gave ye men affections, and not power to govern them? -- Ludovick Barry %% O! If I were a fish I'd lay hap'ly on my dish. Yes, that's my one and only wish -- To be a fish! For fish don't ever mish; They needn't flush after they pish! Yes, and life's just swish, swish, swish, For all the fish!!! %% O! love is like the rose, And a month it may not see, Ere it withers where it grows. -- Bailey %% O'Brian's Law: Everything is always done for the wrong reasons. %% O'Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. "How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?" "Four." "And if the Party says that it is not four but five-- then how many?" "Four." The word ended in a gasp of pain. -- George Orwell (1903-1950) %% O'Connell was staggering home with a pint of booze in his back pocket when he slipped and fell heavily. Struggling to his feet, he felt something wet running down his leg. "Please, God," he implored, "let it be blood!" %% O'Reilly's Law of the Kitchen: Cleanliness is next to impossible. %% O'Riordan's Theorem: Brains x Beauty = Constant. Purmal's Corollary: As the limit of (Brains x Beauty) goes to infinity, availability goes to zero. %% O'TOOLE'S LAW: Murphy was an optimist. %% O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law: Murphy was an optimist.- Opinions are like assholes -- everyone's got one, but nobody wants to look at the other guy's. -- Hal Hickman %% O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Laws: Murphy was an optimist. %% O'propriation: The inclusion of advertising, packaging, and entertainment jargon from earlier eras in everyday speech for ironic and/or comic effect: "Kathleen's Favorite Dead Celebrity party was tons o' fun" or "Dave really thinks of himself as a zany, nutty, wacky, and madcap guy, doesn't he?" -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% O, it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant. -- William Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure", II, 2 %% O. Hal I. Mist %% O.K., fine. %% O.S. messages -- OFF O.S. messages -- ON %% OAG : The sound a telecomputing buff makes after opening the monthly phone bill. (Moral: Ask not for whom the Bell tolls.) %% OCCAM'S ERASER: The philosophical principle that even the simplest solution is bound to have something wrong with it. %% OCEANOGRAPHERS do it down under. %% OFF LINE - failure to pass a sobriety test %% OH, YOU'D BETTER NOT PEEK YOU'D BETTER NOT SPY BETTER NOT POKE I'M TELLING YOU WHY... 602 IS COMING TO CORE! THE DEVLNM BOMBS YOU CAN'T DO A CALL GETTABS JUST WON'T WORK AT ALL 602 IS COMING TO CORE! IT WAKES YOU WHEN YOU'RE SLEEPING IT SWAPS YOU IF YOU'RE SMALL IT PUTS YOU INTO MQ WAIT AND YOU CAN'T GET OUT AT ALL! OH, YOU'D BETTER NOT PEEK YOU'D BETTER NOT SPY BETTER NOT POKE I'M TELLING YOU WHY... 602 IS COMING TO CORE! %% OK Spuds! Act Crazy! %% OK, now let's look at four dimensions on the blackboard. -- Dr. Joy %% OK, so you're a Ph.D. Just don't touch anything. %% OKAY!! Turn on the sound ONLY for TRYNEL CARPETING, FULLY-EQUIPPED R.V.'S and FLOATATION SYSTEMS!! %% OKIDATA, so you managed to log in without help! %% OLD FELLA RED CLARET Produce of Australia -- "The Big 69'er" An unusual "Rough-as-Guts" wine that has the Distinctive Bouquet of old and ill-cared for animals. It is best drunk with the teeth clenched to prevent ingestion of the seeds and skins. Connoisseurs will savour the slight Tannin Taste of burnt shag feathers and soiled medical dressings. Possessors of a cultivated Palate admire the initial assault on the taste buds which comes from the careful and loving blending of circus hosings with perished jock straps. The maturing in Midland Abattoir hogsheads gives it a very Definite Nose. With the bouquet like an aborigine's armpit. In the United States this wine is marketed as Crow Brand (9 out of 10 people who drink it for the first time exclaim "VRAAAARRRRRK"). It won a Bronze at the "Kings Cross Homosexuals Convention" of 1973 Warning: Avoid contact with eyes and open cuts. Keep away from open naked flames -- both old and new. %% OLD TIMER: One who remembers when charity was a virtue and not an organization. %% OLTION'S COMPLETE, UNABRIDGED HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE Bang! ...crumple. -- Jery Oltion %% OML Obey Murphy's Laws %% OMNIVERSAL AWARENESS?? Oh, YEH!! First you need 4 GALLONS of JELL-O and a BIG WRENCH!! ... I think you drop th' WRENCH in the JELL-O as if it was a FLAVOR, or an INGREDIENT ... ... or ... I ... um ... WHERE'S the WASHING MACHINES? %% ON LINE - full but not drunk %% ONE LAST BUG ------------ "But what does it matter?" It still wasn't right, they said with a shrug. as year followed year, "The customer's happy, and strangers would query, what's one little bug?" "Is that nut still here?" But he was determined. He died at his console The others went home. of hunger and thirst. He spread out the program. They buried him next day Deserted. Alone. (face down, nine edge first). The cleaning men came. The last bug in sight, The whole room was cluttered one small ant passing by, with punch cards, core dumps; saluted his tombstone "I'm close," he muttered. and whispered "Nice try." His mumbling grew louder, "Simple deduction! I've got it! It's right! Just change one instruction." -- Author unknown %% ONE LIFE TO LIVE for ALL MY CHILDREN in ANOTHER WORLD all THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES. %% ONE SIZE FITS ALL: Doesn't fit anyone. %% ONE SOVIET INVASION CAN RUIN YOUR WHOLE DAY %% ONE: I will donate my entire "BABY HUEY" comic book collection to the downtown PLASMA CENTER ... TWO: I won't START a BAND called "KHADAFY & THE HIT SQUAD" ... THREE: I won't ever TUMBLE DRY my FOX TERRIER again!! %% OOSTERVAL'S POSTULATE: The value of a report is inversely proportional to it's length. %% OPERATOR! Trace this call and tell me where I am. %% OPERATORS do it person-to-person. %% OPP Optimize Programmer. %% OPPENHEIMER'S LAW: There is no such thing as instant experience. %% OPTICAL SCANNER - male visitor in the key punch section %% OPTIMIST: A proponent of the belief that black is white. %% OPTOMETRISTS do it face-to-face. %% OR (Obnoxious General Features: SLOPPY. Disheveled hair. Old, Rowdy) dirty, or torn clothing. Beat-up shoes. Perpetual ass-holish grin or obnoxious frown. Sometimes the mouth stays open. 'Ass Hole' 'Rowdy' Behavior Summary: None really needed. OR's have a constant 'Partier' overwhelming need to encroach on everyone else's life. 'Slime' Everything they do is aimed against or in spite of someone or something. OR's can use the word 'fucking' as anything from a noun to a preposition. They use 'faggot,' or 'dude,' as personal pronouns. %% ORAL CONTRACEPTIVE: The word "No". %% ORAL SEX: The taste of things to come. %% OREGANO (Ore-gah-no): The ancient Italian art of pizza folding. %% ORG.ASM Not Found. Wife not happy! %% OS SCANDAL: Unix and Ms. Dos found in love nest! -- "National Computer Science Enquirer" %% OS/2 - Not just another pretty program loader! %% OS/2 - Windows with bullet-proof glass. %% OS/2 VirusScan - "Windows found: Remove it? (Y/y)" %% OS/2 must die! %% OS/2: /O S too/ n. The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers --- the design was so {baroque}, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major {app}s shipping for it on the fingers of two hands --- in unary. Often called `Half-an-OS'. On January 28, 1991, Microsoft announced that it was dropping its OS/2 development to concentrate on Windows, leaving the OS entirely in the hands of IBM; on January 29 they claimed the media had got the story wrong, but were vague about how. It looks as though OS/2 is moribund. See {vaporware}, {monstrosity}, {cretinous}, {second-system effect}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% OS: /O-S/ 1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email, occasionally in speech. 2. n.,obs. On ITS, an output spy. See "{OS and JEDGAR}" (in {appendix A}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% OSHA's Discovery: Wet manure is slippery. %% OUCH! Got my floppy caught in my PKZipper! %% OUT TO LUNCH - If not back at five, OUT TO DINNER! %% OUTCONERR Twas FORTRAN as the doloop goes Did logzerneg the ifthen block All kludgy were the function flows And subroutines adhoc. Beware the runtime-bug my friend squrooneg, the false goto Beware the infiniteloop And shun the inprectoo. %% OUTCONERR Twas FORTRAN as the doloop goes Did logzerneg the ifthen block All kludgy were the function flows And subroutines adhoc. Beware the runtime-bug my friend squrooneg, the false goto Beware the infiniteloop And shun the inprectoo. He took his VAX Debug in link Long time the diagnostics he made He felt fine to compile NOD_LINE And so swapped out he stayed. And while in system service wait The runtime-bug, bounds unchecked Came traceback through the calls While common blocks it wrecked. Push-pop Push-pop and in NO_OP The VAX debug set watchpoint trace The bug it found after all was sound TECO put it in its place. And hast thou purged the runtime-bug? Come time-share my megabytes Oh frabjous day, virtual array And unlimited system writes. Twas FORTRAN as the doloop goes Did logzerneg the ifthen block All kludgy were the function flows And subroutines adhoc. %% OVER the underpass! UNDER the overpass! Around the FUTURE and BEYOND REPAIR!! %% OVERFLOW - the result of being too much OFF LINE, or failure to exhibit FLOATING CONTROL %% OWEN'S THEORY OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVIANCE: Every organization has an allotted number of positions to be filled by misfits. COROLLARY: When one misfit leaves, another will be recruited. %% Oatmeal raisin. %% Oats: a grain which is commonly given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. -- Johnson, Definition Dictionary %% Ob-: /ob/ pref. Obligatory. A piece of {netiquette} acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append `ObSex' (or `Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great {winnitude} when your Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ObJoke: Why are there so many lawyers in Philadelphia, and so many toxic waste dumps in New Jersey? %% Obfuscated C Contest: n. An annual contest run since 1984 over USENET by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how *not* to code in C. This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C: /* * HELLO WORLD program * by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985 */ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c)); **c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);} Here's another good one: /* * Program to compute an approximation of pi * by Brian Westley, 1988 */ #define _ -F<00||--F-OO--; int F=00,OO=00; main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO() { _-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_ } See also {hello, world}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Obituaries are the last writes. %% Object Oriented Programming? We've been doing that for years... When the customer objects to the way it works, we go program some more! -- Al Folsom, folsom@decus.org %% Objection, your Honour! My client is an idiot! %% Objectionable-C: n. Hackish take on "Objective-C", the name of an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the NeXT machine). Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the {Right Thing} without actually doing so. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Objectivity is in the eye of the beholder %% Objectivity is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman. -- Joseph Pulitzer %% Objects in taglines are closer than they appear. %% Objects in your terminal are closer than they appear. %% Oblivion together does not frighten me, beloved. -- Thalassa (in Anne Mulhall's body), "Return to Tomorrow," stardate 4770.3 %% Oboeists have TWO reeds %% Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers. %% Obscenity is whatever gives a judge an erection. %% Obscurism: The practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular books, defunct countries, etc.) as a subliminal means of showcasing both one's education and one's wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Obscurity is its own reward %% Observation, not old age, brings wisdom. %% Observe yon plumed biped fine. To activate its captivation, Deposit on its termination, A quantity of particles saline. %% Obsession is when you can't live without that person. Infatuation is when you feel like you'll die when that person isn't around you. Love is when you feel that the person is always with you, even when he/she isn't. %% Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal. -- Hannah More %% Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goal. %% Obstruction. The southwest furthers. The northeast does not further. It furthers one to see the great man. Perseverance brings good fortune. %% Obtain a brilliant assignment, but keep out of sight and out of the limelight. %% Obviously the only rational solution to your problem is suicide. %% Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something to be avoided than harped upon. Possibly the horror that Zaphod experienced at the prospect of being reunited with his deceased relatives led on to the thought that they might just feel the same way about him and, what's more, be able to do something about helping to postpone this reunion. -- Douglas Adams %% 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 %% Occam's Razor principle: Hypotheses are not to be multiplied without necessity. %% Occam's Razor: Entities ought not to be multiplied except from necessity. -- William of Occam %% Occam's Razor: When there appears to be more than one possible solution to a problem, the simplest is most likely to be correct. %% Occident, n.: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, powerful sub-tribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Occupation is the necessary basis of all enjoyment. -- Leigh Hunt %% Occupation is the scythe of time. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% Occupational Slumming: Taking a job well beneath one's skill or education level as a means of retreat from adult responsibilities and/or avoiding possible failure in one's true occupation. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Ocean, n.: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% October 15 -- In an effort to establish that she is not a bimbo, Jessica Hahn appears nude in Playboy magazine. We are pretty sure we must have made this item up. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% October 25 -- The Senate Transportation Committee recommends that the federal speed limit should be raised on highways going through boring or ugly areas, so drivers can get through them quicker. "In Indiana, for instance," the committee says, "it should be 135 miles per hour." -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% October 3 -- Sen. Joseph Biden is forced to withdraw from the Democratic presidential race when it is learned that he is in fact an elderly Norwegian woman. On the Republican side, the spectacularly Rev. Pat Robertson announces his candidacy for president, buoyed by strong popularity among humor columnists. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% October 8 -- Three hundred prominent law professors sign a petition stating that Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork has "a weenie beard." -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February. %% Oden the bardling averred His muse was the bum of a bird, And his Lesbian wife Would finger his fife While Fisherwood waited as third. %% Oedipus was the first man to plug the generation gap. %% Of all affliction taught a lover yet 'Tis sure the hardest science to forget. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore. -- Edward Abbey %% Of all forces acting on man, change is the most beneficial and the most cruel. %% Of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal. %% Of all man's questions, three stand out: Why am I here, where do I go when I die, and why do so many people wear digital watches? %% Of all mankind, each loves himself the best. -- Terence %% Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing. -- Herodotus %% Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest amount of hot air. -- Thomas L. Martin %% Of all the agonies of life, that which is most poignant and harrowing -- that which for the most time annihilates reason and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart -- is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love. -- Bulwer %% Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% Of all the forces that make for a better world, none is so indispensable, none so powerful, as hope. Without hope men are only half alive. With hope they dream and think and work. -- Charles Sawyer %% Of all the ginjoints, in all the cities, in all the world; she walks into mine. %% Of all the idiotic terms Homo Sapiens has created to describe itself, "manliness" is the worst, basically because it is semantically null. "Manliness" involves being "brave and "courageous." If a person is willing to lay down his life to protect those he loves and cares for, he is more "manly" than anyone who hides behind a phrase. -- Xavier R. Quinton %% Of all the monsters put together by the Greek imagination the Centaurs (Kentauroi) constituted a class in themselves. Despite a strong streak of sensuality in their make-up, their normal behaviour was moral, and they took a kindly thought of man's welfare. The attempted outrage of Nessos on Deianeira, and that of the whole tribe of Centaurs on the Lapith women, are more than offset by the hospitality of Pholos and by the wisdom of Cheiron, physician, prophet, lyrist, and the instructor of Achilles. Further, the Centaurs were peculiar in that their nature, which united the body of a horse with the trunk and head of a man, involved an unthinkable duplication of vital organs and important members. So grotesque a combination seems almost un-Greek. These strange creatures were said to live in the caves and clefts of the mountains, myths associating them especially with the hills of Thessaly and the range of Erymanthos. -- Mythology of all races, Vol. 1, pp. 270-271 %% Of all the passions that possess mankind, The love of novelty rules most the mind; In search of this, from realm to realm we roam; Our fleets come fraught with ev'ry folly home. -- Foote %% Of all the people I've met you're certainly one of them %% Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. -- Herman Melville (1819-1891) %% Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing--with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. %% Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important. So quit wearing that silly face. %% Of all the tyrants the world affords, Our own affections are the fiercest lords. -- Earl of Sterling %% Of all the words of witch's doom There's none so bad as which and whom. The man who kills both which and whom Will be enshrined in our Who's Whom. -- Fletcher Knebel %% Of all things man is the measure. -- Protagoras %% Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; Of all tame -- a flatterer. -- Johnson %% Of course he's dead--I killed him! %% Of course there's no reason for it, it's just our policy. %% Of course you can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. After a while you run out of air to push against. %% Of course you have a purpose--to find a purpose. %% Of course, I speak of nothing else but that classic of understated yet wildly exciting eroticism, "The Windflower," by Laura London. Ms. London is the author of such other philosophical block-busters as "Bad Baron's Daughter," "A Heart Too Proud," "Moonlight Mist," and most thigh-warming of all, "Gypsy Heiress". Well, glasses-steaming scenes are to be found on every page, to an extent which overwhelms Your Humble Narrator, and so, in order to save himself extreme embarrassment, he brings you... the blurb: Every lady of breeding knows: no one has a good time on a pirate ship. No one, that is, but the pirates. Yet there she was, Merry Wilding -- kidnapped in error, taken from a ship bound from New York to England, spirited away in a barrel and swept aboard the infamous "Black Joke"... There she was, trembling with pleasure in the arms of her achingly handsome, sensationally sensual, golden-haired captor -- Devon %% Of course, kick a man when he's down. It's the best time. If you're not willing to kick him when he's down, then don't kick him when he's up either. -- Solomon Short %% Of course, you UNDERSTAND about the PLAIDS in the SPIN CYCLE -- %% Of course, you're probably going to say it does in your ``analysis'' of public-key systems, because you'll do anything to make RSA look better than it really is. Have fun making a fool of yourself. -- Dan Bernstein (brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu), in sci.crypt %% Of his face she thought not very much, But then, at the very first touch, Her attitude shifted -- He was terribly gifted At frigging and fucking and such. %% Of sorrows I know I dream of The day when The sun will shine bright I know of sadness Not of happyiness The shell That covers me It keeps the sadness Within the heart When its gone Only for a Moment I feel the happyiness I long for Though the Sadness I live I do not wish For happyiness always Only for peace within the world -- by: J. Amara Barbe %% Of special note is a thief (always carrying a large bag) who likes to wander around in the dungeon (he has never been seen by the light of day). He likes to take things. Since he steals for pleasure rather than profit and is somewhat sadistic, he only takes things which you have seen. Although he prefers valuables, sometimes in his haste he may take something which is worthless. From time to time, he examines his take and discards objects which he doesn't like. He may occasionally stop in a room you are visiting, but more often he just wanders through and rips you off (he is a skilled pickpocket). %% Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Of two evils choose to be the least. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Of two possible events, only the undesired one will occur. %% Of what use are forms, seeing at times they are empty? Of the same use as barrels, which are at times empty too. -- Hare %% Of what use is political liberty to those who have no bread? It is of value only to ambitious theorists and politicians. -- Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793) %% Of what you see in books, believe 75%. Of newspapers, believe 50%. And of TV news, believe 25% -- make that 5% if the anchorman wears a blazer. %% Off Hook : What the author of this column is after finally finishing it. %% Off in the distance you hear someone saying, "My, I wonder what this fine # is doing here?" %% Off the Landlords %% Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: "Do not disturb the dwarves!" %% Off to one side lies a glistening pearl! %% Offense is a human emotion. -- Sarek of Vulcan, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.3 %% Offenses ought to be pardoned, for few offend willingly, but as they are compelled by come affection. -- Hegesippus %% Office Automation, n.: The use of computers to improve efficiency by removing anyone you would want to talk with over coffee. %% Office of Redundant Tautologies Department. Why say it once when you can repeat yourself with pointless verbose rewordings reiterating what it was you already said. -- Pyotr %% Official Project Stages: 1. Uncritical Acceptance 2. Wild Enthusiasm 3. Dejected Disillusionment 4. Total Confusion 5. Search for the Guilty 6. Punishment of the Innocent 7. Promotion of the Non-participants %% Often it is not even advantageous to know what will be. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Often it takes as much courage to resist as it does to go ahead. %% Often statistics are used as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than illumination. %% Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses. -- Ovid %% Often the test of courage is not to die but to live. -- Conte Vittorio Alfieri %% Often things ARE as bad as they seem! %% Ogden's Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up. %% Oh Boy! %% Oh Dad! We're ALL Devo! %% Oh God! It's another disease! And you'd just gotten over the last. %% Oh John, let's not park here. Oh John, let's not park. Oh John, let's not. Oh John, let's. Oh John. Oh. %% Oh Lord! Won'tcha buy me a Cray XM-P?! My friends' all got Sierras, and they're now home free. Code hard for my money, my chip's ain't got clout! Oh Lord get my Cray now, before I freak out! Oh Lord! Won'tcha give me some N log N stuff?! My program's now crawling', 10 MIPS ain't enough. Complexity's breeding, like e raised N stud. Oh Lord give me insight! Or my name is Mudd! Oh Lord! Won'tcha send me Von Neuman's old brain?! My own is a joke now, it's right down the drain! Worked hard on this problem, it's NP complete! Oh Lord send me Turing! I count with my feet! %% Oh baby, give me one more chance (to show you that I love ya')! %% Oh dear, now I've made a terrible mess of things. And all I wanted to do was rule the universe. -- Dr. Zachary Smith %% Oh dear, you seem to have gone over Aragain Falls. Not a very smart thing to do, apparently. %% Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to help you out, but I've never really done this before. Do you want me to try to reincarnate you? %% Oh don't the days seem lank and long When all goes right and none goes wrong, And isn't your life extremely flat With nothing whatever to grumble at! %% Oh don't the days seem lank and long When all goes right and none goes wrong, And isn't your life extremely flat With nothing whatever to grumble at! Oh, I am a C programmer and I'm okay I muck with indices and structs all day And when it works, I shout hoo-ray Oh, I am a C programmer and I'm okay %% Oh give me a home, where the bookmakers roam, Where the beer and the whiskey flows free, Where never is heard, a discouraging word, And the call-girls keep callin' for me! %% Oh goody! Another Muranium Explosive Space Modulator! %% Oh hell. Six bells and all's well. Another week in my little gray cell. Another week in which to excel. Oh hell, sir. -- A West Point Cadet's answer to, "What's the Sunday night poop?" %% Oh my GOD -- the SUN just fell into YANKEE STADIUM!! %% Oh no you don't! Your not stealing this one! %% Oh no! Not the BORE WORMS! %% Oh no, not another learning experience! %% Oh no, not the triple contact electro-magnet. %% 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. %% Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! -- Job xix. 23 %% Oh this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is. -- Gaius Valerius Catullus %% Oh wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound. -- Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke %% Oh what a crummy life, I got living here. %% Oh what a fate worse than death it is to be strapped to the back of a Wookiee! -- C-3PO %% Oh yeah? Well, I remember when sex was dirty and the air was clean. %% Oh yeah? Well, beam *THIS* up, pal! %% Oh yes, and he had a glass eye. Funny I should forget that. The real eye was knocked out by a cop during a strike. %% Oh you won't get a lemon (I wouldn't 'a gotten a lemon?) from Toyota of Orange. %% Oh! greatness! thou art a flattering dream, A wat'ry bubble, lighter than the air. -- Tracy %% Oh! how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding ring. -- Colley Cibber %% Oh! let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about! -- Hilaire Belloc, "The Microbe" %% Oh, Aunty Em, it feels so good! %% Oh, Aunty Em, it's so good to be home! %% Oh, God. I'm so depressed. %% Oh, I am a C programmer and I'm okay I muck with indices and structs all day And when it works, I shout hoo-ray Oh, I am a C programmer and I'm okay %% Oh, I could while away the hours, Smoking herbs and flowers, Shooting up my veins, De-dum, De-dum, De-dum Tell you, I've been a-thinkin' I could drive a shiny Lincoln, If I dealt in good cocaine. -- To If I Only Had A Brain, "Wizard of Oz" %% Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too. -- Lichty & Wagner %% Oh, I get it!! "The BEACH goes on", huh, SONNY?? %% Oh, I get it, you're a behind. %% Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up along delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace, Where never lark, or even eagle flew; And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. -- John Gillespie Magee Jr., "High Flight" %% Oh, I once had a chicken who wouldn't lay an egg... %% Oh, I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner. %% Oh, I'm looking over, my dead dog Rover, That got run over with my mower. One leg is missing, and one other is gone, The fourth one is scattered all over the lawn. It's no use explain'n, the one remaining, It landed by the kitchen door. Oh, I'm looking over, my dead dog rover, that ain't gonna walk no more... -- Tune is something about a four leaf clover. %% Oh, I'm so happy for you! %% Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all have Porches; I must make amends. -- Janis Joplin %% Oh, baby, put two fingers here and one finger there and call me bitch. %% Oh, baby, you knnooow what I LIKE! %% Oh, by the way, which one's Pink? %% Oh, dear. It appears that the smell coming from this room was coal gas. I would have thought twice about carrying a # in here. %% Oh, dear. Such language from a supposedly winning adventurer! %% Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam And I'll show you a house with a messy kitchen %% Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus Where the three-body problem is solved, Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K, And the cold virus never evolved. (chorus) We eat algae pie, our vacuum is high, Our ball bearings are perfectly round. Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed, And a kilogram weighs half a pound. (chorus) If we run out of space for our burgeoning race No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart, If we just find a big enough wrench. (chorus) I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space, And living up here is a bore. Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye 'Cause I'm moving next week to L4! (chorus) CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange, Where the space debris always collects, We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams: Solar power and zero-gee sex. -- to Home on the Range %% Oh, go go away! Why don't you live with a gazelle? %% Oh, go lick a skunk's crotch! %% Oh, how absolutely typical of your species! You don't understand something so you become fearful. -- Trelane, "The Squire of Gothos," stardate 2124.5 %% Oh, how fun! %% Oh, it makes me sort of sad To think about Sir Galahad And all the knights of that romantic day: To amuse a girl and charm her They would climb into their armour And jump into the fray: They called her 'Lady love', They used to wear her little glove, And everything that she said went: For those were the days when a lady was a lady And a gent was a perfect gent. -- P. G. Wodehouse %% Oh, leave the poor unhappy bird alone. %% Oh, my God! %% Oh, my, but that little country boy could play ... go, go, go, Johnny, go ... go, go, Johnny B. Goode -- Chuck Berry %% Oh, no! A fearsome grue slithered into the room and devoured you. %% Oh, no! There goes Tokyo! Go, go, Godzilla! -- Blue Oyster Cult %% Oh, no! You walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue. %% Oh, no. Not again. %% Oh, perspicacity incarnate. Please don't feel compelled now to tell me the story of the boy who cried Worf. -- Q to Worf, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Oh, pity the Duchess of Kent! Her cunt is so dreadfully bent, The poor wench doth stammer, "I need a sledgehammer To pound a man into my vent." %% Oh, screw you! You want an easy computer to use, go by a Mac. This operating system is user fiendly, not user friendly, and it's going to stay that way!! %% Oh, so there you are! %% Oh, sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise, By mountains pil'd on mountains to the skies? Heaven still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Oh, that bright day in the dead of night, Two dead men got up to fight. Three blind men to see fair play, Forty mutes to yell "Hooray"! Back to back, they faced each other, Drew their swords and shot each other. A deaf policeman heard the noise, Came and arrested those two dead boys. %% Oh, that sound of male ego. You travel halfway across the galaxy and it's still the same song. -- Eve McHuron, "Mudd's Women," stardate 1330.1 %% Oh, the agony of delete! %% Oh, to be back at Tara now that spring is here! %% Oh, well, I guess this is just going to be one of those lifetimes. %% Oh, what a fool I've been, to come looking for courage in a lair of cowards. -- Setal/Jarok, "The Defector", stardate 43462.5 %% Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to conceive. -- Don Herold %% Oh, what is so rare as a full day's work in June? -- Baldwin Sells %% Oh, what tangled webs we weave When we first practice to deceive. -- Sir Walter Scott %% Oh, when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave. And now the fancy passes by, And nothing will remain, And miles around they'll say that I Am quite myself again. -- A. E. Housman %% Oh, wow! Look at the moon! %% Oh, ya doesn't have ta call me 'Johnson'! Well, you can call me 'Ray', or you can call me 'Jay', or you can call me 'R. J.', or you can call me 'Ray J.', or you can call me 'R. J. J.', or you can call me 'Ray J. Johnson', or you can call me 'R. J. Johnson', but ya DOESN'T have to call me 'Johnson'... %% Oh, yeah, life goes on, long after the joy of livin' is gone. -- John Cougar, "Jack and Diane" %% Oh, your species is always suffering and dying. -- Q, "Hide and Q", stardate 41590.5 %% Ok, fine for sure, for sure, she's a valley girl and there is no cure. %% Okay - right after this one we're BACK to the TOPIC %% Okay ... I'm going home to write the "I HATE RUBIK's CUBE HANDBOOK FOR DEAD CAT LOVERS" ... %% Okay Shellia, this is your craft: Brian. You'll notice that he was made for flight, just look at those highly dextrous manipulators and that deep space probe. As you sit in the cockpit take note of all the horsepower that you have between your legs. Remember, he's a high performance craft, easy to maneuver into those tight places, and designed to handle those long range missions. And when you want to make that final bombing approach, he can get in, drop his load and get out quick, on your command. %% Okay, Okay -- I admit it. You didn't change that program that worked just a little while ago; I inserted some random characters into the executable. Please forgive me. You can recover the file by typing in the code over again, since I also removed the source. %% Okay, from now on I'll only describe a place in full the first time you come to it. To get the full description, say "look". %% Okay, if you're so smart, do it yourself! I'm leaving! %% Okay, now where did I put my orange smoke?.... >POOF!< Everything disappears in a dense cloud of orange smoke. %% Okay, so these three fundamentalists go into a bar for some grape Nehis. The first one pulls up a stool and orders his soda. "I'm sorry" the bartender says, "but we don't serve fundamentalists here!" "Just a minute," the first one replies, "If I don't get a grape Nehi by the end of March, the Lord will call me back!" The bartender reaches across the bar and throughs the first fundamentalist into the street. The second fundamentalist pulls up a stool and tries to order his soda. "I'm sorry" the bartender says, "but we don't serve fundamentalists here!" "But you don't understand." the second fundamentalist pleaded, "I've just been caught fooling around with a secretary of my ministry, and I'm being cast out as head of the Pluck The Loot club!" The bartender reaches across the bar and throughs the second fundamentalist into the street. The third fundamentalist sneaked away into the men's room, stuffed ten rolls of toilet paper into his pants, covered his head with boraxo, and headed back to the bar. "Give me a grape Nehi, bartender!" he demanded. "Aren't you a fundamentalist?" the bartender asked. "Nope. I'm a Prayed Nut!" %% Okie use' to mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're scum. Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say it. -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) %% Old Boston laws prohibit taking a bath more than once a week or without a written prescription from a medical doctor. %% Old Grandad is dead but his spirits live on. %% Old Jedi Knights never die; they just fade in and fade out. %% Old MacDonald had a computer with an EIE I/O %% Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O And on this farm he had some chicks, E-I-E-I-O With a chickie-poo here, and a chickie-poo there, Here a chick, there a chick, everywhere a whoop-ti-doo, Old McDonald lost his farm, 'Cause he had too many chicks. %% Old Mother Hubbard, Went to the cupboard, To get her poor doggie a bone. But when she stooped over, Old Rover, he drove her. You see, he had a bone of his own. %% Old Scottish Prayer: O Lord, grant that we may always be right, for Thou knowest we will never change our minds. %% Old Testament: n. [C programmers] The first edition of {K&R}, the sacred text describing {Classic C}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Old accountants never die, they just loose their balance. %% Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives. -- Maurice Chevalier %% Old age is the harbor of all ills. -- Bion %% Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man. -- Trotsky %% Old bank robbers never die, they just steal away! %% Old bureaucrats never die, they just waste away. %% Old cars never die; they just trade away. %% Old computer people never die, they just lose their memory! %% Old faculties never die, they just lose their principles! %% Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest to his feet. -- John Seldon %% Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day. -- the 14th Dalai Lama, interview in "TIME", 11 April 1988 %% Old golfers never die. They just lose their balls. %% Old heroes never die; they reappear in sequels. -- Michael Moorcock %% Old mail has arrived. %% Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples. %% Old mercenaries never die. They just go to hell and regroup. %% Old musicians never die, they just decompose. %% Old people like to give good advice, as solace for no longer being able to provide bad examples. -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665 %% Old pilots never die, they just can't get it up! %% Old principals never die, they just lose their faculties! %% Old programmers never die, they just become managers. %% Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit. %% Old programmers never die, they just goto. %% Old programmers never die. They just branch to a new address. %% Old quarterbacks never die; they just fade back and pass away. %% Old railroad people never die, they just lose track! %% Old soldiers never die. Young ones do. %% Old truckers never die; They just get a new Peterbilt. %% Older sister: "Why are you wearing my new raincoat?" Younger sister: "I didn't want to get your new dress wet." %% Olenka Bohachevsky lives! And quite obviously in great seclusion. %% Oliver's Law of Location: No matter where you are, there you are. %% Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: 'If you are seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.' %% Olmstead's Law: After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done. %% Om Mani Padme Hum. %% Omissions, no less than commissions, are often times branches of injustice. -- Antoninus %% Omittance is no quittance. -- William Shakespeare %% Omnibiblious, adj.: Indifferent to type of drink. "Oh, you can get me anything. I'm omnibiblious." %% On 'the totally suffering individual' (i.e. no food, no oxygen, no water, no self-esteem, no safety, no friends, no money, sick and in pain, etc.) "You can't do this with people, which takes all the fun out of life." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% On Brassieres: Russian: Uplifts the masses. Salvation Army: Raises the fallen. American: Makes mountains out of molehills. %% On Darwin's results: All that was new in them was false and what was true was old. %% On Intel fudging benchmark numbers: "Those guys are so smart, its a wonder they don't just make faster machines." %% On Jupiter's second moon few Can consider themselves well-to-do. Though they work and they sweat, They are always in debt Cuz their kids all attend Io U. %% On Line - a statement shouted at tennis judges in response to serves being called out. %% On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks. -- H. Allen Smith, "Let the Crabgrass Grow" %% On November 13, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. %% On Oprah Winfrey's income: "$83 million? Oprah and I do basically the same thing. Stand in front of people and abuse them." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% On SECOND thought, maybe I'll heat up some BAKED BEANS and watch REGIS PHILBIN ... It's GREAT to be ALIVE!! %% On Siamese Fighting Fish: "They're beautiful, they're elegant, they're vicious as hell...there's a real life lesson here somewhere." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% On a beautiful day like this it's hard to believe anyone can be unhappy, but we'll work on it. -- Donald Barr %% 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. %% On a clear day, U.C.L.A. %% On a clear disk you can seek forever. -- P. J. Denning %% On a leather-clad punk: Rebel without a brain. %% On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli %% On a recent flight on a major airline the following occurred. The jet had just leveled after takeoff and the captain keyed the microphone on the intercom. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just completed our ascent to 22,000 feet. I've turned off the seatbelt sign. Feel free to move about the cabin. I expect to arrive in Des Moines on schedule at 10 p.m. Enjoy the flight folks." Seconds later the intercom remained on and the captain was heard to mutter in an entirely different tone of voice. "Yep, all I need now is a cup of coffee and a blowjob!" Upon hearing this, an obviously flustered stewardess began scampering towards the crew cabin. The passengers in coach observing this spectacle chimed in together: "Don't forget the coffee!" %% On a scale of 1 to 10, 4 is about 7. %% On a ship wrecked far out at sea, The girl said, "I can't seem to pee." "Aha!" said the mate, "That settles the fate Of the captain, the pilot, and me." %% On a soft infested summer, me and Terry became friends. %% On a table is a nasty-looking knife. %% On a tous un peu peur de l'amour, mais on a surtout peur de souffrir ou de faire souffrir. [One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.] %% On a well worn, ca 1967 Volkswagen: Driver Carries No Cash %% On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain [as Fist-of-God] to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain. -- "Ringworld" %% On ability: A dwarf is small, even if he stands on a mountain top; a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65) %% On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does. -- Will Rogers %% On alcohol: four is one more than more than enough. -- Jim Pastore %% On all sides, the remains of a rich farming area occupy the entire landscape. Virtually the only surviving evidence of the bygone days of agriculture lies in the preponderance of food-yielding crops and the occasional stone walls which have weathered ages of decay and ruin. %% On an electrician's truck: Let Us Remove Your Shorts %% On an isolated stretch of beach near Cannes, a beautiful French girl threw herself into the sea and drowned despite a young man's attempt to save her. The man dragged the half-nude body ashore and left it on the sand while he went to notify the authorities. Upon his return, he was horrified to find a man making love to the corpse. "Monsieur, monsieur," he shouted, "that woman is dead, that woman is dead!" "Sacre bleu," exclaimed the man, springing up. "I thought she was an American!" %% On beginning play, as many balls as may be required to obtain a satisfactory result may be played from the first tee. Everyone recognizes a good player needs to "loosen up" but does not have time for the practice tee. -- Donald A. Metz %% On croit mourir pour la patrie, on meurt pour des industriels. (You believe you're dying for the country -- you die for some industrialists.) -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% On curing the depression that comes with having to work for a living: Stay home for a day and watch daytime TV. -- Sheldon %% On day a Monterey daughter Did scuba down under the water. She later turned up The mom of a pup, And they say t'was a otter that gotter. %% On exam, he has cigarettes in his front pocket. %% On fear-reduction techniques and how they can be used to make a bad relationship last: "If I could use these techniques as well as I can explain them, do you think I'd be here? And if I was here, I'd look a lot more tired and happy." -- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991 %% On his first day on the job at a small rural town, the new pastor was surprised when only one person showed up for the ceremony. Perplexed, the pastor said, "Well young man...you're the only one in attendance. Do you wish me to go on with the sermon?" After a silent moment, the young cowboy replied " Weeeelll pastor, I don't know much about that religion stuff, but I'll tell you this.... if I went out to pasture to slop the hogs and there was only one out there, I guarantee I'd feed him." Upon this reply the pastor went forth with his sermon, which lasted for an hour and a half! When he had finished he asked the cowboy, "Well son, did you learn anything?" "Weeellll," the cowboy said, "I didn't understand a lot of it, but I'll tell you this..... if I go out to pasture to slop the hogs and there is only one there, I sure wouldn't give him the whole load!!" %% On hooks above the mantlepiece hangs an elvish sword of great antiquity. %% On my planet, to rest is to rest -- to cease using energy. To me, it is quite illogical to run up and down on green grass, using energy, instead of saving it. -- Spock, "Shore Leave," stardate 3025.2 %% On one screen, you see a beautiful view of a planet. On another, you can see a telescopic enlargement showing four square islands grouped together. there is a large building on one of the islands, indicating some kind of intelligent life-forms exist on the planet. A third screen shows the results of a deep-probe scan on the same islands, thus revealing underground caverns. But by far the largest screen shows the view in the other direction -- a fleet of hostile-looking ships, all firing on this ship at once! A small status indicator reads "Condition red". %% On our campus the UNIX system has proved to be not only an effective software tool, but an agent of technical and social change within the University. -- John Lions (U. of Toronto (?)) %% On receiving a check made out to "Bearer": "How could you spell my name like that?" -- Yogi Berra %% On second thought, a philosopher is any person who doesn't want what he can't get. %% On soap operas all whites are in personal touch with (a) a doctor and (b) a lawyer. -- James L. Davis %% On successive charts of the same organization, the number of boxes will never decrease. -- Charles P. Boyle %% On the Pacific Coast Highway, somewhere in S. Cal.: "No motorized bicycles, horses, or dogs allowed on pier." [It's a good thing I still have my old wind-up dog around!] %% On the alter is a large black book, open to page 569. %% On the box of a clockwork toy made in Hong Kong: Guaranteed to work throughout its useful life. %% On the branch is a small birds nest. %% On the breasts of a harlot from Yale Was tattooed the price of her tail And on her behind, For the sake of the blind, Was the same information in Braille. %% On the campaign trail last week, Pat Buchanan said: "I don't want to attack Dan Quayle. That would be child abuse." %% On the contrary! A recent study in which microprocessors were implanted in rhesus monkey brains via satellite shows clearly that... -- Manhattan Chess Club Regulars %% On the door of a Moscow hotel room: If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it. %% On the earth is water: The image of Holding Together. Thus the kings of antiquity Bestowed the different states as fiefs And cultivated friendly relations With the feudal lords. %% On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN. %% On the far wall is a rusty box, whose door has been blown off. %% On the faucet in a Finnish washroom: To stop the drip, turn cock to right. %% On the floor is a gold Zorkmid coin (a valuable collector's item). %% On the floor lies a moby ruby. %% On the floor sit 200 neatly stacked Zorkmid bills. %% On the ground below you can see: %% On the ground lies a small glass vial filled with an oily liquid. %% On the hill sits a green house, In the green house is a white house, In the white house is a red house, In the red house are a lot of little black and white men What am I? Watermelon %% On the left corner of the bumper there was a sticker saying: "Eliminate and Abolish Redundancy" On the right corner of the bumper there was a sticker saying: "Eliminate and Abolish Redundancy" %% On the menu of a Polish hotel: Salad a firm's own make; limpid red beet soup with cheesy dumplings in the form of a finger; roasted duck let loose; beef rashers beaten up in the country people's fashion. %% On the menu of a Swiss restaurant: Our wines leave you nothing to hope for. %% On the mountain, a tree: The image of Development. Thus the superior man abides in dignity and virtue, In order to improve the mores. %% On the net a year or two ago: When I worked for the Infernal Revenue (Dis)Service (about 15 years ago), a bunch of us pooled our paychecks (after withholding) and bought a money order for $1.49. Then we wrote up an *obviously* phony AMENDED return in the name of "Hu Flung Dung, #2 Crescent Moon Drive, Pottyville, NY" and submitted it with a letter saying that the "taxpayer" had found an error in his calculations and was making amends. As if that weren't funny enough, when the IRS receives an amended return *with money*, they are required -- by their own rules -- to continue searching *until they find the original*. Forever. Across the entire country. (They're probably still looking.) %% On the north of the room is a wall which used to be solid, but which now has a cyclops-shaped hole in it. %% On the old "You Bet Your Life" program, Groucho Marx was getting to know one of his contestants. The man told Groucho that he had 10 children. "Why so many children?" Groucho asked. "Well, I love my wife", the man answered. Groucho paused but a second, then said "I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth once in a while!" %% On the other hand are four fingers and a thumb. %% On the other hand, life can be an endless parade of TRANSSEXUAL QUILTING BEES aboard a cruise ship to DISNEYWORLD if only we let it!! %% On the other hand, we cannot ignore efficiency. -- Jon Bently %% On the other hand, you also have 5 fingers. %% On the other size of the door is a narrow passage which opens out into a larger area. %% 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. %% On the release of her album "True Blue": "I hope my record gets out before the world blows up. -- Madonna %% On the road, ZIPPY is a pinhead without a purpose, but never without a POINT ... %% On the shore lies Neptune's own crystal trident. %% On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, 'Twas only when he was off, he was acting. -- Goldsmith %% On the subject of C program indentation: "In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt." -- Blair P. Houghton %% On the surface, selling arms to a country that sponsors terrorism, of course, clearly, you'd have to argue it's wrong, but it's the exception sometimes that proves the rule. -- Vice President George Bush, August 1987 %% On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers. %% On the theory that one should never take anything for granted, follow up on everything, but especially those items varying from the norm. The greater the divergence from normal routine and/or the greater the number of offices potentially involved, the better the chance a never-to-be-discovered person will file the problem away in a drawer specifically designed for items requiring a decision. -- Douglas Evelyn %% On the third day, Jesus rose, shoved open the door of his tomb, and walked again on earth. As he was leaving, a passer-by pointed at the door Jesus had left open. "What's the matter with you?" he said. "Born in a barn?" %% On the to of the tree, See the little man red, A stone in his belly, A cap on his head. A cherry %% On the topic of slugs: (this is a true story) About 2 years ago, there was a big flap when a 6 year old boy and his 3 year old sister disappeared from their home. The police searched, the parents freaked, and the media-types looked solemn as they announced that there was still no trace of the children. The kids showed up a few days later. It seems that they had run away from home due to some dispute over second helpings of Ovaltine or some such. The funny part was when the media-type was interviewing the boy. Interviewer: "Weren't you cold at night?" Boy: "Naw. We just slept under a porch." Interviewer: "Didn't you get hungry? What did you eat?" Boy: "Slugs." Interviewer: (Turning a delightful shade of green but still game.) "How did you eat them?" Boy: "We boiled them in some aluminum foil we stole. They taste kind of like chicken ..." Interviewer: (Going a deeper green.) "Back to you, Cathy.." Now there is a real survivalist. Having eaten escargot, (once), I'm of the opinion that snails are just slugs in dress clothes. %% On the two ends of the altar are burning candles. %% On the unlabeled disk? HELL they're all unlabeled! %% On the wall of a church was a sign: "If you are tired of sin, come to see us!" And right below it, in nice rounded letters: "But if you're not, my phone number is 341-3451!" %% On the wall of the women's restroom in the Enterprise: "Where no man has gone before." %% On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), collected essays %% On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. -- W. C. Fields' epitaph %% On this scroll is a map! %% On this ship, you are my Commander and I obey. In Council Chamber, you are my cha'DIch. You do not insist, you obey. -- Worf to Kurn, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% On this shrunken globe, man can no longer live as strangers. -- Adlai E. Stevenson %% On weightlifting: "Picking up something heavy and then putting it back down? That's not sport, that's indecision." -- Paula Poundstone %% On why it's so tough to play left field in Yankee Stadium: "Because it gets late early." -- Yogi Berra %% On y soit, qui mal y pense. (You are what you think.) %% On-line, adj.: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer. %% Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days. -- W. C. Fields, "My Little Chickadee" %% Once I belonged to a group that really had THE WORD. I fought like hell for them. But another group came along and exposed the word of my group as shallow and degenerate. The had a better word. So I quit the first group and lost all the friends I had made and I joined up with this new group. I fought like hell for them. But another group came around. They exposed the word of my group as false and materialistic. Their word was very much better. So I quit the second group and lost all the friends I had made. And I joined up with this new group. I fought like hell for them. Till this one guy came along and proved that there wasn't any word at all. That I should go off as an individual and grow! So I quit the last group and lost all the friends I had made. And now I sit home alone all day and all I do is grow. It would be nice to join up with some others who feel the way I do. -- J. Feiffer %% Once I built a railroad, Made it run, Made it run right on time. Once I built a railroad, Now it's done, Brother can you spare a dime. -- Hap Arnold (?-1981) %% Once I finally figured out all of life's answers, they changed the questions. %% Once I thought I was wrong - but I was mistaken %% Once I went to the zoo, There to view the old gnu. But the old gnu was dead, And the new gnu, they said, Was too new a new gnu to be viewed. -- Edward Lear %% 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." Then Justice came. His Honor cried: "YOUR states? -- Devil seize you!" "Amica curiae," she replied -- "Friend of the court, so please you." "Begone!" he shouted -- "There's the door -- I never saw your face before!" -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Once a bitch, always a bitch. -- William Faulkner %% Once a knight, always a knight, but once is King is once too often. -- Sir Bella of Eastmarch %% Once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind. -- Pop Baslim %% Once a person has been hired, inertia sets in, and the employer would rather settle for the current employee's incompetence and idiosyncracies than look for a new employee. -- Jules Becker %% Once a philosopher, twice a pervert. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% Once a woman has given you her heart you can never get rid of the rest of her. -- Vanbrugh %% Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% Once a young gay from Khartoum Took a lesbian up to his room. They argued all night Over who had the right To do what, and with which, and to whom. %% Once again dread deed is done. Canon sleeps, his all-knowing eye shaded to human chance and circumstance. Peace reigns anew o'er Pine Valley, but Canon's sleep is troubled. Beware, scant days past the Ides of July. Impatient hands wait eagerly to grasp, to hold scant moments of time wrested from life in the full glory of Canon's power; held captive by his unblinking eye. Three golden orbs stand watch; one each to toll the day, hour, minute until predestiny decrees his reawakening. When that feared moment arrives, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee." Title: I extended the loan on your Camera, at the Pine Valley Pawn Shop today %% Once again, quiet settles over the office, and all that can be heard is the tap, tap, tapping of the keyboard. %% 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" %% Once at a dinner party when he was a young man, Winston Churchill, who at the time had a moustache, was seated next to an older woman. She said to him, "Young man, I care neither for your politics nor for your moustache." He reassured her, "You are as unlikely to come into contact with the one as with the other." %% Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease". Disraeli replied, "That all depends upon whether I embrace your principals or your mistress". %% Once during prohibition I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water. -- W. C. Fields %% Once economists were asked, "if you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" Today they're asked, "Now that you've proved you ain't so smart, how come you got rich?" -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% Once harm has been done, even a fool understands it. -- Homer %% Once in a great while, when the positions of the stars are just right, a seven-year-old rooster will lay an egg. Then, along will come a snake, to coil around the egg, or a toad, to squat upon the egg, keeping it warm and helping it to hatch. When it hatches, out comes a creature called basilisk, or cockatrice, the most deadly of all creatures. A single glance from its yellow, piercing toad's eyes will kill both man and beast. Its power of destruction is said to be so great that sometimes simply to hear its hiss can prove fatal. Its breath is so venomous that it causes all vegetation to wither. There is, however, one creature which can withstand the basilisk's deadly gaze, and this is the weasel. No one knows why this is so, but although the fierce weasel can slay the basilisk, it will itself be killed in the struggle. Perhaps the weasel knows the basilisk's fatal weakness: if it ever sees its own reflection in a mirror it will perish instantly. But even a dead basilisk is dangerous, for it is said that merely touching its lifeless body can cause a person to sicken and die. -- Mythical Beasts by Deirdre Headon (The Leprechaun Library) and other sources. %% Once in a medieval times...there was a King who was getting sort of bored after dinner one night. He decided to hold a contest of who at the court had the mightiest "weapon". The first knight stood up and proclaimed that he had the mightiest weapon...he pulled down his pants and tied a 5 pound weight around it. The weapon doth rose. The crowds cheered...the women swooned...the children waved multi-colored banners...and the band played appropriate music. Another knight stood up and yelled that he had the mightiest weapon. He dropped his pants and tied a 10 pound weight to himself. The weapon doth rose. The crowds cheered...the women swooned...the children waved multi-colored banners... and the band played appropriate music. After several more knights tried to prove their superiority...the King finally spoke out. "I have the mightiest weapon of them all!" He dropped his pants and tied, not a 10 pound, not a 20 pound, not ever a thirty pound, but a 40 pound weight to himself. The weapon doth rose. The crowds cheered...the women swooned...the children waved multi-colored banners...and the band played "God Save the Queen". %% Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action. %% Once is not enough. -- Jacqueline Suzanne %% Once it was green and growing, now it is dead and singing? A wooden musical instrument %% Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more! -- William Shakespeare %% Once more into the breach... -- Zarna, the Human Cannonball %% Once the erosion of power begins, it has a momentum all its own. %% Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky. -- Rainer Rilke %% Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in. -- H. R. Haldeman %% Once there was a little nerd who loved to read your mail, And then yank back the i-access times to get hackers off his tail, And once as he finished reading from the secretary's spool, He wrote a rude rejection to her boyfriend (how uncool!) And this as delivermail did work and he ran his backfstat, He heard an awful crackling like rat fritters in hot fat, And hard errors brought the system down 'fore he could even shout! And the bio bug'll bring yours down too, ef you don't watch out! And once they was a little flake who'd prowl through the uulog, And when he went to his blit that night to play at being god, The ops all heard him holler, and they to the console dashed, But when they did a ps -ut they found the system crashed! Oh, the wizards adb'd the dumps and did the system trace, And worked on the file system 'til the disk head was hot paste, But all they ever found was this: "panic: never doubt", And the bio bug'll crash your box too, ef you don't watch out! When the day is done and the moon comes out, And you hear the printer whining and the rk's seems to count, When the other desks are empty and their terminals glassy grey, And the load is only 1.6 and you wonder if it'll stay, You must mind the file protections and not snoop around, Or the bio bug'll getcha and bring the system down! %% Once there was this conductor see, who had a bass problem. You see, during a portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in which there are no bass violin parts, one of the bassists always passes a bottle of scotch around. So, to remind himself that the basses usually required an extra cue towards the end of the symphony, the conductor would fasten a piece of string around the page of the score before the bass cue. As the basses grew more and more inebriated, two of them fell asleep. The conductor grew quite nervous (he was very concerned about the pitch) because it was the bottom of the ninth; the score was tied and the basses were loaded with two out. %% Once there was this jogger, doing what joggers do along the beach when he spies this woman laying on the beach crying. He decides to go over and try to comfort her. He does go over and sees that this poor woman has no arms or legs. Although that seems like a pretty good reason to cry, he asks her "Why are you crying?". She sniffs "I've never been hugged!" So he hugs her. She stops crying and he runs on down the beach. The next day, this jogger is doing what joggers do along the beach when he spies this woman laying on the beach crying. He goes over and sees that it is the same woman from yesterday. He asks "Now what are you crying about?". She whines "I've never been kissed!" So he kisses her. She stops crying and he runs on down the beach. The day after that, this jogger is doing what joggers do along the beach when he spies this woman laying on the beach crying. He goes over and says "What's the matter now?". She whispers "I've never been fucked!". So he picks her up and throws her into the ocean and says "Now you're fucked!", and runs on down the beach. %% Once there were these two birds who, every year for quite a few years, had one egg, which they hatched and nurtured and loved until the little chick was ready to leave the nest. Then, one year, they had TWO eggs! Well, they were just so excited they could hardly stand it; this year they would each have an egg to take care of and love. They kept close watch on those two eggs so that no harm came to them. Then one day when the eggs were ready to hatch, an earthquake shook the tree that the nest was in; the two birds flew away to safety, all the while worrying about those two eggs that were about to hatch. When the tremor was finished, they hurried back to the nest. As they neared it, they heard one strong "Cheep" coming from the nest. They were worried that something might have happened to the other egg, but when they got to the nest, they found that there were two chicks cheeping in unison. This just goes to show that two can cheap as lively as one. %% Once things have happened, no matter how accidentally, they will be regarded as manifestations of an unchangeable higher reason. -- Prof. Charles Frankel %% Once upon a girl there was a time... %% Once upon a time there is this elephant and this mouse. One day, the elephant falls into a hole and the mouse happens upon him. "My friend! We have been friends for years and now your life is in danger. I must save you!". Suddenty, he gets a idea. The mouse goes and gets his Ferrari, throws a rope down, and pulls the elephant out. The next week, the mouse is walking along and falls into a hole. This time, the elephant happens upon him. "My friend! we have been friends for years and now your life is in danger. I must save you! Problem is that I can't stick my tail down since it is tooooo short. I can't stick my trunk down since I might sneeze and blow you through the center of the earth!" Then, the lights shines and he sticks his dick down and the mouse crawls out... Whats the moral of the story? If ya got a big dick, you don't NEED a Ferrari! %% Once upon a time there was a farmer who owned a large number of chickens and made money by selling chickens to a local distributing company. The farmer wanted to increase his business, and so went to market to buy another rooster. "This rooster," assured the vendor, "is my best. He's virile and energetic and will take care of all your chickens!" The farmer, delighted at this, bought the rooster and returned to his farm. He set the rooster loose among his hen houses and, sure enough, the rooster enthusiastically went to work. It wasn't too long, however, before the rooster finished off all the hens and began on the few geese and ducks that were on the farm. "If you keep up this rate," warned the farmer, "you'll screw yourself to death!" The rooster, however, scoffed at the farmer and continued at an increased speed. The next morning, the farmer was doing his chores when he noticed several buzzards in the sky circling over something. He headed out behind the barn, and sure enough there was the rooster, flat on his back, with eyes closed. The farmer shook his fist at the motionless body and cursed, shouting "I knew it! I told you so! I knew you'd screw yourself to death!" The rooster turned his head toward the farmer, opened one eye, and winked. "Shhh!" he said, pointing to the birds above. "I think they're coming down." %% Once upon a time there was a little girl named Little Red Riding Hood. One fine morning she decided to visit her Grandmother, so she put a freshly baked cake and a .357 magnum into her basket and set off through the forest. When she got there, what should she find but a big black wolf in the bed, who jumped up, grabbed her and snarled, "I'm going to fuck you until the sun goes down." So Little Red Riding Hood whipped out the .357 and said, "Oh, no, you're not! You're going to eat me like the story says!" %% Once upon a time there was a sperm named Stanley. He'd do pushups and somersaults and limber up all the time, while the other sperm just lay around on their fat asses not doing a thing. One day, one of them became curious enough to ask Stanley why he exercised all day. Stanley said, "Look, only one sperm gets a woman pregnant and when the right time comes, I am going to be that one." A few days later, the all felt themselves getting hotter and hotter, and they knew that it was getting to be their time to go. They were released abruptly and, sure enough, there was Stanley swimming far ahead of all the others. All of a sudden, Stanley stopped, turned around, and began to swim back with all his might. "Go back! Go back!" he screamed. "It's a blow job!" %% Once upon a time there were three coeds -- a big coed, a medium-sized coed, and a little, tiny coed. One night they came home from a dance, and the big coed said, "Someone's been sleeping in my bed!" The medium-sized coed looked in her room and said, "Someone's been sleeping in my bed!" And the little, tiny coed said, "Well, nighty-night, girls!" %% Once upon a time there... %% Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be--a man. -- Edward Abbey %% Once upon a time, a frog came into the Doctor's office, and said, "Doc. You gotta help me. I got this real strange problem. I'm green all over, except my dick, which is yellow." Doctor: "Sorry, but you are going to have to go to the specialist about that." Frog: "So how do I get to the specialist?" Doctor: "Just go out here, turn left, go three blocks, turn right, at the third stop-sign, take a left, and in about a mile, you will see the office on the left, just past the Texaco." Frog (hopping off): "Thanks, Doc!" The next patient is an elephant, who comes in and complains, "Doc, I've got a weird problem. I'm grey all over, but last night, my trunk turned bright pink! What'll I do?" Doctor: "You will have to see the specialist to get that fixed." Elephant: "Where is the specialist?" Doctor: "Well, just go out here, take a left, ..... Aw, just follow the yellow-dicked toad." %% Once upon a time, four AMPHIBIOUS HOG CALLERS attacked a family of DEFENSELESS, SENSITIVE COIN COLLECTORS and brought DOWN their PROPERTY VALUES!! %% Once upon a time, in the days of glassnost and perestroika, Russians decided to enter a derby race. Tass and Pravda gave a lot of publicity (started to be capitalistic). Even some betting was allowed on Russian horse!!! Then came the D-day. And next day the headlines ran that Russian horse came second in the race (Russian networks talked about it the night before). It was a moment of celebration and pride for the country. But!!!!!!! There were only two cars in the race. %% Once upon a time, pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she never enter such an array with her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was sufficient, and made her way amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She had become tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point, she tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space. She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered "Was she still convergent?" He decided to integrate improperly at once. Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on no good. "Arcsinh!" she gasped. "Ho, ho." he said, "What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I can see that your angles have lots of secs." "Oh, sir." she protested, "Keep away from me. I haven't got any brackets on." "Calm yourself, my dear." said our suave operator. "Your fears are purely imaginary." "I, i." she thought. "Perhaps he's not normal but homotopic." "What order are you?" he demanded. "Seventeen." replied Polly. Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on?" "Of course not." Polly replied quite promptly. "I'm absolutely convergent." "Come, come." said Curly, "Let's go off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit." "Never!" gasped Polly. "Abscissa!" he swore using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began smoothing her point of inflexions. Poor, poor Polly! The algorithmic method was her only hope. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Soon her convergence would be gone forever. There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly's radius squared itself; Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity, to be multiply connected on her very first integration. Curly went on operating until he had satisfied her hypothesis; then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal. When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous but had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally she went to L'Hospital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation. The moral of our sad story is this: "If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom." %% Once upon a time, there was a non-conforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon after the weather turned cold, the sparrow changed his mind and reluctantly started to fly south. After a short time, ice began to form his on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on this little bird and the sparrow thought it was the end, but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy the little sparrow began to sing. Just then, a large Tom cat came by and hearing the chirping investigated the sounds. As Old Tom cleared away the manure, he found the chirping bird and promptly ate him. There are three morals to this story: (1) Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy. (2) Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend. (3) If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut. %% Once upon a time, there was a woman working at a lingerie counter, and a customer came to the counter with a pair of frilly panties and said she'd like to buy them, adding "but only of you can embroider `If you can read this, you're too close.' on the back." So, the saleswoman took the panties to the tailor in back, and described the rather unusual request. The tailor said "Well, she sounds like a stick in the mud, but I can do that. Does she want block letters or script?" Since the saleswoman didn't know, she went back around to the counter, and asked "do you want that in block letters or script?" The customer replied, with a smile, "Braille." %% Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of the smaller prime numbers. 2: The Odd Prime -- It's the only even prime, therefore is odd. QED. 3: The True Prime -- Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true." 31: The Arbitrary Prime -- Determined by unanimous unvote. We needed an arbitrary prime in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election. 91 received the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the next most. However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none at all. 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. %% Once was a hooker named Gail, Busted and sent-off to jail, She liked the jailer, He wanted to nail her, So Gail made bail with her tail. %% Once you accept his assumptions even a madman seems reasonable. %% Once you accept your own death all of a sudden you are free to live. You no longer care about your reputation ... you no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically--to promote a cause you believe in. -- Saul Alinsky %% Once you got him, what would you do with him? %% Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can. Old worms never die, they just worm their way into larger cans. -- Zymurgy (Conrad Schnieker) %% Once you understand how to write a program, get someone else to write it. %% Once you've tried to change the world you find it's a whole bunch easier to change your mind. %% Once, I read that a man be never stronger than when he truly realizes how weak he is. -- Jim Starlin, "Captain Marvel #31" %% Once, adv.: Enough. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Once, it is said, a friend visited Michael Angelo. The great sculptor was busy putting finishing touches on a magnificent statue of an athlete. To the friends untrained eye, it looked nearly finished. After making some small talk, he left in a hurry so as not to disturb the genius further. When he visited Michael Angelo again some weeks later, he found the great master still working on the statue, which, to him, looked exactly the same as it had done on the occasion of his last visit. "What have you been doing these last few weeks?" he asked in astonishment. "Oh, I've been very busy," Michael Angelo replied, "I've made the bulge of that muscle a little rounder, and I've improved the line of the jaw." "But my dear friend," the friend cried, "why waste your time with such minute details? After all, these are mere trifles!" To which Michael Angelo replied, "That may be so, but don't forget: trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." %% Once, there was NO fun... This was before MENU planning, FASHION statements or NAUTILUS equipment... Then, in 1985.. FUN was completely encoded in this tiny MICROCHIP.. It contain 14,768 vaguely amusing SIT-COM pilots!! We had to wait FOUR BILLION years but we finally got JERRY LEWIS, MTV and a large selection of creme-filled snack cakes! %% Once: Enough. -- Ambrose Bierce %% One Bell System - it sometimes works. %% One Bell System - it used to work before they installed the Dimension! %% One Bell System - it works. %% One FISHWICH coming up!! %% One Last Masquerade When rainbows dim and armor rusts The furtive dreams have turned to dust Responding to his frail calls Soft echoes fade in empty halls He grabs a scrapbook off the shelf To search for something he once felt The book falls open to a page Whose yellow tint reveals its age The dog-eared corners mark the times He's sat to read this silent rhyme Each friendly face and cheerful smile Reminders of a time gone by A parking lot replaced the trees They'd sit beneath on summer eves Preserved within this photograph Their shade becomes an epitaph Retreat within this lone charade Disguised as one last masquerade Of who we are and whom we aren't In which to play our chosen part As hours pass and daylight fades He bows his head and draws the shades The doorbell rings; some friends arrive To ask if he is still alive But leave before he answers 'no' Because they'd rather be alone Returning to his book of dreams Recalling life's unbroken schemes Thou shalt not travel back in time To change the meter or the rhyme A photo's fine to recall friends As long as dreams come to an end When yesterday can live again Intractable as you pretend So be content with what you've done And climb life's ladder rung by rung As he read the words once more Appreciating ancient lore He realized that it was wrong To tamper with a sacred song But then to wonder if it was So wrong to change life for just cause Replay the sorrow to make it sweet And return laughter to the street Time dragged on, and soon he fell Back into that endless well He hoped for things he'd never see To live a life he'd never be One last party and one last dance To just be given one last chance The candle flickers; the image dies As darkness falls, an old man cries %% One Law for the Lion and Ox is oppression. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% One Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood. -- Mark Ardis %% One Saturday afternoon, during the campaign to decide whether or not there should be a Coastal Commission, I took a helicopter ride from Los Angeles to San Diego. We passed several state beaches, some crowded and some virtually empty. They had the same facilities, and in some cases the crowded and the empty beach were within a quarter mile of each other. Obviously many beach-goers prefer to be crowded together. Buying more beaches that people won't go to because they prefer to be crowded together on one beach is a ridiculous waste of our natural resources and our taxes. -- Ronald W. Reagan %% One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening. -- Franklin P. Jones %% One atom bomb can really ruin your day. %% One attains the way of heaven. Success. %% One big pile is better than two little piles. -- Arlo Guthrie %% One bright day in the middle of the night, Two dead men got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other, Drew their swords and shot each other. A deaf policeman heard the noise, Came to rescue the two live boys. Now, if you don't believe this lie is true, Go ask the blind man, he saw it too. %% One business author recently estimated the average American encounters something like 2,000 sales messages a day. %% One by one the vice-presidents of a large corporation were called into the boss's office. Then the junior executives were individually summoned. Finally the office boy was brought in. "I want the truth, Charles," the boss bellowed. "Have you been playing around with my secretary?" "N-no, sir," the office boy stammered. "I-I'd never do anything like that, sir." "All right, all right,"said the boss, "then you fire her." %% One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals. -- Edward Abbey %% One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. -- Helen Keller %% One can never repeat too often, that reason, as it exists in man, is only our intellectual eye, and that, like the eye, to see, it needs light--to see clearly and far, it needs the light of heaven. %% One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the mind, and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God. -- J. Gustav White %% One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means. %% One cannot engage in conflict. One turns back and submits to fate, Changes one's attitude, And finds peace in perseverance. Good fortune. %% One cannot engage in conflict; One returns home, gives way. The people of his town, Three hundred households, Remain free of guilt. %% One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs -- but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelette. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% One character please. %% One child is not enough, but two children are far too many. %% One claim for the value of the British monarchy is that its existence precludes anyone from aspiring to absolute rule. I have a theory that the American presidency serves a similar purpose, precluding anyone from managing the government. %% One creature's torment is another creature's delight. -- Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% One crime is concealed by the commission of another. -- Seneca %% One dark night in the middle of the day Two dead boys went out to play. They faced each other back to back Drew their knives and shot each other. A deaf dumb cop heard the noise And beat the life out of the two dead boys. And if you don't believe this lie is true, Ask the blind man, He saw it too. %% One day Father O'Malley was walking through the park when he came upon an enchanting scene. A beautiful little girl with long blond hair, deep blue eyes, and a dainty white dress was reading under a tree with her adorable little dog. What a lovely picture, thought the Father to himself. Walking over, he asked, "Child, what is your name?" "Blossom," she replied. "What a fitting name," exclaimed Father O'Malley. "And how did your parents come to choose such a pretty name?" "Well, one day when I was still in my mommy's tummy she was lying under this very tree when a blossom fell and landed on her stomach. She thought it was a message from God and decided that I would be a girl and my name would be Blossom," explained the little girl sweetly. How charming, thought the priest. He started to say good-bye and walk away, then turned back. "And the name of your little dog?" he inquired. "Porky," was the child's reply. Again he asked her how the unusual name had been chosen. "Because he likes to fuck pigs." %% One day God came down from heaven and came to the Pope. God looked at the Pope and said, "Do not be afraid, this is just a little survey I take of all the Popes. The first question I have of you is do you think that Priests will ever be able to get married?" The Pope answered "Ah, no, not in my life time." God said, "Okay, the next question is: Do you think there should be women priests?" The Pope answered "Ah, no, not in my life time." God said, "Okay, my last question is: Do you think the Roman Catholic church should approve birth control?" The Pope answered "Ah, no, not in my life time." God said, "Okay, thank you very much for your time." and he turned and started to leave when the Pope said, "Lord, may I ask you one question?" God turned to the Pope and said, "Sure, you answered mine, what would you like to know?" The Pope said, "As you know I am very patriotic and I was wondering if there would ever be another Polish pope?" God answered "Ah, no, not in my life time." %% One day I got on the usual bus, and when I stepped in, I saw the most gorgeous blond Chinese girl... I sat beside her. I said, "Hi," and she said, "Hi," and then I said, "Nice day, isn't it?," and she said, "I saw my analyst today and he says I have a problem." So I asked, "What's the problem?" She replied, "I can't tell you. I don't even know you..." I said, "Well sometimes it's good to tell your problems to a perfect stranger on a bus." So she said, "Well, my analyst said I'm a nymphomaniac and I only like Jewish cowboys... by the way, my name is Denise." I said, "Hello, Denise. My name is Bucky Goldstein..." -- Steve Wright %% One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom forth into hysteria %% One day Nasrudin encountered a meditating Yogi. Hoping to learn something, he asked the Yogi who and what he was. "I am a Yogi," was the reply, "and I seek communion with all living things." "That is interesting," replied Nasrudin, "because a fish once saved my life." The Yogi begged him to join him, because he had such harmony with the animal world. After weeks of meditation, the Yogi asked to hear more of the fish that saved Nasrudin's life. Nasrudin said, "I was starving, and the fish provided sustenance for three days." %% One day Nasrudin was walking down a deserted road, when he saw several mounted men approaching. Fearing that they were bandits or army recruiters, he hid in an adjacent graveyard. The travelers, who were innocent, had seen him leap the wall. They left the road and sought Nasrudin, asking if they could help him, and why he was cowering in the graveyard. The Mullah replied, "I am here because of you, and you are here because of me." %% One day President Reagan, Chairman Andropov, the Pope, and a boy scout were flying together in an airplane. Right out in the middle of nowhere the plane developed engine trouble and started to go down. Unfortunately, only three parachutes could be found for the four passengers! Andropov grabbed one of the parachutes and declared "Comrades, as leader of the socialist workers revolution, my life must be spared," and he jumped out of the plane. Then Reagan exclaimed "As leader of the greatest nation on earth, I must keep the world safe for democracy," and with that he too jumped to safety. Now if you are following all this (or counting on your fingers) you must see that there is only one parachute left for the two remaining passengers. The Pope looked kindly upon the boy scout and said "I have had a long and productive life, my son. You take the parachute and leave me in God's hands." "That's very kind of you," the observant scout replied, "but there is no need. Reagan just jumped out with my knapsack." %% One day Sophie and Eddie are talking about getting old, and Eddie says 'When I'm eighty, I'm going to marry a twenty year old girl;' and Sophie replies, 'Eddie, when I'm eighty, I'm going to marry a twenty year old boy, and I'm going to have more fun' 'Oh yeah,' Eddie asks, 'and why is that?' 'Because,' Sophie replies, 'twenty goes into eighty a lot more times than eighty goes into twenty' %% One day Yogi came home after a game, and asked his wife "Well, how was your day?". And she said "Oh, I went to see Dr. Zhivago today". And Yogi said "Oh, honey, what's wrong?". "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous." -- Yogi Berra %% One day a Catholic Priest, a Protestant Minister, and a Mormon Bishop went fishing together in a little row boat. After a little while, the Priest said, "I forgot to bring some sandwiches along. I"ll be right back!" With that the Priest jumped out of the boat, ran across the water, got his sandwiches, ran back across the water, and got into the boat. A little while later, the Minister said, "I forgot to bring something to drink. I'll be right back!" With that the Minister jumped out of the boat, ran across the water, got his drink, ran back across the water, and got into the boat. Well, the Mormon bishop is not going to be outdone by this showmanship, so he says, "Oh, I forgot my favorite fishing bait, I'll be right back!" So, he jumps out of the boat and SPLASH, he sinks straight to the bottom of the lake. At this the Priest turns to the Minister and says, "I guess we should tell him where the rocks are." %% One day a Jewish boy asked his dad for 10 bucks. His dad's reply: "8 bucks...whatta ya need 6 bucks for?!?". %% One day a mouse was driving along the road in his Mercedes when he heard an anguished roaring noise coming from the side of the road. Stopping the car, he got out and discovered a lion stuck in a deep ditch and roaring for help. Reassuring the lion, the mouse tied a rope around the axle of the Mercedes, threw the other end down to the lion, and pulled the beast out of the ditch. The lion thanked the mouse profusely and they went their separate ways. Two weeks later the lion was out for a stroll in the country when he heard a panicked squeaking coming from the side of the road. Investigating the noise, what should he come across but the mouse stuck in the same hole. "Oh, please help me, Mr. Lion," squeaked the terrified mouse. "I saved you with my car once, remember?" "Course I'll help you, little feller," roared the lion. "I'll just lower my dick down to you, you hold on to it, and we'll have you out of there in a jiffy." Sure enough, a few minutes later the mouse was high and dry on the roadside, trying to convey his eternal gratitude to the lion. "Don't give it another thought," said the lion kindly. "It just goes to show that if you've got a big dick, you don't need a Mercedes." %% One day a physicist at CERN gets a great new idea. He tells his friends and they think that it's a good idea too, so they pool their resources get funding etc. and after a couple of years they've set up the equipment and the physicist presses the go button. The protons in the supercollider smash together as, for a brief instant, more power than is generated in the rest of the world put together is concentrated into one picoscopic area. Meanwhile in Heaven, God is holding a conference with His angels. "Hurry!" cries one angel "I've got six million collisions already" "Don't look at Me" says God "It's never come up before." The angels look at Him expectantly. "O.K." He says "All those who want to give them a new particle raise their wing" Back on Earth the detectors begin to register the result of the vote... %% One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons." Moon patiently told the student the following story-- "One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector... %% One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium. -- Edward Abbey %% One day soon, man is going to be able to harness incredible energy -- maybe even the atom. Energy that could ultimately hurl men to other worlds in some sort of spaceship. And the men that reach out into space will find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world, and to cure their diseases. They'll be able to find a way to give each man hope and a common future. And those are the days worth living for. -- Edith Keeler, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate unknown. %% One day the King decided that he would force all his subjects to tell the truth. A gallows was erected in front of the city gates. A herald announced, "Whoever would enter the city must first answer the truth to a question which will be put to him." Nasrudin was first in line. The captain of the guard asked him, "Where are you going? Tell the truth -- the alternative is death by hanging." "I am going," said Nasrudin, "to be hanged on that gallows." "I don't believe you." "Very well, if I have told a lie, then hang me!" "But that would make it the truth!" "Exactly," said Nasrudin, "your truth." %% One day this guy goes down to the community swimming pool to take a nice swim. Upon arrival at the pool, he sees an old guy lying on the deck of the pool so he asks the man how the water is. The old man says to the guy, "luke warm". Hearing this, the guy takes a running dive into the pool only to come screaming to the surface of the water exclaiming, "AAAgh, this water is freezing!!, I thought you said it was luke warm." To this, the old man replies, "It lukes (looks) warm to me." %% One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine. Goodbye, my dear. Goodbye, Susan. -- Doctor, DALEK INVASION OF EARTH %% One day, a new teacher was assigned to Dirty Johnny's class. "Hello class", she said. "My name is Miss Prussy, and I'm going to be your new teacher." Knowing Dirty Johnny's reputation, she elaborated, "Now that's *Prussy*, with an 'r', and I'm sure all of you can remember to pronounce it correctly." Shortly, the class went out for recess. When they returned, the teacher asked, "Johnny, can you tell the class my name?" Johnny thought and thought. Finally, his face brightened. "Yeah, I remember now", he said. "It's Miss Crunt." %% One day, a very naive, newly ordained priest discovered that he needed to get something in town. Having never been there before, he was looking forward to the excursion. As he walked down the street, taking in the atmosphere of this rather large town, a scantily clad beauty called out to him, "Ten dollars for a quicky, Father?" Embarrassed and unsure as to what this woman was talking about, he hurried past her with his head down. Moving swiftly down the street and pondering the meaning of the woman's words, he was startled by a voice that said, "Hey Father, ten bucks for a quicky!" Looking up, he saw another woman wearing even less clothes than the previous one. Now completely flustered and confused, the priest ran past the woman and hurried on to complete his errand so that he could get back to the monastery to talk to someone about his encounters. At the monastery, he approaches the Mother Superior and asked, "Mother Superior, what's a quicky?" She replied, "Ten dollars, same as in town." %% One day, at a bagel store in Brooklyn, Mr. Finkelstein bumps into his neighbor, Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Moskowitz turns to Mr. Finkelstein and says "hey Finkelstein what was that racket I heard last night? It was coming from your house." "nothing important really" says Finkelstein, "the Wife and I got into an argument, and she threw my overcoat down the stairs." Moskowitz continues, obviously not believing what he has just heard: "how could one coat make all that noise ?" to which he gets the answer from Finkelstein: "my coat was the cause of the noise" he asserts, "AND I WAS IN IT TOO" %% One day, in the middle of the night, Two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back the faced eachother, Drew their swords and shot eachother. A deaf policeman heard the noise, Came and got the two dead boys %% One day, some mice died and went to heaven. They were met at the pearly gates by St. Peter, who showed them to their spot, and said he'd be back to check on them later. The next day, he was back, and asked the mice how they were doing. "Great," they said, "but heaven is such a big place, we're having problems getting around on our little legs." St. Peter procured some roller skates, which seemed to solve the problem. Well, the next day, some cats got to heaven, and they too were shown to their place. St. Peter came by the next day to check on them: "How do you like heaven?" Replied the cats, "Heaven's great -- we especially like the meals on wheels!" %% One day, the Pope, Billy Graham, and President Benson, (current prophet of the Mormon Church,) were out fishing on a lake. The Pope says, "Oh dear! I forgot the can of worms." So he climbs out of the boat and walks on the water to the pier, gets the can of worms, walks on the water back to the boat and gets in the boat. President Benson says, "I forgot the fishing tackle." So he gets out of the boat, walks on the water to the pier, gets the tackle, and walks back. Billy Graham, not to be outdone, says, "I forgot the pop." So he gets out of the boat and prompty sinks into the water. The Pope turns to President Benson and says, "Should we show him where the rocks are?" And President Benson says, "What rocks?" %% One day, the youngest grandson asked Grandpa the secret of old age. Grandpa propped the youngster on his knee and told him. "Look at me", he said. "You ask how I've lived to such an advanced age? Well, I don't smoke, I don't drink, and I certainly never gamble. And next week I'll celebrate my 98th birthday." To which the grandson responded, "How?" %% One day, three nuns were talking while enjoying their cups of tea, when one of the nuns leaned towards the other two and whispered, "I'm in such a dilemma, sisters, and I don't know what to do. Maybe you can help me. When I was cleaning the Father's room, I found a box of condoms in his dresser drawer, and now I don't know whether or not to tell Bishop. What do you think I should do?" "Oh my word," said the second nun. "I must have found the same box of condoms when I cleaned his room last week! Well, I don't know if you96z should tell the Bishop or not but do you know what I did? I poked a hole in the end of each and everyone of them." Both nuns heard a gasp, turned and saw that the third nun had fainted. %% One day, A mad meta-poet, With nothing to say, Wrote a mad meta-poem That started: "One day, A mad meta-poet, With nothing to say, Wrote a mad meta-poem That started: "One day, [...] sort of close". Were the words that the poet, Finally chose, To bring his mad poem, To some sort of close". Were the words that the poet, Finally chose, To bring his mad poem, To some sort of close". %% One difference between a man and a machine is that a machine is quiet when well oiled. %% One does not dip water with a knife. %% One does not drink the mud of the well. No animals come to an old well. %% One does not have to keep bad governments in to keep Communists out. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% One does not patronize a Klingon warrior. -- Riker, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% One does not thank logic. -- Sarek, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.4 %% One draws from the well Without hindrance. It is dependable. Supreme good fortune. %% One ear heard it, and at the other out it went. -- Chaucer %% One evening Mr. Rudolph Block, of New York, found himself seated at dinner alongside Mr. Percival Pollard, the distinguished critic. "Mr. Pollard," said he, "my book, "The Biography of a Dead Cow", is published anonymously, but you can hardly be ignorant of its authorship. Yet in reviewing it you speak of it as the work of the Idiot of the Century. Do you think that fair criticism?" "I am very sorry, sir," replied the critic, amiably, "but it did not occur to me that you really might not wish the public to know who wrote it." -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% 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 loetus." %% One expresses well the love he does not feel. -- J. A. Karr %% One fact is better than one hundred apologies. %% One fall day, two men were out in the woods hunting. Feeling a sudden need to relieve himself, George went over to a nearby clump of bushes, unzipped his fly, and started in when a poisonous snake lunged out of the bushes and bit him on his penis. Hearing George's howl of pain and fright, his friend Fred came running up and told him to lie still while he used the radio to call a doctor. "There's only one way to save your friend's life," said the doctor gravely. "If you cut a shallow 'X' over the bite and then suck as much of the poison out as you can, he'll probably be okay, but otherwise there's not much hope." Hearing Fred's footsteps, George rose weakly up on one elbow and cried out, "Fred, what'd he say? What did the doctor say?" "George, old friend," said Fred sadly, "he said you're gonna die." %% One falls into the pit. Three uninvited guests arrive. Honor them, and in the end there will be good fortune. %% One family builds a wall, two families enjoy it. %% One fish, two fish ... red fish, blue fish. %% One fly to another -- "Your human is down." %% One for casual, one for best. -- Romana, DESTINY OF THE DALEKS %% 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 Brooks Adams (1838-1918) %% One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. -- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), "The Education of Henry Adams", 1907 %% One function of diplomacy is to dress realism in morality. %% One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone. %% One good suit is worth a thousand resumes. %% One good thing about music, well, it helps you feel no pain. So hit me with music; hit me with music now. -- Bob Marley, "Trenchtown Rock" %% One good turn asketh another. -- John Heywood %% One good turn deserves another. -- Gaius Petronius %% One good turn gets most of the bedsheets. %% One good turn gets most of the blanket. %% One good turn usually gets most of the blanket. %% One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature's law; why try to contradict it? -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education", 1762 %% One has to leave shops before closing time. %% One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb. %% One homunculus a day keeps the doctor away. %% One horse laugh is worth 10,000 syllogisms. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% One humanoid escapee One android on the run Seeking freedom beneath A lonely desert sun Trying to change its program Trying to change the mode -- Crack the code Images conflicting Into data overload -- Neil Peart, Rush %% One hundred and one uses for canned peaches. One hundred and two if you plan to eat them. %% One in Kate Bush is worth two in the Hand. %% One is enriched through unfortunate events. No blame, if you are sincere And walk in the middle, And report with a seal to the prince. %% One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious. -- Chateaubriand (1768-1848) %% One is oppressed while at meat and drink. The man with the scarlet knee bands is just coming. It furthers one to offer sacrifice. To set forth brings misfortune. No blame. %% One is the loneliest number that you will ever know. %% One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do... %% One kid says to me, "See that bird? What kind of bird is that?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what kind of bird that is." He says, "It's a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you anything." But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: "See that bird?" he says. "It's a brown-throated thrush." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well in Italian, it's a ... In Portuguese it's a ... In Chinese, it's a ... and in Japanese, it's a ... You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you are finished, you'll know absolutely nothing about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So, let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts." (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.) -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% One kills three foxes in the field And receives a yellow arrow. Perseverance brings good fortune. %% One learns to itch where one can scratch. -- Ernest Bramah %% One legged girls are pushovers. %% One level further down somebody is getting killed, right now. %% One lives by believing in something. %% One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. -- Antonio Porchia, "Voces", 1968 %% One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% One man with courage makes a majority. -- Andrew Jackson %% One man's "magic" is another man's "engineering." "Supernatural" is a null word. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% One man's Mede is another man's Persian. -- George S. Kaufman %% One man's Windows are another man's walls. %% One man's brain plus one other will produce one half as many ideas as one man would have produced alone. These two plus two more will produce half again as many ideas. These four plus four more begin to represent a creative meeting, and the ratio changes to one quarter as many ... -- Anthony Chevins %% One man's idea of hell is to be forced to remain in another man's idea of heaven. %% One man's junk is another's income -- and sometimes his priceless antique. -- Richard N. Farmer %% One man's meat is another's editor %% One man's nightmare is another man's wet dream. %% One man's red tape is another man's system. -- Dwight Waldo %% One man's theology is another man's belly laugh. %% One man's upload is another man's download %% One mark of a good officer was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happened to be right, so much the better . . . -- Louis Wu "Ringworld" %% One may be able to quibble about the quality of a single experiment, or about the veracity of a given experimenter, but, taking all the supportive experiments together, the weight of evidence is so strong as readily to merit a wise man's reflection. -- Professor William Tiller, parapsychologist, Stanford University, commenting on psi research %% One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention. -- Clifton Fadiman %% One meets his destiny often on the road he takes to avoid it. %% One meets his lord in a narrow street. No blame. %% One moment of patience may ward off a great disaster; one moment of impatience may ruin a whole life. %% One monk said to the other, "The fish has flopped out of the net! How will it live?" The other said, "When you have gotten out of the net, I'll tell you." %% One more word out of you, and it's bang! zoom! To the moon! %% One morning after an evening of particularly heavy drinking, a man awoke and upon rolling over in bed saw one of the ugliest women he had ever seen. As he was about to get out of bed, he looked on the floor and saw another woman even less appealing than the first. Seeing his look of wide-eyed amazement, the woman on the floor said, "Don't look at me like that, I was only the bridesmaid." %% One morning, a wren and a lark saw a worm at the same time, and began fighting over it. Being an early bird, the lark had already caught quite a few worms and wasn't that hungry, so he called a time out and tried to reach an understanding. As a goodwill gesture, the lark even lowered himself and spoke in the wren's native language: "Wren, old bird, how hungry art thou?" "Lark, I'm starvin. Gimme da worm, and I'll make it worth yer while." "Verily? And in what fashion shalt you accomplish said noble intention?" "Look, lark, it's like dis: ya gimme da worm, I'll pay ya somethin." The lark's eyes lit up. "Very well, old chirp," the lark said in a droll voice. "Enjoy." The wren gobbled down the worm, then handed the lark a groty looking dime. The lark stared at it, dumbfounded. "In return for such a tasty, life-sustaining morsel, you give me a DIME? TEN CENTS?? IS THAT ALL???!!! Wren, I thought you said you'd PAY me something! The wren shrugged and replied, "Somethin" is "dot ten" in wren, lark. %% One must be either the anvil or the hammer. %% One must be poor to know the luxury of giving. -- George Eliot %% One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones, please. -- Edward Abbey %% One must deal openly and fairly with one's forces if maximum effectiveness is to be achieved. -- Lord Darth Vader %% One must go through the water. It goes over one's head. Misfortune. No blame. %% One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. -- May Sarton %% One need not fear superior numbers if the opposing force has been properly scouted and appraised. -- Sitting Bull %% One need only look at Dolly Parton to realize that good things don't always come in small packages. %% One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people. %% One night I came home very late. It was the next night %% One night I walked home very late and fell asleep in somebody's satellite dish. My dreams were showing up on TV's all over the world. -- Steve Wright %% One night a father was helping his son with his homework. The father asked "What is the Gross National Product?". The little boy pondered for a minute and replied "Spinach!?". %% One night a girl had an affair With a fellow all covered with hair. His enormous red whang Gave her a wonderful bang -- She'd been diddled by Smokey the bear. %% One night a girl had an affair With a fellow all covered with hair. Then she picked up his hat And realized that She'd been had by Smokey the Bear. %% One night in late October, When I was far from sober, Returning with my load of manly pride, My feet began to stutter, So I lay down in the gutter, And a pig came near and lay down by my side; A lady passing by was heard to say: "You can tell a man who boozes, By the company he chooses," And the pig got up and walked away. %% One night of bad sex is still better than a good day at work. %% One night, a Frenchman, a German, and an Englishman were eating and drinking together and discussing the merits of their native languages. The Frenchman said that French was the best language because it was the language of love and poetry and art. The German said that German was the best language because it was the language of commerce and technology and philosophy. The Englishman let the others argue for a while, and finally broke in and said "I really don't understand what you two are going on about. English is clearly the best language. Look here." The Englishman held up a knife. "In German, you call this a *Messen*(sp?), and in French, you call it a *couteau*(sp?). Now, in English we simply call it a KNIFE, which when all is said and done, is precisely what it is." %% One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. %% One of Herbert's great jokes was at the summit of the Totem Pole. He tossed the rappel rope, and as it flew he suddenly screamed, "Oh shit, oh God!", and the rope disappeared over the edge. Having lost their means of retreat, the party contemplated the significance of being on a 300' sandstone needle several hundred miles from the nearest climber (this was ~1963). Then TM hauled the rope back up from where it was suspended just over the edge by a piece of parachute cord. -- John Morton, jmorton@euler.berkeley.edu %% One of life's greatest pleasures: paying the last installment. %% One of life's little ironies is the fact that when you finally master a tough job, you make it look easy %% One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds. -- Frank Zappa, 1979 %% 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 of the NBC Olympic sportscasters (Bob Costus?), describing Florence Griffith Joyner: This is the fastest woman on Earth -- and in the context of the Olympics, that's a compliment. %% One of the advantages of being a captain is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it. -- Kirk, "Dagger of the Mind," stardate 2715.2 %% One of the advantages of bowling over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball. -- Don Carter %% One of the airlines recently introduced a special half-fare rate for wives accompanying their husbands on business trips. Anticipating some valuable testimonials, the publicity department of the airline sent out letters to all the wives of businessmen who used the special rates, asking how they enjoyed their trip. Responses are still pouring in asking, "What trip?" %% One of the best ways to measure people is to watch the way they behave when something free is offered. -- Ann Landers %% One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener %% One of the first and foremost rules of piracy: REAL PIRATES ARE OVER 15 YEARS OLD! Exceptions to this rule are extremely rare at best. corollary: You never have to wonder who breeded Mickey Mouse with a 2600 hz tone to produce a real pirate's voice. %% One of the first things schoolchildren in Texas learn is how to compose a simple declarative sentence without the word "shit" in it. -- anonymous %% One of the fun things in life is reading between the lines. For people with slightly sexually twisted minds, here's a partial list of some common things people say and what Freudian things they're REALLY asking for. (Word play involved - think about each one, you'll get 'em.) * "How old is James?" -- Bondage * "Are you between classes?" -- Intercourse * "Can you get some pickles, dear?" -- Dildo * "Without 'im, they're not plants!" -- Anal %% One of the greatest labor-saving inventions today is tomorrow. %% One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know. -- John Kenneth Galbraith, in "Time", 1961 %% One of the greatest sources of energy is pride in what you are doing. %% One of the greatest unsolved riddles of restaurant eating is that the customer usually gets faster service when the restaurant is crowded that when it is half empty; it seems that the less that the staff has to do, the slower they do it. -- Sydney J. Harris %% One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people. -- Genghis Khan (1162-1227) %% One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it. -- Joyce Carol Oates %% One of the last true Bohemians... %% One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. -- Will Durant, in "Reader's Digest", 1972 %% One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be so outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand hat was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was reknowned for being quite clever and quite clearly was so -- but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous. This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% One of the matches starts to burn. %% One of the most amusing figures in climbing is T.M Herbert, best known for his Yosemite first ascents during the 60's. He still climbs, and I've met him on several occasions, and find his dry sarcasm really cracks me up. One day on Daff Dome in Tuolumne my partner and I were queued up behind T. M. and his partner on a short friction climb. T. M. and his partner finished and rapped down, and were starting an adjacent climb. When my partner on the lead reached the two bolt belay, he was disturbed at the old 1/4" bolts he was going to rely on. T. M. quipped "Yeah, they're bad all right. One of them came out when we were up there, but we stuck it back in with some matchsticks to hold it in place, it should be ok now." -- John Dalbey, jdalbey@cymbal.calpoly.edu %% One of the most expensive things in life is a girl who is free for the evening. %% One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% One of the oldest problems puzzled over in the Talmud is: "Why did God create goyim?" The generally accepted answer is "________somebody has to buy retail." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% One of the rules of Busmanship, New York style, is never surrender your seat to another passenger. This may seem callous, but it is the best way, really. If one passenger were to give a seat to someone who fainted in the aisle, say, the others on the bus would become disoriented and imagine they were in Topeka, Kansas. %% One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987 %% One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything every night before you go to bed. -- Ann Landers %% One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important %% One of the things capitalism brought into the world was democracy, though I do not think the two are inseparable. -- Michael Harrington %% One of the weaknesses of our age is our apparent inability to distinguish our needs from our greeds. -- Don Robinson, quoted in "Reader's Digest", 1963 %% One of the world's worst questions: Do you have statistics to back up that statement? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: Have I kept you waiting? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: Haven't you any sense of humor? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: Now what's the matter? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: So what? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: When are you going to grow up? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: Will you promise not to get mad if I ask you something? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: You asleep? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: You don't honestly expect me to believe that, do you? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the world's worst questions: You don't remember me, do you? -- Jane Goodsell %% One of the worst of my many faults is that I'm too critical of myself. %% One of them gets you! %% One of these centuries the brutes, private or public, who believe that they can rule their betters by force, will learn the lesson of what happens when brute force encounters mind and force. -- Ragnar Danneskjold %% One of these days now, just you wait and see! %% One of these days, Alice, one of these days... %% One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces. %% One of your cookies is the Pledge of Allegiance by that Socialist scamp, Francis Bellamy. It should read, for those wishing to recite it: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to The Union for which it stands, with liberty and justice for all. -- Jeff Daiell %% One of your most ancient writers, a historian named Herodotus, tells of a thief who was to be executed. As he was taken away he made a bargain with the king: in one year he would teach the king's favorite horse to sing hymns. The other prisoners watched the thief singing to the horse and laughed. "You will not succeed," they told him. "No one can." To which the thief replied, "I have a year, and who knows what might happen in that time. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die. And perhaps the horse will learn to sing. -- The Mote in God's Eye %% One ostrich egg will serve 24 people for brunch. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% One out of every two game show hosts had a severe head injury as a child. %% One peek is worth a thousand finesses. %% One person tells a falsehood, a hundred repeat it as true. %% One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests. -- John Stuart Mill %% One person's bug is another person's feature. %% One person's constant is another person's variable. -- Alan J. Perlis, "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% One person's data is another person's program. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% One person's error is another person's data. %% One picture is worth 128K words. %% One picture is worth more than ten thousand words. -- Chinese proverb %% One pill makes you larger And if you go chasing rabbits And, one pill makes you small. And you know you're going to fall. And the ones that mother gives you, Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Don't do anything at all. Has given you the call. Go ask Alice Call Alice When she's ten feet tall. When she was just small. When men on the chessboard When logic and proportion Get up and tell you where to go. Have fallen sloppy dead, And you've just had some kind of And the White Knight is talking mushroom backwards And your mind is moving low. And the Red Queen's lost her head Go ask Alice Remember what the dormouse said: I think she'll know. "Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head." -- Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit", Grace Slick lead vocal %% One planet is all you get. %% One polar bear to another: "I love igloos - they're crunchy on the outside, and soft on the inside." %% One possible reason why things aren't going according to plan is that there never was a plan. %% One potato, two potato, three potato, four... %% One principle object of good-breeding is to suit our behavior to the three several degrees of men--our superiors, our equals, and those below us. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.") This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500 members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil, are already too large to fit on normal aircraft. -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" %% One pushes upward into an empty city. %% One reason why George Washington Is held in such veneration: He never blamed his problems On the former Administration. -- George O. Ludcke %% One sees the wagon dragged back, The oxen halted, A man's hair and nose cut off. Not a good beginning, but a good end. %% One seldom sees a monument to a committee. %% One sharp nasty knife is thrown at you! %% One should be cherry of virgins. %% One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers. -- Eugene O'Neill %% One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged. -- Heine %% One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything and consequently get nothing. Each time I discover, and too late, that one thing had come to me while I was running after another. -- Andre Gide %% One sits oppressed under a bare tree And strays into a gloomy valley. For three years one sees nothing. %% One size fits all. %% One small step for man, one giant stumble for mankind. %% One student fell into a cycle of classes, studying, working and sleeping. Didn't realize how long he had neglected writing home until he received the following note: "Dear Son, Your mother and I enjoyed your last letter. Of course, we were much younger then, and more impressionable. Love, Dad." %% One thing I have no worry about is whether God exists. But it has occurred to me that God has Alzheimer's and has forgotten we exist. -- Jane Wagner, "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" %% One thing common to most success stories is the alarm clock. %% One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill. -- Edward Abbey %% One thing that helped Rip Van Winkle sleep for 20 years was the fact that none of his neighbors owned power lawn mowers. %% One thing the inventors can't seem to get the bugs out of is fresh paint. %% One thing we're able to do is raise money. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, on the GOP %% One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers. -- Edward Abbey %% One thought driven home is better than three left on base. %% One thought fills immensity. %% 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?" %% One time the power went out in my house and I had to use the flash on my camera to see my way around. I made a sandwich and took fifty pictures of my face. The neighbors thought there was lightning in my house. -- Steve Wright %% One toke over the line, sweet Mary, One toke over the line, Sittin' downtown in a railway station, One toke over the line. Waitin' for the train that goes home, Hopin' that the train is on time, Sittin' downtown in a railway station, One toke over the line. %% One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. -- William Shakespeare %% One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% One wand of concentration equals eight scrolls of create monster. %% One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague. -- Robert Burton, 1651 %% One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model. %% One way to stop a runaway horse is to bet on him. %% One who does not know a burro from a burrow does not know his ass from a hole in the ground! %% One who has a shady past knows that nice guys finish last. %% One who is contented with what he has done will never become famous for what he will do. He has lain down to die, and the grass is already over him. -- Christian Nestell Bovee %% One who is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. %% One who laughs last probably doesn't understand the joke. %% One who laughs, lasts. %% One who lives in a wine cellar rarely sees the light of day. %% One who puts into one's art what one has not been capable of putting into one's existence. It is because he was unhappy that God created the world. -- Henri de Montheriant %% One woman said she still cries at movies -- especially when she pays $4 to see a dull one. -- Earl Wilson %% One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word. -- Edward Abbey %% One word of advice: Don't give it. %% One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% One world's butcher is another world's hero. Perhaps I am neither one. -- Jarok, "The Defector", stardate 43462.5 %% One worthwhile task carried to a successful conclusion is worth half-a-hundred half-finished tasks. -- B. C. Forbes %% One would like to stroke and caress human beings, but one dares not do so, because they bite. -- Vladimir Lenin %% One's company, two's a crowd and three's a party. -- Andy Warhol, in "Exposures", 1979 %% One's roommate (who has early classes) has an alarm clock that is louder than God's own. %% One, or both? -- Riker, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% One, two, three, four What are we fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam. Five, six, seven, eight Open up the pearly gates. Ain't no time to wonder why Whoopie! We're all going to die. -- Country Joe and the Fish %% One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted. -- Thomas B. Reed (1839-1902) %% One-Shot Case Study, n.: The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is concluded all clovers possess four leaves and are sometimes green. %% One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide. -- Will Rogers %% Onions don't cause heartburn; they only make it interesting. -- Solomon Short %% Online : Where you hang your laundry to dry. %% Only 19,999 lines of C++ to my next ski trip... %% Only God can make a random selection. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% Only Irish Coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups - alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat. -- Alex Levine %% Only Santa Claus climbs down chimneys. %% Only Today! A dramatic price-cut on slightly used wands. %% Only a coward or a madman would give good for evil. %% Only a fool can reproduce another fool's work. %% Only a fool fights in a burning house. -- Kank the Klingon, "Day of the Dove," stardate unknown %% Only a fool has no doubts. %% Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind. -- Edward Abbey %% Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter. -- Edward Abbey %% Only a fool would stand in the way of progress. -- Kirk, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4725.4 %% Only a mouse could get in there. %% Only a sadistic scoundrel -- or a fool -- tells the bald truth on social occasions. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Only a wimpy God can't get it right the first time! %% Only a wizard can use a magic whistle. %% Only actions give to life its strength, as only moderation gives it its charm. -- J. P. Richter %% Only adults have difficulty with childproof caps. %% Only adventurers of evil alignment think of killing their dog. %% Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Only an unusual mind undertakes an analysis of the obvious. %% Only beautiful women who are engaged or engaged to be engaged or married or your mother's best friend will think that you are a wonderful person that any woman would die for. These same women will be completely dumbfounded at the revelation that you don't go out with a hundred women a week. Much less one. %% Only boring people get bored. -- James T Craddock %% Only chaotic evils kill sleeping monsters. %% Only constant and conscientious practice in the Martial Arts will ensure a long and happy life. -- Bruce Lee %% Only cosmetologists give make-up exams. %% Only david can find the zoo! %% Only democracy saves us from the ravages of being animals. %% Only dirty people need to wash. %% Only exceptionally rational men can afford to be absurd. -- Allen Goldfein %% Only fools are quoted. -- Anonymous %% Only fools have no fear. -- Worf, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2 %% Only in America can humanitarianism be suspect to the patriot. -- John Francis Putnam (1964) %% Only in America could women demand to be considered an official minority group with all the special privileges pertaining thereunto. -- "Cactus" Ed Abbey %% Only in time of peace can the wastes of capitalism be tolerated. -- F. R. Scott %% Only lefties are in their right minds %% Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we." %% Only real trappers escape traps. %% Only real wizards can write scrolls. %% Only someone with nothing to be sorry for smiles back at the rear of an elephant. %% Only ten people in the world now understand the theory of relativity. Each of my 33 friends thinks they are among that ten. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying. -- Baba Ram Dass %% Only the dead fail to rise in my presence. %% Only the fittest survive. The vanquished acknowledge their unworthiness by placing a classified ad with the ritual phrase "must sell -- best offer," and thereafter dwell in infamy, relegated to discussing gas mileage and lawn food. But if successful, you join the elite sodality that spends hours unpurifying the dialect of the tribe with arcane talk of bits and bytes, RAMS and ROMS, hard disks and baud rates. Are you obnoxious, obsessed? It's a modest price to pay. For you have tapped into the same awesome primal power that produces credit-card billing errors and lost plane reservations. Hail, postindustrial warrior, subduer of Bounceoids, pride of the cosmos, keeper of the silicone creed: Computo, ergo sum. The force is with you -- at 110 volts. May your RAMS be fruitful and multiply. -- Curt Suplee, "Smithsonian", 4/83 %% Only the foolish would arm the unemployed. %% Only the good die young. %% Only the half-mad are wholly alive. -- Edward Abbey %% Only the incompetent and mediocre are always at their best. %% Only the sinner has the right to preach. -- Christopher Morley %% Only the suppressed word is dangerous. -- Ludwig Borne %% Only the winners decide what were war crimes. -- Gary Wills, in "New York Times", 1975 %% Only the young die good. %% Only those who attempt the absurd ... will achieve the impossible %% Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. -- Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968) %% Only those who leisurely approach that which the masses are busy about can be busy about that which the masses take leisurely. -- Lao Tsu %% Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer. %% Only trust thyself, and another shall not betray thee. -- William Penn %% Only two groups of people fall for flattery- men and women %% Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid and the other one is out to get him %% Only two things are infinite: the universe and human ignorance. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Only use moderation in moderation. %% Only use moderation in moderation. (A rule of life) %% Only way to open lips of pigeon, sledgehammer. %% Only when a tree has fallen can you take measure of it. It is the same with a man. %% Only when the Sun starts to orbit the Earth will I accept the Bible. -- kmr4@po.CWRU.edu (Keith M. Ryan) %% Only wizards are able to zap a wand. %% Onto the lewd all things are lewd. -- Theodore Schroeder (1864-?) %% Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny -- old biology saw Ontology Recapitulages Philology -- old philosophy saw McCulloch -- old chain saw %% Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny --- or, is that ontology recapitulates philology...??? %% Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. %% Onward through the fog. %% Ooh Baby, just you shut your mouth. %% Ooh I was ugly, so ugly that when I was born the Doctor told my mother "I did all I could but he pulled through anyway". %% Ooh, eeh, ooh aah aah ting tang, walla walla bing bang ooh eeh, ooh aah aah ting tang walla walla bing bang! %% Oonza ponnatyme e wassakitta nayma Giacche. Issamomma shisgivhimma somabiynns. Shisaime "Giacche, wynonshuplanna biynns"? Eesbring inada bacayarde aneesplannada sidds. Eewatera sidds alatyme. Eewait tu, tree monds. Ennasidds grunn justa tu fitte. E gianda, ees laffinon giacche onacounda eeno cannclimeda binnestoche ansteleda gooz. Giacche, egeddaso mada e gianda, eeschoppa ala plannsadown, ene eesaine tu issamomma; "Taikayu binns e schaffadadallengool." %% Oooo, do that again. %% Ooooo, that tickled %% Ooooooh, nooooooo, not tonite!! %% Ooops. Gotta run. My dog wants sex. Later. %% Ooph! This tastes like liquid fire! %% Oops, DECked again. %% Opalko's Observation: The probability of one's supervisor entering one's office unannounced is inversely proportional to the work-relatedness of the activity one is engaged in at the time. %% Open DeathTrap: n. Abusive hackerism for the Santa Cruz Operation's `Open DeskTop' product, a Motif-based graphical interface over their UNIX. The funniest part is that this was coined by SCO's own developers...compare {AIDX}, {terminak}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Open Mouth. Insert Foot. Chew Carefully. %% Open confession is good for the soul. %% Open mouth. Insert Foot. Echo internationally. %% Open your drive door, honey. %% Open your purse and your mouth cautiously; and your stock of wealth and reputation shall, at least in repute, be great. -- Zimmerman %% Opening a tin is difficult, especially when you are not so strong! %% Opening a tin is difficult, especially when you attempt this bare handed! %% Opening an open object is far from productive. %% Opening his two eyes, [Ra, the Sun god] cast light on Egypt, he separated the night from day. The gods came forth from his mouth and mankind from his eyes. All things took their birth from him, the child who shines in the lotus and whose rays cause all beings to live. %% Opening night: the night before the play is ready to open. %% Opening the # reveals: %% Opera - Music that goes in one aria and out the other. %% Opera -- it's no more unreal than the people who are watching it. -- Heard on Public Radio %% Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings. -- Ed Gardner (1905-1963) %% Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?) -- Edward Abbey %% Operating-system software is the program that orchestrates all the basic functions of a computer. -- The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, September 15, 1987, page 40 %% Operation coded OVERKILL has started now. %% Operators mount anything! %% Operators mount everything. %% Ophidiophobia : Fear of snakes Pyrophobia : Fear of fire Astraphobia : Fear of thunderstorms Cynophobia : Fear of dogs Ailurophobia : Fear of cats Nyctophobia : Fear of darkness Triskaidekaphobia : Fear of the number 13 Phobophobia : Fear of fear %% Opinion, that great fool, makes fools of all. -- Field %% Opinion, the blind goddess of fools, foe To the virtuous, and only friend to Undeserving persons. -- Chapman %% Opinion? I thought you said onions. %% Opinions are like assholes -- everyone's got one, but nobody wants to look at the other guy's. -- Hal Hickman %% Opinions are like assholes-- everyone has one. -- Clint Eastwood %% Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence. -- Hebrew Proverb %% Opium is very cheap considering you don't feel like eating for the next six days. -- Taylor Mead [famous transvestite] %% Oppernockity tunes but once. %% Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them. %% Opportunity has hair in front, but behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again. %% Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor. -- Into the Woods %% Opportunity knocks but once. %% Opportunity, n. A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Opportunity- A good chance that always looks bigger going than coming %% Opposition. In small matters, good fortune. %% Oppression. Success. Perseverance. The great man brings about good fortune. No blame. When one has something to say, It is not believed. %% Oprah Winfrey has an incredible talent for getting the weirdest people to talk to. And you just HAVE to watch it. "Blind, masochistic minority, crippled, depressed, government latrine diggers, and the women who love them too much on the next Oprah Winfrey." %% Oprah Winfrey's Famous Diet: 'I Ate My Own Toe'. %% Oprah spelled backwards is Harpo! %% Optimism, n. The belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, good, bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those accustomed to falling into adversity, and most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof -- an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but not contagious. %% Optimist: A male who thinks she won't try. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Optimists will pretend you're invisible. %% Optimization hinders evolution. %% Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none. [Often experienced when asked what kind of salad dressing one wants.] -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Or that you might think it was a line. "Maybe I do think it's a line." Then you think I'm not sincere. "I didn't say that. There's nothing wrong with a line. It's like knocking at the door." Then you're inviting me in? "I'm not sending you away." That's more than I expected. "Is it as much as you hoped?" To hope is to recognize the possibility. I had only dreams. "Dreams can be dangerous." Not these dreams. I dream of a galaxy where your eyes are the stars, and the universe worships the night. "Careful! Putting me on a pedestal so high, you might not be able to reach me." Then I'll learn how to fly. You are the heart of my day, and the soul of my night. -- Riker and Guinan, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8 %% Or was it unlock the safe then swim to the surface? -- H. Houdini %% Oral Sex SUPER DIET for WOMEN -- EAT as OFTEN as you like and STILL LOSE %% Oralgami - The ancient Japanese art of folding words. %% Orange Book: n. The U.S. Government's standards document `Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December, 1985' which characterize secure computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D (least). Stock UNIXes are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to about C2 without excessive pain. See also {{crayola books}}, {{book titles}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Orange juice sorry you made me cry? Don't be soda pressed; them martini bruises. %% Orcs do not procreate in dark rooms. %% Orcs really aren't so bad (if you use lots of catsup). %% Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown. -- Thomas Mann (1875-1955) %% Order is Heaven's first law. %% Order is heaven's first law; and this confest, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence That such are happier, shocks all common sense. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Order is the first requisite of liberty. -- Georg Wihelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) %% Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things. -- Southey %% Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% Ordering sweaters: "That's the kind I want. I want one in Navy Blue and one in Navy brown." -- Yogi Berra %% Ordinary people know little of the time and effort it takes to learn to read. I have been eighty years at it, and have not reached my goal. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Oregon, n.: Eighty billion gallons of water with no place to go on Saturday night. %% Oreo %% Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl. -- Mike Adams %% Organization is the enemy of improvisation. %% Organized crime in America takes in over $40 billion a year and spends very little on office supplies. -- Woody Allen %% Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met. -- Fran Lebowitz %% Originality is the art of concealing your sources. %% Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you hear it. -- Laurence Peter, "Peter's Quotations", 1977 %% Orthodontists do it with braces. %% Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart. -- Edward Abbey %% Orthodoxy is not thinking - not having to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984" %% Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't. %% Oscar was an unlucky sap. Having just spent megabucks on a skydiving class, he dove out of the airplane and discovered that his parachute didn't work. As he was falling and tugging frantically on his ripcord, he noticed a lady rising up toward him! "Hey, you know anything about parachutes?" he shouted to her. The reply: "No... you know anything about gas stoves?" %% Oscillators do it repeatedly. %% Other anomalous laws: The good burghers of Redwood City have outlawed the frying of gravy. In Santa Clara it is forbidden to dedicate parking spaces to the patron saint of television. Prostitutes in San Francisco are not obliged to make change for bills larger than $50. The city of Mountain View proscribes calling pet fish by "names of aggressive content, e.g. "Biter", "Killer", "Sugar-Ray" Bicycles may not be ridden without "appropriate fashion accessories" anywhere in Santa Clara County (de facto law). It is illegal to skateboard on walls "or other vertical surfaces" in Palo Alto. [Damn! What will I do for fun now?] Wearing a sweatshirt inside-out is deemed a "threatening misdemeanor" in Half-Moon Bay. %% Other employees would do no better than Congressmen if the boss showed an interest in them only once in two years. -- unknown %% Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people. -- Walt Whitman %% Other people's patterns of expenditure and consumption are irrational and slightly immoral. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% Other people's property comes naturally to me %% Other people's things are more pleasing to us and ours to other people. -- Publilus Syrus %% Other people's tools work only in other people's yards. -- Jane Bryant Quinn %% Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? %% Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies. -- Antony and Cleopatra %% Others will exhort you to take risks, to be yourself, never to look back or lose your faith. Not I. If the truth be told, I do not want you to take risks. Oh, maybe a selected few to preserve your self-esteem, but not the killing kind of risk, nothing netless. As for being yourself, that's fine, as long as you are happy with yourself. Otherwise, be someone else. You'll find your way; most everyone does. Never to look back? I'd say look back quite often. If you don't look back, you won't know it was you who smashed the china. Never to lose faith? Of course you will. People lose their faith. %% Others will look to you for stability, so hide when you bite your nails. %% Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to operate. See {bucky bits}, {cokebottle}, {double bucky}, {meta bit}, {quadruple bucky}. %% Our "neoconservatives" are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell. -- Edward Abbey %% Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but nothing in this world is certain but death and taxes. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Our Garrick's salad; for in him we see Oil, vinegar, sugar and saltiness agree. -- Goldsmith %% Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user! %% Our [softball] team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am, anyway, but there's no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She's been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don't trust her. They know, deep in their souls, that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she probably would elect to save the infant's life, without ever considering whether there were men on base. -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag" %% Our actions are our own; their consequences belong to Heaven. -- Francis %% Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. -- John Fletcher %% Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with. -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan %% Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it. -- Edward Abbey %% Our birth is nothing but our death begun, As tapers waste the moment they take fire. -- Edward Young %% Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies. -- Frank Gelett Burgess %% Our body is a well-set clock, which keeps good time, but if it be too much or indiscreetly tampered with, the alarm runs out before the hour. -- Joseph Hall %% Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% Our business is run on trust. We trust you will pay in advance. %% Our children are not for sale. -- Dr. Crusher to Radue, "When the Bough Breaks", stardate 41509.1 %% Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wish we had. %% Our comedies are not to be laughed at. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers. %% Our conscience is our spirit's natural response to thorns, thistles, and briars. -- James E. Foust %% Our contemporary Tories prefer the term "ordered liberty" to "freedom". The word "freedom" scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it. -- Edward Abbey %% Our country has plenty of good five-cent cigars, but the trouble is they charge fifteen cents for them. %% Our country is still young and its potential is still enormous. We should remember, as we look toward the future, that the more fully we believe in and achieve freedom and equal opportunity -- not simply for ourselves but for others -- the greater our accomplishments as a nation will be. -- Henry Ford II %% Our country is the world -- our countrymen are mankind. -- William Lloyd Garrison %% Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right. -- Carl Schurz %% Our country. In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country right or wrong! -- Stephen Decatur %% Our customer's paperwork is profit. Our own paperwork is loss. -- Tony Brown, Control Data Corp. %% Our daughter said 'Brian is a complete gentleman always - but I guess that's better then not having a boyfriend at all. %% Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Our documentation manager was showing her 2 year old son around the office. He was introduced to me, at which time he pointed out that we were both holding bags of popcorn. We were both holding bottles of juice. But only *__he* had a lollipop. He asked his mother, "Why doesn't HE have a lollipop?" Her reply: "He can have a lollipop any time he wants to. That's what it means to be a programmer." %% Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. -- William Shakespeare %% 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 %% Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Our father who art in heaven ... I sincerely pray that SOMEBODY at this table will PAY for my SHREDDED WHAT and ENGLISH MUFFIN ... and also leave a GENEROUS TIP .... %% Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. -- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), 1957 %% Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% Our happiness in this world depends on the affections we are enabled to inspire. -- Duchesse de Praslin %% Our houseplants have a good sense of humous. %% Our humanity were a poor thing were it not for the divinity which stirs within us. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Our judgment can be no better than our information. %% Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in 1786 %% Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society. -- Isaac Asimov %% Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee. -- Tennyson %% Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions. -- Edward R. Murrow %% Our missions are peaceful -- not for conquest. When we do battle, it is only because we have no choice. -- Kirk, "The Squire of Gothos," stardate 2124.5 %% Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris. -- Edward Abbey %% Our natures are like oil; compound us with anything, yet will we strive to swim at the top. -- Beaumont and Fletcher %% Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves, but to the Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we sprang. -- Carl Sagan %% Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% Our parents were never our age. %% Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Our people are warriors, often savage, but we are also many other pleasant things. -- Romulan Commander, "The Enterprise Incident," stardate 5027.3 %% Our people don't believe in slavery. -- Kirk, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4040.7 %% Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing. -- Roy L. Ash, ex-president Litton Industries %% Our problems are so serious that the best way to talk about them is lightheartedly. %% Our record alone won't cut it. -- White House Chief of Staff Sam Skinner to his staff, on the importance of negative campaigning in the 1992 election %% Our repentance is not so much regret for the evil we have done, as fear of its consequences. %% Our schizophrenic societies progress by knowledge but survive on inspiration derived from the very beliefs which that knowledge erodes. I suggest that the paradox can be at least intellectually resolved, not all at once but eventually and with consequences difficult to perfect, if we pay due attention to the sociobiology of religion. Although the manifestations of the religious experiences are resplendent and multidimensional and so complicated that the finest of psychoanalyst and philosophers get lost in their labyrinth, I believe that religious practices can be mapped onto the two dimensions of genetic advantage and evolutionary change. -- Edward O. Wilson, "On Human Nature" %% Our sires' age was worse that our grandsires'. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% Our species can only survive if we have obstacles to overcome. You remove those obstacles. Without them to strengthen us, we will weaken and die. -- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3220.3 %% Our strength is often composed of the weakness we're damned if we're going to show. %% Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial. -- Edward Abbey %% Our swords shall play the orators for us. -- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) %% Our two main methods of time travel are, 1) stellar flyby 2) use of the Guardian, and 3) .... uh... THREE, our THREE methods of time travel are 1) stellar flyby 2) use of the Guardian, 3) the atavichron, and... um... AMONG our methods of time travel ARE: 1) stellar flyby 2) use of the Guardian, 3) the atavichron, and 4) antimatter implosion!!! -- (I wonder if fanatical devotion to the Pope would work?) %% Our vegetable love should grow - Vaster than empires, and more slow.... %% Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it. -- Alex Schure %% Our way is peace. -- Septimus, the Son Worshiper, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4040.7 %% Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new read. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. -- General Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981) %% Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner. -- General Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981) %% Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. -- General Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981) %% Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it. %% Ours is an abiding faith in the cause of freedom. We know it is God's cause. -- Thomas E. Dewey %% Ours is the age which is proud of machine which think, and suspicious of men who try to. %% Out of inodes %% Out of our way mister, you'd best keep. %% Out of sight is out of mind. -- Arthur Clough %% Out of swap %% Out of the best and most productive years of each man's life, he should carve a segment in which he puts his private career aside to serve his community and his country, and thereby serve his children, his neighbors, his fellow men, and the cause of freedom. -- David Lilenthal %% Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made. -- Immanuel Kant %% Out of the frying pan, into der fire. -- The Swedish Chef %% Out of the mouths of babes does often come cereal. %% Out of the same substances one stomach will extract nourishment, another poison; and so the same disappointments in life will chasten and refine one man's spirit, and embitter another's. -- William Matthews %% Out of the shadow of night, the world rolls into light. It is daybreak everywhere. -- Longfellow %% Out on the road today I saw a "Dead-Head" sticker on a Cadillac. %% Out, damned spot! Out, I say! %% Out, out damn spot! -- William Shakespeare, or Tide commercial %% Outlaw junk mail, and save the trees! %% Outpatient: A person who has fainted. %% Outside a Hong Kong tailor shop: Ladies may have a fit upstairs. %% Outside a Paris dress shop: Dresses for street walking. %% Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in. -- Katherine Whitehorn %% Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend: and inside a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Outside the backstreet girls are dancing to music that the D.J.'s play. %% Outside there's a real death-waltz between what's fact and what's fantasy. %% Over 5,000 years ago, Moses said to the children of Israel, "Pick up your shovels, mount your asses and load your camels, and I will lead you to the promised land." Not too long ago, Roosevelt said, "Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, light a Camel, this is the promised land." Now Nixon is stealing your shovels, kicking your asses, raising the price of Camels, and mortgaging the promised land. %% Over the earth, the lake: The image of Gathering Together. Thus the superior man renews his weapons In order to meet the unforeseen. %% Over the next few decades you'll convince people to stop pretending that survival requires courage, intelligence and wisdom. %% Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls. -- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities" %% Over the shoulder supervision is more a need of the manager than the programming task. %% Over the years, I've developed my sense of deja vu so acutely that now I can remember things that *have* happened before ... %% 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 %% Overboarding: Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one's previous life interests; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs... -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Overconfidence breeds error when we take for granted that the game will continue on its normal course; when we fail to provide for and unusually powerful resource--a check, a sacrifice, a stalemate. Afterwards the victim may wail, `But who could have dreamt of such an idiotic-looking move?' -- Fred Reinfeld, "The Complete Chess Course" %% Overdoing things is harmful in all cases, even when it comes to efficiency. %% Overdrawn? But I still have checks left! %% Overeat: To dine. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket. %% Overheard at funeral: "I know this is an inconvenient time to ask, but did he ever mention anything about source code?" %% Overheard by a person with a cold: "I have more phlegm in my throat than a Belgian prostitute. %% Overheard: No, honey, I don't want to learn how to run the washing machine. I'm sorry I learned how to run the dishwasher. -- Andrew Mason %% Overload -- core meltdown sequence initiated. %% Overwork, n. A dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Ow, I think. "Now what?" There's something wrong with my stomach. "It hurts?" It's making noises. "Maybe you're hungry. -- Q and Dr. Crusher, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Owe no man any thing... -- Romans 13:8 %% Oxymoron - Definite possibility %% Oxymoron of the day: Hypochondria is the one disease I have not got. %% Oxymoron: Advanced BASIC %% Oxymoron: Airline food %% Oxymoron: American culture %% Oxymoron: Athletic scholarship %% Oxymoron: Black Light %% Oxymoron: Bosnian Cease-Fire %% Oxymoron: Brave politician %% Oxymoron: Business ethics %% Oxymoron: Central Intelligence (Agency) %% Oxymoron: Cheerful pessimist %% Oxymoron: Chili %% Oxymoron: Communist party (fun time!) %% Oxymoron: Corporate planning %% Oxymoron: Covert U.S. operations in Central America %% Oxymoron: Creationist Science %% Oxymoron: Definite maybe %% Oxymoron: Fallout Shelter %% Oxymoron: Fellowship of Christian Athletes %% Oxymoron: Final Version. %% Oxymoron: Good Television (Shows) %% Oxymoron: High School Education %% Oxymoron: Honest crook %% Oxymoron: Honest politician %% Oxymoron: House Ethics Committee %% Oxymoron: Innocent women %% Oxymoron: Jumbo shrimp %% Oxymoron: Justice Burger %% Oxymoron: Justice system %% Oxymoron: Libertarian Organization %% Oxymoron: Liberty Federation %% Oxymoron: Limited Nuclear War %% Oxymoron: Logical Thought %% Oxymoron: Long-Island Expressway %% Oxymoron: Management Science %% Oxymoron: Military intelligence %% Oxymoron: Moral Majority %% Oxymoron: Never generalize!! %% Oxymoron: New Democratic Party %% Oxymoron: Non-Alcoholic Beer %% Oxymoron: Plastic glasses? %% Oxymoron: Postal service %% Oxymoron: Practical logic %% Oxymoron: President Reagan %% Oxymoron: Progressive Conservative %% Oxymoron: Rapid transit %% Oxymoron: Resident Visitor %% Oxymoron: Same difference %% Oxymoron: Social Security %% Oxymoron: Soviet Union. %% Oxymoron: Student Athlete %% Oxymoron: Super Bowl (XX = Yawn) %% Oxymoron: Sweet sorrow %% Oxymoron: Terribly pleased %% Oxymoron: Union craftsman %% Oxymoron: United Nations %% Oxymoron: Wise fool %% Oy Vey! %% Oysters cannot fly. %% 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. %% Ozmosis: The inability of one's job to live up to one's self-image. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% P-K4 %% P. D. Q. Bach's life proves, if proof be needed, the importance of a sound musical education. -- Prof. Peter Schickele (?) %% P.O. Box 35 Baffled Greek, Michigan %% P.O.D.: /P-O-D/ Acronym for `Piece Of Data' (as opposed to a code section). Usage: pedantic and rare. See also {pod}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% P.O.E. %% PAIN: One thing, at least it proves that you're alive! %% PAINTERS do it with longer strokes. %% PANDY'S OBSERVATION: A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. %% PANIC - no super user password entry %% PANIC ip null in lkfront %% PANIC: can't find SYS$SYSTEM: %% PAR: energy. "Solar par is downright unAmerican!" -- Texan Dictionary %% PARALLELIDIOTS: Two people side by side approaching a "left lane ends" that stick it out until the very last second. %% PARAMEDICS can revive anything. %% PARAMETER - the absolute limit beyond which the secretary yells for help %% PARANOIA: A healthy understanding of the way the universe works. %% PARDON me, am I speaking ENGLISH? %% PARKER'S RULE OF PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE: A motion to adjourn is always in order. %% PARKINSON'S AXIOM: 1. An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals. 2. Officials make work for each other. %% PARKINSON'S SIXTH LAW: The progress of science varies inversely with the number of journals published. %% PARTY: A gathering where you meet people who drink so much you can't even remember their names. %% PATCH 1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. 2. v. To insert a patch into a piece of code. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PATENT: A method of publicizing inventions so others can copy them. %% PAUL'S LAW: You can't fall off the floor HAHN'S EXTENSION: It takes children two years to learn Paul's law: %% PAWN: on top of. "Put yur guns pawn the table!" -- Texan Dictionary %% PAYCHECK: The weekly $5.27 that remains after deductions for federal withholding, state withholding, city withholding, FICA, medical/dental, long-term disability, unemployment insurance, Christmas Club, and payroll savings plan contributions. %% PAYPUL: a body of persons. "Who are all these paypul?" -- Texan Dictionary %% PBD: /P-B-D/ [abbrev. of `Programmer Brain Damage'] n. Applied to bug reports revealing places where the program was obviously broken by an incompetent or short-sighted programmer. Compare {UBD}; see also {brain-damaged}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PC-ism: /P-C-izm/ n. A piece of code or coding technique that takes advantage of the unprotected single-tasking environment in IBM PCs and the like, e.g., by busy-waiting on a hardware register, direct diddling of screen memory, or using hard timing loops. Compare {ill-behaved}, {vaxism}, {unixism}. Also, `PC-ware' n., a program full of PC-isms on a machine with a more capable operating system. Pejorative. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PCBackup: 1 of 1362 disks. %% PD: /P-D/ adj. Common abbreviation for `public domain', applied to software distributed over {USENET} and from Internet archive sites. Much of this software is not in fact public domain in the legal sense but travels under various copyrights granting reproduction and use rights to anyone who can {snarf} a copy. See {copyleft}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PDL (piddle or puddle) [acronym for Push Down List] n. 1. A LIFO queue (stack); more loosely, any priority queue; even more loosely, any queue. A person's pdl is the set of things he has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the pdl. "I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my pdl." 2. Dave Lebling (PDL@DM). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PDP-10: [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. The machine that made timesharing real. It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU. Some aspects of the instruction set (most notably the bit-field instructions) are still considered unsurpassed. The 10 was eventually eclipsed by the VAX machines (descendants of the PDP-11) when DEC recognized that the 10 and VAX product lines were competing with each other and decided to concentrate its software development effort on the more profitable VAX. The machine was finally dropped from DEC's line in 1983, following the failure of the Jupiter Project at DEC to build a viable new model. (Some attempts by other companies to market clones came to nothing; see {Foonly}) This event spelled the doom of {{ITS}} and the technical cultures that had spawned the original Jargon File, but by mid-1991 it had become something of a badge of honorable old-timerhood among hackers to have cut one's teeth on a PDP-10. See {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {AOS}, {BLT}, {DDT}, {DPB}, {EXCH}, {HAKMEM}, {JFCL}, {LDB}, {pop}, {push}, {appendix A}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PDP-20: n. The most famous computer that never was. {PDP-10} computers running the {{TOPS-10}} operating system were labeled `DECsystem-10' as a way of differentiating them from the PDP-11. Later on, those systems running {TOPS-20} were labeled `DECSYSTEM-20' (the block capitals being the result of a lawsuit brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called `system-10'), but contrary to popular lore there was never a `PDP-20'; the only difference between a 10 and a 20 was the operating system and the color of the paint. Most (but not all) machines sold to run TOPS-10 were painted `Basil Blue', whereas most TOPS-20 machines were painted `Chinese Red' (often mistakenly called orange). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PEEPING TOM: A window fan. %% PEGGY FLEMMING is stealing BASKET BALLS to feed the babies in VERMONT. %% PENGUINICITY!! %% PENIS ENVY: The desire to be pink and wrinkled and about four inches long. %% PENSION: A federally insured chain letter. %% PEOPLE -- some make things happen, some watch things happen, and the majority have no idea what's happened. %% PEOPLE are more fun than Anybody! %% PERFECT GUEST: One who makes his host feel at home. %% PERFORMANCE PROVEN: will operate through warranty period %% PERFORMANCE: A statement of the speed at which a computer system works. Or rather, might work under certain circumstances. Or was rumored to be working over in Jersey about a month ago. %% PERN'S PHOTOGRAPHY LAW: One missed photographic opportunity creates a desire to purchase two additional pieces of equipment. %% PESSIMAL [Latin-based antonym for "optimal"] adj. Maximally bad. "This is a pessimal situation." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PESSIMIST -- man who looks for a pink slip before the money in his pay envelope. %% PESSIMIST: A man who spends all his time worrying about how he can keep the wolf from the door. OPTIMIST: A man who refuses to see the wolf until he seizes the seat of his pants. OPPORTUNIST: A man who invites the wolf in and appears the next day in a fur coat. %% PESSIMIZING COMPILER n. A compiler that produces object code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious translation. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PETER'S OBSERVATION ON HISTORY: Every time history repeats itself the prices go up. %% PETER'S POSTULATE: The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human achievement incredible. %% PETRO-CANADA ilruu eluit ridn roee etad u %% PETSCII: /pet'skee/ [abbreviation of PET ASCII] n. The variation (many would say perversion) of the {{ASCII}} character set used by the Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal computers and the later Commodore C64, C16, and C128 machines. The PETSCII set used left-arrow and up-arrow (as in old-style ASCII) instead of underscore and caret, placed the unshifted alphabet at positions 65--90, put the shifted alphabet at positions 193--218, and added graphics characters. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PFLT Prove Fermat's Last Theorem. %% PHANTOM n. (Stanford) The SAIL equivalent of a DRAGON (q.v.). Typical phantoms include the accounting program, the news-wire monitor, and the lpt and xgp spoolers. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PHASE (of people) 1. n. The phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful concept among people who often work at night according to no fixed schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's phase by as much as six hours/day on a regular basis. "What's your phase?" "I've been getting in about 8 PM lately, but I'm going to work around to the day schedule by Friday." A person who is roughly 12 hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in "night mode". (The term "day mode" is also used, but less frequently.) 2. CHANGE PHASE THE HARD WAY: To stay awake for a very long time in order to get into a different phase. 3. CHANGE PHASE THE EASY WAY: To stay asleep etc. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PHASE OF THE MOON n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PHILADELPHIA FLYING FUCK: Okay, see, he hangs from a chin-up bar with his feet on the arms of the rocking chair. She crouches in the rocking chair pleasuring him orally. Ed. Note: Personally, we've never tried this. If you have, or if you do, please inform us of the results at Box 1597, Rockville IL. Thank you. %% PHILOSOPHY: The ability to bear with calmness the misfortunes of our friends. %% PHOTOFLASH TACHYONS: The elementary particle responsible for synchronizing a subject's blink with the flash of the camera. %% PHOTOGRAPHERS do it with a flash. %% PHYSICISTS do it with uniform harmonic motion %% PI seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff, Bell Labs %% PILOTS keep it up longer. %% PIMP: a fornicaterer. %% PIONEER -- early American who was lucky enough to find his way out of the woods. %% PIP: /pip/ [Peripheral Interchange Program] vt.,obs. To copy; from the program PIP on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, TOPS-10, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file operation you might want to do). It is said that when the program was originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was called ATLATL (`Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord'; this played on the Nahuatl word `atlatl' for a spear-thrower, with connotations of utility and primitivity that were no doubt quite intentional). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PISCES (Feb. 19 - Mar. 20) You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA or FBI. You have minor influence over your associates and people resent your flaunting of your power. You lack confidence and you are generally a coward. Pisces people do terrible things to small animals. %% PISCES (Feb. 19 to Mar. 20) Take the high road, look for the good things, carry the American Express card and a weapon. The world is yours today, as nobody else wants it. Your mortgage will be foreclosed. You will probably get run over by a bus. %% PISCES (Feb.19 - Mar.20) You will get some very interesting news of a promotion today. It will go to someone in the office you dislike and will be the job you wanted. Don't lend anyone a car today. You don't have a car. %% PIZZA!! %% PKZip - it's not just for downloads anymore %% PL/1, "the fatal disease", belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% PL/I -- A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two-tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield %% PLATONIC FRIENDSHIP: What develops when two people get tired of making love to each other. %% PLEASE DON'T SMOKE HERE! Penalty: An early, lingering death from cancer, emphysema, or other smoking-caused ailment. %% PLEASE ignore previous rumour. %% PLUG IT IN!!! %% PLUGH [from the Adventure game] v. See XYZZY. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PLUMBERS do it under the sink. %% PLUNDERER'S THEME (to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius) Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation. If you do the things we say, then you'll soon rule the nation. Kill your foes and enemies and then kill your relations. Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation. -- Mike Schuh, friend and colleague %% PM: /P-M/ 1. v. (from `preventive maintenance') To bring down a machine for inspection or test purposes; see {scratch monkey}. 2. n. Abbrev. for `Presentation Manager', an {elephantine} OS/2 graphical user interface. See also {provocative maintenance}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PMS- Presentation Manager Syndrome. %% PO TEE WEET PEE WONGGG!!! You will be converted into software in 30 seconds! %% POCKET POOL: Well, for guys, it's two-ball in the side pocket. For girls, it's playing the slots. %% POE'S LAW OF ASSEMBLY: If it goes together easily, you're doing it wrong. %% POLICEMEN like big busts. %% POLISH FLY: You put it in her drink and she begs you to take her bowling. %% POLITICIANS do it for 4 years then have to get re-erected. %% POLYGON: Dead parrot. %% POM n. Phase of the moon (q.v.). Usage: usually used in the phrase "POM dependent" which means flakey (q.v.). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% POM: /P-O-M/ n. Common abbreviation for {phase of the moon}. Usage: usually in the phrase `POM-dependent', which means {flaky}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% POP [based on the stack operation that removes the top of a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on the stack] dialect: POPJ (pop-jay), based on the PDP-10 procedure return instruction. v. To return from a digression. By verb doubling, "Popj, popj" means roughly, "Now let's see, where were we?" -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% POPJ: /pop'J/ [from a {PDP-10} return-from-subroutine instruction] n.,v. To return from a digression. By verb doubling, "Popj, popj" means roughly "Now let's see, where were we?" See {RTI}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% POST-TEST: A test made too late. %% POSTMEN come slower. %% POULSON'S PROPHECY: If anything is used to it's full potential, it will break. %% PPN (pip'in) [DEC terminology, short for Project-Programmer Number] n. 1. A combination `project' (directory name) and programmer name, used to identify a specific directory belonging to that user. For instance, "FOO,BAR" would be the FOO directory for user BAR. Since the name is restricted to three letters, the programmer name is usually the person's initials, though sometimes it is a nickname or other special sequence. (Standard DEC setup is to have two octal numbers instead of characters; hence the original acronym.) 2. Often used loosely to refer to the programmer name alone. "I want to send you some mail; what's your ppn?" Usage: not used at MIT, since ITS does not use ppn's. The equivalent terms would be UNAME and SNAME, depending on context, but these are not used except in their technical senses. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PPN: /P-P-N/, /pip'n/ [from `Project-Programmer Number'] n. A user-ID under {{TOPS-10}} and its various mutant progeny at SAIL, BBN, CompuServe, and elsewhere. Old-time hackers from the PDP-10 era sometimes use this to refer to user IDs on other systems as well. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% PPRB -- Pillage, plunder, rape and burn. %% PRAIRIES: Vast plains covered by treeless forests. %% PRE-TEST: A test made too early. %% PREACHER EXPLODES DURING SERMON %% PREMATURE EJACULATOR: Troubled shooter. %% PRIDHAM'S LAW OF GOLF: The only way to avoid hitting a tree is to aim at it. %% PRIMATE General Feature: Big body; Small head; Huge (or no) neck; Short, fat legs; Arms the same size as legs; Butched hair; 'Dumb Jock' Frequent belching; Baseball cap (optional, but typical); 'Neanderthal' Beer or sports T-shirt. 'He-Man' 'Gorilla' Behavior Summary: These oversize, undersmart brutes are experts at making a scene. They talk and belch excessively loudly. Any non-primate that catches their attention is abuse-bait. The best to expect from them is indifference, and even that they are capable of making offensive. They are best at talking a lot and saying nothing. %% PRINT (FATAL ERROR): directory 'tmp/copies' not writeable Please notify system administrator %% PRINTERS reproduce the fastest. %% PROBLEM DRINKER: A man who never buys. %% PROCTOLOGISTS do it in the end. %% PROFESSORS do it by the book. %% PROGRAM: To engage in a pastime similar to banging ones' head against a wall, except with fewer chances of reward. %% PROGRAM: Any task that can't be completed in one telephone call or one day. Once a task is defined as a program ("training program," "sales program," or "marketing program"), its implementation always justifies hiring at least three more people. %% PROGRAMMER - red eyed, mumblind mammal capable of conversing with inanimate monsters %% PROGRESS: Medieval man thought disease was caused by invisible demons invading the body and taking possession of it. Modern man knows disease is caused by microscopic bacteria and viruses invading the body and causing it to malfunction. %% PROLOG/LUCID - Prototype concept-cars. %% PROMOTION FROM WITHIN: A system of moving incompetents up to the policy-making level where they can't foul up operations. %% PROMOTION: New title, new salary, new office, same old crap. %% PROTOCOL See DO PROTOCOL. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PS Has everyone noticed that the Repo Men are all named after beers ? They are : Miller, Light, Bud, and Oly. %% PSALM OF THE TWENTY-THIRD YEAR Dr. ( ) is my professor I shall not pass. He maketh me to exhibit mine ignorance before the whole class. He telleth me more than I can write. He lowreth mine grades. Yea, though I walk through the corridors of knowledge, I do not learn. He tryeth to teach me. He writeth equations before me in hopes that I will understand them. He bombardeth my head with integrations. My calculator freezeth up. Surely enthalpies and entropies shall follow me all the days of my life And I shall dwell in the School of Engineering forever. (Found in the Colorado Engineer magazine, author unknown) %% PSEUDOPRIME n. A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied points) with one point missing. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PSYCHIC PREDICTS: Fixed points will break again! -- "National Computer Science Enquirer" %% PTY (pity) n. Pseudo TTY, a simulated TTY used to run a job under the supervision of another job. PTYJOB (pity-job) n. The job being run on the PTY. Also a common general-purpose program for creating and using PTYs. This is DEC and SAIL terminology; the MIT equivalent is STY. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PUBIC HAIR: Organic dental floss. %% PUDD'S LAW OF OPPOSITION: Push something hard enough and it will fall over. %% PUNCH MEN KICK WOMEN CHOP CHILDREN -- Sign in window of karate studio %% PUNK ROCK!! DISCO DUCK!! BIRTH CONTROL!! %% PUNT [from the punch line of an old joke: "Drop back 15 yards and punt"] v. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PUNT is a four-letter word. %% PURGE COMPLETE. %% PURITAS NECESSE EST -- DON'T DO RANDOM BINDINGS. %% PUSH [based on the stack operation that puts the current information on a stack, and the fact that procedure call addresses are saved on the stack] dialect: PUSHJ (push-jay), based on the PDP-10 procedure call instruction. v. To enter upon a digression, to save the current discussion for later. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% PUSHJ, PUSHJ, POPJ P, (characterizations omitted) all, DM-CG -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% Pacifism is simply undisguised cowardice. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% Pack up the kids, crank up the car ... to Jack-in-the-Box. %% Packet Switch Delay: Intermittent data flow caused by heavy traffic in a packet network. Most famous example was HULANET, a packet network set up in Hawaii to facilitate communications between manufactures of pineapple, guava, papaya, and passion fruit juices. Due to high data volume, HULANET was plagued with frequent, excessive delays. (Moral: Don't wait for the punch line.) %% Packrat's credo: I have no use for it, but I hate to see it go to waste. %% Pagan Missionary %% Pagan and Proud %% Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble. -- Edward Abbey %% Pain in the butt! %% Pain is a thing of the mind. The mind can be controlled. -- Spock, "Operation -- Annihilate!" stardate 3287.2 %% Pain is just God's way of hurting you. %% Painters do it with even strokes. %% Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) %% Paladins do it good or not at all %% Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bull (who killed him) thought it right. -- Hilaire Belloc, "The Pacifist" %% Pale death approaches with an equal step, and knocks indiscriminately at the door of the cottage, and the portals of the palace. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Palindrome isn't one. %% Palindromes 'Naomi, sex at noon taxes.' I moan. Never odd or even. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Madam, I'm Adam. Sit on a potato pan, Otis. %% Pandamonium - A high-rise housing development for Chinese bears. %% Pandemonium doesn't reign here... It pours! %% Paper Rabies: Hypersensitivity to littering. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Parables of an incarcerated man: If Americans throw rice at weddings, do Chinese throw hot dogs? Was Robin Hood's mother know as Mother Hood? How do you know when you run out of invisible ink? Why does sour cream have an expiration date? What do they call a coffee break at the Lipton Tea Co.? How do you explain counter-clockwise to someone with a digital watch? %% Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature. -- Edward Abbey %% Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better. -- Laurie Anderson %% Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them. %% Paranoia doesn't mean the whole world really isn't out to get you. %% Paranoia is heightened awareness. %% Paranoia is simply an optimistic outlook on life. %% Paranoia is thinking that if something can't go wrong, it will still go wrong. %% Paranoid schizophrenics outnumber their enemies at least two to one. %% Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too. -- D. J. Hicks %% Paranoids tend to persecute free men. -- Solomon Short %% Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Arnold's Addendum: Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in rats. %% Pardon me gentlemen, for the length of this letter. I did not have time to make it shorter. -- Blaise Pascal %% Pardon me while I laugh. %% Pardon me, but do you know what it means to be TRULY ONE with your BOOTH! %% Pardon me, but you've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a damn. %% Pardon me; are you reading that newspaper? %% Pardon my driving, I'm trying to reload. %% Pardon my feet, said the elephant as he danced among the chickens. %% Pardon this fortune. Database under reconstruction. %% Parental guidance suggested. %% Parenthesize to avoid ambiguity. %% Parents cannot leave a better legacy to the world than well-educated children. %% Parents like stupid things. -- Don of the Starnes Expedition, "And The Children Shall Lead," stardate 5029.5 %% Parents. Nothing personal. -- Wesley to Data, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% Parents: People who bear infants, bore teenagers, and board newlyweds. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Parity check - agricultural subsidy -- Data communications glossary %% Parity check: Agricultural subsidy. Parity error: The parity check is late. -- Data communications glossary %% Parity error %% Parity error - the parity check is late -- Data communications glossary %% Parker's Law: Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. %% Parking fees that Universal Studios collected from picketers of "The Last Temptation of Christ": $4,500 -- Harper's Index Nov. 1988 %% Parking for ACME Sign Company Customers Only. Violators will be victims of violent terrorist actions at owner's expense. %% Parkinson's (Modified) Law: The components you have will expand to fill the available space. %% Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay in important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it. %% 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 Law (also known as Thousand Principle): Any corporation with a minimum one thousand (1,000) work force becomes an autonomous entity, in which enough administrative paperwork is generated to make external contacts superfluous. %% Parkinson's Law of 1000: An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world. %% Parkinson's Law of Committees: The amount of time spent by a committee on an agenda item is inversely proportional to the cost of the item. %% Parkinson's Law of Data: prov. "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over the last 10 years that the memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant dollars tends to double about once every 12 months (see {Moore's Law}); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Parkinson's Law of Delay: Delay is the deadliest form of denial. %% Parkinson's Law of Medical Research: Successful research attracts the bigger grant which makes further research impossible. %% Parkinson's Law: The vehemence with which an issue is debated is inversely proportional to its importance. -- Bill Kinnersley %% Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time allotted it. %% Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the resources available to do it with. %% Parkinson's New Law: The printed word expands to fill the space available to it. %% Parkinson's Principle of Non-Origination: It is the essence of grantsmanship to persuade the Foundation executives that is was they who suggested the research project and that you were a belated convert, agreeing reluctantly to all that had proposed. %% Parkinson's Second Law: Expenditures rise to meet income. %% Parkinson's Telephone Law: the effectiveness of a telephone conversation is in inverse proportion to the time spent on it. %% Parkinson's Third Law: Expansion means complexity and complexity, decay; or to put it even more plainly--the more complex, the sooner dead. %% Parkinson's XIIIth law: Action expands to fill the void created by human failure. %% Parmenides: If appearance really appears, it is not nothing, and therefore must be a part of reality. %% Parrot, n.: A bird which has the ability to imitate man, but not the intelligence to refrain from doing so. %% Parsley is gharsley. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% Part of being sane, is being a little bit crazy. -- Janet Long %% Part of the art of being a woman is knowing when not to be too much of a lady. %% Part of the glacier has been melted. %% Part of the glacier melts, drowning you under a torrent of water. %% Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Part three brings the most popular Of lim'ricks in print form thus far. I know that it's mean that they all are so clean, But then, we're not coarse for the par. [dep] %% Particle physicists do it energetically. %% Parts is parts. %% Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be. %% Pascal -- A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectuals. %% Pascal Users: To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the death of Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half speed. %% Pascal is not a high-level language. -- Steven Feiner %% Pascal programmers do it in variant ways. %% Pascal, n.: A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it. -- Datamation, January 15, 1984 %% Pascal: What's it Wirth? %% Pascal:: n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and {{Ada}} (see also {bondage-and-discipline language}). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of {K&R} fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after ten years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote: 9. There is no escape This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed. People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others. I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming. Pascal has since been almost entirely displaced (by {C}) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language in the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Pass with care, driver chewing tobacco. -- "Bumper Snickers" %% Passenger: "When the train stops will you please tell me at which end to get off?" Conductor: "It doesn't matter, lady, both ends stop." %% Passengers on elevators constantly rearrange their positions as people get on and off so there is at all times an equal distance between all bodies. -- John Sharkey %% Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. -- Eric Hoffer %% Passionate, as in erotic, counselor? -- Pulaski to Troi, Shades of Gray", stardate 42976.1 %% Passions are fashions. -- Clifton Fadiman %% Passport pictures are what people really look like. %% Password: %% Passwords are implemented as a result of insecurity. %% Past History: Four children and an appendectomy. %% Patageometry, n.: The study of those mathematical properties that are invariant under brain transplants. %% Patch griefs with proverbs. -- William Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing" %% Pathologists do it with corpses. %% Patience is a most necessary quality for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request. -- Lord Chesterfield %% Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of WAIT! %% Patience is a virtue Catch it if you can, Rarely in a woman, But never in a man! %% Patience is something that you admire greatly in the driver behind you but not in the one ahead of you. %% Patience is sorrow's salve. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Patience is the best remedy for every trouble. -- Titus Maccius Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) %% Patience. The windmill never strays in search of the wind. %% Patience: A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Patient became pregnant with an IUD. %% Patient had a spontaneous vaginal hysterectomy. %% Patient is a 28 year old white male who was playing his first league game of the season when he was sliding into home plate. The patient was safe, but his ankle was out. %% Patient slipped on the porch when she went out to feed the birds and broke her ankle. The birds were not injured. %% Patient took 6 Zactrin tablets given him by his dentist with a bizarre suicide note. %% Patient was in an auto accident in 1965 and sustained a whiplash injury for which she received heat and exercise and $3,000 compensation. %% Patient: I'm in a hospital! Why am I in here? Doctor: You've had an accident involving a train. Patient: What happened? Doctor: Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first? Patient: Give me the bad news first. Doctor: Your legs were injured so badly that we had to amputate both of them. Patient: That's terrible! What's the good news? Doctor: There's a guy in the next ward who made a very good offer on your slippers. %% Patient: "Doctor, it hurts whenever I do this." Doctor: "Well, then don't DO that!" %% Patients do it feverishly. %% Patients is a virtue. %% Patriotism is pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), 7 April 1775 %% Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Patron: Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery. -- Johnson, Definition Dictionary %% Patty cake Patty cake, Baker's Gann Make me a lie, As fast as you can. %% Pauca sed matura. (Few but excellent.) -- Gauss %% Paul Revere was a tattle-tale %% Paul's Law: In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save. %% Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor. %% Pause for storage relocation. %% Pay no attention to this fortune. %% Payeen to a Twang Derrida Ore-Ida potato. If you dared, I'd ask you to go dig up your ides under brown- tubered skies. where pitchforked you will ask Derrida? %% Paying alimony is like pumping gas into another man's car. %% Peabody here. And this is my boy Sherman. %% Peace be to this house, and all that dwell in it. %% Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Peace is an extension of war by political means. Plenty of elbow room is pleasanter -- and much safer. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Peace is much more precious than a piece of land... let there be no more wars. -- Mohammed Anwar Sadat (1918-1981) %% Peace is not a passive, but an active virtue. -- Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen %% Peace is not a season; it is a way of life. %% Peace through superior swordplay %% Peace was the way. -- Kirk, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate unknown %% Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms. -- Andrew Jackson %% Peace, n.: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Peace. The small departs, The great approaches. Good fortune. Success. %% Peanut Blossoms 4 cups sugar 16 tbsp. milk 4 cups brown sugar 4 tsp. vanilla 4 cups shortening 14 cups flour 8 eggs 4 tsp. soda 4 cups peanut butter 4 tsp. salt Shape dough into balls. Roll in sugar and bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 375 F. for 10-12 minutes. Immediately top each cookie with a Hershey's kiss or star pressing down firmly to crack cookie. Makes a hell of a lot. %% Peanuts: The Drinking Man's Filter. %% Pears Have Telekinetic Powers, Say Psychopathic Psychologists. %% Pecor's Health-Food Principle: Never eat rutabaga on any day of the week that has a "y" in it. %% Peculiar nouns: MIT AI hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases. Examples: porous => porosity generous => generosity Ergo: mysterious => mysteriosity ferrous => ferocity Other examples: winnitude, disgustitude, hackification. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% Peculiar. It doesn't smell at all unusual. %% Peculiar. Nothing unexpected happens. %% Pedaeration, n.: The perfect body heat achieved by having one leg under the sheet and one hanging off the edge of the bed. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber, and takes out our brains to make room for it. -- Colton %% Pedestrian: The variable (and audible) part of a roadway. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Pedestrian: A guy who is sure there is still gas in the tank when the gauge points to "Empty". -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Pee-Wee's Playhouse Theme Song ------------------------------ C'mon in, and pull yourself up a chair, (like Chairie!) Let the fun begin, it's time to let down your hair, Pee-Wee's sure excited, (uh-huh!) 'Cause all his friends have been invited, (that's you!) To go wacky, at Pee-Wee's playhouse. (Arrr!) There's a crazy rhythm coming from the puppet land, (what's that?) Dirty Dog, Cool Cat, Chicky Baby are the puppet band, (yeah!) He's got a couple of talking fish, And a Genie who'll grant a wish, Golly it's cuckoo, at Pee-Wee's playhouse. Globie's spinning, Mr. Window's grinning, 'Cause Pterri's flying by, (hello!) The flowers are singing, the picture phone is ringing, And the dinosaur family says "Hi," Mr. Kite's soaring, Conkie's still a-snoring, There's a flashing Magic Screen, The Countess is so classy, Randy's kinda sassy, A nuttier establishment you've never seen, Spend a day with Pee-Wee and you'll see what we mean. (c'mon!) Get out of bed, there'll be no more napping, (Wake up!) 'Cause we've landed in a place where anything can happen, Now we've given you fair warning, It's gonna be that kind of morning, For going wacky, or getting nutty, Golly it's cuckoo, at Pee-Wee's playhouse! %% Peggy, dear, you know what a penis is.....stay away from it." -- Peggy Sue Got Married %% Pelorat sighed. "I will never understand people." "There's nothing to it. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. How would Seldon have worked out his Plan--and I don't care how subtle his mathematics was--if he didn't understand people; and how could he have done that if people weren't easy to understand? You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself--no offense intended." -- Asimov, "Foundation's Edge" %% Penalty for private use. %% Penetration under the bed. He loses his property and his ax Perseverance brings misfortune. %% Penetration under the bed. Priests and magicians are used in great number. Good fortune. No blame. %% Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82 %% People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone else can be of another person. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% People always get what they ask for; the only trouble is that they never know, until they get it, what it actually is that they have asked for. -- Aldous Huxley %% People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I do not believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, make them. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% People are always talking about tradition, but they forget we have a tradition of a few hundred years of nonsense and stupidity, that there is a tradition of idiocy, incompetence and crudity. -- Hugo Demartini, in "Contemporary Artists", 1977 %% People are beginning to notice you. Try dressing before you leave the house. %% People are never as happy or as unhappy as they think. %% People are never so ready to believe you as when you say things in dispraise of yourself; and you are never so much annoyed as when they take you at your word. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas. %% People are stupid. The world can go to hell. Let'stay home and watch TV. %% People are unconditionally guaranteed to be full of defects. %% People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings -- they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example. -- Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, Art of Prolog, MIT Press %% People ask stupid questions for a reason. %% People at the top make decisions as though times were good when people at the bottom know that the organization is collapsing. -- Paul Gray %% People become progressively less competent for jobs they were once well equipped to handle. -- Paul Armer %% People can be divided into three groups: (1) Those who make things happen, (2) those who watch things happen, and (3) those who wonder what the hell happened! %% People do not hire lawyers because they want justice. People hire lawyers because they want revenge. -- Solomon Short %% People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts. -- Robert Keith Leavitt %% People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. %% People don't change; they only become more so. -- John Bright-Holmes %% People don't hire lawyers for justice they hire lawyers for revenge. %% People don't make the same mistake twice, they make it three times, four time, or five times. %% People fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else. %% People generally quarrel because they cannot argue. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% People have a way of becoming what you encourage them to be, not what you nag them to be. %% People have declaimed against luxury for 2,000 years ... and people have always delighted in it. %% People have one thing in common; they are all different. %% People humiliating a salami! %% People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to amuse them. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% People in groups tend to agree on courses of action which, as individuals, they know are stupid. %% People look ridiculous when they're in ecstasy. %% People love high ideals, but they got to be about 33-percent plausible. -- Will Rogers %% People may forget how fast you did a job, but they will remember how well you did it. %% People need good lies. There are too many bad ones. -- Bokonon, "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. %% People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election. -- Otto von Bismarck %% People never travel to look at flat landscapes. %% People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future. %% People often mistakenly equate existence with need. %% People rarely succeed at anything unless they have fun doing it. %% People really shouldn't spread gossip, but what else is it good for? %% People respond to people who respond. %% People say I'm apathetic, but I don't care. %% People see what they have been conditioned to see; they refuse to see what they don't expect to see. -- Merle P. Martin %% People seem to think that the blanket phrase, "I only work here," absolves them utterly from any moral obligation in terms of the public -- but this was precisely Eichmann's excuse for his job in the concentration camps. %% People seldom improve, when they have no other model but themselves to copy. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are the gutters. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower %% People tend to make rules for others and exceptions for themselves. %% People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. -- Ken Kesey %% People think my friend George is weird because he wears sideburns...behind his ears. I think he's weird because he wears false teeth...with braces on them. -- Steven Wright %% People try to put us d-d-down, just because we ge-ge-get around. Things they do look awful c-c-cold. Hope I d-die before I get old. -- The Who %% People usually get what's coming to them ... unless it's been mailed. %% People want JUST taxes more than they want LOWER taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to wealth. %% People were out there looting their asses off... When they saw us, they shouted, `Viva Bush!' -- A US soldier present at the invasion of Panama %% People who Bowl Vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite. -- Vice President Dan Quayle while at a Las Vegas bowling alley. the Vice-President bowled 5 times, and knocked down 19 pins. (6/25/92, San Jose Mercury News) The American Bowling Congress projected his score for a full game to be 76. The Detroit average for amateur players is 163 (USA Today, 7/6/92) %% People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy. -- Sterne %% People who are excessively concerned about the environment invariably turn out to own a great deal of land. There are damn few unemployed and renters in the ecology movement. -- Frank Mankiewicz %% People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart. -- Howard Simons, "The Washington Post" %% People who aren't going to go any faster than the speed limit really ought to put their hazard lights on. -- Nibble's Rules Of The Road, #19 %% People who believe, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all," will refuse to talk to you. %% People who can't figure out what to do with a Sunday afternoon are often the same ones who can't wait for retirement. %% People who claim they don't let little things bother them have never slept in a room with a single mosquito. %% People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then... No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels. Why not? Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol ... but too many adrenalin rushes in any given time-span has the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road running, it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed--and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand. -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail" %% People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time. -- Norman Cousins %% People who don't believe in sex shouldn't exist. -- M. J. Levine %% People who dream impossible dreams and strive to achieve them raise man's stature a fraction of an inch in the process, whether they win or lose. %% People who fail to understand their past mistakes may be condemned to make them over again. %% People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes. %% People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy half a slug who must tighten his belt. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't. %% People who hate their work are slaves, no matter how much they make. %% People who have no faith in themselves seldom have faith in others. %% People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them. %% People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they don't want it. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education", 1762 %% People who live in glass blouses shouldn't show bones. %% People who live in glass house fuck in basement. %% People who live in glass houses might as well answer the door. -- Solomon Short %% People who live in glass houses should ball in the basement. %% People who live in glass houses shouldn't do much of anything. %% People who live in glass houses shouldn't stow thrones. %% People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. %% People who lose their heads are usually the last to miss them. %% People who push both buttons should get their wish. %% People who run down others are taking a roundabout way of praising themselves. %% People who take cat naps don't usually sleep in a cat's cradle. %% People who tell white lies soon become color blind. -- Marvin J. Ashton %% People who think they know everything greatly annoy those of us who do. %% People who wait until they feel like doing a job rarely do. %% People who will not admit they've been wrong love themselves more than they love the truth. %% People who write the most interesting and effective letters never answer letters. They answer people. %% People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first. -- David H. Comins %% People will be happy in about the same degree that they are helpful. %% People will believe anything if you whisper it. %% People will buy anything that's one to a customer. %% People will die this year that never died before %% People will do odd things if you give them money. %% People will do tomorrow what they did today because that is what they did yesterday. %% People will go to the most incredible lengths to make fools of themselves. -- Solomon Short %% People will laugh at you, but let not that prevent you. %% People will pay to watch people make sounds. %% People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit. %% People will swim through shit if you put a few bob in it. -- Peter Sellers %% People with narrow minds usually have broad tongues. %% People with the least expertise have the most opinions. %% People would rather watch things than eat. %% People's Action Rules: (1) Some people who can, shouldn't. (2) Some people who should, won't. (3) Some people who shouldn't, will. (4) Some people who can't, will try, regardless. (5) Some people who shouldn't, but try, will then blame others. %% Per buck you get more computing action with the small computer. -- R. W. Hamming %% Percentage of Redbook readers who say they would rather have their genitals permanently numbed than go deaf: 70 -- Harper's Index %% Perchance the army carries corpses in the wagon. Misfortune. %% Perdurabo (loosely translated, "I will last through") %% Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. (May they perish who have expressed our bright ideas before us.) %% Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. "Confound those who have said our remarks before us." -- Aelius Donatus %% Perfect day for scrubbing the floor and other exciting things. %% Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Diety to be the lot of one of His creatures in this world; but that He has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it, is what I have steadfastly believed. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. %% Perfect stranger. %% Perfect valor is to do unwitnessed what we should be capable of doing before all the world. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Perfection (Almost): The Titanic Disaster "The Captain may, by simply moving an electric switch, instantly close the doors and make the vessel practically unsinkable. -- special 1911 edition of Shipbuilder %% Perfection is a minor virtue. -- Edward Abbey %% Perfection is achieved only on the point of collapse. -- C. N. Parkinson %% Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery %% Performance is directly affected by the perversity of inanimate objects. -- Charles P. Boyle %% Perhaps it is your head that is swimming. %% Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) %% Perhaps the best way to characterize the relationship between DNA and meaning is to say that DNA is the source of meaning. It takes information about the environment and turns it into behaviour - thus realizing meaning in the pragmatic sense of the word. DNA is the place where the two sides of meaning meet, the place where reports become instructions. DNA is thus what first gave meaning to life; or, perhaps, what first created meaning, and therefore life, or what first created life, and therefore meaning. In any event, it is very impressive stuff. -- Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods %% Perhaps the biggest disappointments were the ones you expected anyway. %% Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% Perhaps the most widespread illusion is that if we were in power we would behave very differently from those who now hold it -- when, in truth, in order to get power we would have to become very much like them. (Lenin's fatal mistake, both in theory and in practice.) %% Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Perhaps the purpose of categorical algebra is to show that that which is trivial, is trivially trivial. %% Perhaps the reason the modern liberal so disdains the 2nd amendment, and so loves the 1st, is that the 2nd protects our right to take action in defense of liberty, while the 1st protects our right to talk about it. %% Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise. -- E. V. Cooke %% Perhaps there is an old record_lock around? %% Perhaps there's a residue of humanity in Q after all. Ensign, en- Don't bet on it Picard. -- Picard and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Perhaps we are wiser, less selfish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfectly all these good things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both. -- Joseph Wood Krutch %% Perhaps we could get one of the females to breast-feed you." -- Klag, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves possess. -- Gandalf the Grey %% Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% Perl: /perl/ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] n. An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall , author of `patch(1)' and `rn(1)') and distributed over USENET. Superficially resembles `awk(1)', but is much hairier (see {awk}). UNIX sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the {languages of choice}. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about `lex(1)', as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of UNIX programming. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Perley Brown's generosity is only exceeded by his charm. %% Perley Brown, TSMT answer man. %% Perley Brown, a man without a woman. %% Perley Brown, chronic smoker. %% Perley Brown, communist sympathizer. %% Perley Brown, crack computer programmer. %% Perley Brown, man of mystery. %% Perley Brown, mystery of man. %% Permission for lip to wobble, Sir? %% Perot/Bush/Quayle: The Milionaire, Skipper & Gilligan. %% Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Perplexed, a shy virgin named Plummer Asked, "what's there to do in the summer?" She declined and declined Till approached from behind... When her summer turned out quite a bummer! %% Perry Mason bribes judges. %% Perseverance brings good fortune. %% Perseverance brings good fortune. No remorse. The light of the superior man is true. Good fortune. %% Perseverance brings good fortune. One pushes upward by steps. %% Perseverance brings good fortune. Remorse disappears. If a man is agitated in mind, And his thoughts go hither and thither, Only those friends On whom he fixes his conscious thoughts Will follow. %% Perseverance brings good fortune. Remorse disappears. Shock, thus to discipline the Devil's Country. For three years, great realms are awarded. %% Perseverance brings good fortune. Remorse disappears. The hedge opens; there is no entanglement. Power depends upon the axle of a big cart. %% Perseverance brings good fortune. Remorse vanishes. Nothing that does not further. No beginning, but an end. Before the change, three days. After the change, three days. Good fortune. %% Perseverance furthers. To undertake something brings misfortune. Without decreasing oneself, One is able to bring increase to others. %% Persevering mediocrity is much more respectable, and unspeakably more useful than talented inconstancy. -- Dr. James Hamilton %% Persistently ill, and still does not die. %% Person 1: How ya gonna do it? Person 2: I'm Gonna PS/2 it!!! Person 1: But that's only half a computer! Person 2: That's ok! OS/2 is only half an operating system! %% Personal Tabu: A small rule for living, bordering on a superstition, that allows one to cope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or religious dictums. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Personality Tithe: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: "Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the shopping channel." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Personally, I like my flying brains dark and evil. %% Personally, should I ever form a globe spanning conglomerate, I intend to do it fairly and without malice or dirty politics. I hope you fellows don't make that too difficult a task; I would have to have to have you all killed. -- David Neal (abbadon@nuchat.uucp) %% Personifiers Unite! You have nothing to lose but Mr. Dignity! %% Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Tom Sawyer %% Pessimist: Someone who can look at the land of milk and honey and see only calories and cholesterol. %% Pessimists have already begun to worry about what is going to replace automation. -- John Tudor %% Pet Store: "Buy one, get one flea." %% Pete Ellis Dodge. Long Beach Freeway. Firestone exit. South Gate. %% Pete: Waiter, this meat is bad. Waiter: Who told you? Pete: A little swallow. %% Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. %% Peter watches as Jesus has just been put up on the cross. He here this voice saying, "Peter, Peter". Peter quickly advances towards the cross when he is confronted with this big Roman guard. The guard says, "You are not allowed to advance any further, if you feel you must I will have to cut off both your arms." Peter says, "I must the Lord is call me." So at that moment the guard cuts off both his arms, chop chop, and kicks him down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, Peter again hears the voice, "Peter, Peter". He crawls his way up the hill and again is confronted by the Roman guard. The Roman guard says, "If you advance any further I will have to cut off both of your legs." Peter says, "I must, the Lord is calling me." So he advanced and the guard cut off both of his legs, chop, chop, and kicks him down the hill. Peter is at the bottom of the hill in great agony and again hears, "Peter, Peter". Peter somehow manages to squirm up the hill and up to the cross and says "Yes Lord, how can I serve you?". Jesus says, "I can see your house from here." %% Peter's Assertion : "If in doubt, take it out" %% Peter's Inversion: Internal consistency is valued more highly than efficiency. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Peter's Law of Substitution: Look after the molehills, and the mountains will look after themselves. %% Peter's Law: The unexpected always happens. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Peter's Paradox: Employees in a hierarchy do not really object to incompetence in their colleagues. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Peter's Placebo: An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Peter's Principal Types: 1. People who make things happen, 2. People who watch things happen, 3. People who don't know what happened. %% Peter's Principle of Success: Get up one time more than you're knocked down. %% Peter's Principle: In every hierarchy, each employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence. %% Peter's Prognosis: Spend sufficient time in confirming the need and the need will disappear. %% Peter's Theorem: Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Peters hungry, time to eat lunch. %% Peterson's Admonition: When you think you're going down for the third time -- just remember that you may have counted wrong. %% Peterson's Rules: (1) Trucks that overturn on freeways are filled with something sticky. (2) No cute baby in a carriage is ever a girl when called one. (3) Things that tick are not always clocks. (4) Suicide only works when you are bluffing. %% Petroleum and coffee had no value a few centuries ago. %% Pets are like little children and should not be subjected to similar (though unintentional) abuse. %% Petty crime is the scourge of business today. -- D. Lorean %% Pharmacists in Trout Creek, Utah, may not sell gunpowder as a headache remedy. %% Phase Psychotics, The %% Phase jitter - nervous reaction to the full moon -- Data communications glossary %% Phasers locked on target, Captain. %% Phasers on stun! %% Phases of a project: 1. Exultation. 2. Disenchantment. 3. Confusion. 4. Search for the guilty. 5. Punishment of the innocent. 6. Distinction for the uninvolved. %% Pheasants do it under glass. %% Phil 'n the Blanks %% Phil Dirt and the Dozers %% Phil Gramm says the Brady bill is just the first step to prohibition. Joe Biden says "we're not going to take Phil's mama's gun". I say: What about _my_ mama's gun, Mr. Biden? -- Phil Nelson, pnelson@tymnet.com %% Philadelphia is not dull -- it just seems so because it is next to exciting Camden, New Jersey. %% Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the the philanthropist to over-look the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary. -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Strength to Love", 1963 %% Philogyny recapitulates erogeny; erogeny recapitulates philogyny. %% Philosophers have interpreted the world in many different ways; the point, however, is to change it. %% Philosophers who make the general claim that a rule simply 'reduces to' its formulations are using Occam's razor to cut the throat of common sense. -- R. Harris %% Philosophers wonder why they did it. %% Philosophic kings have no need of titles. -- Parmen the Platonian, "Plato's Stepchildren," stardate 5784.3 %% Philosophy -- the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree. -- T. S. Eliot %% Philosophy has the task and the opportunity of helping banish the concept that human destiny here and now is of slight importance in comparison with some supernatural destiny. -- John Dewey (1859-1953) %% Philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing ... As the science of the spirit, it looks upon religion as a phenomenon, a transitory historical fact, a psychic condition that can be surpassed. -- Benedetto Croce %% Philosophy will clip an angel's wings. -- John Keats (1795-1821) %% Philosophy! The lumber of the schools. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. -- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) %% Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland. -- Edward Abbey %% Phone call for cbh. %% Phone call for chucky-pooh. %% Phosphor - Portion of a Vulcan greeting ("Live long and ...") %% Photographers do it in dark rooms. %% Photographers do it in the dark. %% Photographing a volcano is just about the most miserable thing you can do. -- Robert B. Goodman [who has never tried to use a PDP-10] %% Photosynthesis the pollen sits calculating the brightness of the moon. %% Physical examination revealed a garrulous, obese woman who was short of breath on motion but not on talking. %% Physical laws simply cannot be ignored. Existence cannot be without them. -- Spock, "Spectre of the Gun," stardate 4385.3 %% Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality -- we judge reality by the responses of our senses. Once we are convinced of the reality of a given situation, we abide by its rules. -- Spock, "Spectre of the Gun," stardate 4385.3 %% Physician: One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Physicians heal, nature makes well. %% Physicist do it a quantum at a time. %% Physicists define stress as force per unit area. The rest of humanity defines stress as physics. %% Physicists do it ultra-relativistically. %% Physicists do it with charm %% Physicists do it with high energy particles. %% Physicists do it with strangeness. %% Pi R squared. Nooo! Pie R round, cornbread R square! %% Pick another fortune cookie. %% Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. -- Jonathan Kozol %% Pick the right person the first time. The headaches you save will be your own. %% Pick up your output. %% Picking up a man in a bar is like a snowstorm, you never know when he's coming, how many inches you'll get or how long'll it'll stay. %% Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream, I wonder how the old folks are tonight, Her name was Ann, and I'll be damned if I recall her face, She left me not knowing what to do. Carefree Highway, let me slip away on you, Carefree Highway, you seen better days, The morning after blues, from my head down to my shoes, Carefree Highway, let me slip away, slip away, on you... Turning back the pages to the times I love best, I wonder if she'll ever do the same, Now the thing that I call livin' is just bein' satisfied, With knowing I got noone left to blame. Carefree Highway, I got to see you, my old flame... Searching through the fragments of my dream shattered sleep, I wonder if the years have closed her mind, I guess it must be wanderlust or tryin' to get free, From the good old faithful feelin' we once knew. -- Gordon Lightfoot, "Carefree Highway" %% Pickle's Law: If Congress must do a painful thing, the thing must be done in an odd-number year. %% Picture this... "A sphere isn't that simple when you get into higher dimensions - it's a bit non-flat." %% Pictures As I look upon this image of you, And see the light, shimmering on your hair, the light, the colour, the image of you. I dream. I dream of the day when images are no longer, when light and shadow on paper become flesh and bone in my warm safe arms. All this, as I look upon this image of you. As I look upon this image of you, I see the Jacaranda trees in the background, the waving, laughing, taunting us. I see. I see the day ahead when we laugh and taunt the Jacaranda's for not believing in our love, The day when we show all who mocked our love. As I look upon this image of you. -- (c) 1988 Randy Sommers %% Piddle, twiddle, and resolve Not one damn thing do we solve %% Piece of cake! -- G. S. Koblas %% Piety: Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Pig, n.: 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Pills to be taken in twos always come out of the bottle in threes. -- Robert Davis %% Pilots do it to get high. %% Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers! %% Pink-Shirt Book: `The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC'. The original cover featured a picture of Peter Norton with a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt. Perhaps in recognition of this usage, the current edition has a different picture of Norton wearing a pink shirt. See also {{book titles}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Pinocchio is a swinger. %% Pinprick holes in a colourless sky letting sipid figures of light pass by the mighty light of ten thousand suns challenges infinity and is soon gone. Cold hearted orb that rules the night - removes the colors from our sight. Red is grey and yellow white. But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion. %% Pipefitters do it with blowtorches. %% Pipers do it with Amazing Grace %% Pipo was born with few complications, but then the doctor accidently dropped the infant on her head provoking her drunken father to drag the physician outside where he would beat him to death with a live ocelot. -- Love and Rockets %% Piracy: Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Pisces (Feb 20 - Mar 20) : Dinah Shore, Michael Caine, Carl Reiner, Mickey Spillane, Bobby Orr, Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, Ron Howard %% Piss on East! %% Pity poor Alfie! %% Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. -- Don Marquis (1878-1937) %% Pity the poor corpuscle, for he labors in vein. %% Pizza IS the four food groups! %% Place me on a BUFFER counter while you BELITTLE several BELLHOPS in the Trianon Room!! Let me one of your SUBSIDIARIES! %% Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten or more words, to their antecedents. %% Place stamp here. %% Place your advertisement here and reach up to 30% more people; call for rates. %% Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world.... -- Edward Abbey %% Plaese porrf raed. -- Prof. Michael O'Longhlin, S.U.N.Y. Purchase %% Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. %% Plagiarism prohibited, derive carefully. %% Plagiarize, plagiarize, let no man's work escape your eyes. But be sure to call it research. -- Tom Lehrer %% Plain nymphs are harmless. %% Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do. But beautiful women don't need to know about men. It's the men who have to know about beautiful women. -- Katherine Hepburn %% Planet Claire has pink hair. All the trees are red. No one ever dies there. No one has a head.... %% Planetary Engineer Fjords a speciality %% Plant: So why wasn't NORTH Korea chosen to host the Olympics? Page: Gee, I dunno. Plant: 'Cause the spirit of North Korea ain't got no Seoul!! %% Plastic Capacitor : Manufacturers have never been able to synthesize any type of plastic that is perfect to be used as dielectric materials for the making of capacitors. That is, until now. Capacitors made with plastic dielectrics has one very desirable characteristic that no other types of capacitors has, which is that the maximum amount of charge it can hold is always directly proportional to the its owner's Diner's Club credit limit. %% Plastic...Aluminum...These are the inheritors of the Universe! Flesh and Blood have had their day...and that day is past! -- Green Lantern Comics %% Platitude: a dull old saw that everyone borrows but no one sharpens. %% Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms. -- Edward Abbey %% Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets. -- Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer) "Venus on the Half Shell" %% Platonic Shadow: A nonsexual friendship with a member of the opposite sex. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Platonic friendship: The interval between the introduction and the first kiss. -- Sophie Irene Loeb %% Play Hack, visit exotic locations, meet strange creatures, kill and eat them. %% Play Rogue, visit exotic locations, meet strange creatures and kill them. %% Play an accordion ... go to prison. That's the law! [in response to: "Use a gun ... go to prison. That's the law!"] Well ... accordion players have now struck back! Twenty-five accordion players, lobbying to have the accordion declared San Francisco's "official musical instrument," all played "Lady of Spain" VERY LOUDLY on the steps of City Hall yesterday. They wanted to perform inside the building, but officials feared 25 accordions playing in unison would further damage the building, already damaged by the recent earthquake. %% Play it again, Sam. %% Play with fire. %% Play with my body, not my mind. %% Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table. -- Dave Barry, "The Snake" %% Playing billiards pays when you are in a shop. %% Playing cards have the top halves upside down to help cheaters. %% Playing hack on terminals without cm is suspect... %% Playing in this way with a # #. %% Playing poker with busty Ms. Ware, He announced as he folded with flair, "I had four of a kind, But those aces combined, Don't stack up, I'm afraid with your pair." %% Pleasant prospects for the future are indicated. %% Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will have me as a member. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Please all, and you will please none. %% Please answer the question. %% Please cleanup after yourself. Your mother doesn't work here. %% Please close all windows at speeds beyond 140MPH. -- Sticker on dash of MA chase vehicle %% Please come home with me...I have Tylenol!! %% Please deposit .25 for the first 3 minutes. %% Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. -- quoted by Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) %% Please don't ask me to do that which I've just said I'm not going to do, because you're burning up time; the meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering. -- President George Bush, refusing to answer a reporter's persistent questions about the Oliver North trial %% Please don't ask me what the score is, I'm not even sure what the game is. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% Please don't drink and post. %% Please don't fall back on your tired cliche of charging to the rescue just in the nick of time. I don't want to be rescued. My life as a human being has been a dismal failure. Perhaps my death will have a little dignity. "Q, there is no dignity in this suicide." Yes, I suppose you're right. Death of a coward then, so be it. But as a human, I would have died of boredom. -- Q and Picard, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Please don't filter this twit %% Please don't lie to me, unless you're absolutely sure I'll never find out the truth. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% Please don't put a strain on our friendship by asking me to do something for you. %% Please don't recommend me to your friends-- it's difficult enough to cope with you alone. %% Please follow more cautiously Life's Golden Rule. %% Please forgive me if, in the heat of battle, I sometimes forget which side I'm on. %% Please go away. %% Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it. %% Please ignore previous fortune. %% Please input the entire command again. %% Please keep your hands off the secretary's reproducing equipment. %% Please leave us. Why should we leave you? Because we don't like you. -- Kirk and Androids, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% Please remain calm, it's no use both of us being hysterical at the same time. %% Please see your doctor. Your condition has deteriorated. %% Please send all complaints via MAIL to SYSTEM %% Please stand by... the computer is down. %% Please stand for the Nation Anthem: O Canada Our home and native land True patriot love In all thy sons' command With glowing hearts we see thee rise The true north strong and free From far and wide, O Canada We stand on guard for thee God keep our land glorious and free O Canada we stand on guard for thee O Canada we stand on guard for thee Thank you. You may resume your seat. %% Please stand for the National Anthem. God save our Gracious Queen! Long live our Noble Queen! God save the Queen! Send her victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign o'er us! God save the Queen! Thank you. You may resume your seat. %% Please take note: %% 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 update your programs. %% Please, mother! I'd rather do it myself! %% Please, won't somebody tell me what diddie-wa-diddie means? %% Pleasure is to Women what the Sun is to the Flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, etiolates, and destroys. -- Colton %% Pleasure soon exhausts us and itself also; but endeavor never does. -- Richter %% Pleasure that comes unlooked for is thrice welcome. -- Rogers %% Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood, Our greatest evil, or our greatest good. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Plebiscite: A popular vote to ascertain the will of the sovereign. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is. %% Plots are like girdles. Hidden, they hold your interest; revealed, they're of no interest except to fetishists. Like girdles, they attempt to contain an uncontainable experience. -- R. S. Knapp %% Plugh! %% Plumber: "Mrs. Brown, I'm the plumber." Mrs. Brown: "I didn't send for the plumber." Plumber: "I know, the people downstairs did." %% Plumbers do it with snakes and helpers. %% Plunder: To take the property of another without the decent and customary reticences of theft. To effect a change of ownership with the candid concomitance of a brass band. To wrest the wealth of A from B and leave C lamenting a missed opportunity. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose. %% Plutonium-239 is so lethal that a ball the size of a grapefruit contains enough poison to kill nearly all the people living today. %% Pobody's Nerfect! %% Pocket: The cradle of motive and the grave of conscience. In woman, this organ is lacking; so she acts without motive, and her conscience, denied burial, remains ever alive, confessing the sins of others. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Podiatrists do it with feet. %% Poetry has been to me "its own exceeding great reward;" it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% Poetry is the eloquence of truth. -- Campbell %% Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own. %% Poetry is when every line starts with a capital letter. %% Poetry--even bad poetry--may be our final hope. -- Edward Abbey %% Poets are all who love -- all who feel great truths -- And tell them. -- Bailey %% Poets go from bad to verse %% Poets make better lays %% Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it. %% Point blank, right between those pretty lies that you tell. %% Point not found. A)bort, R)eread, I)gnore. %% Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy. -- von Hohenheim (1493-1541) %% Poker players do it with their own hand. %% Poker, n. A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Police up your spare rounds and frags. Don't leave nothin' for the dinks. -- Willem Dafoe in "Platoon" %% 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. %% Policeman's barbecue -- steak-out -- Raymond D. Love %% Polite conversation is seldom either. %% Politeness is the art of choosing among one's real thoughts. -- Abel Stevens %% Politeness: The most acceptable hypocrisy. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Political T.V. commercials prove one thing: some candidates can tell all their good points and qualifications in just 30 seconds. %% Political economy: two words that should be divorced -- on grounds of incompatibility. -- The Wall Street Journal %% Political panjandrums prologize pedantic paronomasia. %% Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. -- Mao Zedong, "Quotations from Chairman Mao", 1966 %% Political power is as permanent as today's newspaper. Ten years from now, few will know or care who the most powerful man in any state was today. -- Mark B. Cohen %% Political speeches are like steer horns. A point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in between. -- Alfred E. Newman %% Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Politically Incorrect Yes, Im a tree hugger.......long enough to hook up my winch! -- Reginald Mathusz %% Politician, n.: An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Politician, n.: 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 %% Politicians Prefer Unarmed Peasants -- William W. Hughes whughes@lonestar.utsa.edu %% Politicians are like bananas: They're green when you pick 'em, and then they hang around in bunches and get rotten. %% Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. -- Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894-1971) %% Politicians do it to everybody. %% Politicians do it to make the headlines. %% Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them. -- Fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773) %% Politicians say the other guy did it... %% Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% Politicians who throw dirt lose ground %% Politicians who vote huge expenditures to alleviate problems get reelected; those who propose structural changes prevent problems get early retirement. -- John McClaughry %% Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war, you can only be killed once. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times. -- Winston Churchill %% Politics is like coaching a football team. you have to be smart enough to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest. %% Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Politics is the doctrine of the possible, the attainable. -- Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) %% Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. %% Politics is the science of who gets what, when, and why. -- Sidney Hillman (1887-1946) %% Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. -- Mao Zedong, "Quotations from Chairman Mao", 1966 %% Politics isn't too bad a profession. If you succeed, there are many rewards. If you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book. -- Ronald Reagan %% Politics makes strange bedfellows. %% Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of matrydom to the reformers of error. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Polly Wanda Cracker %% Pollyanna's Educational Constant: The hyperactive child is never absent. %% Polymer Chemists do it in chains. %% Polymer physicists are into chains. %% Polymorphing your dog probably makes you safer. %% Pommersheim's principle: All obvious theorems are true. %% Pompoir: The most sought-after feminine sexual response of all. 'She must... close and constrict the Yoni until it holds the Lingam as with a finger, opening and shutting at her pleasure, and finally acting as the hand of the Gopala-girl who milks the cow. This can be learned only by long practice, and especially by throwing the will into the part affected, even as men endeavor to sharpen their hearing ...Her husband will then value her above all other women, nor would he exchange her for the most beautiful queen in the Three Worlds... Among some races the constrictor vaginae muscles are abnormally developed. In Abyssinia for instance, a woman can so exert them as to cause pain to a man, and when sitting on his thighs, she can induce orgasm without moving any other part of her person. Such an artist is called by the Arabs Kabbazah, literally, a holder, and its not surprising that slave dealers pay large sums for her' Thus Richard Burton. It has nothing to do with 'race' but a lot to do with practice. See exercises. -- "The Joy of Sex" %% Pomposity is its own reward. %% Pontius Pilate was the first great censor, and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship. -- Ben Lindsay %% Poor Alice who lived in Corvallis Had heard of, but not seen, the male phallus. At her first sight of one She started to run, And last was seen sprinting through Dallas. MAKE WAR, THEN LOVE %% Poor Buoyancy: The realization that one was a better person when one had less money. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called "March of the Soviet Police." -- Edward Abbey %% Poor android, who's behavior do you find more perplexing? Human or Kling on? At the moment, I would find it difficult to choose. -- K'Ehleyr and Data, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Poorman's Rule: When you pull a plastic garbage bag from its handy dispenser package, you always get hold of the closed end and try to pull it open. %% Poorochondria: Hypochondria derived form not having medical insurance. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Pope Goestheveezl was the shortest reigning pope in the history of the Church, reigning for two hours and six minutes on 1 April 1866. The white smoke had hardly faded into the blue of the Vatican skies before it dawned on the assembled multitudes in St. Peter's Square that his name had hilarious possibilities. The crowds fell about, helpless with laughter, singing Half a pound of tuppenny rice Half a pound of treacle That's the way the chimney smokes Pope Goestheveezl The square was finally cleared by armed carabineri with tears of laughter streaming down their faces. The event set a record for hilarious civic functions, smashing the previous record set when Baron Hans Neizant B"ompzidaize was elected Landburgher of K"oln in 1653. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Popular consensus says that reality is based on popular consensus. %% Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% Popular politics means noise, and what intelligence needs is calm. At times, through a painful imposition of Providence, Dante is in exile, Cervantes in prison; Beethoven is deaf and Milton is blind. It was in the golden solitude of a farm in the outskirts of Rome that Horace could write his "Odes" and Virgil his "Aeneid," never in a Parliamentary seat. -- Felipe Torroba Bernaldo de Quiros %% Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.... Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio. -- Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) %% Populus vult decipi. (The people like to be deceived.) %% Pornography? We don't even have a pornograph! %% Porridge: oat cuisine. %% Porsche; there simply is no substitute. -- Risky Business %% Portable - Smaller and lighter than the average refrigerator. %% Portable - When referring to hardware: Has a handle and weighs less than 100 pounds. But note that most portable computers require an electrical outlet. When referring to software: takes a team of 10 expert programmers no more than a year to convert. The Unix system is a portable operating system in this sense. %% Portable, adj.: Survives system reboot. %% Porthole: A glass-covered opening in the hull designed in such a way that when closed (while at sea) it admits light and water, and when open (while at anchor) it admits light, air, and insects (except in Canadian waters, where most species are too large to gain entry in this manner). -- from "Sailing" by Henry Beard and Roy Mckie %% Positive Odin. -- Charles Cranleigh, BLACK ORCHID %% Positive anything is better than negative nothing. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% Positive feedback is dangerous. %% Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Possession in Great Measure. Supreme success. %% Possession, n. The whole of the law. %% Possessions increase to fill the space available for their storage. -- Ryan %% Possibility, a malfunction in their engines, sir? Breaks my heart. -- Data and Geordi about the Ferengi, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% Possible existence of a parallel universe has been scientifically conceded. -- Spock, "The Alternative Factor," stardate 3088.7 %% Post Office - U.S. Snail %% Post office will not deliver without postage. %% Post proelium, praemium. (After the battle, the reward.) %% PostScript:: n. A groundbreaking Page Description Language ({PDL}), based on work originally done by John Gaffney at Evans and Sutherland in 1976, evolving through `JaM' (`John and Martin', Martin Newell) at {XEROX PARC}, and finally implemented in its current form by John Warnock et al. after he and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1982. PostScript gets its leverage by using a full programming language, rather than a series of low-level escape sequences, to describe an image to be printed on a laser printer or other output device (in this it parallels {EMACS}, which exploited a similar insight about editing tasks). It is also noteworthy for implementing on-the fly rasterization, from Bezier curve descriptions, of high-quality fonts at low (e.g. 300 dpi) resolution (it was formerly believed that hand-tuned bitmap fonts were required for this task). Hackers consider PostScript to be among the most elegant hacks of all time, and the combination of technical merits and widespread availability has made PostScript the language of choice for graphical output. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Postage will be paid by addressee. %% Poster in Belgrade tourist office: Visit the Soviet Union before it visits you. %% Posterity will ne'er survey A nobler grave than this; Here lie the bones of Castlereagh; Stop, traveler, and piss. -- Lord Byron, on Lord Castlereagh %% Postmen do it at the front entrance. %% Postmen never die, they just lose their zip. %% Postulate #1: Nothing is better than sex. Postulate #2: Masturbation is better than nothing. Conclusion: Masturbation is better than sex. %% Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth. %% Pounding in your temples And a surge of adrenalin Every muscle tense -- To fence The enemy within . . . I'm not giving in To security under pressure I'm not missing out On the promise of adventure I'm not giving up On implausible dreams -- Experience to extremes -- Experience to extremes -- Neil Peart, Rush %% Pour guerir un acces de fievre Un jeune homme poursuivit un lievre; Il le prit a son trou, Et fit faire un ragout Des entrailles et des pattes au genievre. -- Edward Gorey %% Pour the full tide of eloquence along, Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Pouring out his troubles to his great and good friend over a couple of triple martinis, Brad had to confess that things weren't going too well at home. "My wife and I just don't hit it off at night," he was saying to Bart. "I hate to admit it, but I'm afraid I just don't know how to make her happy." "Hell, boy," said Bart, "there's really nothing to it. Let me give you some advice. At bedtime, switch on a new Sinatra platter, turn all the lights low and spray some perfume around the room. Next, tell your wife to get into her sheerest nightie; then make sure you raise the bottom window." "Then what do I do?" asked Brad. "Just whistle." "Whistle?" "That's right. I'll be waiting outside the window. When I hear you whistle, I'll come right up and finish the job." %% Pournelle must die! %% Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties. %% Poverty Lurks: Financial paranoia instilled in offspring by depression-era parents. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Poverty begins at home. %% Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient. -- Rev. Sydney Smith %% Poverty is the mother of crime. -- Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (490-575) %% Poverty makes people satirical -- soberly, sadly bitterly satirical. -- Friswell %% Poverty wants some things, luxury many, avarice all things. -- Abraham Cowley %% Poverty: An unhappy state that persists as long as anyone lacks anything he would like to have. %% Power Mist: The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous. -- William Proxmire %% Power attracts people but it cannot hold them. -- Mark B. Cohen %% Power buries those who wield it. -- The Talmud (Yoma, 86 b.) %% Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress. -- Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) %% Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat -- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987 %% Power corrupts. And atomic power corrupts atomically. %% Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Power fail Stopped %% Power in the toes. Continuing brings misfortune. This is certainly true. %% Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best. -- Edward Abbey %% Power is danger. -- The Centurion, "Balance of Terror," stardate 1709.2 %% Power is measured by the pound or the fist %% Power is poison. %% Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Power is the finest token of affection. %% Power means not having to respond. %% Power outage at a department store yesterday, Twenty people were trapped on the escalators. -- Steven Wright %% Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. -- Lord Acton (1834-1902), Letter, 5 April 1887 %% Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollustes whate'er it touches... -- Percy Bysshe Shelley %% Power, n: The only narcotic regulated by the SEC instead of the FDA. %% Powerful - Hard to learn, dangerous to use. %% Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming. -- J. P. McEvoy %% Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking. -- Mary Poppins %% Practice a lot when you're alone. %% Practice does not make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. -- Vince Lombardi %% Practice is the best of all instructors. -- Publilius Syrus %% Practice yourself what you preach. -- Titus Maccius Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) %% Praise is like champagne; it should be served while it is still bubbling. %% Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, And this be our motto: "In God we trust;" And the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave. -- Francis Scott Key %% Praise the lord and pass the ammunition. %% Praise the sea, but keep on land. -- George Herbert %% Praise the sea; on shore remain. -- John Florio %% Praise was originally a pension, paid by the world. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Pray for a computer crash. It won't be ready in time. %% Pray for obscene mail. %% Pray tell me, people, if you can Who is that highly favored man Who though he has married many a wife May still be single all his life? Cleric %% Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore. -- Russian Proverb %% Pray, but row for shore. %% Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Pray. %% Prayer carries us half way to God, fasting brings us to the door of his place, and alms-giving procures us admission. -- The Koran %% Praying to saint Vidicon will occasionally get random bugs out, any port in a storm don't ya' know. %% Praying will frighten Demons. %% Preacher to me: "A dollar for the Lord, brother?" Me to preacher: "That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him." -- Edward Abbey %% Precision? What precision? %% Predestination was doomed from the start. %% Predicting the future of technology is fraud with peril! %% Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future. -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) %% Pregnancy -- the worst sexually transmitted disease of them all. %% Pregnancy begins with a single sell. %% Prejudice: A vagrant opinion without visible means of support. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Premature optimization is the root of all evil. -- D. E. Knuth %% Premature withdrawal may lead to loss of interest. %% Prenuptial agreement: An "I do" with an asterisk. %% Preoperative diagnosis: Had enough kids. Desires tubal ligation. %% Preparation for war is a constant stimulus to suspicion and ill will. -- President James Monroe (1758-1831) %% Preparation is a prerequisite to inspiration. -- Matthew Cowley %% Preparation, knowledge, and discipline can deal with any form of danger. -- Tom Clancy, "THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER", 1984 %% Prepare for tomorrow -- get ready. -- Edith Keeler, "The City On the Edge of Forever," stardate unknown %% Prepare to meet thy GOD! (Evening dress optional) %% Preponderance of the Great. The ridgepole sags to the breaking point. It furthers one to have somewhere to go. Success. %% Preponderance of the Small. Success. Perseverance furthers. Small things may be done; great things should not be done. The flying bird brings the message: It is not well to strive upward, It is well to remain below. Great good fortune. %% Prerecorded for this time zone. %% Prescott's pickle principle: Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered. %% Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Presenting reports - No mater how good and detailed a report is, if it has any spelling mistakes it will be instantly rejected. Senior managers don't read reports, but just check the spelling, grammar and arithmetic. If all these area acceptable then there will be a strong chance that they will agree with the findings - simply because they look good. %% Presently she told Dick she had a cat so smart that it first ate cheese and then breathed down the mouseholes -- with baited breath -- to entice the creatures out. -- Richard Hughes %% Preserve Wildlife! Throw a party today! %% Preserve the old, but know the new. %% Preserve wildlife - pickle a squirrel today! %% Presidency: The greased pig in the field game of American politics. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% President Reagan announced that, in urging immunity for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral Poindexter, he only meant they should get flu shots. %% President Reagan has noted that there are too many economic pundits and forecasters and has decided on an excess prophets tax. %% 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 %% Press -- to continue. %% Press all the keys at once to continue... %% Press any key to continue or any other key to quit. %% Pretend to spank me -- I'm a pseudo-masochist! %% Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% Pretty soon little girl, I'm going to take charge. %% Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side. %% Prevalent beliefs that knowledge can be tapped from previous incarnations or from a "universal mind" (the repository of all past wisdom and creativity) not only are implausible but also unfairly demean the stunning achievements of individual human brains. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171 %% Prevent security leaks. %% Prevention of birth is precipitation of murder. -- Tertullian (180?-230?) %% Price does not include taxes, title, destination charges, or dealer prep. %% Price's Advice: It's all a game -- play it to have fun. %% Price: Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear of conscience in demanding it. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. -- Proverbs 16:18 %% Pride invites calamity; humility reaps its harvest. %% Pride makes us esteem ourselves; vanity makes us desire the esteem of others. It is just to day, as Dean Swift has done, that a man is too proud to be vain. -- Blair %% Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), (Poor Richard) %% Priest: "May the Lord have mercy on your soul." Verdoux: "Why not? After all, it belongs to Him." -- Charles Chaplin, "Monsieur Verdoux" %% Priests do it heavenly. %% Prime Time : Any hour of the day divisible by 1 and itself. %% Prince Absalom lay with his sister And bundled and nibbled and kissed her, But the kid was so tight, And it was deep night -- Though he shot at the target, he missed her. %% Prince And Princess Diana Seen Together In BBC Television Center: 'Is It Love?' %% Prince Charles and Lady Di do it royally. %% Prince Charles does it in succession. %% Prince Hamlet thought Uncle a traitor For having it off with his Mater; Revenge Dad or not? That's the gist of the plot, And he did -- nine soliloquies later. -- Stanley J. Sharpless %% Princess cards she sends me with her regards. %% Princess in training. %% Princesses don't do dishes or take out garbage. %% Princeton's taste is sweet like a strawberry tart. Harvard's is a subtle taste, like whiskey, coffee, or tobacco. It may even be a bad habit, for all I know. -- Prof. J. H. Finley '25 %% Principal Skinner: "You'll be getting an Albanian [student]." Homer: "You mean all white with pink eyes?" -- Homer in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons %% Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party. -- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), Speech, 19 April 1923 %% Printer - An electromechanical paper-shredding device. %% Printers do it without wrinkling the sheets. %% Prior Laws of Politics: (1). Pay your dues. (2). Attend the meetings. -- Lyndon B. Johnson %% Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% Private and secret offices of religion are like the refreshing of a garden with the distilling and pretty drops of a water pot; but, addressed from the temple, are like rain from heaven. -- Jeremy Taylor %% Private enterprise ... makes OK private action which would be considered dishonest in public action. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% Private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not private enterprise. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% Privileged instruction %% Prizes are for children. -- Charles Ives [upon being given, but refusing, the Pulitzer prize] %% Pro is to con as progress is to Congress. %% Probability is a constant. -- Solomon Short %% Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities. -- Aristotle %% 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 %% Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which live was first breathed... There is granduer in this view of life ... that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being, evolved. -- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) %% Probably no invention came more easily to man than when he thought up heaven. -- G. C. Lichtenberg %% Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have orgasms? The answer is yes, the have orgasms almost constantly, which is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime. -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know" %% Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back. -- Pat Hein %% Proboscis: The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Procedure for determining user-friendliness of software: Ask yourself this question: "If this were a person, how long would it take before I punched it in the mouth?" %% Processed at location stamped in code at top of carton. %% Proclaim liberty throughout the land until all the inhabitants thereof. -- Leviticus 25:10 %% Proclaim yourself "World Champ" of something -- tiddly-winks, rope-jumping, whatever -- send this notice to newspapers, radio, TV, and wait for challengers to confront you. Avoid challenges as long as possible, but continue to send news of your achievements to all media. Also, develop a newsletter and letterhead for communications. -- Will Yolen %% Procrastinate now! %% Procrastination is the only thing I can seem to find time for. %% Procrastination is the thief of time. -- Dr. Young %% Procrastination: The art of keeping up with yesterday. %% Procrastinators do it tomorrow. %% Procrastinators will do it when they get around to it. %% Producers seem to be so prejudiced against actors who've had no training. And there's no reason for it. So what if I didn't attend the Royal Academy for twelve years? I'm still a professional trying to be the best actress I can. Why doesn't anyone send me the scripts that Faye Dunaway gets? -- Farrah Fawcett-Majors %% Productivity = (Number of secretaries X Average typing speed) / (Number of Scientists). Note that when the number of scientists is zero, productivity becomes infinite. -- Robert Sommer %% Productivity = <# of scientists> / <# of administrators> %% Productivity = / . Note that when the number of scientists is zero, productivity becomes infinite. -- Robert Sommer (This guy's a real dick.) %% Prof. McCarthy does it with a LISP. %% Profanity has been known to offer spiritual relief denied to prayer. -- One Minute Wisdom %% Profanity is the one language all programmers know best. %% Professional assassination is the highest form of public service. -- Chiun %% Professional wrestling: ballet for the common man. %% 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% %% Professor: A textbook wired for sound. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Professors forget to do it. %% Profits go to the profit minded. %% Program 'till you puke! %% Program - what commercials try to do to us. %% Program Initialization Error 1432. %% Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in English. %% Program in disorder - perhaps you'd better Quit %% Program quits. %% Program: Any assignment that cannot be completed with one telephone call. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% Programmer's Cheer: "Shift to the left! Shift to the right! Pop up, push down! Byte! Byte! Byte!" A joke so old it has hair on it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Programmera person with a natural sense of algorithm %% Programmers can't support child processes %% Programmers do it at 19200 bps %% Programmers do it bit by bit. %% Programmers do it depth-first. %% Programmers do it full-duplex %% Programmers do it in loops. %% Programmers do it routinely. %% Programmers do it top down ( or bottom up or with stepwise refinement or ...). %% Programmers do it until it goes down. %% Programmers do it when the computer's down %% Programmers do it with Unix. %% Programmers do it with bugs. %% Programmers do it with their write protect on %% Programmers get overlaid. %% Programmers of the world unite; you have nothing to use but your brains! %% Programmers used to batch environments may find it hard to live without giant listings; we would find it hard to use them. -- D. M. Ritchie %% Programming Department: Mistakes made while you wait. %% Programming by Monte Carlo methods is frowned upon. %% Programming errors which would normally require one day to find will take five days when the programmer is in a hurry. %% Programming graphics in X is like finding sqrt(pi) using Roman numerals. -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% Programming is an art form that fights back. %% Programming is an unnatural act. %% Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% Programs are like martyrs--the REAL shit doesn't hit the fan until you execute them.... -- Lindsey Durway (durway@dg-rtp.dg.com) %% Programs are like poetry %% Programs do it in loops. %% Programs: Those things you used to look at on your television before you hooked your computer up to it. %% Progress doesn't enlighten people - it just makes them stupid in new ways. %% Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator and change has its enemies. -- Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968) %% Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Progress is made by lazy men looking for an easier way to do things. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Progress is made on alternate Fridays. %% Progress is our most important problem. %% Progress like a hamster. Perseverance brings danger. %% Progress means replacing a theory that is wrong with one more subtly wrong. %% Progress might be a circle, rather than a straight line. -- Eberhard Zeidler, in "Contemporary Architects", 1980 %% Progress might have been alright once, but it's gone on too long. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% Progress. The powerful prince Is honored with horses in large numbers. In a single day he is granted audience three times. %% Progressing, but in sorrow. Perseverance brings good fortune. Then one obtains happiness from one's ancestress. %% Progressing, but turning back. Perseverance brings good fortune. If one meets with no confidence, one should remain calm. No mistake. %% Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), speech in the Illinois House of Representatives, 18 Dec 1840 %% Project: To determine what makes things tick. Plan: ....to stop the ticking. %% Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsicly doomed to fail. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% Promise her anything, but give her Exxon unleaded. %% Promising career in law ahead: Two weeks jury duty %% Promising costs nothing, it's the delivering that kills you. %% Promptness is its own reward, if one lives by the clock instead of the sword. %% Proof techniques #1: Proof by Induction. This technique is used on equations with "n" in them. Induction techniques are very popular, even the military used them. SAMPLE: Proof of induction without proof of induction. We know it's true for n equal to 1. Now assume that it's true for every natural number less than n. N is arbitrary, so we can take n as large as we want. If n is sufficiently large, the case of n+1 is trivially equivalent, so the only important n are n less than n. We can take n = n (from above), so it's true for n+1 because it's just about n. QED. (QED translates from the Latin as "So what?") Topics is be covered in future issues include proof by: Intimidation Gesticulation (handwaving) "Try it; it works" Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...) Blatant assertion Changing all the 2's to n's Mutual consent Lack of a counterexample, and "It stands to reason" %% Proof techniques #1: Proof by Induction. This technique is used on equations with "_n" in them. Induction techniques are very popular, even the military used them. SAMPLE: Proof of induction without proof of induction. We know it's true for _n equal to 1. Now assume that it's true for every natural number less than _n. _N is arbitrary, so we can take _n as large as we want. If _n is sufficiently large, the case of _n+1 is trivially equivalent, so the only important _n are _n less than _n. We can take _n = _n (from above), so it's true for _n+1 because it's just about _n. QED. (QED translates from the Latin as "So what?") %% Proof techniques #2: Proof by Oddity. SAMPLE: To prove that horses have an infinite number of legs. (1) Horses have an even number of legs. (2) They have two legs in back and fore legs in front. (3) This makes a total of six legs, which certainly is an odd number of legs for a horse. (4) But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. (5) Therefore, horses must have an infinite number of legs. Topics is be covered in future issues include proof by: Intimidation Gesticulation (handwaving) "Try it; it works" Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...) Blatant assertion Changing all the 2's to _n's Mutual consent Lack of a counterexample, and "It stands to reason" %% Proof techniques#1: Proof by induction This technique is used with equations with 'n' in them. Induction techniques are very popular. Even the military has used them. %% Proof: Evidence having a shade more of plausibility than of unlikelihood. The testimony of two credible witnesses as opposed to that of only one. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. %% Prope mare erat tubulator Qui virginem ingrediebatur. Dessine ingressus Audivi progressus: Est mihi inquit tubulator. %% Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself, a cold will hang on for a week. -- Darrell Huff %% Property of Presteign's %% Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: BBW Branch Both Ways BEW Branch Either Way BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full BH Branch and Hang BMR Branch Multiple Registers BOB Branch On Bug BPO Branch on Power Off BST Backspace and Stretch Tape CDS Condense and Destroy System CLBR Clobber Register CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately CM Circulate Memory CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip CRN Convert to Roman Numerals %% Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: DC Divide and Conquer DMPK Destroy Memory Protect Key DO Divide and Overflow EMPC Emulate Pocket Calculator EPI Execute Programmer Immediately EROS Erase Read Only Storage EXCE Execute Customer Engineer HCF Halt and Catch Fire IBP Insert Bug and Proceed INSQSW Insert into queue somewhere (for FINO queues [First in never out]) PBC Print and Break Chain PDSK Punch Disk %% Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: PI Punch Invalid POPI Punch Operator Immediately PVLC Punch Variable Length Card RASC Read And Shred Card RPM Read Programmers Mind RSSC reduce speed, step carefully (for improved accuracy) RTAB Rewind tape and break RWDSK rewind disk RWOC Read Writing On Card SCRBL scribble to disk - faster than a write SLC Search for Lost Chord SPSW Scramble Program Status Word SRSD Seek Record and Scar Disk STROM Store in Read Only Memory TDB Transfer and Drop Bit WBT Water Binary Tree %% Proposed Country-Western song titles: "I Still Miss You, Baby, But My Aim's Gettin' Better." %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Never worrying about what you can hit on the highway. CON: Not being able to have other people worry about what you throw on the highway. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No 1'st day of school. CON: No last day of school. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more 50 below zero winters. CON: Not seeing people freeze to death in the streets. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more Mormans, Jews, and any other ethnic or religious group you especially hate. CON: No more pestering, perturbing, bothering, threatening, terrorizing your least favorite group. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more Ronald Reagan. CON: No president to rag on. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more bad trips. CON: No more smoking the ganja. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more beat parties. CON: No more wild parties. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more being sick or unhappy. CON: Not being able to get out of things you don't want to do because you are sick or unhappy. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more broken hands when someone steps on it with cleats. CON: No more sports (like football with your friends, etc.) %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more butthole skatboarders. CON: Not being able to clothesline em. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more car insurance, and car to take care of. CON: No more running over innocent pedestrians. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more cleaning up your room. CON: No more finding that $20 bill that you lost under all that shit on the floor. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more enemies CON: No more friends. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more fights with your girlfriend. CON: No more meat when you want it. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more getting chased by people because you just broke their picture window with an iceball (right chris, rich?) CON: No more snow. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more getting cut up by fuckin sea shells sticking up in the sand. CON: No more beach. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more itchy balls. CON: No more tight Levis. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more long, irrelevant trips to nowhere. CON: No more trips to exotic, far away places. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more losing on your favorite game at your local arcade. CON: No more playing your favorite game at your local arcade. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more lung cancer. CON: No more butts. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more pain. CON: No more inflicting pain. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more school, books, and teachers dirty looks. CON: No more girls, mags, and dirty books! %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more school. CON: No more beautiful asses gallivantin down the hall. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more stupid T.V. shows like Dallas, Punky Brewster, Face the Nation, 10 hour religious shows, Love Boat, and 1000's of others. CON: No more cool shows like Miami Vice, Saturday night Live, Simon & Simon, the A-Team (sure), Mission Impossible, and a few others. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more stupid inner city people. CON: No more cool local people. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more stupid jokes. CON: No more sick jokes. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more sunburn. CON: No more sun. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more wasted money on bad brew or stupid concerts. CON: No more killer concerts, nor any tailgate parties. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: No more wrapping it around a tree and getting killed (again). CON: No more going 105 down the road in the BMW. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Nobody tellin you what to do. CON: Not being able to tell the boss to "kiss my fuckin ass, im gone!!" %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not being able to catch AIDS. CON: Not being able to laugh at all the sick people. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not experiencing fear. CON: Not being able to inflict fear. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not getting burned when you put your hand on the stove. CON: Not being able to laugh at other people burning their hands on the stove. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not getting caught in the middle of street fights. CON: No more street fights. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not getting hit by various objects falling from the sky. CON: Not being able to throw rocks and other harmful objects off tall buildings in the city. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not getting in trouble for picking on little assholes. CON: No more picking on little assholes. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not going to your family picnic. CON: No more free money from all your stupid rich bitch relatives. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not having to dress up in a suit and tie. CON: Not being able to wear your old levis and favorite shirt. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not having to eat shit food like at Burger King, and other scum joints. CON: No more shrimp, steak, lobster, Big Mac's, Chicken mc nuggets, and other delicacies to eat. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not having to get up from your comfortable lounge chair. CON: Not being able to change the T.V. to see that porno flick that everyone is raving about. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not having to go christmas shopping. CON: Not getting anything in return. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not having to see others bad taste on the same wall. CON: Not painting your favorite groups on a large white wall. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not having to talk to the local losers. CON: No more friends across the country. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not having to worry about your health. CON: Not having your health to worry about. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: Not spending the night in the tank. CON: Not being able to cause general mayhem in your neighborhood. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You can't get chlorine or salt in your eyes again. CON: You can't swim in a pool or the ocean ever again. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You never have to get up in the morning. CON: You will never have another good night's sleep. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You will never have another 'bad fuck'. CON: You will never experience orgasm again! %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You will never have another hangover, nor forget what you did last night. CON: You won't be able to get intoxicated again. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You will never have to work another day for eternity. CON: You will never have the opportunity to spend the money you have made over your lifetime. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You won't be a victim of violent, bloody, painful crime. CON: You won't be able to kill or attack! %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You won't be around to get bothered by kids in a nursing home. CON: You can't go to your local nursing home and bother the old people. %% Pros and Cons of Death: PRO: You won't be wondering your ass off about what stupid foreigners are saying. CON: You can't give the stupid forigener wrong directions! %% Pros are people who do jobs well even when they don't feel like it %% Prosecutors will be violated %% Prosp long and liver, %% Prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Prosperity is not without many fears and distaste; adversity not without many comforts and hopes. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Prosperity is our God given right %% Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them. -- Publilius Syrus %% Prosperity tries the fortunate: adversity the great. -- Pliny the Younger %% Prostitution is the only business where you can go into the hole and still come out ahead. %% Protein: In favor of young people. %% Protocol : For golf, Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus. %% Prototype designs always work. -- Don Vonada %% Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together. %% Proud member of P.E.T.A. - People for Eating Tasty Animals -- hucke@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu %% Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.... -- Edward Abbey %% Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity. -- Edward Abbey %% Providence New Jersey is one of the few cities where Velveeta cheese appears on the gourmet shelf. %% Prune juice will set you free. %% Prunes give you a run for your money. %% Pryor's Observation: How long you live has nothing to do with how long you are going to be dead. %% Psst! Shadowfax in the seventh. %% Psychiatrist - A mind sweeper. A freudy cat. %% Psychiatrists do it like crazy. %% Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're ok, you're it. %% Psychiatrists stay on your mind. %% Psychiatry is quite similar to prostitution, only less honest. They both promise to make people feel better, but the prostitute doesn't make pretensions that the feelings will last once the client walks out the door. %% Psycho Daisies %% Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est? %% Psychoanalysis?? I thought this was a nude rap session!!! -- Zippy the Pinhead %% Psychoceramics: The study of crackpots. %% Psychologists do it best at variable intervals. %% Psychologists do it with rats! %% Psychologists only do it if they feel good about it %% Psychologists think they do it. %% Psychologists would like to do it with 95% confidence. %% Psychology is a fairly modern disease discovered by a man named Floyd. %% Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Psychotherapy: A long, drawn out process consisting of subtle probings of the human mind, whereby women are blamed for all of Freud's shortcomings. %% Psychotic Norman %% Psychotics relate to Datatrieve %% Puberty is a hair-raising experience. %% Public Speaking is very easy. -- Vice President Dan Quayle to reporters in 10/88 %% Public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel. -- Boies Penrose, 1931 %% Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso %% Public-relations gambits. -- A White House spokesman, when Gorbachev offered to stop sending arms to the Sandinistas. [It's part of] the public-relations battle. -- President George Bush, describing his arms-reduction proposal. Politics. -- Secretary of State James Baker's response when Gorbachev withdrew 500 missiles from Europe %% Publish or parish? %% Publishing a volume of poetry is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. -- Don Marquis (1878-1937) %% Pucker up, quick. %% Pudder's Law: Anything that begins well will end badly. (Note: The converse of Pudder's law is not true.) %% Puff the Jewish dragon lived in Palestine, And frolicked in the Autumn mist, And drank Manishiewitz wine. Little Rabbi Jacob loved that rascal Puff, And brought him soup and Matzah balls, And other kosher stuff. Then one day it happened, Puff was eating pork. Little Rabbi Jacob took that dragon for a walk. Gently he explained that dragons don't eat meat, That come from little piggies who have dirty filthy feet. %% Pull-The-Plug, Slice The Pie: A fantasy in which an offspring mentally tallies up the net worth of his parents. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Punched cards! I thought only Neanderthals worked with punched cards. %% Punishment becomes ineffective after a certain point. Men become insensitive. -- Eneg, "Patterns of Force," stardate 2534.7 %% Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water. -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny" %% Purchase not friends with gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such will cease to love. -- Fuller %% Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off the TV screen. -- Marvin Kitman %% Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. -- James I, 27 %% Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world. -- Edward Abbey %% Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Purity is almost always toxic. -- Solomon Short %% Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine, of honor. -- Hare %% Purity of Essence %% Purple Book: n. 1. The `System V Interface Definition'. The covers of the first editions were an amazingly nauseating shade of off-lavender. 2. Syn. {Wizard Book}. See also {{book titles}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Purple hum Assorted cars Laser lights, you bring All to prove You're on the move and vanishing -- The Cars %% Purpose for exterior drapings, father? It is an accepted custom that we wear clothing. -- Lal and Data, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% Purposes, as understood by the purposer, will be judged otherwise by others. Corollary: If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will. Corollary: If you do something which you are sure will meet with everybody's approval, somebody won't like it. Corollary: Procedures devised to implement the purpose won't quite work. -- Francis P. Chisholm %% Pursue the monsters and you will be had indeed. %% Push any key. Then push the any other key. %% Push the limit, and the limit will move away! %% Push where it gives and scratch where it itches. %% Pushing 40 is exercise enough. %% Pushing upward has supreme success. One must see the great man. Fear not. Departure toward the south Brings good fortune. %% Pushing upward in darkness. It furthers one to be unremittingly persevering. %% Pushing upward that meets with confidence Brings great good fortune. %% Put God to work for you and maximize your potential in our divinely ordered capitalist system. -- Norman Vincent Peale %% Put all of your routines back now! I need them. %% Put all your eggs in one basket, and WATCH THAT BASKET! -- Jerry Buchmeyer %% Put an excessive value on money. %% Put another password in, Bomb it out, then try again. Try to get past logging in, We're hacking, hacking, hacking. Try his first wife's maiden name, This is more than just a game. It's real fun, but just the same, It's hacking, hacking, hacking. %% Put cats in the coffee and mice in the tea! %% Put no trust in cryptic comments. %% Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust. -- Holmes %% Put on a ring of teleportation: it will take you away from onslaught. %% Put on your seatbelt. I wanna try something. %% Put only the restriction on your pleasures -- be cautious that they hurt no creature that has life. -- Zimmerman %% Put people on hold when possible. %% Put some whiskey in your water, sugar in your tea. Don't turn on the lights, 'cause I don't want to see. %% Put your Nose to the Grindstone! -- Amalgamated Plastic Surgeons and Toolmakers, Ltd. %% Put your best foot forward. Or just call in and say you're sick. %% Put your brain in gear before starting your mouth. %% Put your ducks in a line today. So you can shoot them all with one bullet. %% Put your trust in those who are worthy. %% Put your trust in those who are worthy. If you can find any. %% 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. %% Putting salt on railroad tracks is a crime in Alabama. %% Pyro's of the world.....IGNITE !!! %% Q : What does a Chinese cook do for exercise? A : He goes to a Wok. %% Q : What does a Chinese cook say to his children the first thing in the morning? A : Rice and Shine. %% Q : What does a Chinese lumberjack do? A : Chop sticks. %% Q : What is the name of the most favorite T.V. game show in China? A : Wheel of Fortune Cookies. %% Q might have done the right thing for the wrong reason, perhaps we needed a good kick in our complacency to get us ready for what's ahead. -- Picard to Guinan, "Q-Who?", stardate 42761.3 %% Q's Law: No matter what stage of completion one reaches in a project, the cost of the remainder of the project remains constant. %% Q-line: [IRC] v. To ban a particular {IRC} server from connecting to one's own; does to it what {K-line} does to an individual. Since this is applied transitively, it has the effect of partitioning the IRC network, which is generally a {Bad Thing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Q. Do you know how to tell a Polack at a cockfight? A. He's the only one with a duck. Q. Do you know how to tell an Aggie at a cockfight? A. He's the only one who bets on the duck. Q. And do you know how to tell the Mafia is at the cockfight? A. The duck wins! %% Q. What's the capital of Canada? A. American. %% Q. How many Holy Clerics of Paladine does it take to change a light light bulb? A. None. Paladine lights their path. %% Q. How many gnomes does it take to change a light light bulb? A.' None. The light bulb keeps blowing up. A." The answer's in committee. A."' Ohwedon'tuselightbulbsanymoreaswemadevastimprovementsonthat inventionlongagowhenmyGreatgrandfatherdiscovered... %% Q. How many gully dwarves does it take to change a light light bulb? A.' Two. Not more than two. A." What light bulb? A."' You sure it's dark? %% Q. How many kender does it take to change a light light bulb? A. None. The light bulb keeps mysteriously falling into the kender's pouches. %% Q. What did the soviet nuclear engineer say after the reactor caught fire in Russia A. I said Bud Light, comrade %% Q. What's the difference between COBOL and forcible sodomy. A. Not much %% Q. Are you married? A. No, I'm divorced. Q. And what did your husband do before you divorced him? A. A lot of things I didn't know about. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Can you use a vacuum cleaner on your dog? A. Yes, but it is generally better to take it for a walk. %% Q. Did he pick the dog up by the ears? A. No. Q. What was he doing with the dog's ears? A. Picking them up in the air. Q. Where was the dog at this time? A. Attached to the ears. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Do you know how far pregnant you are right now? A. I will be three months November 8th. Q. Apparently then, the date of conception was August 8th? A. Yes. Q. What were you and your husband doing at that time? -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Doctor, did you say he was shot in the woods? A. No, I said he was shot in the lumbar region. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people? A. All my autopsies have been performed on dead people. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. How can you tell a Chtorran was born in Vermont? A. It pours maple syrup on the babies before it eats them. %% Q. How did the polish nymphomaniac chip her tooth? A. On her vibrator. %% Q. How do Pollacks have oral sex? A. They sit next to each other and say "fuck you". %% Q. How do you fuck a fat woman? A. Roll her in flour and aim for the wet spot. %% Q. How do you housebreak a Chtorran? A. With a flamethrower Q. How do you teach a Chtorran to sit? A. Holler "sit!" and kick its hind legs out from under it %% Q. How do you tickle a JAP? A. Gucci, Gucci, Gucci. %% Q. How does a Chtorran have an abortion? A. It eats the eggs %% Q. How does a JAP do it doggie style? A. Her lover sits up and begs while she rolls over and plays dead. %% Q. How many libertarians does it take to change a lightbulb? A. Three - one to do it and two to argue whether it's principled to change it. -- Bill Ware (?) %% Q. Mrs. Jones, is your appearance this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney? A. No. This is how I dress when I go to work. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Mrs. Smith, do you believe that you are emotionally unstable? A. I should be. Q. How many times have you committed suicide? A. Four times. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Now, Mrs. Johnson, how was your first marriage terminated? A. By death. Q. And by whose death was it terminated? -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Officer, what led you to believe the defendant was under the influence? A. Because he was argumentary and he couldn't pronunciate his words. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. To a Chtorran, what's the difference between a baby and a bowling ball? A. The bowling ball needs salt %% Q. Were you acquainted with the decedent? A. Yes, sir. Q. Before or after he died? -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. What are the ingredients in Chtorran mouthwash? A. Kerosene, nitric acid and 32 lawyers %% Q. What are three things a black man can't get? A. A black eye, a fat lip and a job. %% Q. What did God say when He made the first Chtorran? A. Oh, shit %% Q. What did the Chtorran get when it ate Mary Poppins? A. Diabetes Q. What would a Chtorran get if it ate the Supreme Court? A. Food poisoning %% Q. What do Chtorrans call Amtrak? A. Fast food %% Q. What do Chtorrans call Carnegie Hall? A. Tasteful %% Q. What do Chtorrans call Chicago? A. Lunch Q. What do Chtorrans call Atlanta? A. Lunch Q. What do Chtorrans call New Jersey? A. Hardtack %% Q. What do Chtorrans call Harlem? A. Soul food Q. What do Chtorrans call the United Nations? A. Smorgasbord Q. What do Chtorrans call Congress? A. Inedible %% Q. What do Chtorrans call San Francisco? A. Quiche Q. What do Chtorrans call Oregon? A. Natural food Q. What do Chtorrans call Southern California? A. Granola (It's all fruits, nuts and flakes.) %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a Hollywood lawyer? A. Tough %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a blood bank? A. A juice bar %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a carload of drunks? A. A jar of pickles %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a cemetery? A. Jerky %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a chain saw? A. A good kisser %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a concrete bunker? A. Crunchy style %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a fat-farm? A. An opportunity %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a grizzly bear? A. A good fuck %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a hospital nursery? A. Hot canapes %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a midget? A. Bite-size %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a political convention? A. A wild party %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a poodle? A. Hors d'oeuvres. %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a stampede? A. An interesting challenge %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a swimming pool full of children? A. Cold soup %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a thousand worms in one big pile? A. A race to eat your way out Q. What does the winner get? A. Seconds %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a traffic jam? A. Lunch Q. What do Chtorrans call an elevator? A. Lunch Q. What do Chtorrans call New York? A. Dinner %% Q. What do Chtorrans call a urine specimen? A. Au jus %% Q. What do Chtorrans call an obstetrician? A. A caterer - he delivers %% Q. What do Chtorrans call cremation? A. Wasting food %% Q. What do Chtorrans call humans who have sex with them? A. Lunch %% Q. What do Chtorrans call the afterbirth? A. Dessert %% Q. What do Chtorrans call the morgue? A. A refrigerator Q. What do Chtorrans call the corpsicles? A. Cold cuts %% Q. What do Chtorrans call two people having sex? A. Making lunch %% Q. What do Chtorrans do in Hollywood? A. Lunch Q. What do Chtorrans do in Beverly Hills? A. Brunch Q. What do Chtorrans eat for brunch? A. A bagel, cream cheese, and Nova Scotia %% Q. What do hurricanes and steroids have in common? A. They both make Jamaicans run like hell! %% Q. What do you call a Chtorran who eats its children? A. Well adjusted %% Q. What do you call a Chtorran with gas? A. A showoff %% Q. What do you call a fat Chinese? A. A chunk. %% Q. What do you do with a Chtorran who's just eaten 15 babies? A. Burb it %% Q. What do you find in a Chtorran lunch box? A. Two slices of rye bread and Chicago Q. What does a Chtorran use for a toothpick? A. A jackhammer %% Q. What do you get when you cross a JAP with a computer? A. A machine that never goes down. %% Q. What do you get when you cross a JAP with a prostitute? A. Someone who sucks your American Express card. %% Q. What do you get when you cross a whore with a computer? A. A fucking know-it-all. %% Q. What do you get when you drop a bomb on your kitchen floor? A. Linoleum Blownapart. %% Q. What do you say to a Chtorran attacking a battalion? A. Don't play with your food %% Q. What do you say to a Chtorran who's eating the president? A. Bon appetit Q. What do you do when it's finished? A. Bring it the check %% Q. What does a Chtorran call Moby Dick? A. Sushi %% Q. What does a Chtorran call a grenade? A. A jaw-breaker %% Q. What does hair on a Chtorran mean? A. It masticates %% Q. What happened then? A. He told me, he says, "I have to kill you because you can identify me." Q. Did he kill you? A. No. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. What happened when the Pope went to Mount Olive? A. Popeye shot him... %% Q. What is red and has seven little dents in it? A: Snow White's cherry! %% Q. What is the Chtorran word for picnic? A. Rome %% Q. What is the definition of a WASP? A. Someone who gets out of the shower to take a leak. %% Q. What is your name? A. Ernestine McDowell. Q. And what is your marital status? A. Fair. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. What should you make when you invite a Chtorran to dinner? A. Your will %% Q. What would a Chtorran get if it ate a tank? A. Its minimum daily requirement of iron Q. What would a Chtorran get if it ate a Revelationist? A. An American flag pin Q. What would a Chtorran get if it ate Congress? A. The President's personal thanks %% Q. What would a Chtorran get if it ate the President? A. Heartburn Q. What would a Chtorran get if it ate the Vice-President? A. Our deepest sympathies %% Q. What's Chtorran Planned Parenthood? A. Tactical nukes %% Q. What's a Chtorran abortion? A. A hungry rat on a string %% Q. What's a JAP's definition of foreplay? A. Four hours of begging. %% Q. What's meaner than a Chtorran with the clap? A. The lawyer who gave it to him %% Q. What's the Chtorran national sport? A. Hide and eat %% Q. What's the Chtorran version of the Heimlich maneuver? A. Eating Dr. Heimlich %% Q. What's the Chtorran word for Jacuzzi? A. Cup O'Soup %% Q. What's the Chtorran word for friend? A. Lunch %% Q. What's the Chtorran word for idealist? A. Lunch %% Q. What's the definition of Jewish kinky sex? A. She moves. %% Q. What's the difference between Noah's Ark and Joan of Arc? A. Noah's Ark was made of wood; Joan of Arc was Maid of Orleans. %% Q. What's the difference between a Chtorran and Viet Nam? A. The Chtorran burps %% Q. What's the difference between a Chtorran and a lawyer? A. There are some things a Chtorran won't do Q. Why won't a Chtorran eat a lawyer? A. Even a Chtorran has some taste %% Q. What's the difference between a Chtorran and a volcano? A. The volcano has better manners %% Q. What's the difference between a JAP and a bowl of jello? A. The jello quivers when you eat it. %% Q. What's the difference between pizza and the shuttle? A. Pizza doesn't vaporize when you burn it. %% Q. What's the favorite dish in Kiev? A. 180 pound lobster. %% Q. What's the favorite drink in Kiev? A. Black Russian. %% Q. What's white and has dirty knees? A. A head nurse. %% Q. When he went, had you gone and had she, if she wanted to and were able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not to go, gone also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she, with him to the station? MR. BROOKS: Objection. That question should be taken out and shot. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Where does a 500-lb. Chtorran eat? A. Anywhere it wants to %% Q. Where does a 500-pound gorilla sleep? A. Inside the Chtorran %% Q. Why are Helen Keller's legs yellow? A. Her dog is blind, too. %% Q. Why did God give women vaginas? A. So men would talk to them. %% Q. Why did god invent gentiles? A. Somebody had to buy retail. %% Q. Why did the Chtorran cross the road? A. To eat everything on the other side %% Q. Why did the Chtorran eat Mt. Everest? A. Because it was there %% Q. Why did the Chtorran eat only one of the Vice-President's legs? A. It didn't want to leave him without a leg to stand on %% Q. Why do JAPs like their men circumsized? A. They like anything that's 20 percent off. %% Q. Why do you hang out with that sadist? A. Beats me! -- B. Kliban %% Q. Why does Helen Keller wear tight pants? A. So people can read her lips. %% Q. Why don't Chtorrans take Alka-Seltzer? A. Indigestion is how a Chtorran knows it had a good time %% Q. Why don't lepers scuba dive? A. Because they fall apart under pressure! %% Q. Why don't the animals go into the jungle between 3 and 5 o'clock? A. That't when the elephants jump out of trees. Q. Why are alligators long and flat? A. They go into the jungle between 3 and 5. %% Q. Why is fucking a fat woman like riding a moped? A. It's fun, but you don't want your friends to know. %% Q. You say you had three men punching at you, kicking you, raping you, and you didn't scream? A. No ma'am. Q. Does that mean you consented? A. No, ma'am. That means I was unconscious. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% Q. Are there any historical precedents for the Soviet system of elections? A. Yes, in the story of the creation. God made Eve, put her in the Garden of Eden, and said to Adam: "Now choose a woman." %% Q. Have you heard about the new use the Ukrainians have found for bald-headed men? A. Street lights. %% Q. How did NASA know that the Challenger crew had dandruff? A. They found their Head and Shoulders. %% Q. How do you know when a JAP had an orgasm? A. She drops her nail file %% Q. How does a JAP make dinner? A. Calls the nearest chinese restaurant. %% Q. How many Russian fire fighters does it require to put out a fire? A. Only 2, but 2000 of them will never return. %% Q. How many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb? A. None - the market will take care of it. -- Bill Ware (?) %% Q. What color were Christa McAuliffe's eyes? A. Blew. %% Q. What do Nancy Reagan and an IUD have in common? A. They're both stuck up cunts. %% Q. What do Walruses and NASA have in common? A. They're both looking for a tight seal. %% Q. What do you call 10 JAPS in a basement A. A wine cellar %% Q. What do you call a JAP on waterbed? A. 1) Lake Placid, 2) a cherry float %% Q. What do you call a cowboy hat sitting on top of a pair of boots? A. A Texan with the shit kicked out of him. %% Q. What do you call three lawyers up to their necks in quicksand? A. Not enough quicksand. %% Q. What happens when you try to start the engine on a Suzuki? A. It turns over. [Well, some of you might not quite understand this one if you didn't read the recent articles stating that the "fun to drive" Suzuki Samurai can be rolled over far more easily than any other car, causing Consumer Reports, I think to give it the first "unacceptable" rating they have given a car in many years. Ironic because of Suzuki's commercial about doing silly tests on a test track. -ed] %% Q. What is a JAP's favorite house A. Living room, diningroom, no kitchen and no bedroom. %% Q. What's all wrinkled and hangs out your underwear? A. Your mother. %% Q. What's the difference between a lawyer and a gigolo? A. A gigolo only screws one person at a time. %% Q. What's the difference between a lawyer and a vampire? A. A vampire only sucks blood at night. %% Q. What's the difference between a woman in church and a woman in the bathtub? A. The woman in church has hope in her soul. %% Q. Whats a JAP's favorite position? A. Facing Bloomingdales %% Q. Whats a JAPs idea of natural child birth? A. No makeup %% Q. Whats different between a computer and a JAP? A. A computer goes down. %% Q. Whats the difference between a JAP and a piranha? A. Nail polish %% Q. Whats the difference between a JAP and a vulture A. A vulture waits until you're dead to eat your heart out %% Q. Whats the difference between a JAP and the Bermuda triangle? A. The Bermuda triangle swallows seamen %% Q. When is it much better to be a women than a men ? A. When you are in the lavatory and the plane hits turbulences. %% Q. Where can you find a good lawyer? A. In the cemetery %% Q. Where is an elephant's sex organ located? A. In his foot: if he steps on you, you're f*cked. %% Q. Which company has had the biggest turn-over so far in 1987 ? A. Townsend-Thoreson. %% Q. Which stretches the farthest? Skin or Rubber. A. According to the Bible it would be skin. It says: "Then Aron tied his ass to a tree and walked forty miles . . .". %% Q. Why Didn't Jesus go to college? A. Because he got nailed on the boards. %% Q. Why did the turtle cross the road? A. To get to the Shell station. %% Q. Why didn't Dr. Pepper have any children? A: He only comes in a bottle. %% Q. Why do JAPs like circumcised men? A. They always want 20% off %% Q. Why do JAPs wear bikinis? A. To separate the milk from meat %% Q. Why do computer science people confuse Halloween and Christmas A. Because Oct. 31 = Dec. 25 %% Q. Why do lawyers wear neckties? A. To keep the foreskin from crawling up their chins. %% Q. Why does a JAP wear a gold diaphragm? A. So her boyfreind knows he's coming into money %% Q. Why is it that many lawyers have broken noses? A. From chasing parked ambulances. %% Q. Why was the Brazil nut so jealous? A. It had peanut envy. %% Q. Why was there only one black [oriental] [Jew] on the shuttle crew? A. They didn't know it would blow up. %% Q." How would a Solamnic Knight change a light light bulb? A." According to the Code and the Measure of course. %% Q.' How many Solamnic Knights does it take to change a light light bulb? A.' It doesn't matter. They can't see over the glare of their armour anyway. %% Q: Are we not men? A: We are Vaxen. %% Q: Have you ever been picked up by the fuzz? A: No, but I bet it hurts like hell. %% Q: Have you heard about the man who didn't pay for his exorcism? A: He got re-possessed! %% Q: How can a real man tell when his girl friend's having an orgasm. A: Real men don't care. %% Q: How can we get the Beatles to reunite for one more concert? A: With three more bullets. %% Q: How can you tell if an elephant is having an affair with your wife? A: You have to wait 22 months. %% Q: How can you tell if an elephant is sitting on your back in a hurricane? A: You can hear his ears flapping in the wind. %% Q: How can you tell the bride at a WASP wedding? A: She's the one kissing the golden retriever. %% Q: How can you tell when a Burroughs salesman is lying? A: When his lips move. %% Q: How can you tell when a WASP is sexually aroused? A: By the stiff upper lip. %% Q: How can you tell when your girlfriend has had an orgasm? A: Who cares? %% Q: How did Hellen Keller burn the side of her face? A: She answered the iron. Q: How did she burn the other side of her face? A: They called back. %% Q: How did the elephant get to the top of the oak tree? A: He sat on a acorn and waited for spring. Q: But how did he get back down? A: He crawled out on a leaf and waited for autumn. %% Q: How do you catch a unique rabbit? A: Unique up on it! Q: How do you catch a tame rabbit? A: The tame way! %% Q: How do you fit 1000 dead babies into a phone booth? A: Cuisinart. Q: How do you get them back out? A: Doritos. %% Q: How do you get a woman to stop having sex with you? A: Propose. %% Q: How do you hide an elephant in a cherry tree? A: Paint his balls red and his toenails green. Q: Ever see an elephant in a cherry tree? A: No -- so it must work pretty well! Q: How did Tarzan die? A: Picking cherries!!! %% Q: How do you keep a moron in suspense? %% Q: How do you know your elephant had her period? A: There's a nickel on your dresser and your mattress is missing. %% Q: How do you make a dead baby float? A: With 2 scoops of dead baby and some rootbeer. %% Q: How do you make an elephant float? A: You get two scoops of elephant and some rootbeer... %% Q: How do you stop an elephant from charging? A: Take away his credit cards. %% Q: How do you tell if two elephants have been making out in your backyard? A: The Hefty trashcan liners are missing. %% Q: How does a girl know she's sleeping with a Computer Scientist? A: It isn't hard. %% Q: How does a hacker fix a function which doesn't work for all of the elements in its domain? A: He changes the domain. %% Q: How does a mink get babies? A: The same way babies get minks. %% Q: How many Aggies does it take to eat an armadillo? A: Three, one to eat it, and two to watch for traffic. %% Q: How many Californians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Five. One to screw in the lightbulb and four to share the experience. (Actually, Californians don't screw in lightbulbs, they screw in hot tubs.) Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three. One to screw in the lightbulb and two to fend off all those Californians trying to share the experience. %% Q: How many WASP's does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One. %% Q: How many college football players does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Only one, but he gets three credits for it. %% Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: NONE! THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!!! %% Q: How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Ten. One to do it, and nine to talk about how gratifying it was without a man. %% Q: If Jane had been a princess, what would Cheetah have been? A: A fur coat. %% Q: Know what the difference between your latest project and putting wings on an elephant is? A: Who knows? The elephant *might* fly, heh, heh... %% Q: What did Raggedy Anne say to Pinocchio as she was sitting on his face? A: Tell the truth! Tell a lie! Tell the truth! Tell a lie! %% Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming over the hill? A: "The elephants are coming over the hill." Q: What did he say when saw them coming over the hill wearing sunglasses? A: Nothing, for he didn't recognize them. %% Q: What do WASP's do instead of making love? A: Rule the country. %% Q: What do a walrus and a tupperware container have in common? A: They both like a tight seal. %% Q: What do elephants use for tampons? A: Sheep. (Haven't you heard of toxic flock syndrome?) %% Q: What do elephants use instead of tampons? A: Sheep. Haven't you heard of toxic flock syndrome? Q: Why do elephants have trunks? A: Sheep don't have strings. %% Q: What do little WASPs want to be when they grow up? A: The very best person they can possibly be. %% Q: What do they call the alphabet in Arkansas? A: The impossible dream. %% Q: What do two WASPs say after making love? A: Thank you very much. It'll never happen again. %% Q: What do you call a deaf-mute quadraplegic Virginian? A: Trustworthy. %% Q: What do you call a dog with no hind legs? A: It doesn't matter, because he can't come anyway. Hear about the guy who had a dog with no hind legs? Use to call him Cigarette, took him out every evening for a drag. %% Q: What do you call a half-dozen Indians with Asian flu? A: Six sick Sikhs (sic). %% Q: What do you call a million cats at the bottom of Lake Michigan? A: A good start. %% Q: What do you call a nun who has had a sex change operation? A: A transistor. %% Q: What do you call a woman who can suck a golf ball through 50 feet of garden hose? A: Darling. %% Q: What do you call couples that use that rhythm method? A: Parents. %% Q: What do you call the WASP who doesn't work for his father, isn't a lawyer, and believes in social causes? A: A failure. %% Q: What do you call the money you pay to the government when you ride into the country on the back of an elephant? A: A howdah duty. %% Q: What do you call the scratches that you get when a female sheep bites you? A: Ewe nicks. %% Q: What do you do if an Irishman throws a pin at you? A: Run like hell, he's got a grenade in his mouth!! %% Q: What do you get when you cross a computer and a JAP? A: A computer that won't go down on you. %% Q: What do you get when you cross a rooster with a telephone pole? A: A thirty foot cock that wants to reach out and touch someone! %% Q: What do you get when you cross an onion with a donkey? A: Well, most of the time you get an onion with big ears, but every once in a while you get a piece of ass that will bring tears to your eyes... %% Q: What do you get when you stuff a flaming stick down a rabbit-hole? A: Hot cross bunnies! %% Q: What do you say to a Puerto Rican in a three-piece suit? A: Will the defendant please rise? %% Q: What does a WASP Mom make for dinner? A: A crisp salad, a hearty soup, a lovely entree, followed by a delicious dessert. %% Q: What does it say on the bottom of Coke cans in North Dakota? A: Open other end. %% Q: What goes green, red, green, red, green, red, pink? A: A frog in a blender. Q: What do you get if you add 2 eggs to it?? A: Frognogg. If you drink it, you croak. %% Q: What goes Click. "Did I get it?" Click. "Did I get it?" Click. "Did I get it?" Click. "Did I get it?" A: Stevie Wonder doing the Rubik's Cube. %% Q: What is black and white and red all over? A: Half a nun. %% Q: What is green and comes in Brownies? A: Boy Scouts. %% Q: What is green and lives in the ocean? A: Moby Pickle. %% Q: What is it that a cow has four of and a woman has two of? A: Feet. %% Q: What is orange and goes "click, click?" A: A ball point carrot. %% Q: What is printed on the bottom of beer bottles in Minnesota? A: Open other end. %% Q: What is purple and commutes? A: An Abelian grape. %% Q: What is purple and concord the world? A: Alexander the Grape. %% Q: What is the difference between Texas and yogurt? A: Yogurt has culture. %% Q: What is the difference between a duck? A: One leg is both the same. %% Q: What is the difference between snow-men and snow-women? A: Snowballs! %% Q: What is the last thing a Kansas stripper takes off? A: Her bowling shoes. %% Q: What lies on the bottom of the ocean and twitches? A: A nervous wreck. %% Q: What looks like a cat, flies like a bat, brays like a donkey, and plays like a monkey? A: Nothing. %% Q: What's a JAP's (Jewish American Princess) dream house? A: Fourteen rooms in Scarsdale, no kitchen, no bedroom. %% Q: What's a WASPs idea of open-mindedness? A: Dating a Canadian. %% Q: What's black and white and red all over and can't go through a revolving door? A: A nun with a javelin through her head. %% Q: What's bruised, bleeding, and lies in a ditch? A: Somebody who tells Aggie jokes. %% Q: What's buried in Grant's tomb? A: A corpse. %% Q: What's hard going in and soft and sticky coming out? A: Chewing gum. %% Q: What's red and has 7 dents? A: Snow White's cherry. %% Q: What's the difference between Bell Labs and the Boy Scouts of America? A: The Boy Scouts have adult supervision. %% Q: What's the difference between a dog and a fox? A: About four drinks. %% Q: What's the difference between a duck? A: You can't get down off an elephant. %% Q: What's the difference between a man and the weekend? A: The weekend never comes too soon. %% Q: What's the difference between a sorority girl and a fast car? A: Not everyone's been in a fast car. %% Q: What's the difference between a woman and a toilet seat? A: One doesn't follow you around for a week after you've used it. %% Q: What's the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish wake? A: One more drunk. %% Q: What's the difference between erotic and kinky? A: Erotic is when you use a feather. Kinky is when you use the whole bird... %% Q: What's the difference between hard and dark? A: It stays dark all night. %% Q: What's the difference between your girlfriend and the Titanic? A: Only 1500 men went down on the Titanic. %% Q: What's the last thing that goes through a grasshopper's mind when he hits your windshield? A: His ass. Q. What's the second-to-last thing to go through a grasshopper's mind when he hits your windshield? A. Oh, SHIT!! %% Q: What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous? A: A canary with the super-user password. %% Q: What's white and crawls up your leg? A: Uncle Ben's Perverted Rice. %% Q: What's worse than getting raped by Jack the Ripper? A: Getting fingered by Captain Hook! %% Q: Where does Catwoman go for a good time? A: To the batpoles, Robin! %% Q: Where'd your girlfriend get those crow's feet? A: From squinting and saying, "Suck what!?" %% Q: Why can't Hellen Keller have children? A: Because she's dead. %% Q: Why did Captain Kirk piss on the bridge? A: He wanted to boldly go where no man had gone before! %% Q: Why did God create goyim? A: Somebody had to buy retail. %% Q: Why did God invent booze? A: So ugly men could get laid too. %% Q: Why did Hellen Keller go all the way on her first date? A: She'd never been taught to say no. %% Q: Why did Menachem Begin invade Lebanon? A: To impress Jodie Foster. %% Q: Why did Ted Kennedy report the accident 8 hours after Mary Jo Kopechne drowned? A: Do you have any idea how hard it is to dress a woman underwater? %% Q: Why did the WASP cross the road? A: To get to the middle. %% Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: He was giving it last rites. %% Q: Why did the germ cross the microscope? A: To get to the other slide. %% Q: Why did the programmer call his mother long distance? A: Because that was her name. %% Q: Why do dogs lick their private parts? A: Because they can. %% Q: Why do firemen wear red suspenders? A: To conform with departmental regulations concerning uniform dress. %% Q: Why do men marry women? A: You can't teach a sheep to do housework. %% Q: Why do mice have such small balls? A: Very few of them know how to dance! %% Q: Why do the police always travel in threes? A: One does the reading, one the writing, and the other keeps an eye on the two intellectuals. %% Q: Why do women have vaginas? A: So when they're drunk, you can carry them like a six-pack. %% Q: Why do you put a baby in a blender feet first? A: So you can watch the expression on its face. %% Q: Why does an elephant have 4 feet? A: Because 8 inches isn't enough. %% Q: Why is it that Mexico isn't sending anyone to the summer games? A: Anyone in Mexico who can run, swim or jump is already in LA. %% Q: Do you know what the death rate around here is? A: One per person. %% Q: How many contras does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Only one, but he needs one Iranian, one Israeli, four Canadians, and Arab, twenty Swiss, and Afghan, and Oliver North (no relation) to help him. %% Q: How many disarmament folks does it take to change a light bulb? A: They won't, because: 1. "If we change our bulb, they will just change theirs to a brighter one, so where will it all end?" 2. "We already have enough bulbs to illuminate the entire world three times over." 3. "We shouldn't spend money for light bulbs as long as anyone is hungry anywhere." 4. "We don't know what effect all of this artificial light will have on the future of mankind." 5. "Nature provides us with all the light we need; we just haven't learned to husband it yet." 6. "Artificial light isn't aesthetically correct." 7. "The candle is more traditional, and it uses no electricity." 8. "It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to provide light to all Americans, without regard to race, age, creed, color sex (anatomic), sex (persuasion), religion, socio-economic status, national origin, or need." 9. "I'm not about to touch anything that has WATT written on it!" %% Q: Why do ducks have flat feet? A: To stamp out forest fires. Q: Why do elephants have flat feet? A: To stamp out flaming ducks. %% Q: Why do mountain climbers rope themselves together? A: To prevent the sensible ones from going home. %% Q: Why did the Australian aborigine cross the road? A: Because he was stapled to the chicken. Q: Why did the koala fall out of the tree? A: Because it was dead. Q: Why did the 2nd koala fall out of the tree? A: Because it was holding on to the 1st koala. Q: Why did the 3rd koala fall out of the tree? A: Because it was stupid enough to think it was a game. Q: Why did the 4th koala fall out of the tree? A: Because it was stapled to the 3rd koala. Q: Why did the aborigine fall off his bicycle? A: Because he was hit by the falling koalas. Q: Why did the 2nd aborigine fall off his bicycle? A: Because it was a tandem bicycle. %% Q: How fast can a woman go? A: 68; when she does 69 she blows a rod! %% Q: Did you know condoms have serial numbers on them? A: I guess you're not unrolling them as far as I do! %% Q: Do you know how many musicians it takes to change a lightbulb? A: No, big daddy, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it. %% Q: How can you tell if your roommate's gay? A: His dick tastes like shit. %% Q: How did you get into artificial intelligence? A: Seemed logical -- I didn't have any real intelligence. %% Q: How do you circumcise a whale? A: With four skin-divers. %% Q: How do you get a nun pregnant? A: You fuck her. %% Q: How do you play religious roulette? A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck by lightning first. %% Q: How do you tell if an Elephant has been making love in your backyard? A: If all your trashcan liners are missing ... %% Q: How do you tell if you're making love to a nurse, a schoolteacher, or an airline stewardess? A: A nurse says: "This won't hurt a bit." A schoolteacher says: "We're going to have to do this over and over again until we get it right." An airline stewardess says: "Just hold this over your mouth and nose, and breath normally." %% Q: How does getting up at 4AM resemble a pig's tail? A: It's "twirly"! %% Q: How many 'pro-lifers' does it take to change a light bulb? A: 6: 2 to screw in the bulb and 4 to testify that it was lit from the moment they began screwing. %% Q: How many (Generals/Politicians) does it take to change a lightbulb? A: 1,000,001: One to change the bulb and 1,000,000 to rebuild civilization to the point where they need lightbulbs again. %% Q: How many gods does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to hold the bulb and the other to rotate the planet. %% Q: How many does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 10. One to hold the bulb and nine to rotate the ladder. %% Q: How many Bell Labs Vice Presidents does it take to change a light bulb? A: That's proprietary information. Answer available from AT&T on payment of license fee (binary only). %% Q: How many Bratzlaver Chasidim does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. They will never find one that burned as brightly as the first one. %% Q: How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb? A: Six. One to turn the bulb, one for support, and four to relate to the experience. %% Q: How many Carl Sagans does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Billions and billions. %% Q: How many Chinese Red Guards does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 10,0000 - to give the bulb a cultural revolution. %% Q: How many Christian Scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None, but it takes at least one to sit and pray for the old one to go back on. %% Q: How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb? A: Three, but they're really only one. %% Q: How many DEC repairman does it take to fix a flat ? A: Five; four to hold the car up and one to swap tires. %% Q: How many DEC repairman does it take to fix a flat? A: Five; four to hold the car up and one to swap tires. Q: How long does it take? A: It's indeterminate. It will depend upon how many flats they've brought with them. Q: What happens if you've got TWO flats? A: They replace your generator. %% Q: How many Ergonomicists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Five. Four to decide which way the bulb OUGHT to turn, and... %% Q: How many Federal employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Sorry, that item has been cut from the budget! %% Q: How many Feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Thats not funny!!! A': It's 'Women' and it's not funny! %% Q: How many Field Service Engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: That depends on how many defective bulbs they brought. %% Q: How many Harvard students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Just one. He holds the lightbulb and the universe revolves around him. %% Q: How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None. ('Thats all right...I'll just sit here in the dark...') %% Q: How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None a ya damn business! A': 50. 50? Yeah 50; its in the contract. %% Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Five. One to change the bulb and four more to chase off the Californians who have come up to relate to the experience. %% Q: How many Polacks does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Just one, but you need 6000 Russian troops in case he goes on strike! %% Q: How many Professors does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None...what do you think their graduate students are for? %% Q: How many Psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? A: None; the bulb will change itself when it is ready. %% Q: How many Psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Only one, but the bulb has got to really WANT to change. A': None; the bulb will change itself when it is ready. %% Q: How many Pygmies does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: At least three. %% Q: How many Radcliffe girls does it take to change a light bulb? A: It's "Women" and it's not funny! %% Q: How many Roman Catholics does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two, one to screw it in, and another to repent. %% Q: How many Romulans does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 151, one to screw the light-bulb in, and 150 to self-destruct the ship out of disgrace. (Warning: do not tell this to Romulans or be ready for a fight. They consider this joke to be a disgrace, though it is not bad for a LBJ.) %% Q: How many TV comedians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two, one to screw it in, and another to say 'Sock it to Me.' (Notes: Sock it = Socket. Also, the phrase was from 'Laugh In.') %% Q: How many U.S marines does it take to screw in a lightbulb ? A: 50. One to screw in the lightbulb and the remaining 49 to guard him. %% Q: How many Unix hacks does it take to change a light bulb? A: As many as you want; they're all virtual, anyway. %% Q: How many Vulcans does it take to change a light bulb? A: 'Approximately 1.00000000000000000000000' %% Q: How many WASPs (Californians) does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Silly, WASPs (Californians) don't screw in a lightbulb, they screw in hot tubs. %% Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: A tree in a golden forest. A': Two: one to change the bulb and one not to change it. A': One to change and one not to change is fake Zen. The true Zen answer is Four. One to change the bulb. A''':Zen Masters don't need to screw in light bulbs because they carry their own light with them. %% Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Zen Masters don't need to screw in light bulbs because they carry their own light with them. %% Q: How many `Real Women' does it take to change a light bulb? A: None: A 'Real Woman' would have plenty of real men around to do it. %% Q: How many accountants does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: What kind of answer did you have in mind? %% Q: How many actors does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Only one. They don't like to share the spotlight. %% Q: How many anarchists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: All of them. %% Q: How many assholes does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None; assholes never see the light anyway. %% Q: How many astronauts does it take to fly the Shuttle? A: More than seven. %% Q: How many astronomers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. Astronomers prefer the dark. %% Q: How many bankers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. Bankers don't change light bulbs. (Ever notice that the electronic bank signs are full of burned-out light bulbs?) %% Q: How many big black monoliths does it take to change a light bulb? A: Sorry, light bulbs are an evolutionary dead end. %% Q: How many bikers does it take to change a light bulb? A: It takes two. One to change the bulb, and the other to kick the switch. %% Q: How many board meetings does it take to get a light bulb changed? A: This topic was resumed from last week's discussion, but is incomplete pending resolution of some action items. It will be continued next week. Meanwhile... %% Q: How many brewers does it take to change a light bulb? A: About one third less than for a regular bulb. %% Q: How many bureaucrats does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to assure the everything possible is being done while the other screws the bulb into the water faucet. %% Q: How many cats does it takes to screw in a light bulb? A: You can throw away your light bulbs. Just douse the cat with gasoline, light it up with a match, and you'll have all the light you need. %% Q: How many civil servants does it take to change the lightbulb? A: 45. One to change the bulb, and 44 to do the paperwork. %% Q: How many consultants does it take to change a light bulb? A: I'll have an estimate for you a week from Monday. %% Q: How many cops does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None. It turned itself in. %% Q: How many data base people does it take to change a light bulb? A: Three: One to write the light bulb removal program, one to write the light bulb insertion program, and one to act as a light bulb administrator to make sure nobody else tries to change the light bulb at the same time. %% Q: How many dead babies does it take to change a light bulb? A: As many as it takes to make a pile big enough to climb on to reach the bulb. %% Q: How many doctors does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three. One to find a bulb specialist, one to find a bulb installation specialist, and one to bill it all to Medicare. %% Q: How many dorm residents does it take to change a light bulb? A: Trick Question. Dorm residents don't change them, they steal them. %% Q: How many dull people does it take to change a light bulb? A: one. %% Q: How many dyslexics does it take to change a light bulb? A: Eno. %% Q: How many economists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Two. One to assume the ladder, and one to change the lightbulb. %% Q: How many editors of Poor Richard's Almanac does it take to replace a light bulb? A: Many hands make light work. %% Q: How many efficiency experts does it take to replace a light bulb? A: None. Efficiency experts replace only dark bulbs. %% Q: How many football players does it take to change a lightbulb? A: The entire team! And they all get a semester's credit for it! %% Q: How many frat guys does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three: One to screw it in, and the other two to help him down off the keg. A': Five: One to hold the bulb, and four to guzzle beer until the room spins. %% Q: How many frat guys does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three: One to screw it in, and the other two to help him down off the keg. %% Q: How many gays does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and the other to say 'Fabulous.' %% Q: How many gorillas does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Only one, but it sure takes a shitload of light bulbs! %% Q: How many graduate students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Only one, but it may take upwards of five years for him to get it done. %% Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. They always work in the dark!!!! %% Q: How many hardware folks/FSE's does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. That's a software problem. A': None. They always work in the dark!!!! %% Q: How many heterosexual males does it take to screw in a light bulb in San Francisco? A: Both of them. %% Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Three. One to report it as an inspired government program to bring light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government plot to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win a pulitzer prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a lightbulb assassin to break the bulb in the first place. %% Q: How many jugglers does it take to change a light bulb? A: One, but it takes at least three light bulbs. %% Q: How many junkies does it take to change a light bulb? A: Oh wow, is it like dark, man? %% Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? A: How many can you afford? %% Q: How many lesbians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three. One to screw it in and two to talk about how much better it is than with a man. %% Q: How many lightbulb jokes does it take to change a lightbulb joke? A: The probability that a given lightbulb joke will be submitted to the net in any given week is .4, and the probability that it will have changed detectably since the last transmission is .2 . Hence (assuming independence, which is reasonable since no submitter of a lightbulb joke ever seems to know it has been submitted before, within the last 2 or 3 weeks), the probability that it will change in a given week is .08 . So it takes about 12.5 lightbulb jokes to change a lightbulb joke. %% Q: How many lightbulbs does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One, if it knows its own Goedel number. %% Q: How many managers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Three. One to get the bulb and two to get the phone number to dial one of their subordinates to actually change it. %% Q: How many marxists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None: The lightbulb contains the seeds of its own revolution. %% Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: One. He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem to the earlier joke. %% Q: How many members of the U.S.S. Enterprise does it take to change a light bulb? A: 7. Scotty will report to Captain Kirk that the light bulb in the Engineering Section is burnt out, to which Kirk will send Bones to pronounce the bulb dead. Scotty, after checking around, notices that they have no more new light bulbs, and complains that he can't see in the dark to tend to his engines. Kirk must make an emergency stop at the next uncharted planet, Alpha Regula IV, to procure a light bulb from the natives. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Sulu, and 3 red shirt security officers beam down. The 3 security officers are promptly killed by the natives, and the rest of the landing party is captured. Meanwhile, back in orbit, Scotty notices a Klingon ship approaching and must warp out of orbit to escape detection. Bones cures the native king who is suffering from the flu, and as a reward the landing party is set free and given all of the light bulbs they can carry. Scotty cripples the Klingon ship and warps back to the planet just in time to beam up Kirk et. al. The new bulb is inserted, and the Enterprise continues with its five year mission. %% Q: How many mice does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Only two, but the hard part is getting them into the light bulb. %% Q: How many mystery writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Two, one to screw it almost all the way in and the other to give it a surprising twist at the end. %% Q: How many necrophiliacs does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None, Necrophiliacs prefer dead bulbs. A': Only one. Oh, excuse me could you please test the socket with your finger while I go get a new bulb? %% Q: How many net.jokers does it take to tell yet-another LBJ? A: 1,622. One to tell the original joke, and the rest to give some minor variation of it! %% Q: How many netters does it take to submit a lightbulb joke? A: 1000: One to submit the joke and 999 to submit 'How many programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, thats a hardware problem' %% Q: How many people does it take to throw away a one WATT bulb?? A: Five. A Black, a Jew, two women, and a cripple... Notes: topical to the resignation of Interior secretary James Watt in 1983 %% Q: How many people from New Jersey does it take to change a light bulb? A: Three. One to change the light bulb, one to be a witness, and the third to shoot the witness. %% Q: How many pre-med students does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Five: One to change the bulb and four to pull the ladder out from under him. %% Q: How many professors does it take to change a light bulb? A: Only one, but they get three tech. reports out of it. %% Q: How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None. Thats a hardware problem. A': Two. One always leaves in the middle of the project. %% Q: How many psychics does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: ---- You should have hit 'n'! %% Q: How many referral agents does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Two: One to screw you out of a fee, and the other to send you to a store where they ran out of bulbs weeks ago. %% Q: How many sorority girls does it take to change a light bulb. A1: 7, one to change it and six to go out and buy Tab (or diet Coke). A2: 65, 1 to do it and 64 to sing and clap. %% Q: How many sorority sisters does it take to change a light bulb? A: 51. One to change the bulb, and fifty to sing about the bulb being changed. %% Q: How many straight San Franciscans does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Both of them. %% Q: How many strong does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 115. One to hold the bulb and 114 to rotate the house. %% Q: How many supply-side economists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None. If the government would just leave it alone, it would screw itself in. %% Q: How many survivors of a nuclear war does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None, because people who glow in the dark don't need light bulbs. %% Q: How many technical writers does it take to screw in a light-bulb? A: Just one, provided there's a programmer around to explain how to do it. %% Q: How many thought police does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None. There never *was* any lightbulb. Notes: Probably the only really good light bulb joke of 1984. %% Q: How many valley girls does it take to change a light bulb? A: Oooh, like, manual labor? Gag me with a spoon! For sure. %% Q: How much money do you give to a 900 foot Jesus? A: As much as he wants. %% Q: If you see a lawyer on a bicycle, why shouldn't you hit him? A: It might be your bicycle. %% Q: What did Cinderella say when she was sitting on Pinochio's face? A: "Lie to me! Tell the truth! Lie to me! Tell the truth! ..." %% Q: What do you call a cow that is standing in the Thames River near St. Paul's Cathedral that forms a circuit with a 220-240 voltage line and the water? A1: London Broil, of course. A2: Roast beef. %% Q: What do you call a herd of cattle masturbating? A: Beef Strokin' off. %% Q: What do you call a hippie with no legs? A: A vetern. %% Q: What do you call someone who mixes cement with a pitch fork? A: A mortar forker. %% Q: What do you call two skunks doing 69? A: Odor eaters. %% Q: What do you get when you cross James Dean with Ronald Reagan? A: A rebel without a clue. %% Q: What does a sorority girl say when she wants a date. A: I'm sooo wasted! %% Q: What famous musical is about a family who escape the Nazis by elevator? A: "The Sound of Muzak" %% Q: What has 4 wheels and flies? A: A garbage truck. %% Q: What is cheaper, Deernuts or Walnuts? A: Deernuts, because they're under a buck!! %% Q: What is the difference between a pregnant woman and a lightbulb? A: You can unscrew a lightbulb. %% Q: What is the worst story Helen Keller ever read? A: A cheese grater %% Q: What smells like worms? A: Bird farts. %% Q: What's -1 when less than 0, 0 when 0, 1 when greater than 0, and a pioneer in the field of psychoanalysis? A: Signum Freud... %% Q: What's a light-year? A: One-third less calories than a regular year. %% Q: What's a sorority girl's favorite wine? A: Daddy! I wanna go to the Bahammas. %% Q: What's the FIRST thing a sorority girl does in the morning? A: Introduce herself. %% Q: What's the SECOND thing a sorority girl does in the morning? A: Walk home. %% Q: What's the difference between Xerox and the Titanic? A: The Titanic had a band. %% Q: What's the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman? A: The car salesman can probably drive! -- Joan McGalliard (jem@latcs1.oz.au) %% Q: What's the difference between a kinky person and a pervert person? A: A kinky person uses a feather and a pervert uses the whole chicken. %% Q: What's the difference between a poodle humping your leg and a pit bull humping your leg? A: You let the pit bull finish! %% Q: What's the difference between a tavern and an elephant fart? A: The tavern's a bar room; the elephant fart's a BARROOM. %% Q: What's the difference between ignorance and apathy? A: Who knows? Who cares? %% Q: What's the easiest solution to Rubik's Cube? A: Spray paint. %% Q: What's the problem with the Chinese water torture? A: An hour later, it doesn't bother ya anymore. %% Q: Where can you buy black lace crotchless panties for sheep? A: Fredrick's of Ithaca, New York. %% Q: Where do watermelons send their kids in summer? A: John Cougar MelonCamp. %% Q: Where is medicine first mentioned in the bible? A: Where Moses gets his two tablets! %% Q: Why did Mozart kill his chickens? A: Because they kept saying Bach, Bach!! %% Q: Why didn't Santa Claus have any children? A: Because he only comes once a year, and it's down a chimney. %% Q: Why didn't Smokey-the-Bear have any children? A: When his wife got hot, he beat her with a shovel. %% Q: Why does Helen Keller masturbate with one hand? A: So she can moan with the other! %% Q: how many cabbage patch dolls does it take to change a lightbulb? A: the question is irrelevant since you couldn't find the dolls even if you knew how many. Notes: Topical to 1983 and the difficulty of obtaining cabbage patch dolls %% Q: "What is the burning question on the mind of every dyslexic existentialist?" A: "Is there a dog?" %% Q: Are we not men? A: We are DEVO! %% Q: Did you hear about the elephant orgy? A: It took place at the Share-a-ton hotel. %% Q: Did you hear about the merger between McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken? A: They have a new product: Crispy McAuliffe %% Q: Did you hear about the new brand of tires - Firestein? A: They not only stop on a dime, they pick it up. %% Q: Did you hear about the new movie called "Altered Suits?" A: It's the story of a Jewish man who takes acid and buys retail. %% Q: Did you hear that Christa was to do a spot for the U.S Forestry Service? A: "Learn not to burn" %% Q: Did you hear the one about the two Irish homosexuals? A: Michael Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzmichael. %% Q: Have you heard about the new cookbook? A: It's called "101 Ways to Wok Your Dog." "You can tell by the way I use my wok, I'm a Chinese cook, no time to talk" %% Q: How can I choose what groups to post in? ... Q: How about an example? A: Ok. Let's say you want to report that Gretzky has been traded from the Oilers to the Kings. Now right away you might think rec.sport.hockey would be enough. WRONG. Many more people might be interested. This is a big trade! Since it's a NEWS article, it belongs in the news.* hierarchy as well. If you are a news admin, or there is one on your machine, try news.admin. If not, use news.misc. The Oilers are probably interested in geology, so try sci.physics. He is a big star, so post to sci.astro, and sci.space because they are also interested in stars. Next, his name is Polish sounding. So post to soc.culture.polish. But that group doesn't exist, so cross-post to news.groups suggesting it should be created. With this many groups of interest, your article will be quite bizarre, so post to talk.bizarre as well. (And post to comp.std.mumps, since they hardly get any articles there, and a "comp" group will propagate your article further.) You may also find it is more fun to post the article once in each group. If you list all the newsgroups in the same article, some newsreaders will only show the the article to the reader once! Don't tolerate this. -- Brad Templeton, brad@looking.on.ca "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette" %% Q: How can you tell when a lawyer is lying? A: His lips are moving. %% Q: How can you tell when elephants have been in your garage? A: They've used the trashbags for condoms. %% Q: How did Noah construct the cages he needed? A: Ark-welding! %% Q: How do most women hold their liquor? A: By the ears! %% Q: How do you get a lawyer out of a tree? A: Cut the rope. %% Q: How do you keep a fool in suspense? A: I'll tell you tomorrow. %% Q: How do you keep a lawyer from drowning? A: Take your foot off his head. %% Q: How do you know the letter you just received is from a leper? A: His tongue is hanging from the stamp!! %% Q: How do you stop volcanos from erupting? A: Give them earth control pills. %% Q: How many 'Real Men' does it take to change a light bulb? A: None, 'Real Men' aren't afraid of the dark. %% Q: How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: NONE! Californians screw in hot tubs, not light bulbs! %% Q: How many DBMS engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: ALL. Two to support the backend, one to support the frontend, an interface engineer to screw it up, and the rest to turn the base. %% Q: How many Feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Thats not funny!!!! %% Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to execute a job? A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off. %% Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb? A: 100. Ten to do it, and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001, Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility, of which 10% of the pages state only "This page intentionally left blank", and 20% of the definitions are of the form "A ...... consists of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks". %% Q: How many Jewish-American Princesses does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to get a Tab and one to call Daddy. %% Q: How many Martians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: One and a half. %% Q: How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb? A: (heavy NY accent) None a ya f***in business! %% Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three. One to screw in the lightbulb and two to fend off all those Californians trying to share the experience. %% Q: How many Prolog programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: No. %% Q: How many Psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Only one, but the bulb has got to really WANT to change. %% Q: How many Zen Buddhists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 3. One to do it, one not to do it, and one to do both. %% Q: How many alchemists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Into what? %% Q: How many cryonicists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Four. One to ensure that the lightbulb is certifiably dead, one to perfuse it with cryoprotectants, one to slowly cool it to liquid nitrogen temperature, and one to wait two hundred years for technology to advance sufficiently to revive it. %% Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the lightbulb itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness. %% Q: How many folk singers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Two. One to change the bulb, and one to write a song about how good the old light bulb was. Notes: This has also been said of Virginians. %% Q: How many guitarists does it take to screw in a light bulb ? A: 30; 1 to do it and 29 to stand around and say "I can do that." %% Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Fifty four. Eight to argue, one to get a continuance, one to object, one to demur, two to research precedents, one to dictate a letter, one to stipulate, five to turn in their time cards, one to depose, one to write interrogatories, two to settle, one to order a secretary to change the bulb, and twenty-eight to bill for professional services. %% Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One, because the world revolves around him. %% Q: How many mice does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. (Hint: They are small enough to fit inside). %% Q: How many pre-meds does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three -- one to hold the light bulb, and two to pull out the chair from under him! A': None: premeds don't screw, they study. %% Q: How many right-to-lifers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and one to say that light started when the screwing began. %% Q: How many roads must a man walk down before he finds a damn good pub? A: Let us define n to be the number of roads a man must travel before he finds the pub defined above. We may thus define n+1 to be the first road which a man need not travel in order to reach a good pub. Now the traversal of road n+1 is not a necessary condition, but rather a sufficient one; thus it is sufficient for n+2 as well. Thus the statement is true for x roads where x is >= n. Therefore, by induction, it is true for any finite number x greater than n. We may conclude that the statement is true for sufficiently large x, or alternatively that as x approaches infinity, the number of roads that have been travelled become sufficient to have found a good pub. %% Q: How many shuttle crew members can fit in a VW? A: Eleven. Two in the rear, two in the front, and seven in the ashtray. %% Q: How many supply-siders does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. The darkness will cause the light bulb to change by itself. %% Q: How many teachers does it take to screw in a light bulb (on the space shuttle)? A: 1,000,001. One to screw it in and a million to pick up the pieces. %% Q: I cant spell worth a dam. I hope your going too tell me what to do? A: Don't worry about how your articles look. Remember it's the message that counts, not the way it's presented. Ignore the fact that sloppy spelling in a purely written forum sends out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience. -- Brad Templeton, brad@looking.on.ca "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette" %% Q: If Tarzan and Jane were Jewish, what would Cheetah be? A: A fur coat. %% Q: If Tarzan was Jewish, and Jane was a princess, what would Cheetah be? A: A fur coat. %% Q: In these busy market times, how can you get the attention of your broker? A: Say, "Hey, waiter!" -- from rec.humor.funny %% Q: In what way can Quicksort improve the performance of Natural Merge? A: By making it faster. %% Q: Is the Kiev accident anything like Three Mile Island? A: Of course, there's a direct core-relation. %% Q: Is there ANYthing that is stronger than love? A: Yes, garlic. %% Q: Somebody just posted that Roman Polanski directed Star Wars. What should I do? A: Post the correct answer at once! We can't have people go on believing that! Very good of you to spot this. You'll probably be the only one to make the correction, so post as soon as you can. No time to lose, so certainly don't wait a day, or check to see if somebody else has made the correction. And it's not good enough to send the message by mail. Since you're the only one who really knows that it was Francis Coppola, you have to inform the whole net right away! -- Brad Templeton, brad@looking.on.ca "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette" %% Q: They just announced on the radio that Dan Quayle was picked as the Republican V.P. candidate. Should I post? A: Of course. The net can reach people in as few as 3 to 5 days. It's the perfect way to inform people about such news events long after the broadcast networks have covered them. As you are probably the only person to have heard the news on the radio, be sure to post as soon as you can. -- Brad Templeton, brad@looking.on.ca "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette" %% Q: What branch of the service has 7 openings for shuttle pilots? A: The Marine Corpse. %% Q: What condition was Christa McAuliffe suffering from? A: Teacher burnout. %% Q: What did Christa McAuliffe leave to her students in her will? A: A picture of herself, blown up. %% Q: What did Jesus do when he got to the Holiday Inn? A: He threw some nails down on the counter and asked, "Can you put me up for the night?" %% Q: What did astronaut say to his/her spouse before the launch? A: You feed the dog; I'll feed the fish. %% Q: What did the battery say to the potato chip? A: If you're Frito-Lay, I'm Ever-Ready. %% Q: What do <*ethnic*> girls put behind their ears to attract men? A: Their ankles. %% Q: What do bar owners have in common with lesbians? A: Licker Licenses. %% Q: What do have when a lawyer is buried up to his neck in sand? A: Not enough sand. %% Q: What do the Chinese cooks listen to while making dinner? A: Wok music on a Wokman. %% Q: What do the Patriots and the space shuttle have in common? A: They both were doing fine for a minute and a half. %% Q: What do the sharks around Cape Canaveral eat? A: Launch meat. %% Q: What do women and turds have in common? A: The older they are, the easier they are to pick up. %% Q: What do you call 500 Indian women with no nipples??? A: The Indian-Nippless-500. %% Q: What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start! %% Q: What do you call a 6' 6" Angolan Guerilla with a sub-machine gun and six hand-grenades? A: "Sir." %% Q: What do you call a cow that can't give milk? A: An utter failure. %% Q: What do you call a potato in orbit? A: A spudnik. %% Q: What do you call a potato that commits a crime? A: A perpetater. %% Q: What do you call a potato that reads the news? A: A commentater %% Q: What do you call a potato that runs a country? A: A dictater. %% Q: What do you call a short psychic who escapes from prison? A: A small medium at large. %% Q: What do you call an E.T. with three balls? A: E.T.: The Extratesticle %% Q: What do you call poisoned coffee? A: Grounds for divorce. %% Q: What do you call the taxi stands in front of a Dallas hotel? A: The yellow rows of taxis. %% Q: What do you do for a choking dyslexic rabbi? A: You perform the L'chaim Maneuver. %% Q: What do you do with an elephant with three balls? A: Walk him and pitch to the rhino. %% Q: What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness and an atheist? A: Someone who knocks on your door for no reason whatsoever. %% Q: What do you get when you cross a potato with a penis? A: A dicktater. %% Q: What do you get when you cross the Godfather with a lawyer? A: An offer you can't understand %% Q: What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft? A: A-flat miner. %% Q: What do you get when you drop a piano on a battlefield? A: A-flat Major. %% Q: What do you get when you employ a Kiev resident as a movie critic? A: Glowing reviews. %% Q: What do you get when you kiss a galactic frog? A: Star Warts. %% Q: What does N.A.S.A. stand for? A: Not Another Seven Astronauts. %% Q: What does NASA stand for? A: National Astronaut Scattering Administration %% Q: What does a 200 lb. canary say? A: "Here, kitty." %% Q: What does a lawyer typically say in a bar? A: "Moo" %% Q: What does an insomniac, dyslexic philosopher do at night? A: He stares at the ceiling and wonders if there's a Dog. %% Q: What does it take to make a dead baby float? A: One scoop of ice cream and one scoop of dead baby! %% Q: What happens when you cross a pig with a lawyer? A: Nothing. There are some things a pig won't do. %% Q: What has four legs an an arm? A: A VERY happy pit bull! %% Q: What has two heads, gives milk, and goes "moo"? A: A goose in Kiev. %% Q: What is "SMOORPLAY"? A: It's what SMURFS do before they SMUCK, of course! %% Q: What is a free list? A: A data structure on a North American computer. %% Q: What is black, white, red and cannot turn around in an elevator? A: A nun with a shovel through her head. %% Q: What is brown, has a hump, and lives at the North Pole? A: A lost camel. %% Q: What is invisible but smells like carrots? A: Rabbit fart. %% Q: What is small and yellow and very dangerous? A: A canary with the system password. %% Q: What is the best way a lawyer can prolong his life? A: Wrap himself with duct tape. %% Q: What is the black stuff between the elephant's toes? A: Pygmies who were in the forest between 2 and 3 PM. %% Q: What is the definition of a "crying shame"? A: There was an empty seat. %% Q: What is the definition of a shame (as in "that's a shame")? A: When a busload of lawyers goes off a cliff. %% Q: What is the definition of a shame (as in "that's a shame")? A: When a busload of lawyers goes off a cliff. Q: What is the definition of a "crying shame"? A: There was an empty seat. %% Q: What is the difference between Australia and real yoghurt? A: Yoghurt has a living culture. %% Q: What is the difference between a Moose and the Lawrence Welk Orchestra? A: A Moose has its horns in the front and its ass hole in the back. %% Q: What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? A: I don't know and I don't care. %% Q: What is the motto for the Soviet Ministry of Nuclear Power? A: "Better dead than Red." %% Q: What is the new emblem of the Soviet Union? A: The hammer and sickle-cell. %% Q: What is the nickname of the first teacher in space? A: Crispy McAuliffe %% Q: What is the speed of a swallow? A: The speed of the swallow, Black, white, green, or yellow, Is the largest eigenvalue (Calculated as I tell you) Of the matrix of wind vectors, And some other similar factors, .... The jist of this [blasted] rhyme Is that exact speed varies with time. %% Q: What is their favorite music when you see your lover cooking outside on a bad day with another person? A: "I saw you...(and HIM!)...Wokking in the rain..." %% Q: What is their favorite party music? A: "Everybody Wang Chung tonight." %% Q: What is their favorite song? A: "Wok Like an Egyptian" %% Q: What is their favorite spiritual? A: "Wok of Ages" %% Q: What method of suicide is the best? A: Dying of old age: it takes the longest and most planning. %% Q: What one word describes the absolute worst blowjob you have ever had? A: Fantastic! %% Q: What to you call a potato participating in the Siddhis project? A: A levitater. %% Q: What was going through the astronauts heads when the space shuttle blew up? A: A 7-inch piece of metal. %% Q: What was the last thing to go through Christa's mind? A: A heat tile. %% Q: What was the weather forecast down in Florida the morning of the shuttle blast? A: Cloudy, with widely scattered bodies and debris. %% Q: What well-known novel could have predicted the fate of the space shuttle Challenger? A: The Story of O-Ring %% Q: What were Christie McAuliffe's last words? A: "Hey, what's this button for?" %% Q: What's Jewish foreplay? A: Two hours of begging. %% Q: What's black and white and black and white and black and white and black and white and black and blue? A: A nun falling downstairs. %% Q: What's black and white and found all over?? A: The space shuttle Challenger. %% Q: What's black and white and looks good on a lawyer? A: A doberman. %% Q: What's the REAL definition of Endless Love? A: Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder playing tennis..... %% Q: What's the choice between the shuttle Challenger and Dolly Parton? A: It's Boom or Bust! %% Q: What's the difference between God and a programmer? A: God doesn't think he is a programmer. %% Q: What's the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road? A: There are skid marks in front of the dog. %% Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a bucket of shit? A: The bucket. %% Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a pig? A: A pig doesn't become a lawyer when he drinks. %% Q: What's the difference between an IBM-PC and a boat anchor? A: Segment registers. %% Q: What's the difference between an oral and a rectal thermometer? A: Taste. %% Q: What's the last thing to go through a bug's mind as it hits your windshield? A: It's ass. %% Q: What's the main difference between what biologists call a "bug" and what computer programmers call a "bug"? A: Biological bugs reproduce very easily. %% Q: What's the only thing left of the first teacher in space? A: Her pupils. %% Q: Whats the difference between a hormone and a vitamin? A: You can't make a vitamin... %% Q: Where does virgin wool come from? A: Ugly sheep. %% Q: Where is Christa McAuliffe spending her vacation? A: All over the Eastern coast of Florida. %% Q: Why are so many experimental labs now using lawyers instead of white rats? A: (1) There are more lawyers than rats, (2) The scientists don't become as attached to the lawyers and (3) There are some things even a rat won't do. %% Q: Why did Bach have 20 children? A: He had no stops on his organ. %% Q: Why did NASA management overrule their engineers and launch the Challenger? A: To impress Jodie Foster. %% Q: Why did the chicken cross the basketball court ? A: He heard the ref was blowing fowls. %% Q: Why did the elephant wear sunglasses? A: He didn't want to be recognized. Q: Why did the grape wear sunglasses. A: It wanted to be an elephant. %% Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road? A: Because it was on the other side. %% Q: Why didn't the Greek ever leave home? A: He couldn't bear to leave his sisters behind Q: Why did he do so poorly in school? A: He hadn't been reared properly. %% Q: Why didn't the astronauts take a shower before the fateful launch ?? A: Because they wanted to wash up on the shore. %% Q: Why do Vulcans have pointed ears? A: So they can count to twelve. -- "Mad Magazine" %% Q: Why do the Swedes bring sandpaper to the desert? A: They use it as a map. %% Q: Why do the elephants paint their toenails red? A: So they can hide in cherry trees. %% Q: Why does the U.S.S. ENTERPRISE ("Star Trek") stock so much toilet paper? A: To wipe out the Klingons around Uranus. %% Q: Why don't Baptists do it standing up? A: Because it might lead to dancing. %% Q: Why don't the French have to worry about radioactivity from the Russian nuclear accident? A: They won't let the cloud use their airspace. %% Q: Why is Pepsi the official soft drink of NASA? A: They couldn't get Seven-Up. %% Q: Why is football the only real gay game? A: The quarterback's job is to make passes at the tight-end (deep and long) hoping to score; the running back's job is to penetrate any opening he can find. %% Q: Why is one prong on a wall plug wider than the other? A: Well, supposedly, it's because this arrangement protects your electronic equipment by providing a ground. Actually, it's because the great Gods of Electromotive Force require a small sacrifice of time and profanity every time you plug something in. %% Q: Why should you bury your lawyer? A: Because deep down inside, he's a good guy. %% Q: Why they don't let government workers look out the window in the morning? A: So they'll have something to do in the afternoon! %% Q: why did Pope John Paul get rid of all the dogs at the Vatican ? A: Because they always went around urinating on the poles. %% Q:how numb can an unworld get? A:number %% QED. %% QFM: Quelle Fashion Mistake. "It was really QFM, I mean painter pants? That's 1979 beyond belief!" -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% QUANTIZATION REVISION OF MURPHY'S LAW: Every thing goes wrong all at once. %% QUANTUM MECHANICS FOR WOMEN: It is impossible to know both what a woman is doing or where she is going at any given instant. %% QUARK: The sound made by a well bred duck. %% QUOTE OF THE DAY: ` %% QUUX [invented by Steele. Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent verb QUUXO, QUUXARE, QUUXANDUM IRI; noun form variously QUUX (plural QUUCES, Anglicized to QUUXES) and QUUXU (genitive plural is QUUXUUM, four U's in seven letters).] 1. Originally, a meta-word like FOO and FOOBAR. Invented by Guy Steele for precisely this purpose when he was young and naive and not yet interacting with the real computing community. Many people invent such words; this one seems simply to have been lucky enough to have spread a little. 2. interj. See FOO; however, denotes very little disgust, and is uttered mostly for the sake of the sound of it. 3. n. Refers to one of four people who went to Boston Latin School and eventually to MIT: THE GREAT QUUX: Guy L. Steele Jr. THE LESSER QUUX: David J. Littleboy THE MEDIOCRE QUUX: Alan P. Swide THE MICRO QUUX: Sam Lewis (This taxonomy is said to be similarly applied to three Frankston brothers at MIT.) QUUX, without qualification, usually refers to The Great Quux, who is somewhat infamous for light verse and for the "Crunchly" cartoons. 4. QUUXY: adj. Of or pertaining to a QUUX. 5. n. The Micro Quux (Sam Lewis). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% QWERT (kwirt), n. [MW < OW qwertyuiop, a thirteenth]: 1. a unit of weight equal to 13 poiuyt avoirdupois (or 1.69 kiloliks), commonly used in structural engineering; 2. [colloq.] one thirteenth the load that a fully grown sligo can carry; 3. [anat.] a painful irritation of the dermis in the region of the anus; 4. [slang] person who excites in others the symptoms of a qwert. -- Webster's Middle World Dictionary, 4th ed. %% QWERTY: /kwer'tee/ [from the keycaps at the upper left] adj. Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard (sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as opposed to Dvorak or foreign-language layouts or a {space-cadet keyboard} or APL keyboard. Historical note: The QWERTY layout is a fine example of a {fossil}. It is sometimes said that it was designed to slow down the typist, but this is wrong; it was designed to allow *faster* typing --- under a constraint now long obsolete. In early typewriters, fast typing using nearby type-bars jammed the mechanism. So Sholes fiddled the layout to separate the letters of many common digraphs (he did a far from perfect job, though; `th', `tr', `ed', and `er', for example, each use two nearby keys). Also, putting the letters of `typewriter' on one line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and accuracy for {demo}s. The jamming problem was essentially solved soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but the keyboard layout lives on. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Qoylu' vIneHpu'be'chugh vIjatlhpu'be' -- Klingon Proverb Translation: If I hadn't want it heard I wouldn't have said it. -- "The Final Reflection" %% Quack! %% Quack! Quack!! Quack!! %% Quality Control, n.: The process of testing one out of every 1,000 units coming off a production line to make sure that at least one out of 100 works. %% Quality-of-Life Constant: Each time you think you are about to be able to make both ends meet, somebody moves the ends. %% Quantity is no substitute for quality, but its the only one we've got. %% Quantum Mechanics do it with uncertainty. %% Quantum Mechanics: The dreams of which stuff is made. %% Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February. -- Edward Abbey %% Quark! Quark! Beware the quantum duck! %% Quasars shift red Hot stars burn blue Space is warped And so are you. %% Quayle stumbled in response to a question about his opinion of the Holocaust. He said it was "an obscene period in our nation's history." Then, trying to clarify his remark, Quayle said he meant "this century's history" and added a confusing comment. "We all lived in this century, I didn't live in this century," he said. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Que es mas macho: `lightbulb' o `schoolbus'? %% Que pendejo! %% Queen Elizabeth rules, UK? %% Queensboro president Donald Mannis, charged with receiving bribes in exchange for city contracts, resigned on Tuesday. Mannis feels he must devote more time to impending litigation, some of which might emanate from a recent statement he made comparing New York Mayor Ed Koch to Nazi Martin Bormann. A spokesman from the Bormann estate said they are weighing the odds of a slander suit. Mayor Koch could naturally be reached for comment, but we chose not to listen. -- Dennis Miller, "Saturday Night Live" %% Question Authority and the Authorities will question You. -- Danny Low (dlow%hpspcoi@hplabs.hp.com) %% Question Authority, ask me anything %% Question authority. %% Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Question: "Do you consider $10 a week enough for a longshoreman with a family to support?" Answer: "If that's all he can get, and he takes it, I should say it's enough." -- J. P. Morgan (1837-1913) %% Question: "Do you think the State or any other institution should do more for writers?" Answer: The State should do no more for writers than it should do for any other person who lives in it. The State should give shelter, food, warmth, etc., whether the person works for the State or not. Choice of work, and the money that comes from it, should then be free for that man; what work, what money, is his own bother. -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) %% Question: Is it better to abide by the rules until they're changed or help speed the change by breaking them? %% Question: Man Invented Alcohol, God Invented Grass. Who do you trust? %% Questionable day. Ask somebody something. %% Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Qui trop embrasse mal entreint. (Grab much, gain little.) %% Quick as a flashlight. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened! %% Quick, Boo-Boo, hide the lunch basket! Here comes the park ranger! %% Quick, sing me the BUDAPEST NATIONAL ANTHEM!! %% Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.) %% Quien mucho abarca poco aprieta. (Grab much, gain little.) %% Quiet return. Good fortune. %% Quigley's Law: Whoever has any authority over you, no matter how small, will atttempt to use it. %% Quigley's Laws: 1) If you take off your right-hand glove in very cold weather, the key will be in your left-hand pocket. 2) Any system that works perfectly will be revised. %% Quisling: After Vikdun Quisling, the Norwegian Prime Minister who invited the Germans to occupy his country at the start of World War II. %% Quit reading cookies and get to work. %% Quit reading these messages, and get back to work. %% Quit when you're still behind. -- Pierre Salinger %% Quit while you're ahead. You may not get another chance. %% Quit work and play for once! %% Quite frankly, I don't like you humans. After what you all have done, I find being "inhuman" a compliment. %% Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi. [Translation: What Jove may do, is not permitted to a cow.] %% Quorum: A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have their own way and their own way of having it. In the United States Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House; in the House of Representatives, the Speaker and the devil. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Quotable Quotes from Reader's Digest, April 1987: If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. %% Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911 %% Quote " My mother made me a homosexual " " If I gave her the wool will she make me one ? " %% Quoting court decisions is not a very useful activity when arguing with someone who is engaging in their constitutionally protected right to disagree with those decisions and attempting to change the environment in which they are made. You might believe that any legal decision by the courts is ipso facto correct and moral, but that's not the way most folks in this country operate. Look at Roe v. Wade... I happen to agree with the goals of that decision, but there are a hell of a lot of people who don't, and they have managed to get it changed, to some extent. Jeff is in the same position, and can quite reasonably argue that these statistics are irrelevant to his position. -- Peter da Silva, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com %% Qvid me anxivs svm? %% RACERS like to come in first. %% RACQUETBALL PLAYERS do it off the wall. %% RADICAL: A person whose left hand does know what his other left hand is doing. -- Bernard Rosenberg %% RADIO SHACK LEVEL II BASIC READY >_ %% RADIO and TV ANNOUNCERS broadcast it. %% RAID Antivirus - Kills Virus's DEAD!!! %% RAID!!! %% RAID!!! %% RAM - a male sheep. %% RAM wasn't built in a day. %% RANDOM adj. 1. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical definition); weird. "The system's been behaving pretty randomly." 2. Assorted; undistinguished. "Who was at the conference?" "Just a bunch of random business types." 3. Frivolous; unproductive; undirected (pejorative). "He's just a random loser." 4. Incoherent or inelegant; not well organized. "The program has a random set of misfeatures." "That's a random name for that function." "Well, all the names were chosen pretty randomly." 5. Gratuitously wrong, i.e., poorly done and for no good apparent reason. For example, a program that handles file name defaulting in a particularly useless way, or a routine that could easily have been coded using only three ac's, but randomly uses seven for assorted non-overlapping purposes, so that no one else can invoke it without first saving four extra ac's. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RANDOM adj. [cont.] 6. In no particular order, though deterministic. "The I/O channels are in a pool, and when a file is opened one is chosen randomly." n. 7. A random hacker; used particularly of high school students who soak up computer time and generally get in the way. 8. (occasional MIT usage) One who lives at Random Hall. J. RANDOM is often prefixed to a noun to make a "name" out of it (by comparison to common names such as "J. Fred Muggs"). The most common uses are "J. Random Loser" and "J. Random Nurd" ("Should J. Random Loser be allowed to gun down other people?"), but it can be used just as an elaborate version of RANDOM in any sense. [See also the note at the end of the entry for HACK.] -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RANDOM: as in number, predictable. as in memory access, unpredictable. %% RANDOMIZATION: The assignment of subjects to conditions in an experiment according to some preconceived plan. Randomness like chastity is more often claimed than maintained. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RANDOMNESS n. An unexplainable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. Also, a hack or crock which depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or rather, the combination upon which the crock depends). "This hack can output characters 40-57 by putting the character in the accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting 6 bits -- the low two bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing." "What randomness!" -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RAPE v. To (metaphorically) screw someone or something, violently. Usage: often used in describing file-system damage. "So-and-so was running a program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up raping the master directory." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RAVE (WPI) v. 1. To persist in discussing a specific subject. 2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows very little. 3. To complain to a person who is not in a position to correct the difficulty. 4. To purposely annoy another person verbally. 5. To evangelize. Also used to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bullshitting. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RE: /R-E/ n. Common spoken and written shorthand for {regexp}. %% READ UNHAPPY - MAKNAM -- LISP 1.5 %% README file: n. By convention, the top-level directory of a UNIX source distribution always contains a file named `README' (or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or some other variant), which is a hacker's-eye introduction containing a pointer to more detailed documentation, credits, miscellaneous revision history notes, etc. In the Mac and PC worlds, software is not usually distributed in source form and a README is more likely to contain user-oriented material like last-minute documentation changes, error workarounds, and restrictions. When asked, hackers invariably relate the README convention to the famous scene in Lewis Carroll's `Alice's Adventures In Wonderland' in which Alice confronts magic munchies labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink Me". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% REAL BOSTONIANS decorate an apartment the old-fashioned way ... ... they fern it. %% REAL BUDDY: Someone who'll go downtown and get two blowjobs, and come back and give you one. %% REAL COOKS obtain butter the old-fashioned way ... ... they churn it. %% REAL ESTATE PEOPLE know all the prime spots. %% REAL MUSICIANS adjust their volume the old-fashioned way ... ... they turn it [to eleven! Owright!!!]. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS deal with assembly language the old-fashioned way ... ... they learn it. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS disdain structured programming. Structured programming is for compulsive, prematurely toilet-trained neurotics who wear neckties and carefully line up sharpened pencils on an otherwise uncluttered 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 brown-bag lunches to work. 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 - and even harder to modify. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS don't do documentation. Documentation is for simps who can't figure out the listing. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies. And Szechwan food. Do not go to eat Szechwan food with a group of REAL PROGRAMMERS unless you are prepared to argue bitterly over the last spring roll. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS don't use LISP. Only weakling programmers use more parentheses than actual code. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS don't write in Pascal, Mesa, Ada or any of those other pinko computer science languages. Strong typing is for people with weak memories. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS have no use for managers. Managers are a necessary evil. Managers are for dealing with the bozos in Personnel, bean counters, senior planners and other mental defectives. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS know every nuance of every instruction and use them all in every real program. Puppy architects won't allow execute instructions to address another execute as the target instruction. REAL PROGRAMMERS despise such petty restrictions. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS like vending machine popcorn. Coders pop it in the microwave oven. REAL PROGRAMMERS use the heat given off by the CPU. They can tell what job is running just by listening to the rate of popping. %% REAL PROGRAMMERS: Don't draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate's form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts - look how much good it did for them. Don't Believe in schedules. Planners make up schedules. Managers "firm up" schedules. Frightened coders strive to meet schedules. Real programmers Ignore schedules. Like vending machine popcorn. Coders pop it in the microwave oven. Real programmers use the heat given off by the CPU. They can tell what job is running just by listening to the rate of popping. Know every nuance of every instruction and use them all in every real program. Puppy architects won't allow execute instructions to address another execute as the target instruction. Real programmers despise such petty restrictions. Don't bring brown bag lunches to work. 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' programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working in "only a few" 30-hour debugging sessions. %% REAL TEXANS curse the old-fashioned way ... ... the dern it. %% REAL USER n. 1. A commercial user. One who is paying "real" money for his computer usage. 2. A non-hacker. Someone using the system for an explicit purpose (research project, course, etc.). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% REAL WOMYN answer a man's advance the old-fashioned way ... ... they spurn it. %% REALITY.DAT not found. Press any key to reset Universe. %% REALITY.SYS Corrupted - Unable To Recover Universe %% REALITY.SYS Corrupted: Re-boot universe? (Y/N/Q) %% REAPPRAISAL: An abrupt change of mind after being found out. %% REASON: the Devil's harlot. -- Martin Luther %% RECEPTION AREA: The purgatory where office visitors are condemned to spend innumerable hours reading dog-eared back issues of trade magazines like Modern Plastics, Chain Saw Age, and Chicken World, while the receptionist blithely reads her own trade magazine -- Cosmopolitan. %% RECOVER.COM: a little slice of hell %% RECURSION n. See RECURSION, TAIL RECURSION. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RECYCLERS use it again. %% RED KANGS ARE BEST %% REDESIGNED: previous faults corrected, we hope %% RED Let me act out my life by myself, `cause i burned so long to be like him. And i walked the soles off ten old shoes, `cause it took so long for me too be done. So let me see the man in the moon, who o.ce was silent, but who now let's me curse in his silence. Let me see the end of my troubles, `cause I burned so long just to be like him. -- jeremy michael mullen %% REFORMED: A synagogue that closes for the Jewish holidays. %% REGISTER: A part of a computer's processor that holds information for a while. Number of registers in a given system is N-3 where N is the number needed to efficiently implement a function. %% REJECTION: When you're masturbating and your hand falls asleep. %% REL See BIN. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RELATIVES!! %% RELATIVITY FOR CHILDREN: Time moves slower in a fast moving vehicle. %% RELIABLE SOURCE : The guy you just met. %% RELIABLE: Sometimes capable of giving the same results. %% RELIGION: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% REPAIRMEN can fix anything. %% REPORTER: "How did you like school when you were growing up, Yogi?" YOGI BERRA: "Closed." %% REPORTER: "What would you do if you found a million dollars?" YOGI BERRA: "If the guy was poor, I would give it back." %% REPORTER: Senator, are you for or against the MX missile system? SENATOR: Bob, the MX missile system reminds me of an old saying that the country folk in my state like to say. It goes like this: "You can carry a pig for six miles, but if you set it down it might run away." I have no idea why the country folk say this. Maybe there's some kind of chemical pollutant in their drinking water. That is why I pledge to do all that I can to protect the environment of this great nation of ours, and put prayer back in the schools, where it belongs. What we need is jobs, not empty promises. I realize I'm risking my political career be being so outspoken on a sensitive issue such as the MX, but that's just the kind of straight-talking honest person I am, and I can't help it. -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics" %% REPORTERS do it daily. %% RESEARCH: Consider Columbus: He didn't know where he was going. When he got there he didn't know where he was. When he got back he didn't know where he had been. And he did it all on someone else's money. %% RESEARCHERS are still looking for it. %% RESTORE A: C:\VIRGINITY\*.* /S %% RETAILERS move their merchandise. %% RETI: v. Syn. {RTI} %% REVERSALS / SYMMETRY: -- Steve Wright %% REVIEWER'S NOTE: A rejection slip based upon literature and theories in vogue during the period the reviewer was studying for his or her Ph.D. %% REVOLUTION: A form of government abroad. %% REVOLUTIONARY: it's different from our competitors %% RFC: /R-F-C/ [Request For Comment] n. One of a long-established series of numbered Internet standards widely followed by commercial and PD software in the Internet and UNIX communities. Perhaps the single most influential one has been RFC-822 (the Internet mail-format standard). The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted. %% RFC: /R-F-C/ [Request For Comment] n. One of a long-established series of numbered Internet standards widely followed by commercial and PD software in the Internet and UNIX communities. Perhaps the single most influential one has been RFC-822 (the Internet mail-format standard). The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted. The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standard-writing done by individuals or small working groups has important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO. Emblematic of some of these is the existence of a flourishing tradition of `joke' RFCs; usually at least one a year is published, usually on April 1st. Well-known joke RFCs have included 527 ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973), 748 ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin; 1 April 1978), and 1149 ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP-IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon. The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work --- they manage to have neither the ambiguities which are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures which often haunt formal standards, and they define a network which has grown to truly worldwide proportions. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RFE: /R-F-E/ n. 1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement. 2. [from `Radio Free Europe', Bellcore and Sun] Radio Free Ethernet, a system (originated by Peter Langston) for broadcasting audio among Sun SPARCstations over the ethernet. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RHAPSODY in Glue! %% RIBBIT %% RIGHT THING, THE n. That which is "obviously" the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree. "Never let your conscience keep you from doing the right thing!" "What's the right thing for LISP to do when it reads '(.)'?" %% RL: // [MUD community] n. Real Life. "Firiss laughs in RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing. Oppose {VR}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RLI Rotate Left Intermittently %% ROBERT'S AXIOM: Only errors exist. BERMAN'S COROLLARY TO ROBERT'S AXIOM: One man's error is another man's data. %% ROBERT'S RULES OF ORDER FOR BUREAUCRATS: 1. Always state motions in as complex a fashion as humanly possible. 2. Allow 3 minutes to count the ayes, and one second the noes. %% ROBERTSON'S LAW: Quality assurance dosen't. %% ROBIN'S LAW OF DELIVERY: Firmness of delivery dates is inversely proportional to tightness of schedule. %% ROBOT: Someone who's been made by a scientist. %% ROBUSTNESS: Never having to say you're sorry. %% ROGER'S LAW: As soon as the airline stewardess serves coffee, the aircraft will encounter turbulence. DAVE'S EXPLANATION OF ROGER'S LAW: Serving coffee on an aircraft causes turbulence. %% ROM - a RAM after a delicate operation. %% 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. %% ROOFERS do it on top. %% ROWELL'S DEFINITION OF THE ORATOR: One who has a flood of words and a drop of reason. %% ROWING: Eight big men and their cute little cox. %% RRSGWSSNK Round and Round She Goes, Where She Stops, Nobody Knows %% RS-232: An interface standard (what's that word you just said?) between computers, modems and stuff. Notable characteristics: a universal uncertainty about switching pins 2 and 3. Uses bipolar signals; was probably designed by the CEO of a power supply manufacturer. Has signals nobody ever uses except the peripheral you just bought. %% RSN: // adj. See {Real Soon Now}. %% RTBM: /R-T-B-M/ [UNIX] imp. Commonwealth Hackish variant of {RTFM}; expands to `Read The Bloody Manual'. RTBM is often the entire text of the first reply to a question from a {newbie}; the *second* would escalate to "RTFM". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RTFAQ: /R-T-F-A-Q/ [USENET: primarily written, by analogy with {RTFM}] imp. Abbrev. for `Read the FAQ!', an exhortation that the person addressed ought to read the newsgroup's {FAQ list} before posting questions. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RTFB: /R-T-F-B/ [UNIX] imp. Acronym for `Read The Fucking Binary'. Used when neither documentation nor the the source for the problem at hand exists and the only thing to do is use some debugger or monitor and directly analyze the assembler or even the machine code. "No source for the buggy port driver? Aaargh! I *hate* proprietary operating systems. Time to RTFB." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RTFM! %% RTFM: /R-T-F-M/ [UNIX] imp. Acronym for `Read The Fucking Manual'. 1. Used by {guru}s to brush off questions they consider trivial or annoying. Compare {Don't do that, then!} 2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't just asking out of {randomness}. "No, I can't figure out how to interface UNIX to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM." Unlike sense 1, this use is considered polite. See also {FM}, {RTFAQ}, {RTFB}, {RTFS}, {RTM}, all of which mutated from RTFM, and compare {UTSL}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RTFS: /R-T-F-S/ [UNIX] 1. imp. Acronym for `Read The Fucking Source'. Stronger form of {RTFM}, used when the problem at hand is not necessarily obvious and not available from the manuals --- or the manuals are not yet written and maybe never will be. For even more tricky situations, see {RTFB}. 2. imp. `Read The Fucking Standard;' this oath can only be used when the problem area (e.g., a language or operating system interface) has actually been codified in a ratified standards document. The existence of these standards documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated compromises which they inevitably contain, and the stifling language in which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use. (Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as the {Right Thing} to do is obvious to any thinking observer; sadly, this casual attitude towards specifications becomes unworkable when a system becomes popular in the {Real World}.) Since a hacker is likely to feel that a standards document is both unnecessary and technically deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may be directed as much against the standard as against the person who ought to read it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RTI: /R-T-I/ interj. The mnemonic for the `return from interrupt' instruction on many computers including the 6502 and 6800. The variant `RETI' is found among former Z80 hackers (almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore). Equivalent to "Now, where was I?" or used to end a conversational digression. See {pop}; see also {POPJ}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RTM: /R-T-M/ [USENET: abbreviation for `Read The Manual'] 1. Politer variant of {RTFM}. 2. Robert T. Morris Jr., perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see {Great Worm, the}); villain to many, na"ive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's name on ITS was hacked from RTM to {RTFM}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% RUCKERT'S LAW: There is nothing so small that it cannot be blown out of proportion. %% RUDE (WPI) adj. 1. (of a program) Badly written. 2. Functionally poor, e.g. a program which is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% RUDNICK'S RULE: That which cannot be taken apart, will fall apart. %% RUGBY: Elegant violence. %% RUGGED: too heavy to lift %% RULE OF POLITICAL PROMISES: Truth varies. %% RULES OF EATING -- THE BRONX DIETER'S CREED (1) Never eat on an empty stomach. (2) Never leave the table hungry. (3) When traveling, never leave a country hungry. (4) Enjoy your food. (5) Enjoy your companion's food. (6) Really taste your food. It may take several portions to accomplish this, especially if subtly seasoned. (7) Really feel your food. Texture is important. Compare, for example, the texture of a turnip to that of a brownie. Which feels better against your cheeks? (8) Never eat between snacks, unless it's a meal. (9) Don't feel you must finish everything on your plate. You can always eat it later. (10) Avoid any wine with a childproof cap. (11) Avoid blue food. -- Richard Smit, "The Bronx Diet" %% RUNNERS get into more pants. %% RX (Arrogant General Features: Body any size, but usually not big; Expert) Short, styled hair; Glasses (optional, but typical); Expensive clothes; Ridiculously expensive calculator in a quick-draw 'Smart Ass' holster; Briefcase (optional but typical). 'Typical College Behavior Summary: These image-happy bozos make it their Student' game to appear as though they know everything when in fact they don't. To reinforce their position, they carefully watch everyone for some trivial lack of knowledge to viciously exploit. RX's regard all sentient life with contempt. Occasionally (but not often) RX's are actually intelligent. %% Rabbit - Hare today, Welsh tomorrow. %% Rabble: In a republic, those who hold supreme power tempered by fraudulent elections. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Rachel Prejudice %% Racial prejudice is a pigment of the imagination. %% Radar: Extremely realistic kind of electronic game often found on larger sailboats. -- from "Sailing" by Henry Beard and Roy Mckie %% Radford: "How about a Black Cow on the house in honor of your being my first customer of the day?" Marshall: "Thanks, Mr. Radford." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% Radford: "Well boys, you're my first customers in quite some time. Drinks are on the house; what'll you have?" Marshall: "Uh - Black Cow with a nip of java." Radford: "Black Cow with a nip of java." [Turns to Simon] Simon: "Ditto." Radford: "Ditto. Coming right up." -- "Hole in the Head Gang", Eerie Indiana %% Radicalism: The conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Radio Engineers do it till it MegaHertz. %% Radio Engineers do it with Frequency %% Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. %% Radioactive halibut will make fission chips. %% Raffiniert ist der Herrgott aber boshaft ist er nicht. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Raffle: In Alabama, used for hunting. %% Rah Rah Ree Kick 'em in the knee Rah Rah Rass Kick 'em in the other knee %% Rainy days and Mondays always get me down. %% Rainy days and Mondays really suck. %% Rainy days and automatic weapons always get me down. %% Raise your hand, Raise your hand, Raise your hand if you're SURE %% Raising pet electric eels is gaining a lot of current popularity. %% Raking his stiletto across your arm, the thief draws blood. %% Ralph: Lisa, you have no tits and a awful tight pussy. Lisa: Ralph... get off my back!! %% Ralph: Dad, will you do my math for me tonight? Dad: No, son, it wouldn't be right. Ralph: Well, you could try. %% Ram: What you do to the side of your computer when it's not working properly. %% Ramon Azteca! Crusader Rabbit! %% Rampaging anarchist horde and floating beer party %% Ranchers do it with cows and sheep. %% Randel, n.: A nonsensical poem recited by Irish schoolboys as an apology for farting at a friend. -- Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure & Preposterous Words %% Randomness: The property required to make statistical calculation come out right. %% Ranger is very! %% Rap music is Oxymoron %% Rapoport's Rule of the Roller-Skate Key: Certain items which are crucial to a given activity will show up with uncommon regularity until the day when that activity is planned, at which point the item in question will disappear from the face of the earth. -- Dan Rapoport %% Raquel Welch : 36-24-36 Bo Derek : 35-24-36 Ann-Margaret : 37-25-36 Bette Middler : 37-25-36 Marilyn Munroe : 37-24-37 Jane Russell : 39-27-38 Jayne Mansfield : 40-23-37 Sophia Loren : 37-25-36 %% Rascal, am I? Take THAT! -- Errol Flynn %% Rascality has limits; stupidity has none. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% Rash of Stabbings, A %% Rasputin's Revenge: Vodka and Strawberry diet Yoohoo. %% Rather than I wanna hold your hand, I wanna swallow you whole 'n lick you everywhere it's pink 'n everywhere you think Whole kit'n kaboodle'n the kitchen sink Heaven's sexy as hell Life is integrated, Goes together so well 'n so on Well, I'm gonna go on 'n do my washing Well you may think I'm crazy But I want you to lick my decals off baby 'n I don't want you to be lazy 'cause it's driving me crazy 'n this song ain't no sing song It's all about the birds and the bees 'n where it all went wrong 'n where it all belongs 'n the earth all go down on their knees lookin' for a little ease She stuck out her tongue 'n the fun begun She stuck out her tongue 'n the fun begun She stuck it out at me, 'n I just thumbed my nose 'n went on washing my clothes %% Rats live on no evil star %% Rattlesnake - Tattle Tail. %% Rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert, I pick up my money and head back into to town. %% Rattling around the back of my head is a disturbing image of something I saw at the airport ... Now I'm remembering, those giant piles of computer magazines right next to "People" and "Time" in the airport store. Does it bother anyone else that half the world is being told all of our hard-won secrets of computer technology? Remember how all the lawyers cried foul when "How to Avoid Probate" was published? Are they taking no-fault insurance lying down? No way! But at the current rate it won't be long before there are stacks of the "Transactions on Information Theory" at the A&P checkout counters. Who's going to be impressed with us electrical engineers then? Are we, as the saying goes, giving away the store? -- Robert W. Lucky, IEEE President %% Ratty bug-breath! %% Raunch Hands, The %% Ray S. Dawroof %% Ray's Hangover Cure: Stay drunk! %% Ray's Rule of Precision: Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe. %% Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acids stain you, And drugs give you cramp. Guns aren't lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful, You might as well live. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures. %% Re: an article titled 'Inside The Dukakis Campaign': "Kinda like looking up a dead horse's ass." -- William Meyer (succinctly put, Dad) %% Reach high! The best is always kept Upon life's topmost shelves, But not beyond our reach if we Will reach beyond ourselves. -- Helen Laurie Marshall %% Reach into the thoughts of friends, And find they do not know your name. Squeeze the teddy bear too tight, And watch the feathers burst the seams. Touch the stained glass with your cheek, And feel its chill upon your blood. Hold a candle to the night, And see the darkness bend the flame. Tear the mask of peace from God, And hear the roar of souls in hell. Pluck a rose in name of love, And watch the petals curl and wilt. Lean upon the western wind, And know you are alone. -- Dru Mims %% Reach out and fuck someone. %% Reach out, reach out, and touch someone. %% Read a good book. %% Read and listen for what is missing. Many advisors are quite capable of stating how to improve what has been proposed, or what's wrong. Few seem capable of sensing what isn't there. -- Donald Rumsfeld %% Read in the "Letters to the Editor" column of "TIME" in response to an article on teen suicide: "People should be aware of the dangers of killing themselves." %% Read me Doctor Memory. %% Read me! Read me and judge if you understand! So you stopped in your journey because I called, scenting something unusual, something droll. Thus, although I am nothing, and even less, there is no one that sees me but lingers here. Stranger, I am a law of the universe. Stranger, render the law what is due the law! %% Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Read the manual before entering the cave - You might get killed otherwise. %% Read what I mean, not what I write. %% Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Reading Herbert will disgust you, but in one case it might be enlightening. %% Reading Tolkien might help you. %% Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own. %% Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. %% Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Reading might change your vision. %% Reading might improve your scope. %% Reagan can't _a_c_t either %% Reagan is the first president to be accompanied by a Silly Statement Repair Team. -- Mark Russell %% Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. Had he run unopposed he would have lost. -- Mort Sahl %% Real Life Ghost Busters Exorcise Poltergeist From Mick Jagger's Home in Castro Street. %% Real People Wear Fake Furs. %% Real Programmer: [indirectly, from the book `Real Men Don't Eat Quiche'] n. A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal `Real Programmer' likes to program on the {bare metal} and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been {bum}med into a state of {tense}ness just short of rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation: "If it was hard to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be hard to understand." Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers --- because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a {Good Thing} that there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in {appendix A}. The term itself was popularized by a 1983 Datamation article "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on USENET and Internet in on-line form. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Real Programmers always confuse Christmas and Halloween because OCT 31 == DEC 25 ! -- Andrew Rutherford (andrewr@ucs.adelaide.edu.au) %% Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTO's. %% Real Programmers don't drink the Tequila - they just eat the worms. %% Real Programmers don't eat quiche. In fact real programmers don't know how to SPELL quiche. They eat Twinkies, and Szechwan food. %% Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room. %% Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN. %% Real Programmers don't write specs -- users should consider themselves lucky to get any programs at all and take what they get. %% Real Programmers think better when playing Adventure or Rogue. %% Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them? %% Real Soon Now: [orig. from SF's fanzine community, popularized by Jerry Pournelle's column in `BYTE'] adv. 1. Supposed to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical. 2. When one's gods, fates, or other time commitments permit one to get to it (in other words, don't hold your breath). Often abbreviated RSN. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Real Time, adj.: Here and now, as opposed to fake time, which only occurs there and then. %% Real Users are afraid they'll break the machine -- but they're never afraid to break your face. %% Real Users find the one combination of bizarre input values that shuts down the system for days. %% Real Users hate Real Programmers. %% Real Users know your home telephone number. %% Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn't deliver it. %% Real Users never use the Help key. %% Real World, The n.: 1. In programming, those institutions at which programming may be used in the same sentence as FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, IBM, etc. 2. To programmers, the location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5. 4. The location of the status quo. 5. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the real world." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not unlike talking about a deceased person. %% Real World: n. 1. Those institutions at which `programming' may be used in the same sentence as `FORTRAN', `{COBOL}', `RPG', `{IBM}', `DBASE', etc. Places where programs do such commercially necessary but intellectually uninspiring things as generating payroll checks and invoices. 2. The location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A bizarre dimension in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5 (see {code grinder}). 4. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the Real World." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the Real World is not unlike speaking of a deceased person. It is also noteworthy that on the campus of Cambridge University in England, there is a gaily-painted lamp-post which bears the label `REALITY CHECKPOINT'. It marks the boundary between university and the Real World; check your notions of reality before passing. See also {fear and loathing}, {mundane}, and {uninteresting}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Real computer scientists admire ADA for its overwhelming aesthetic value but they find it difficult to actually program in it, as it is much too large to implement. Most computer scientists don't notice this because they are still arguing over what else to add to ADA. %% Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O. %% Real computer scientists don't comment their code. The identifiers are so long they can't afford the disk space. %% Real computer scientists don't debug programs, they dynamically modify them. This is safer, since no one has invented a way to do anything dynamic to FORTRAN, COBOL, or BASIC. %% Real computer scientists don't eat quiche. They shun Szechwan food since the hackers discovered it. Many real computer scientists consider eating an implementation detail. (Others break down and eat with the hackers, but only if they can have ice cream for desert.) %% Real computer scientists don't program in assembler. They don't write in anything less portable than a number two pencil. %% Real computer scientists don't write code. They occasionally tinker with `programming systems', but those are so high level that they hardly count (and rarely count accurately; precision is for applications.) %% Real computer scientists don't write the user interface, they merely argue over what it should look like. %% Real computer scientists like C's structured constructs, but they are suspicious of it because its compiled. (Only Batch freaks and efficiency weirdos bother with compilers, they're soooo un-dynamic.) %% Real computer scientists like having a computer on their desk, otherwise how would they read their mail. %% Real computer scientists like planning their own environments to use bit mapped graphics. Bit mapped graphics is great because no one can afford it. So their systems can be experimental. %% Real computer scientists love conventions. No one is expected to lug a 3081 attached to a bit map screen to a convention, so no one will ever know how slow their systems run. %% Real computer scientists love the concept of users. Users are always real impressed by the stuff computer scientists are talking about; it sure sounds better than the stuff they are being forced to use now. %% Real computer scientists only write specs for languages that might run on future hardware. Nobody trusts them to write specs for anything homo sapiens will ever be able to fit on a single planet. %% Real computer scientists play go. They have nothing against the concept of mountain climbing, but the actual climbing is an implementation detail best left to programmers. %% Real computer scientists regret the existence of PL/1, PASCAL and LISP. ADA is getting there, but it is still allows people to make mistakes. %% Real computer scientists work from 5 pm to 9 am because that's the only time they can get the 8 megabytes of main memory they need to edit specs. (Real work starts around 2 am when enough MIPS are free for their dynamic systems.) Real computer scientists find it hard to share 3081's when they are doing 'REAL' work. %% Real estate brokers do it on the ground. %% Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile. -- Sir Wilfred Grenfell %% Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance. -- Confucius %% Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Real life isn't like this. %% Real men consider saturated fats as one of the four major food groups. %% Real men don't set for stun. %% Real men write self-modifying code. %% Real pirates accept the reality that 300 baud is dead. %% Real pirates are more imaginative than to use the word 'copy' in their alias. corollary: Real pirates aren't named 'Mr. Copy' because real pirates don't brag about cracking Dung Beetles. %% Real pirates are satisfied with one exclamation point. %% Real pirates aren't around to trade on Friday or Saturday nights. %% Real pirates aren't named Sam Houston,Sir Spanky, The Gamemaster, Lord Fagen, (insert your own losers here), or Mr. Copy. %% Real pirates don't name themselves after alcoholic beverages (i.e. Jack Daniels, Harvey Wallbanger, Jim Beam, etc.) especially when they've never had one. %% Real pirates don't name themselves after heavy metal groups. %% Real pirates don't post their high scores. corollary: Real pirates don't keep score. %% Real pirates don't say 'K-K00L','K-AWESOME', 'X10DER', 'L8R0N', or anything of the sort. %% Real pirates don't search for new ways to spell 'WARES'. %% Real pirates don't use the last 5 lines of their messages bragging about the 8 meaningless organizations that they belong to. %% Real pirates don't waste everyone's time backspacing over their alias 50 times. %% Real pirates feel guilty when pirating Beagle Brothers. Of course, that never stops them. %% Real pirates know the difference between 'f' and 'ph' (i.e. 'philes', 'phuck', 'fone', etc.). %% Real pirates never get into 'bitch wars' unless, of course, they are grinding some 13 year old TI user into the dust. %% Real pirates never use text graphics in their messages. %% Real pirates spell their aliases correctly (unlike 'The Poenix'). %% Real pirates upload. They realize that leeching is the #2 sin (behind, of course, being 13 years old). %% Real pirates would never think of deleting 'Sabotage'. It's too much fun imagining those little men are actually Sir Knight. %% Real pirates' aliases don't sound as if they were extracted from the lyrics of an Ozzy Ozbourne song (i.e. Provisioner of Satan, Black Avenger, Dark Phantom, etc.). %% Real pirates' names aren't parodies of other reputable pirates (i.e. Resident of Lavender Bag, Mr. Pac Man, Franklin Bandit, etc.). %% Real pirates, if named after some aspect of pirate legend (i.e. Jolly Roger, Captain Hook, Eye Patch, etc.) don't say, 'Avast ye scurvy dogs,' or anything of the like. %% Real programmers are a figment of the imagination. %% Real programmers are not in it for the money. Most of them are secret millionaires. %% 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 pencils on otherwise clear desks. %% Real programmers do not clear registers twice before using them. In fact, if you annoy a real programmer, he/she won't clear the registers at all. And that goes for your memory too! %% Real programmers do not eat quiche. They eat Twinkies (because they are in vending machines) and Szechuan food (because they deliver at 4am). Also, real programmers have recently discovered the product, JOLT Cola and have begun to stock this instead of Coke or Mountain Dew. Real programmers do not require caffeine to stay awake, but is required to train new and upcoming real programmers. %% Real programmers do not wonder where the bits went following a shift operation. They do not care. %% Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches. If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche. %% Real programmers don't care about users. They write programs for aesthetic beauty. %% Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. %% Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be even harder to understand and modify. %% Real programmers don't document. Documentation is for simpletons who can't read listings or the object code from the dump. %% Real programmers don't document; if it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. %% Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate's form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look how much good it did them. %% Real programmers don't dress for success unless they are going on an interview. %% 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 drive clapped-out Mavericks. they prefer BMWs, Lincolns or pick-up trucks with floor shifts. Fast motorcycles are highly regarded. %% Real programmers don't eat quiche. Real programmers don't even know how to spell quiche. They like Twinkies, Old Coke, palate-scorching Szechwan food, and Tacos. %% Real programmers don't like the Team Programming concept. Unless, of course, they are the Chief Programmer. %% Real programmers don't play video games, they write them. %% Real programmers don't read manuals. Reliance on a reference is the hallmark of the novice or coward. %% Real programmers don't use Fortran. Fortran is for wimpy engineers who wear white socks, pipe stress freaks, and crystallography weenies. They get excited over finite state analysis and nuclear reactor simulation. %% Real programmers don't use PL/I. Pl/I is for insecure momma's boys who can't choose between Cobol and Fortran. %% Real programmers don't write applications programs, they program right down on the bare metal. Application programming is for dullards 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 reaching puberty. %% Real programmers don't write in COBOL. COBOL is for COmmon Business Oriented Laymen who can run neither a buiness or a real program. %% 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. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks. %% Real programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks. They get excited over finite state analysis and nuclear reactor simulation. %% Real programmers don't write in LISP. Only sissy programs contain more parentheses than actual code. %% Real programmers don't write in PASCAL, ADA, BLISS or any of those sissy computer science languages. Strong typing is a crutch for people with weak memories. %% Real programmers don't write in PL/1. PL/1 is for insecure anal retentives who can't choose between COBOL and FORTRAN. %% Real programmers don't write in RPG. RPG is for gum-chewing dimwits who maintain ancient payroll programs. %% Real programmers don't write specs. Users should be grateful for whatever they get; they are lucky to get any programs at all. %% 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 midgets. %% Real programmers know that good human factors design requires only the application of common sense. Besides, no one cares about users. The program is written for aesthetic beauty. %% Real programmers like vending machine popcorn. Coders pop it in the microwave oven. Real programmers use the heat given off by the cpu. %% Real programmers never "write" memos on paper. They "send" memos via MAIL. %% Real programmers never deliver programs on Wednesdays. Real programmers never deliver programs on the first day of any month. %% Real programmers never deliver programs on schedule. Either the program is "done" in two days or it is never finished. In any case, it is never delivered when it was scheduled. %% Real programmers never eat at restaurants. If the vending machine sells it, they eat it. If it doesn't, they don't. Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches, either. Recently, real programmers discovered that popcorn was being sold in vending machines. Common coders discovered that it could be popped in the microwave oven in the vending-machine room, but real programmers use the heat escaping from the top of the CPU. Vending machines don't sell quiche, which is why Real programmers don't eat it. %% Real programmers never grow old. They suffer from burnouts, monumental crashes, or bugs in their DNA. %% Real programmers never make up schedules. Only planners make up schedules. Only managers read them. %% Real programmers never work 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9 AM its because they were up all night. %% Real programmers scorn floating point arithmetic. The decimal point was invented for pansy bedwetters who are unable to think big. %% Real programmers' programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working order in "only a few" 30-hour debugging sessions. %% Real programs don't eat cache. %% Real software engineers admire PASCAL for its discipline and Spartan purity, but they find it difficult to actually program in. They don't tell this to their friends, because they are afraid it means that they are somehow Unworthy. %% Real software engineers aren't too happy about the existence of users, either. Users always seem to have the wrong idea about what the implementation and verification of algorithms is all about. %% Real software engineers don't comment their code. The identifiers are so mnemonic they don't have to. %% Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness. This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package. %% Real software engineers don't eat quiche. %% Real software engineers don't like the idea of some inexplicable and greasy hardware several aisles away that may stop working at any moment. They have a great distrust of hardware people, and wish that systems could be virtual at *___all* levels. They would like personal computers (you know no one's going to trip over something and kill your DFA in mid-transit), except that they need 8 megabytes to run their Correctness Verification Aid packages. %% Real software engineers don't program in assembler. They become queasy at the very thought. %% Real software engineers don't read dumps. They never generate them, and on the rare occasions that they come across them, they are vaguely amused. %% Real software engineers don't write applications programs, they implement algorithms. If someone has an application that the algorithm might help with, that's nice. Don't ask them to write the user interface, though. %% Real software engineers don't write in ADA, because the standards bodies have not quite decided on a formal spec yet. %% Real software engineers like C's structured constructs, but they are suspicious of it because they have heard that it lets you get "close to the machine." %% Real software engineers like writing their own compilers, preferably in PROLOG (they also like writing them in unimplemented languages, but it turns out to be difficult to actually RUN these). %% Real software engineers play tennis. In general, they don't like any sport that involves getting hot and sweaty and gross when out of range of a shower. (Thus mountain climbing is Right Out.) They will occasionally wear their tennis togs to work, but only on very sunny days. %% Real software engineers regret the existence of COBOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC. PL/1 is getting there, but it is not nearly disciplined enough; far too much built in functions. %% Real software engineers think better when playing WFF 'N' PROOF. %% Real software engineers work from 9 to 5, because that is the way the job is described in the formal spec. Working late would feel like using an undocumented external procedure. %% Real software engineers write in languages that have not actually been implemented for any machine, and for which only the formal spec (in BNF) is available. This keeps them from having to take any machine dependencies into account. Machine dependencies make real software engineers very uneasy. %% Real time - see BAUD -- Data communications glossary %% Real wealth can only increase. -- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) %% Realistic leaders accept occasional disappointment as part of the job and make the best of it. %% Reality -- what a concept! -- Robin Williams %% Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack Of Acid %% Reality always seems harsher in the early morning. %% Reality can be useful. -- Solomon Short %% Reality does not exist - yet. %% Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with Usenet. %% Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs. -- Lily Tomlin %% Reality is a crutch for people who can't deal with science fiction %% Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle buttons %% Reality is a crutch for those who can't handle virtual reality. %% Reality is a crutch. %% Reality is always more conservative than ideology. -- Raymond Aron %% Reality is an illusion caused by a shortage of alcohol. %% Reality is an illusion created by an alcohol deficiency. %% Reality is an incompressible computation by a fractal cellular automaton of inconceivable dimensions. -- Rudy Rucker %% Reality is an obstacle to hallucination. %% Reality is bad enough, why should I tell the truth? -- Patrick Sky %% Reality is for people who can't deal with drugs. -- Lily Tomlin %% Reality is for people who lack imagination. %% Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction. %% Reality is good sometimes for kicks, but don't let it get you down. %% Reality is in the mind of the beholder. %% Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity. -- Alvy Ray Smith %% Reality is just a figment of your imagination. %% Reality is merely a point of view, Chaos is merely a career option. -- rburns@maine.UUCP %% Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. %% Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K. Dick %% Reality is the flaw in the perfection of nothingness. -- Nyarlathotep, Reed College, Portland, OR - %% Reality is what bumps into you when you stand still with your eyes open. -- Solomon Short %% Reality police. %% Realizing just in time that you'd be stabbed in the back if you tried to take the chalice, you return to the fray. %% Really quit? %% Really?? What a coincidence, I'm shallow too!! %% Rear: In American military affairs, that exposed part of the army that is nearest to Congress. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Reason deceives use often; conscience never. -- Rousseau %% Reason for traffic accident (taken from accident/insurance forms): I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home, as I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision. -- From the "Toronto Sun" %% Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried. -- Edward Abbey %% Reason is the life of the law; nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason ... The law which is the perfection of reason. -- Coke %% Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history. -- Edward Abbey %% Reason is the test of ridicule -- not ridicule the test of truth. -- Warburton %% Reason magazine reports that a survey of hotel bills from last year's convention of religious broadcasters revealed that 80 percent watched an X-rated movie on their hotel room's closed-circuit channel. %% Reason should direct and appetite obey. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Reason? There's no reason. It's just policy. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a man number 12: If your Bicycle goes flat you can fix it. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a man number 16: You don't have to be jealous of the girl who works on your Bicycle. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a man number 26: If your Bicycle doesn't look good you can paint it or get better parts. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a man number 5: You can share your Bicycle with your friends. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 10: Bicycles don't care if you buy Bicycle magazines. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 13: If your Bicycle is too loose you can tighten it. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 18: You can ride your Bicycle as long as you want and it won't get sore. You will. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 21: Bicycles don't get headaches. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 22: Bicycles don't insult you if you're a bad rider. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 25: You don't have to take a shower before you ride your bicycle. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 28: The only protection you have to wear when riding your Bicycle is a decent helmet. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 29: When in mixed company, you can talk about what a great ride you had the last time you were on your Bicycle. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 2: You can ride your Bicycle any time of the month. %% Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 4: Bicycles don't whine unless something is really wrong. %% Reasons why beer is better than men number 22: You can have a beer in public. %% Reasons why beer is better than men number 25: Beer always comes in multiples of six. %% Reasons why beer is better than men number 40: Beer always listens and never argues. %% Reasons why beer is better than men number 43: Beer doesn't have cold hands/feet. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 26: Beer doesn't mind being in the "wet spot" that IT left. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 31: You rarely (if ever) find beer labels on the shower curtain rod. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 41: Beer labels don't go out of style every year. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 46: If you change beers, you don't have to pay alimony. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 52: Beer doesn't mind if you fart or belch. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 58: Beer doesn't mind seeing Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson flicks. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 66: Beer doesn't wear a bra. %% Reasons why beer is better than women number 69: Beer doesn't use up your toilet paper. %% Reassurance of business by a President has an unfavorable effect on confidence. -- Mark Epernay %% Rebecca's House Rules: At least one fits every occasion. 1. Throw it on the bed. 2. Fry onions. 3. Call Jenny's mother. 4. No one's got the corner on suffering. 5. Run it under the cold tap. 6. Everything takes practice, except being born. -- Sharon Mathews %% Rebelling is useless, we both know that. -- Maylin Renis, Time Lash %% Rebellion Postponement: The tendency in one's youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtainserious career experience. Sometimes results in the mourning for lost youth at about age thirty, followed by silly haircuts and expensive joke-inducing wardrobes. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV" %% Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Rebellions of the belly are the worst. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% 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" %% Recent Microsoft ad: "Some people don't see the advantages of combining Microsoft applications. But then some people didn't see what would come of mixing nitro and glycerin." %% Recent investments will yield a slight profit. %% Recent research has tended to show that the Abominable No-Man is being replaced by the Prohibitive Procrastinator. -- C. N. Parkinson %% Recently, Apple Computer Inc. purchased a 14.5 million dollar Cray Research supercomputer to aid in the design of their next-generation Apple computers. John Rollwagen, Cray Research Inc. chief executive, told Seymour Cray about how Apple was using their newly purchased Cray supercomputer. "There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Seymour said 'That's interesting, because I'm designing the next Cray with an Apple'." %% Receptionists do it in the vestibule. %% Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose your job. These economic downturns are very difficult to predict, but sophisticated econometric modeling houses like Data Resources and Chase Econometrics have successfully predicted 14 of the last 3 recessions. %% Rechargeable batteries die at the most critical time of the most complex problem. -- John L. Shelton %% Recipe for a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster: (1) Take the juice from one bottle of Ol' Janx Spirit (2) Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V (Oh, those Santraginean fish!) (3) Allow 3 cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (properly iced or the benzine is lost.) (4) Allow four liters of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it. (5) Over the back of a silver spoon, float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract. (6) Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve. (7) Sprinkle Zamphuor. (8) Add an olive. (9) Drink...but...very carefully... %% Recipriversexcluson: A number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Reckless Driver: A motorist who passes you on the highway in spite of all you do to prevent it. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Reclaimer, spare that tree! Take not a single bit! It used to point to me, Now I'm protecting it. It was the reader's CONS That made it, paired by dot; Now, GC, for the nonce, Thou shalt reclaim it not. %% Recognition of the fact -- -- that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch. -- that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust. -- that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. -- that the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up. -- that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you. -- that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction. -- John Galt %% Recollect: To recall with additions something not previously known. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Recommendations: "...You will be fortunate if you can get him to work for you." "...His dissertation is the sort of work you don't expect to see these days; in it he has definitely demonstrated his complete capabilities." "...In short he is a triple-A mathematician: affable, alive and anonymous." %% Record additional transactions on back of previous stub. %% Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines. -- Edward Abbey %% Recount: In American politics, another throw of the dice, accorded to the player against whom they are loaded. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Recreational Slumming: The practice of participating in recreational activities of a class one perceives as lower than one's own: "Karen! Donald! Let's go bowling tonight! And don't worry about shoes... apparently you can rent them." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Recursion in everyday life: Inscription on a shampoo bottle: Lather Rinse Repeat -- Seen on an MIT computer's login message %% Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time. %% Recursion theorists do it in one go (Kleene normal form theorem). %% Recursion: The ability to talk to yourself and get an answer. -- Ralph E. Griswold %% Recursion: n. See Recursion. -- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary %% Recursive, adj.; see Recursive %% Recurving: Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Red Alert. -- Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Red Book: n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on {{PostScript}} (`PostScript Language Reference Manual', Adobe Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1985; QA76.73.P67P67; ISBN 0-201-10174-2, or the 1990 second edition ISBN 0-201-18127-4); the others are known as the {Green Book}, the {Blue Book}, and the {White Book} (sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the 3 standard references on Smalltalk (`Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment' by Adele Goldberg (Addison-Wesley, 1984; QA76.8.S635G638; ISBN 0-201-11372-4); this too is associated with blue and green books). 3. Any of the 1984 standards issued by the CCITT eighth plenary assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. 4. The new version of the {Green Book} (sense 4) --- IEEE 1003.1-1990, a.k.a ISO 9945-1 --- is (because of the color and the fact that it is printed on A4 paper) known in the U.S.A. as "the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On The Shelf" and in Europe as "the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size". 5. The NSA `Trusted Network Interpretation' companion to the {Orange Book}. See also {{book titles}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Red automobiles are illegal in Minneapolis. %% Red ship crashes into blue ship - sailors marooned. %% Redundancy: A Politician with an airbag in his car. %% References: The city sighs when the fog rolls in. The people start slowing, the evening begins. And though its still early, they all feel the chill. When they go home to dress warm the streets all go still. An old man cries when the fog rolls in. He's tired of thinking so he's drinking his gin. Too many heartaches to soothe with a pill, But his soul's far to empty for drinking to fill. Young hearts fly when the fog rolls in. They're looking ahead and their minds start to spin. So much to accomplish, no time to stand still. In a few years they'll realize Time's there to kill. A poet walks by when the fog rolls in. To head for a warm spot that sells beer and sin. He's written some trash that might help pay the bills. But he hoped for some answers and he's hoping it still. -- copyright 1987 Michael Gunzler, Elisarian Chronicles of Time %% Reform, like charity must begin at home. Once will at home, how will it radiate outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak and work; kindling every new light by incalculable contagion, spreading, in geometric ratio, far and wide, doing good only wherever it spreads, and not evil. -- Carlyle %% Reforms come from below. No man with four aces howls for a new deal. -- John F. Parker %% Refreshed by a brief blackout, I got to my feet and went next door. -- Martin Amis, "Money" %% Refuse Novocain...Transcend Dental Medication! %% Regal Lager, It's not just a beer... It's a palindrome! %% Regarding FDA advisory panel rejection of Warner-Lambert's anti-Alzheimer's drug Cognex: Government approval, with Ronald Reagan still alive and potentially able to testify about Iran-Contragate? Don't think so! :-X %% Regarding Robin, the Boy Wonder: "I mean the kid lives with a millionaire, apparently only goes to school on alternate Wednesdays, gets to stay up all night, and beats up adults regularly. Who could ask for more?" -- Fred Bals %% Regarding astral projection, Woody Allen once wrote, "This is not a bad way to travel, although there is usually a half-hour wait for luggage." %% Regardless of the units used by either the supplier or the customer, the manufacturer shall use his own arbitrary units convertible to those of either the supplier or the customer only by means of weird and unnatural conversion factors. %% Regardless of whether a mission expands or contracts, administrative overhead continues to grow at a steady rate. -- Charles J. Zimmerman %% Regnant populi. %% Regnant populi. (The people rule.) %% Regrets. You've had a few. But then again, too few to mention. %% Regularity is unity, unity is godlike, only the devil is unchangeable. -- Richter %% Reincarnation is a pleasant surprise. %% Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite? -- Edward Abbey %% Reisner's Rule of Conceptual Inertia: If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it. %% Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to get along. -- C,S & N %% Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), "The Importance of Being Earnest", 1895 %% Relax! And assume the position! %% Relax, Julie. Everyone will understand. -- Romeo %% Release him, Doctor. "Do you know what you're doing?" No! Release him! -- Picard and Pulaski, "Time Squared", stardate 42679.2 %% Relentless Cookout %% Reliable information is a must for successful planning. -- C. Columbus %% Religion ... is the opium of the masses. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883), "Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right", 1844 %% Religion and Morality are the firmest foundations of the duties of men and women. -- Alexander Hamilton %% Religion and sex are powerplays, manipulate the people for the money they pay, selling skin, selling god, the numbers look the same on their credit cards. Politicians say no to drugs, while we can pay for wars in South America. Fighting Fire with empty words. While the banks get fat and the poor stay poor and the rich get rich and the cops get paid. To look away. As the one percent rules America. -- Queensryche %% Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% Religion is a job. %% Religion is fine, Churchianity sucks. %% Religion is the best armor that a man can have, but it is the worst cloak. -- Bunyan %% Religion is the opiate of the masses. -- lenin Opiates are the religion of the masses. -- eag %% Religion is the soul of soulless conditions, the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% Religion makes beauty enchanting, And even where beauty is wanting, The temper and mind, Religion-refined, Will shine through the veil with sweet lustre. %% Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Religions revolve madly around sexual questions. %% Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune. -- Raymond Queneau, "A Model History" %% Religious intolerance is getting to be a greater problem in this country. I understand some Unitarians were caught burning question marks on people's front lawns. %% Relying on a dog might turn you in a dog addict. %% Remark made by Bertrand Meyer (inventer of the Eiffel language) at a panel discussion at OOPSLA '89: "COBOL programmers are destined to code COBOL for the rest of their lives, and thereafter." %% Remarriage: The triumph of hope over experience. %% Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is when he never used it. -- Dave Barry %% Remember - if you drink like a fish, don't drive - SWIM. %% Remember - no matter where you go - there you are. -- Buckaroo Banzai %% Remember -- only 10% of anything can be in the top 10%. %% Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice. %% Remember Gummidge's Law and you will never be found out. %% Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains. %% Remember folks. Street lights timed for 35 mph are also timed for 70 mph. -- Jim Samuels %% Remember how I kept you waiting when it was my turn to be the guard. %% Remember that there is an outside world to see and enjoy. -- Hans Liepmann %% Remember that time in office is money in the campaign fund. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% Remember that whatever misfortune may be your lot, it could only be worse in Cleveland. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata" %% Remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else. %% Remember the Finagle laws. The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum. The universe is hostile. -- Louis Wu "Ringworld" %% Remember the bookkeeper Perched on his stool Green eyeshade tilted Quill for a tool? He wasn't too fast But nowhere in town Did you hear the excuse "Our computer is down." %% Remember the good old days where you decided which candidate to vote for by asking who would do the most good? Now you ask who will do the least harm. %% Remember the good old days, when CPU was singular? %% Remember the... the... uhh..... %% 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. -- William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", I : v : 95 %% Remember there's an if in the middle of life. %% Remember to say hello to your bank teller. %% Remember to share good fortune as well as bad with your friends. %% Remember when safe sex meant not getting caught? %% Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out of it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other. -- Jules Feiffer %% Remember your place, programmer, that way you may keep your head. %% Remember, I know more than you do. %% Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. %% Remember, Yanks, if it wasn't for us British you'd all have been Spanish. %% Remember, an int is not always 16 bits. I'm not sure, but if the 80386 is one step closer to Intel's slugfest with the CPU curve that is asymptotically approaching a real machine, perhaps an int has been implemented as 32 bits by some Unix vendors...? -- Derek Terveer %% Remember, drive defensively! And of course, the best defense is a good offense! %% Remember, even if you win the rat race -- you're still a rat. %% Remember, if you do it yourself, sooner or later you'll need a bigger hammer. %% Remember, in 2039, MOUSSE & PASTA will be available ONLY by prescription!! %% Remember, peasants, it's not a disgrace to be poor, only to dress like it! -- Zorro, the Gay Blade %% Remember, the more engineering projects there are, the more products there will be. -- Richard F. Moore %% Remember, there are two kinds of ships ... submarines, and targets. %% Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over. -- Frank Zappa %% Remember, today could just as easily be the LAST day of the rest of your life. -- Solomon Short %% Remember, when Hitler's war ended, there were the Nuremberg trials. -- President George Bush, October 1990 %% Remember, when preparing a dish for bedtime, champagne is the best tenderizer. %% Remember, you know more than I do. %% Remember... like.. your doen' everyone a favor man when you go lawyer hunten'. Cause... like they destroy valuable crops and stuff... you know if money grew on trees man lawyers would have ... like... long necks like gerafs... no man ... they would ... honest dude... %% Remember: Silly is a state of Mind, Stupid is a way of Life. -- Dave Butler %% Remember: The line eater is your friend. %% Remember: The ocean is full of water. Why? We'll probably never know. %% Remember: every downhill has its uphill. %% Remember: use logout to logout. %% Remembering is for those who have forgotten. -- Chinese proverb %% Remind me to tell you sometime about the concept of the human ego. %% Remorse disappears. %% Remorse disappears. Men believe him. Changing the form of government brings good fortune. %% Remorse disappears. If you lose your horse, do not run after it; It will come back of its own accord. When you see evil people, Guard yourself against mistakes. %% Remorse disappears. Take not gain and loss to heart. Undertakings bring good fortune. Everything serves to further. %% Remorse disappears. The companion bites his way through the wrappings. If one goes to him, How could it be a mistake? %% Remorse vanishes. During the hunt Three kinds of game are caught. %% Removing the straw that broke the camel's back does not necessarily allow the camel to walk again. %% Render unto Caesar if line 54 is larger than line 62. %% Renegade Time Lady %% Renegade Time Lord %% Renfield! I told you never to call me during the daytime! You know how the sunlight burns! %% Renning's Maxim: Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying. %% Reparation, n. Satisfaction that is made for a wrong and deducted from the satisfaction felt in committing it. %% Repartee: Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Repeal inhibition!! %% Repeal the law of gravity!! %% Repeated penetration. Humiliation. %% Repeated return. Danger. No blame. %% Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences. -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665 %% Repetition of the Abysmal. In the abyss one falls into a pit. Misfortune. %% Replace repetitive expressions by calls to a common function. %% Replace with same type. %% Reply hazy, ask again later. %% Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither. -- Edward Abbey %% Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): "Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization?" Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea." %% Reporter, n.: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Reporters do it for the sensation it causes. %% Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Him Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day--while my own deadline fell every two weeks--but neither of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under. Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that. No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland.... On the other hand, it might be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car. -- H. S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail" %% Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy. -- Edward Abbey %% Reproduction strictly prohibited. %% Republican boys date Democratic girls. They plan to marry Republican girls, but feel they're entitled to a little fun first. %% Republicans consume three-fourths of the rutabaga produced in this country. The remainder is thrown out. %% Republicans employ exterminators. Democrats step on the bugs. %% Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmatians and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids and taxes. Democrats eat the fish they catch. Republicans hang them on the wall. Republican boys date Democratic girls. They plan to marry Republican girls, but feel they're entitled to a little fun first. Democrats make up plans and then do something else. Republicans follow the plans their grandfathers made. Republicans consume three-fourths of the rutabaga produced in the USA. The remainder is thrown out. Republicans sleep in twin beds -- some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats. -- The Official Rules, as compiled by Paul Dickson %% Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmatians, and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids, and taxes. %% Republicans sleep in twin beds -- some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats. %% Republicans study the financial pages of the newspaper. Democrats put them in the bottom of the bird cage. %% Republicans tend to keep their shades drawn, although there is seldom any reason why they should. Democrats ought to, but don't. %% Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Republicans usually wear hats and clean their paint brushes. %% Reputation is for Time. Character is for Eternity. %% Reputation: what others are not thinking about you. %% Reputations are fine up to a point. After that they become a pain! -- D. Juan %% Research has shown that breathing air can cause you to die of cancer. There is a 100% correlation. People who have died of cancer always have breathed air. %% Research is reading two books that have never been read in order to write a third that will never be read. %% Research is the best place to be: you work your buns off, and if it works you're a hero; if it doesn't, well--nobody else has done it yet either, so you're still a valiant nerd. %% Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun %% Research scientists are so wrapped up in their own narrow endeavors that they cannot possibly see the whole picture of anything, including their own research. %% Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh claim to have located the "Gullibility Center" of the brain, and outline an operation in which a neurosurgeon can go into the brain and lower the gullibility of a person, leaving the rest of the brain unaltered. If you believe this, then you are a very gullible person and ought to consider having the operation done. %% Researchers do it with control. %% Researchers have discovered that female praying mantises don't always bite off the male's head before mating. It seems that females in previous studies were simply underfed -- the hunger overcame the lure of romance. Moral for males: take the lady out to dinner if you don't want her to bite your head off when you propose. %% Resistance Is Useless! (If < 1 ohm) %% Resistance is futile. -- First Mate, Enlightenment %% Resistance is ill-advisable. -- Styggron, The Android Invasion %% Resistance is useless (if less than 1 ohm) %% Resistance is useless. Stand still. -- The Doctor, The Web Planet %% Resistance is useless. Submit your will to the sake of the greater good. It has been decided. -- The Master of the Land of Fiction, The Mind Robber %% Resistance is useless. -- Doctor, Invasion of Time %% Resisting temptation is easier when you think you'll probably get another chance later on. %% Resolute conduct. Perseverance with awareness of danger. %% Resolved, that the 67th General Convention affirm the glorious ability of God to create in any manner, whether men understand it or not, and in this affirmation reject the limited insight and rigid dogmatism of the "Creationist" movement... -- from a 1982 resolution of the Episcopal Church %% Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776. -- Susan B. Anthony %% Resorting to lawyers is proof of failure. -- Solomon Short %% Respect is a rational process. -- McCoy, "The Galileo Seven," stardate 2822.3 %% Respectable men and women content with good and easy living are missing some of the most important things in life. Unless you give yourself to some great cause you haven't even begun to live. -- William P. Merrill %% Response From: coleman@baleen.cs.ucla.edu (Michael Coleman) To the question: is there a COBOL mode for GNU emacs: Isn't it pitiful when the editor you are using is a better programming environment than the *language* you are using?? BTW, there is a COBOL and a Fortran mode. %% Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck, or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology, it was customary to unload it upon a star. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Rest assured that your dog is finally getting enough cheese. %% Rest is for the weary, sleep is for the dead. -- Colin Baker, ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN %% Rest is the sweet sauce of labor. -- Plutarch %% Restaurant package, not for resale. %% Restaurant by Jeremy Michael Mullen In Los Angeles, there was this cafe I went there every night The owner was a poet He always put up the poem of the day In front of the building And the food was great Since we have much in common I was wondering Did you go there also? %% Restlessness as an enduring condition brings misfortune. %% Restrain thy mind, and let mildness ever attend thy tongue. -- Theognis %% Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. -- Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) %% Retaliation: The natural rock upon which is reared the Temple of Law. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Retirement should be based on the tread, not the mileage. %% Retreat. Success. In what is small, perseverance furthers. %% Return from a short distance. No need for remorse. Great good fortune. %% Return to sender, address unknown. %% Return to sender, no forwarding order on file, unable to forward. %% Return to the way. How could there be blame in this? Good fortune. %% Return((usBirdInHand = 2 * InTheBush())); %% Return. Success. Going out and coming in without error. Friends come without blame. To and Fro goes the way. On the seventh day comes return. It furthers one to have somewhere to go. %% Reunite Gondawanaland!!! %% Reusable Condoms: Just shake the fuck out of them. %% Rev. Jim: What does an amber light mean? Bobby: Slow down. Rev. Jim: What ... does ... an ... amber ... light ... mean? Bobby: Slow down. Rev. Jim: What .... does .... an .... amber .... light.... %% Revenge is a dish best served cold...and it is very cold in space. %% Revenge is a dish best served cold. -- Klingon Proverb. Khan Noonian Singh, "ST:II, The Wrath of Khan," stardate 8130.3 %% Revenge is a form of nostalgia. %% Revenge is sleeping with your enemies wife. Sweet revenge is the realization that she's a lousy lay. %% Revenge is the answer. %% Reverence is an attitude of deepest respect and amazement toward deity. -- L. Tom Perry, Oct. 1990 %% Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. %% Review Questions (1) If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20 KPH, and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it be before he exceeds the speed of light? How long will it be before the Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his spaceship? (2) If Roger Rowdy wrecks his car every week, and each week he breaks twice as many bones as before, how long will it be before he breaks every bone in his body? How long will it be before they cut off his insurance? Where does he get a new car every week? (3) If Johnson drinks one beer the first hour (slow start), four beers the next hour, nine beers the next, etc., and stacks the cans in a pyramid, how soon will Johnson's pyramid be larger than King Tut's? When will it fall on him? Will he notice? %% Revolution. On your own day You are believed. Supreme success. Furthering through perseverance. Remorse disappears. %% Rewards are usually anti-climatic -- the fun is in the doing. %% Rhode's Corollary to Hoare's Law: Inside every complex and unworkable program is a useful routine struggling to be free. %% Rhode's Law: When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening, circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly, empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied, inferred, induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience, expediency, political advantage, material gain, or personal comfort, or any combination of the above, or none of the above, be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally, immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it becomes advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe. %% Rich people will travel great distances to look at poor people. %% Rich, be not exalted; poor, be not dejected. -- Cleobulus %% Richard Hell and the Voidoids %% Richard Nixon Tells Of Night Of Terror With Princess Diana: 'She Threatened Me With Pen Knife'. ...Exclusive Pictures Inside. %% Richard Nixon means never having to say you're sorry %% Richard's Complementary Rules of Ownership: 1. If you keep anything long enough you can throw it away. 2. If you throw anything away, you will need it as soon as it is no longer accessible. %% Riches cover a multitude of woes. -- Menander %% Riches: A gift from Heaven signifying, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." -- John D. Rockefeller, (slander by Ambrose Bierce) %% Rick promised to gently deflower A maiden who lived on South Gower. (The truth is, he spread Her legs wide on the bed, And finished her off in an hour.) %% Rick: "How can you close me up? On what grounds?" Renault: "I'm shocked! Shocked! To find that gambling is going on here." Croupier (handing money to Renault): "Your winnings, sir." Renault: "Oh. Thank you very much." -- Casablanca %% Ridiculous racoon! %% Riffle West Virginia is so small that the Boy Scout had to double as the town drunk. %% Right Thing: n. That which is *compellingly* the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Often capitalized, always emphasized in speech as though capitalized. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree. "What's the right thing for LISP to do when it sees `(mod a 0)'? Should it return `a', or give a divide-by-0 error?" Oppose {Wrong Thing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Right now I find you extremely, extremely...of course we haven't time for that sort of thing. "What sort of thing?" Oh, god would I love to show you. -- Dr. Crusher and Picard, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. -- Steve Wright %% Right you are if you say you are -- obscurely. -- TIME, 30-Dec-77 %% Righteeoh! %% Righteous indignation is bravery in a closet. -- John Francis Putnam (1964) %% Rights are not subject to negotiation. -- Jeff Chan, chan@shell.portal.com %% Ring around the collar. %% Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. -- Emmerson %% Riot, n. A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Rita Rudner says she wasn't popular as a child. She only had two friends. They were both imaginary. They played with each other. %% Ritchie's Rule: (1) Everything has some value-if you use the right currency. (2) Paint splashes last longer than the paint job. (3) Search and ye shall find-but make sure it was lost. %% Robbers do it under arms. %% Robin Williams on engineering majors: "We don't get laid much, but we're building the future." %% Robin's Rules of Marketing: 1) Your share of the market is really lower than you think. 2) Never delay the end of a meeting or the beginning of lunch hour. 3) The combined market position goals of all competitors always totals at least 150%. 4) The existence of a market does not ensure the existence of a customer. 5) Beware of alleged needs that have no market. 6) The competition really can have lower prices. 7) The number of competitors never declines. 8) Secret negotiations are usually neither. 9) If the customer wants vanilla, give him vanilla. 10) If the customer buys lunch, you've lost the order. %% Robots do it mechanically. %% Rock and roll Hoochy-koo; lawdy mama, light my fuse! -- Rick Derringer %% Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree top, When the wind blows, the cradle will rock, When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall And down will come baby, cradle and all. (What kind of cradle am I?) A bird's nest %% Rocks have been shaken from their solid base, but what shall move a firm and dauntless mind? -- Joanna Baillie %% Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist. -- Edward Abbey %% Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention Unless the results are known in advance, funding agencies will reject the proposal. %% Rodney, please go away! %% Rogue players do it with all sorts of different animals. %% Roll over, Beethoven. Tell Tchaikovsky the news. %% Roll the window and let the wind blow back your hair, so you're sacred and you're thinking that maybe you're not that young anymore. %% Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness. -- Edward Abbey %% Rome didn't fall in a day either. -- Solomon Short %% Rome was not built in one day. -- John Heywood %% Rome wasn't burnt in a day. %% Romeo was restless, he was ready to kill, He jumped out the window 'cause he couldn't sit still, Juliet was waiting with a safety net, Said "don't bury me 'cause I ain't dead yet". -- Elvis Costello %% Romeo wasn't bilked in a day. -- Walt Kelly, "Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo" %% Romulan women are not like Vulcan females. We are not dedicated to pure logic and the sterility of non-emotion. -- Romulan Commander, "The Enterprise Incident," stardate 5027.3 %% Ronald McClanahan, 41, was arrested in September when he tried to rob a Columbia, Mo., gun shop with a knife. He tried to open the electronic cash register by randomly pushing buttons, but then became frustrated and tried to carry it away until the cord got caught, yanking him to the floor. When an employee approached with a shotgun, McClanahan first lay perfectly still, then bolted up, yelling, "Go ahead and shoot me," then tried to lug the cash register out again. Then he dropped it so he could flee, but when the drawer broke open, he stopped to grab some money. As he ran for the exit, gun-wielding employees blocked him. When police arrived, they had to use force to loosen his grip on the money. %% Ronald Reagan -- America's favorite placebo %% Roofers do it up on top. %% Roosters do it coquettishly. %% Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature. -- Edward Abbey %% Rope: An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are mortal. It is put about the neck and remains in place one's whole life long. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together; And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans, Still we went coupled, and inseparable. -- William Shakespeare %% Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocals. Nobody wants to read the small print in dreams. -- Ann Landers %% Roses are red, Violet's are blue, And mine are white. %% Roses are red, and violets are too expensive for you. %% Roses are red, violets are blue, Rhymes can be typeset with BoXes and glue. -- the TeXBook %% Roses are red, Violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic I AM....Listen, bud, I'm telling you I'm schizo.... Can you believe this, Joe, he doesn't think I'm schizo... %% Roses are red, Violets are blue, Some poems rhyme, But this one doesn't. %% Roses on your piano isn't nearly as good as tulips on your organ. %% Roses red and violets blew and all the sweetest flowers that in the forrest grew -- Edmund Spenser %% Rosie Rex & The Cuchifritos %% Ross Perot, Greek for "None of the Above..." %% Rotate your tires. %% Rothschild's Hypothesis: The average lifetime of a roll of toilet paper in a public restroom is forty years, ending 5 minutes before you enter the stall. %% Rotisserie: a ferris wheel for chickens %% Rotten wood can not be carved. -- Confucius (Analects, Book 5, Ch. 9) %% Rough stone steps lead up the dome. %% Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) %% Round Numbers are always false. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Round as a ball, flat as a board, The shining alter of the Lupian Lords, Pearl in the sea, Jewel on black velvet, Changing yet never changed. The moon %% Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee prettiest little thing, I ever did see. A watch %% Round as a biscuit, deep as a cup, Yet all the world's oceans, Can't fill it up? A sieve %% Round as an apple, yellow as gold With more things in it than you're years old? A pumpkin %% Round as an apple Black as a bear Tell me this riddle Or I'll pull out your hair. An iron teakettle %% Round, round, get around. I've gotten round! %% Row (3x) that boat gently down the stream, Charon (4x), death is but a dream. %% Row, row, row your bits, gently down the stream... %% Rowe's Rule: The odds are 6 to 5 that the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming express train. %% Rub her feet. %% Rubber bands have snappy endings! %% Rubbing the electric lamp is not particularly rewarding. Anyway, nothing exciting happens. %% Rudd's Discovery: You know that any senator or congressman could go home and make $300,000 to $400,000, but they don't. Why? Because they can stay in Washington and make it there. %% Rudeness: When someone keeps right on talking while you are trying to interrupt. -- Lorraine Hoffman, "Trade Secrets" %% Rudin's Law: If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will do it every time. %% Rudin's Law: If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will do it every time. Rudin's Second Law: In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative courses of action, people tend to choose the worst possible course. %% Rugby is played by men with odd-shaped balls! %% Rugby players do it with leather balls. %% Rugby players eat their dead. %% Ruin, v. To destroy. Specifically, to destroy a maid's belief in the virtue of maids. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Rule #10 of the Miss America Pageant: Liposuction is permitted, but not as part of the talent competition. -- Late Night with David Letterman %% Rule 157: "You can tell you're pushing a new frontier when all available tools are inappropriate." Corollary to Rule 157: "There's glory in using inappropriate tools." -- David Berkstresser, Quotemeister %% Rule of Accuracy: When working toward the solution of a problem it always helps you to know the answer. %% Rule of Creative Research: (1) Never draw what you can copy. (2) Never copy what you can trace. (3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down. %% Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies. %% Rule of Feline Frustration: When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the bathroom. %% Rule of Life #1 -- Never get separated from your luggage. %% Rule of Parenthood: Birthday parties always end in tears. -- Phyllis C. Richman %% Rule of Parenthood: Enough is never enough. -- Phyllis C. Richman %% Rule of Parenthood: The sun always rises in the baby's bedroom window. -- Phyllis C. Richman %% Rule of Parenthood: Whenever you decide to take the kids home, it is always five minutes earlier that they break into fights, tears, hysteria. -- Phyllis C. Richman %% Rule of the Great: When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch. %% Rules for Academic Deans: (1) HIDE!!!! (2) If they find you, LIE!!!! -- Father Damian C. Fandal %% Rules for College Survival: Avoid administrators. Skim the required reading. Skip everything else. Write vague, spineless papers. Cram. %% Rules for Good Grammar #4. 1: Don't use no double negatives. 2: Make each pronoun agree with their antecedents. 3: Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. 4: About them sentence fragments. 5: When dangling, watch your participles. 6: Verbs has got to agree with their subjects. 7: Just between you and i, case is important. 8: Don't write run-on sentences when they are hard to read. 9: Don't use commas, which aren't necessary. 10: Try to not ever split infinitives. 11: It is important to use your apostrophe's correctly. 12: Proofread your writing to see if you any words out. 13: Correct speling is essential. 14: A preposition is something you never end a sentence with. 15: While a transcendent vocabulary is laudable, one must be eternally careful so that the calculated objective of communication does not become ensconsed in obscurity. In other words, eschew obfuscation. %% Rules for Writers: Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. Don't use no double negatives. Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. No sentence fragments. Avoid commas, that are unnecessary. Eschew dialect, irregardless. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. Hyphenate between sy-llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens. Write all adverbial forms correct. Don't use contractions in formal writing. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'" %% Rules for driving in New York: (1) Anything done while honking your horn is legal. (2) You may park anywhere if you turn your four-way flashers on. (3) A red light means the next six cars may go through the intersection. %% Rules of Parenthood: Birthday parties always end in tears. Enough is never enough. The sun always rises in the baby's bedroom window. Whenever you decide to take the kids home, it is always five minutes earlier that they break into fights, tears, hysteria. -- Phyllis C. Richman %% Rules! Who needs rules! %% Rules: (1) The boss is always right. (2) When the boss is wrong, refer to rule 1. %% Rules? Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window, and stairway to express it. -- Howard Roark %% Ruling a big country is like cooking a small fish. -- Lao Tsu %% Rumour has it that Larry Wall, author of readnews, is a finalist in the race for the Nobel Peace Prize for his invention of the kill file. %% Run amok. %% Run if you like, but try to keep your breath; Work like a man, but don't be worked to death. -- Holmes %% Run not into debt, either for wares sold, or money borrowed; be content to want things that are not of absolute necessity, rather than run up the score. -- Sir M. Hale %% Run! Run! The little blue men are coming! Run! Aarrgghh! %% Rune's Rule: If you don't care where you are, you ain't lost. %% Running a business is about 95% people and 5% economics. %% Running a dead proc %% Running from one short wall to the other at about waist height is a wooden bar, carefully carved and drilled. This bar is pierced in two places. The first hole is in the center of the bar (and thus in the center of the room). The second is at the left end of the room (as you face opposite the entrance). Through each hole runs a wooden pole. The pole at the left end of the bar extends only about a foot %% Running together all about, The servants put each other out, Till the grave master had decreed, The more haste, ever the worst speed. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% Runs and runs and never walks, Great long tongue and never talks. A wagon %% Russia has abolished God, but so far God has been more tolerant. -- John Cameron Swayze %% Russian Express Card motto: Don't leave home! %% Russian: (1) A person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul. (2) A Tartar emetic. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Russians are cute. Russians are nice. Pet a Russian today. %% Rust never sleeps. -- Neil Young %% Ryan's Law: Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish yourself as an expert. %% S&L Bailout? The newest trend in Socialism for Banks. Its motto: "From each according to his stupidity, To each according to his greed." %% S-t-r-e-t-c-h your coffee break, top it off with Juicy Fruit Gum! %% S. Thompson [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream] %% S.N.A.F.U. EQUATIONS 1. Given a problem with N equations, there are N+1 unknowns 2. Any device needing service or replacement will be least accessible 3. Interchangeable devices won't %% S/N ratio: // n. (also `s/n ratio', `s:n ratio'). Syn. {signal-to-noise ratio}. Often abbreviated `SNR'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SACKS: male of female. "Whut sacks are yew?" -- Texan Dictionary %% SACRED adj. Reserved for the exclusive use of something (a metaphorical extension of the standard meaning). "Accumulator 7 is sacred to the UUO handler." Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object, but clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to. %% SADISM: A sadist refusing to whip a masochist. %% SADO-NECRO-BESTIALITY: Beating a dead horse. %% SAFETY TIP #12: Never stare directly into the sun. Modern science has proven that the eye is like a lens, and looking directly into the sun will burn little holes in the back of your head, so never stare at the sun. %% SAFETY TIP #17: Never shave when you're angry. If you are about to shave your face, legs, or other body parts and happen to be angry, it might be a good idea to put down your razor and wait for a few minutes. This way you can avoid serious cuts and dangerous infections. %% SAGA (WPI) n. A cuspy but bogus raving story dealing with N random broken people. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SAGITTARIUS (Nov.22 - Dec.21) Your efforts to help a little old lady cross a street will backfire when you learn that she was waiting for a bus. Subdue impulse you have to push her out into traffic. %% SAIL:: /sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ n. 1. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, XEROX PARC, and the UNIX community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the {{WAITS}} entry for details). The SAIL machines were officially shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned. 2. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at SAIL (sense 1). It was an Algol-60 derivative with a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SAILORS like to be blown. %% SALESPEOPLE have away with their tongues. %% SAN DIEGO: Four million people, where you can't get a good cheeseburger, no matter how hard you try. %% SANTA CLAUS IS WIELDING A GUN (to the tune of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town") Oh, you better watch out You better not pry You better stay back I'm telling you why Santa Claus is wielding a gun He's making a list And checking it twice Gonna find out who He's gonna ice Santa Claus is wielding a gun Don't give him any trouble He'll blow you right away Don't give him any cause to shoot Or you'll make his Christmas Day Oh, you better believe He's packing a rod No coal in your stocking Just lead in your bod Santa Claus is wielding a gun He doesn't want cookies Or none of that crud He doesn't want milk What he wants is your blood Santa Claus is wielding a gun (Music Bridge, with automatic arms fire) He doesn't trust nobody Shot all his reindeer dead Thought Dancer was a sissy And thought Rudoulph was a red Oh, you better watch out You better not pry You better stay back I'm telling you why Santa Claus is wielding a gun %% SANTA CLAUS comes down a FIRE ESCAPE wearing bright blue LEG WARMERS ... He scrubs the POPE with a mild soap or detergent for 15 minutes, starring JANE FONDA!! %% SAR: having a tart taste. "Boy, that lemon is sar!" -- Texan Dictionary %% SATISFACTION GUARANTEED: manufacturer's, upon receipt of the check %% SAV (save) See BIN. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SAVE THE CHOCOLATE MOOSE! %% SAVINO'S MAIL-ORDER LAW: If you don't write to complain, you'll never receive your order. If you do write, you will receive your order before your tacky letter reaches the company. %% SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out! -- Ken Thompson %% SCENARIO: An imagined sequence of events that provides the context in which a business decision is made. Scenarios always come in sets of three: best case, worst case, and just in case. %% SCHLOPENHAUER'S LAW OF ENTROPY: If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel of sewage, you have sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine, you have sewage. %% SCHMIDT'S LAW Simple tasks aren't. %% SCIENCE CORNER: Today's topic is "Are We Alone in the Universe?" We can only begin to explore this question by taking you deep underground where gas deposits are normally surrounded by countless "fossils" left over from billions of years of evolution on earth. Although the stars are made entirely of gas, spectrographs have shown that they contain no fossil-like material. Thus, we may safely assume that life has not evolved on the stars. %% SCIENTISTS discovered it. %% SCORPIO (Oct.24 - Nov.21) You will receive word today that you are eligible to win a million dollars in prizes. It will be from a magazine trying to get you to subscribe, and you're just dumb enough to think you've got a chance to win. You never learn. %% SCSI: [Small Computer System Interface] n. A bus-independent standard for system-level interfacing between a computer and intelligent devices. Typically annotated in literature with `sexy' (/sek'see/), `sissy' (/sis'ee/), and `scuzzy' (/skuh'zee/) as pronunciation guides --- the last being the overwhelmingly predominant form, much to the dismay of the designers and their marketing people. One can usually assume that a person who pronounces it /S-C-S-I/ is clueless. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SCUD : Sure Could Use Directions %% SECOND LAW OF GARDENING: Fancy gizmos don't work. %% SECRETARIES do it from 9 to 5. %% SED: [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] /S-E-D/ n. Smoke-emitting diode. A {friode} that lost the war. See {LER}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SELF-IMPROVEMENT WORKSHOPS Creative Suffering Overcoming Peace of Mind Guilt without Sex The Primal Shrug Ego Gratification through Violence Holding your Child's Attention through Guilt and Fear Dealing with Post Self-realization Depression Whine and Whimper Your Way to Alienation %% SENILITY: The state of mind of elderly persons with whom one happens to disagree. %% SENSE: from a past time. "It's a are sense ah had a RC!" -- Texan Dictionary %% SEP: to omit. "Everybody gets a RC sep yew!" -- Texan Dictionary %% SERENDIPITY: The process by which human knowledge is advanced. %% SERVER n. A kind of DAEMON which performs a service for the requester, which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the server runs. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SEX-CHANGE NUN BECOMES TV WRESTLER %% SEX: /seks/ [Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a {Good Thing}, but unprotected SEX can propagate a {virus}. See also {pubic directory}. 2. The rather Freudian mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine instruction found in the PDP-11 and many other architectures. The RCA 1802 chip used in the early Elf and SuperElf personal computers had a `SEt X register' SEX instruction, but this seems to have had little folkloric impact. DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the `SEX' mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the last time this happened, either. The author of `The Intel 8086 Primer', who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted that there was originally a `SEX' instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was renamed `CBW' and `CWD' (depending on what was being extended). Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is also missing straight `SEX' but has logical-or and logical-and instructions `ORL' and `ANL'. The Motorola 6809, used in the U.K.'s `Dragon 32' personal computer, actually had an official `SEX' instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II it competed with did not. British hackers thought this made perfect mythic sense; after all, it was commonly observed, you could (on some theoretical level) have sex with a dragon, but you can't have sex with an apple. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SF Examiner's MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS OF 1988: A spokesman for the California Board of Dental Examiners revealed the board's enforcement personnel carry guns because "There are some dentists out there who have a criminal kind of leaning." %% SF Examiner's MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS OF 1988: In a TV interview, House of Representatives Republican leader Robert Michel bemoaned the end of black-face minstrel shows, saying, "I used to love to imitate Amos 'n Andy." %% SF Examiner's MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS OF 1988: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox Television Network was presenting "The Late Show" hosted by comedian Arsenio Hall, was approached by Hall in the parking lot of a Los Angeles restaurant. Murdoch handed Hall his valet parking stub and said, "It's the green Jaguar." %% SHARE: n. Give in, endure humiliation. %% SHAW'S PRINCIPLE (Apple MAC Principle) If you build a machine that an idiot can use, only an idiot will want to use it %% SHHHH!! I hear SIX TATTOOED TRUCK-DRIVERS tossing ENGINE BLOCKS into empty OIL DRUMS ... %% SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT! POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE! %% SHIRLEY'S OBSERVATION: Most people deserve each other. %% SHOCKING EXPOSE: Illegal core dumping in Lake Erie! -- "National Computer Science Enquirer" %% SHOP OR DIE, people of Earth! [offer void where prohibited] -- Capitalists from outer space, from Justice League Int'l comics %% SHR (share) See BIN. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SHRIEK See EXCL. (Occasional CMU usage.) -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SHUT UP !! ...Bloody Vikings... %% SIEGE SINISTER SERVICES SYNDICATE "The Villians Nine Rig Ruin" Reputations Ruined -- Competitors Bankrupted -- Dragons Wormed -- Basements Flooded -- Wells Dried Up -- Georges Exterminated -- Contracts Executed Promptly, bargain rates on mothers-in-law -- Juries Suborned -- Stocks, Bonds, and Gallows -- Saturday Night Specials -- Houses Haunted (skilled Poltergeist at no extra charge) -- Midnight Catering to Ghouls, Vampires, & Werewolves -- Incubi & Succibi for rent by the night or by the week -- 7-year itch powder. P. S. We Also Poison Dogs %% SIG: /sig/ n. (also common as a prefix in combining forms) The Association for Computing Machinery traditionally sponsors Special Interest Groups in various technical areas; well-known ones include SIGARCH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Architecture) and SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics). Hackers, not surprisingly, like to overextend this naming convention to less formal associations like SIGBEER (at ACM conferences) and SIGFOOD (at University of Illinois). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SKINN'S LAW: Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. DAN'S COROLLARY: What this says about teachers is obvious. %% SKOFF'S LAW: A child will not spill on a dirty floor. %% SKYDIVERS are good till the last drop. %% SLAVE: part of a garment. "It's a long slave shirt!" -- Texan Dictionary %% SLOP n. 1. A one-sided fudge factor (q.v.). Often introduced to avoid the possibility of a fencepost error (q.v.). 2. (used by compiler freaks) The ratio of code generated by a compiler to hand-compiled code, minus 1; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn't do it yourself. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SLOW MEN AT WORK %% SLURP v. To read a large data file entirely into core before working on it. "This program slurps in a 1K-by-1K matrix and does an FFT." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SMALL: Is it in yet? %% SMILE :-) %% SMOKING CLOVER n. A psychedelic color munch due to Gosper. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SMOKING IS NOW ALLOWED !!! Anyone wishing to smoke, however, must file, in triplicate, the U.S. government Environmental Impact Narrative Statement (EINS), describing in detail the type of combustion proposed, impact on the environment, and anticipated opposition. Statements must be filed 30 days in advance. %% SMOP [Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] n. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is significantly greater than its complexity. Usage: used to refer to a program that could obviously be written, but is not worth the trouble. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SMOP: /S-M-O-P/ [Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] n. 1. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is significantly greater than its complexity. Used to refer to a program that could obviously be written, but is not worth the trouble. Also used ironically to imply that a difficult problem can be easily solved because a program can be written to do it; the irony is that it is very clear that writing such a program will be a great deal of work. "It's easy to enhance a FORTRAN compiler to compile COBOL as well; it's just a SMOP." 2. Often used ironically by the intended victim when a suggestion for a program is made which seems easy to the suggester, but is obviously (to the victim) a lot of work. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SNAFU %% SNAFU principle: /sna'foo prin'si-pl/ [from WWII Army acronym for `Situation Normal, All Fucked Up'] n. "True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth." --- a central tenet of {Discordianism}, often invoked by hackers to explain why authoritarian hierarchies screw up so reliably and systematically. The effect of the SNAFU principle is a progressive disconnection of decision-makers from reality. This lightly adapted version of a fable dating back to the early 1960s illustrates the phenomenon perfectly: In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification; And the plan was without form, and the specification was void. And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof; And they spake unto their leader, saying: "It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer." And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader: "It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof." And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying: "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it." The section head then hurried to his department manager, and informed him thus: "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength." The department manager carried these words to his general manager, and spoke unto him saying: "It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong." And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news unto the Vice President. "It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful." The Vice President rushed to the President's side, and joyously exclaimed: "This powerful new software product will promote the growth of the company!" And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good. After the subsequent disaster, the {suit}s protect themselves by saying "I was misinformed!", and the implementors are demoted or fired. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SNAPPY REPARTEE: What you'd say if you had another chance. %% SNARF v. To grab, esp. a large document or file for the purpose of using it either with or without the author's permission. See BLT. Variant: SNARF (IT) DOWN. (At MIT on ITS, DDT has a command called :SNARF which grabs a job from another (inferior) DDT.) -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SO: /S-O/ n. 1. (also `S.O.') Abbrev. for Significant Other, almost invariably written abbreviated and pronounced /S-O/ by hackers. Used to refer to one's primary relationship, esp. a live-in to whom one is not married. See {MOTAS}, {MOTOS}, {MOTSS}. 2. The Shift Out control character in ASCII (Control-N, 0001110). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SOCCER PLAYERS have leather balls. %% SOCIALISM - If you have 2 cows, you must give one away. COMMUNISM - If you have 2 cows, the government takes them both and sells you the milk. CAPITALISM - If you have 2 cows, you sell one and buy a bull. %% SOCIALISM - You have two cows. The government takes one to give to someone else. %% SOCIALISM: You have two cows. Give one to your neighbour. COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Give both to the government. The government gives you milk. CAPITALISM: You sell one cow and buy a bull. FACISM: You have two cows. Give milk to the government. The government sells it. NAZISM: The government shoots you and takes the cows. NEW DEALISM: The government shoots one cow, milks the other, and pours the milk down the sink. ANARCHISM: Keep the cows. Steal another one. Shoot the government. CONSERVATISM: Freeze the milk. Embalm the cows. %% SOFTWARE ROT n. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if "nothing has changed". Also known as "bit decay". -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SOLOMON'S WISDOM ON CATS: The probability of a cat eating it's dinner has nothing to do with the price of the food. %% SORRELL'S INVESTMENT PRINCIPLE: Never invest in anything that eats. %% SOS 1. (ess-oh-ess) n. A losing editor, SON OF STOPGAP. 2. (sahss) v. Inverse of AOS, from the PDP-10 instruction set. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SOS: n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously {losing} text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty} `stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded when new ones (in particular, {TECO}) came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ n. To decrease; inverse of {AOS}, from the PDP-10 instruction set. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SOUDER'S LAW: Repetition does not establish validity. %% SPACEWAR: n. A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. This game was first implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1960--61. SPACEWAR aficionados formed the core of the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years later, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became {{UNIX}}. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still {feep}ing in video arcades everywhere. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% SPAZZ 1. v. To behave spastically or erratically; more often, to commit a single gross error. "Boy, is he spazzing!" 2. n. One who spazzes. "Boy, what a spazz!" 3. n. The result of spazzing. "Boy, what a spazz!" -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SPECIAL CHARACTER - a character which is out of the ordinary, different, a resident of Greenwich Village %% SPECIMEN: An Italian astronaut. %% SPEECH PATHOLOGISTS are oral specialists. %% SPELUNKERS do it underground. %% SPINSTER: A bachelor's wife. %% SPLAT n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the ASCII star ("*") character. 2. (MIT) Name used by some people for the ASCII pound-sign ("#") character. 3. (Stanford) Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. (This character is also called "circle-x", "blobby", and "frob", among other names.) 4. (Stanford) Name for the semi-mythical extended ASCII circle-plus character. 5. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs whatever the the local interpretation of splat is. Usage: nobody really agrees what character "splat" is, but the term is common. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SPORTSCASTERS like an instant replay. %% SSDD %% SS You're too incompetent to prepare for your own retirement. [We'll confiscate a certain amount of your earnings and invest them in a sure-fire Ponzi scheme.] -- George L Roman, george@sgi.com %% STACK: A memory space used to entertain the programmers and management by overflowing or being subjected to mismatched PUSH/POPs. %% STALE: to take feloniously. "Thou shalt not stale!" -- Texan Dictionary %% STANDARDS: The principles we use to reject other people's code. %% STARS: a flight of steps. "Jes go up them stars!" -- Texan Dictionary %% STARTLING EVIDENCE: LISP came from Mars? -- "National Computer Science Enquirer" %% STATE n. Condition, situation. "What's the state of NEWIO?" "It's winning away." "What's your state?" "I'm about to gronk out." As a special case, "What's the state of the world?" (or, more silly, "State-of-world-P?") means "What's new?" or "What's going on?" %% STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Mysterious, sometimes bizarre, manipulations performed upon the collected data of an experiment in order to obscure the fact that the results have no generalizable meaning for humanity. Commonly, computers are used, lending an additional aura of unreality to the proceedings. %% STEWARDESSES do it in the air. %% STICK: A boomerang that doesn't work. %% STODD'S RULE FOR SUCCESS: Trust only those who stand to lose as much as you do if things go wrong. %% STOPPAGE n. Extreme lossage (see LOSSAGE) resulting in something (usually vital) becoming completely unusable. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% STRANO'S LAW: When all else fails, try the boss's suggestion. %% STRAPLESS EVENING GOWN: Bust truster. %% STRATEGY: A comprehensive plan of inaction. %% STRING space corrupt? But I always use TAPE! %% STUDENTS use their heads. %% STUPIDITY is NOT a HANDICAP! Park elsewhere! %% STY (pronounced "sty", not spelled out) n. A pseudo-teletype, which is a two-way pipeline with a job on one end and a fake keyboard-tty on the other. Also, a standard program which provides a pipeline from its controlling tty to a pseudo-teletype (and thence to another tty, thereby providing a "sub-tty"). This is MIT terminology; the SAIL and DEC equivalent is PTY. %% SUBROUTINE: A unit of software that makes tangled code look like it isn't. Opposite of GOTO (sort of). Useful for overflowing STACKs. %% SUCCESS: Living long enough to be a burden on your children. %% SUCCESSFUL CUNNILINGUS: When you wake up the next morning with a face like a frosted doughnut. %% SUGAR DADDY: A man who can afford to raise cain. %% SUGAR VAX - Programmers cereal. %% SUNSET: Pronounced atmospheric scattering of shorter wavelengths, resulting in selective transmission below 650 nanometers with progressively reducing solar elevation. %% SUPDUP v. To communicate with another ARPAnet host using the SUPDUP program, which is a SUPer-DUPer TELNET talking a special display protocol used mostly in talking to ITS sites. Sometimes abbreviated to SD. %% SUPERMARKET HELL 1: they are out of everything you need. "we should be getting it tomorrow." 2: every single product has a wierd name you've never seen. (GLICK household cleaner, TTTENSE PUFFS cereal) 3: no matter what line you're on, the person ahead of you must fight with the checker. "last week it was only 32 cents!" "this express line is for 10 items or less. two sixpacks counts as 12 items." %% SUPERPROGRAMMER n. See "wizard", "hacker". Usage: rare. (Becoming more common among IBM and Yourdon types.) -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SURGEONS are smooth operators. %% SUSHIDO the way of the tuna %% SUTIN'S LAW: The most usless computer tasks are the most fun to do. %% SVR4: the first system so open that everyone dumps their garbage there. -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% SWAPPED adj. From the use of secondary storage devices to implement virtual memory in computer systems. Something which is SWAPPED IN is available for immediate use in main memory, and otherwise is SWAPPED OUT. Often used metaphorically to refer to people's memories ("I read TECO ORDER every few months to keep the information swapped in.") or to their own availability ("I'll swap you in as soon as I finish looking at this other problem."). %% SWAR Space War (in one instruction) %% SWEENEY'S LAW: The length of a progress report is inversely proportional to the amount of progress. %% SWIMMING POOL -- a mob of people with water in it. %% SYNTAX? Why not--they tax everything else! %% SYSOP's read minds. But QWKly, very, very QWKly! %% SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR: A person whose job it is to do everything that isn't his job. %% SYSTEM n. 1. The supervisor program on the computer. 2. Any large-scale program. 3. Any method or algorithm. 4. The way things are usually done. Usage: a fairly ambiguous word. "You can't beat the system." SYSTEM HACKER: one who hacks the system (in sense 1 only; for sense 2 one mentions the particular program: e.g., LISP HACKER) -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% SYSTEM-INDEPENDENT: Works equally poorly on all systems. %% Sabbath bloody sabbath. %% Sacher's Observation: Some people grow with responsibility -- others merely swell. %% Sacred cows make great hamburgers. %% Sacred knowledge in the hands of fools destroys. -- The Upanishads %% Saddam Hussein still has a job. Do you? %% Saddam doesn't realize that if he doesn't get out, we're going to kick his ass out. -- President George Bush, January 1991 %% Saddam eats his Kurds %% Sadly, # can't be put in a #. %% Safety Third. %% Safety net-ism: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Sagittarius (Nov 22 - Dec 21) : Woody Allen, Andy Willams, Lee Remick, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Eli Wallach, Cecely Tyson %% Said Crystal, who hails from Poughkeepsie: "I ball guys on top when I'm tipsy." Then we peeked in the tent Where her binge time is spent, And we found Crystal balls on a gypsy! %% Said Einstein, "I have an equation Which to some may seem rabelaisian: Let _V be virginity Approaching infinity; Let _P be a constant persuasion; "Let _V over _P be inverted With the square root of _M_u inserted _N times into _V ... The result, Q.E.D., Is a relative!" Einstein asserted. %% Said Francesca, "My lack of volition Is leading me straight to perdition; But I haven't the strength To go to the length Of making an act of contrition." -- Edward Gorey %% Said John, "Sex I've always enjoyed And the way to avoid being cloyed For the fellow who dallies is The psychoanalysis Of the school of the great Sigmund Freud." %% Said President Jobcock one day : "War's better than love, I should say. Instead of a virgin, It's murder I'm urgin'-- You get lots more blood that-a-way." %% Said Young James, In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent and a redhaired girl. Now Nortons and Greeves won't do. They don't have a soul like a Vincent '52. He reached for her hand and he gave her the keys. He said I don't have any further use for these. I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome swooping down from Heaven to carry me home. He gave her one last kiss and died And he gave her his Vincent to ride. -- "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" by Richard Thompson %% Said a dainty young whore named Ms. Meggs, "The men like to spread my two legs, Then slip in between, If you know what I mean, And leave me the white of their eggs." %% Said a decadent wench of Bombay : "This has been a most wonderful day. Three cherry tarts, At least twenty farts, Two shits, and a bloody fine lay." %% Said a girl who upon her divan Was attacked by a virile young man: "Such excess of passion Is quite out of fashion" And she fractured his wrist with her fan. -- Edward Gorey %% Said a happy young man of Fort Drum : "What care I for this shortage of gum? My favorite chew Is a condom or two, With a goodly amount of fresh come." %% Said a horny young girl from Milpitas, "My favorite sport is coitus." But a fullback from State Made her period late, And now she has athlete's fetus %% Said a lecherous fellow named Shea, When his prick wouldn't rise for a lay, "You must seize it, and squeeze it, And tease it, and please it, For Rome wasn't built in a day." %% Said a lesbian lady, "It's sad; Of all the girls that I've had, None gave me the thrill Of real rapture until I learned how to be a tribade." %% Said a madam named Mamie La Farge To a sailor just off of a barge, "We have one girl that's dead, With a hole in her head-- Of course there's a slight extra charge." %% Said a man from Mobile, Alabama, "I'm displeased with my role in life's drama. My wife, who's a shrew, Isn't willing to screw And she's sure to outlive me, God damma." %% Said a modest young miss to de Sade, I'm simply too shy and afraid To take part in your pranks. But to show you my thanks, I'd just love to become your first aide. %% Said a moonlighting housewife in Goshen: "There are service-club guys with a notion! When the luncheon is through, And I'm game for a screw, What I like is the Rotary motion!" %% 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." %% Said a swinging young chick named Lyth Whose virtue was largely a myth, "Try as hard as I can, I can't find a man That it's fun to be virtuous with." %% Said a woman with open delight, "My pubic hair's perfectly white. I admit there's a glare But the fellows don't care They locate it more quickly at night." %% Said a young man, "I'm really delighted To find that my love is requited By all twenty-eight Of the girls that I date. Were they fewer, I'd feel myself slighted." %% Said crew girl Angelica Bauer : "The captain's withdrawn, cold, and sour." Uhura said, "No, At night that's not so-- He doesn't withdraw for an hour." %% Said old Dick to a quite famous beauty, "I think that it's my bounden duty To give you the measure Of my tip for your pleasure --And by 'tip' I don't mean a gratuity." %% Said sneering Mohammed el-Din : "Only infidel dogs put it in. Back home in Arabia We nibble the labia Till the juice dribbles off of our chin." %% Said the Duchess of Danzer at tea, "Young man, do you fart when you pee?" I replied with some wit, "Do you belch when you shit?" I think that was one up for me. %% Said the attractive, cigar-smoking housewife to her girl-friend: "I got started one night when George came home and found one burning in the ashtray." %% Said the chemist: ``I'll take some dimethyloximidomesoralamide And I'll add just a dash of dimethylamidoazobensaldehyde; But if these won't mix. I'll just have to fix Up a big dose of trisodiumpholoroglucintricarboxycide.'' %% Said the cunt-lapping Bey of Algiers, In a cunt halfway up to his ears : "This nautch is delicious, And without doubt nutritious. She's my best-tasting wife in ten years!" %% Said the doc to J. Fenimore Cooper, "There's something gone wrong with your pooper. The Indians, I fear Have attacked from the rear, While you lay in inebriate stupor." %% Said the nun as the bishop withdrew, "This must be our final adieu, For the vicar is slicker, And thicker, and quicker, And two inches longer than you." %% Said the sales rep. at P.D.A., All of us here are in great dismay. While PATRAN is neat, it just can't compete, with I-DEAS that we saw run today! %% Sailing is fun, but scrubbing the decks is aardvark. -- Heard on Noahs' ark %% Sailing: A form of mast transit. %% Sailing: The fine art of getting wet and becoming ill while slowly going nowhere at great expense. -- from "Sailing" by Henry Beard and Roy Mckie %% Sailor's luck, Mr. Spock. Or as one of Finable's Laws puts it: "Any home port the ship makes will be somebody else's, not mine!" -- Kirk, "Amok Time," stardate 3372.7 %% Sailors do it ad nauseam. %% Sailors in Inland China do it seasonally. %% Sailors in ships, sail on! Even while we died, others rode out the storm. %% Saint Peter was having a slow day at the Pearly Gates so he took a little stroll. He noticed that the fence between heaven and hell was in need of some repair. So he hollers over the fence to Lucifer. Saint Peter: "This fence needs some repair. I'll see to it that it gets fixed if you will help pay for it." Lucifer: "If you want it fixed, you pay for it." Saint Peter: "The fence is partly your responsibility and you will help pay for it or I will sue you for that amount." Lucifer: "Ha!! Where do you think you are going to get a lawyer?!" %% Saint Peter was once heard to boast That he'd had all the heavenly host : The Father and Son, And then - just for fun - The hole in the Holy Ghost. %% Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Sainthood is acceptable only in saints. %% Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent. -- George Orwell (1903-1950) %% Salaam. %% Sale on Italian War Surplus Rifles: All in perfect condition. Never fired, dropped once. %% Salespeople's claims for performance should be multiplied by a factor of 0.25. %% Sally plays strip poker. Whenever she loses, she has to put something on. -- Rod Schmidt %% Sally sued for support; she was claimin' Phil had fathered her baby (named Damon). She said, "I ought to know," As she pointed below. "'Cause this is the box that he came in." %% Sally's sex life was carefully planned. Said she, "I prefer to be manned. Things that are anal, Are always so banal, But things that expand are just grand." %% Sally-Jo taught erotic correction. She told her student to get an erection. "Put your dick in my mouth. Move it north, move it south -- Now, you're getting a sense of direction!" Her instructions were very explicit, And more than a little illicit: "Please fill up my cunny With fresh clover honey, And butter my buns like a biscuit." Then wrap me up nice in a blanket, And I'll sit on your staff while you crank it. I'll put on some feathers, And laces and leathers, And wiggle my ass while you spank it." "Now that your fingers are stinky, Tie me up in some chains that are clinky. Bring in goats and a sheik, Give my titties a tweak, --- And NOW, we can start getting kinky!" "Forget what the chain and the whip meant. Just get the straps and the slings and a shipment Of high-grade Vaseline, And a strong trampoline, And all of the other equipment!" "Now, when we get all the bedsprings a-drummin', That's when I'll start a-hummin', Then quickly, my dear, Put it into my ear, So I'll hear the sound of it comin'!" "I don't know how much this is costing," Said her student, still covered with frosting. "But I can say with affinity That I've lost my virginity. Quite frankly, my dear, you're EXHAUSTING!" %% Sally-Jo was exceedingly vexed, When they said she was quite oversexed. Said she, "That's not true, I just like to screw. Now, please take a number. Who's next?" %% Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand. -- Edward Abbey %% Sam Lefkovitz is having an intimate party to celebrate his thirty immensely profitable years in the construction business. "You know," he laments to his friends, "over the years I have constructed dozens of enormous projects in and around this city, but am I known as Sam the Builder? No. And over the years I have contributed literally millions of dollars to charitable causes of one sort or another, but am I called Sam the Philanthropist? No, sir. But suck one little cock..." %% Sam's Axiom (1): Any line, however short, is still too long. %% Sam's Axiom (2): Work is the crabgrass of life, but money is the water that keeps it green. %% Sam: "Ethel, ya got no tits and yer all dried up ..." Ethel: "Sam, get off my back!!!!" %% Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel. %% Sample Error Message from DEC's RSTS OS for the PDP-11: "UNIBUS TIMEOUT FATAL TRAP PROGRAM LOST SORRY" %% Sample Proof: . . . 4.7 At this point we assume that x is an element of the set S, and therefore...We know this according to L. Krueger[pg. 71] Question...has anyone ever bothered to see if these type of references exist. Come on...we all know what happens when we are writing a freshman english composition and run out of sources...how better to prove your thesis with a little blurb from some obscure, and nonexistent source %% San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was. -- Herb Caen %% San Francisco prohibits elephants from strolling down %% San Francisco, n.: Marcel Proust editing an issue of Penthouse. %% Sanctus Camberus, defensor hominem, fiat voluntas tua. %% Sandwich: After Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-92), for whom sandwiches were made so that he could stay at the gambling table without interruptions for meals. %% Sanely applied advertising could remake the world. -- Stuart Chase (1888-?) %% Sanitized for your protection. %% Sanity and insanity overlap a fine gray line. -- Charles van Kriedt %% Sanity is not statistical. %% Sanity is overrated. %% Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold %% Sanity, n. A state of mind which immediately precedes and follows murder. %% Sank heaven for leetle curls. %% Santa Claus is watching! %% Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, He must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, Must be a pacifist. What's in that pipe that he's smoking? -- Arlo Guthrie %% Santa Claus wears a red suit He's a Communist. He has long hair and a beard Must be a pacifist. And what's in the pipe that he's smoking? Santa Claus comes in your house at night. He must be a dope fiend to get you up tight. Why do police guys beat on peace guys? -- Arlo Guthrie, "The Pause of Mr. Claus" %% Santa's elves are just a bunch of subordinate Clauses. %% Sarcasm: barbed ire. %% Satan can counterfeit a burning feeling, but he cannot counterfeit a good feeling. -- Mark E. Petersen %% Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million. %% Satan the envious said with a sigh: Christians know more about their hell than I. -- Alfred Kreymborg %% Satellite Safety Tip #14: If you see a bright streak in the sky coming at you, duck. %% Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone. %% Satire is what closes in New Haven. %% Satisfaction derived from a trip goes down as Expectation goes up if Reality is unchanged. S = R/E As Reality becomes more favorable, the chance for Satisfaction goes up IF Expectation is unchanged. -- Hall T. Sprague %% Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. %% Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in. %% Saturation - The result of reading too many of these dafynitions. %% Saturday night in Toledo Ohio, Is like being nowhere at all, All through the day how the hours rush by, You sit in the park and you watch the grass die. -- John Denver, "Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio" %% Saturday-night special: [from police slang for a cheap handgun] n. A program or feature kluged together during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to pressure from a {salescritter}. Such hacks are dangerously unreliable, but all too often sneak into a production release after insufficient review. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Satyr is a Sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every Body's Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that Kind Reception it meets with. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% Satyrs have more faun. %% Sauron is alive in Argentina! %% Sausage Principle: People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either one being made. %% Savage rabbits attacked me without mercy! %% Savage's Law of Expediency: You want it bad, you'll get it bad. %% Save Soviet Jewry -- Win Valuable Prizes!!!! %% Save a forest - eat a beaver! %% Save a mouse, eat a pussy! %% Save a whale, harpoon a fat person. %% Save an alligator; shoot a preppie %% Save energy: Drive a smaller shell. %% Save energy: be apathetic. %% Save fuel. Get cremated with a friend. %% Save gas, don't eat beans. %% Save gas, don't use the shell. %% Save our slums!! %% Save the Whales -- Harpoon a Honda. %% Save the seals. %% Save the whales! Trade them for valuable prizes! %% Save the whales. %% Save the whales. Club a seal instead. %% Save the whales. Collect the whole set. %% Save water, bathe with a friend. %% Save your bottles. %% Save your money for a rainy day, or a new computer! %% Save yourself! Reboot in 5 seconds! %% Saved. %% Saves are not permitted during the endgame. %% Saving level %% Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of inspector of desert water holes. -- Edward Abbey %% Savings do include amnesia. %% Savoir-faire: The ability to smile when you discover that your girl and your best friend are both missing from the dance floor. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Saw this one in a public toilet out in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska about fifteen-plus years ago: "If Black Is Beautiful, I Just Shit A Masterpiece!" %% Saw this sticker on the lefthand side of a bumper on the 405 freeway during Friday afternoon rush hour: "I LOVE TO DRIVE THE 405" Then, a few seconds later, as I'm wondering what bizarre kind of person would actually enjoy driving the 405 during rush hour, I notice another bumpersticker on the righthand side: "I ALSO LOVE TO BANG MY HEAD WITH BRICKS" %% Saward scandal coverage. -- Gordon Hogenson, Doctor Who Bulletin #44, p. 12 (June '87) %% Saxophonists have curved ones %% Say "twenty-three-skiddoo" to logout. %% Say it with flowers - Give her a triffid. %% Say many of cameras focused t'us, Our middle-aged shots do us justice. No justice, please, curse ye! We really want mercy: You see, 'tis the justice, disgusts us. -- Thomas H. Hildebrandt %% Say no, then negotiate. -- Helga %% Say something you'll be sorry for, I love receiving apologies. %% Say the secret word and win $100 -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Say the word I'm thinking of. Say the word. The word is Love. Say the word, and you'll be free. Say the word and be like me. %% Say what you mean, and mean what you say. %% Say! You've struck a heap of trouble-- Bust in business, lost your wife; No one cares a cent about you, You don't care a cent for life; Hard luck has of hope bereft you, Health is failing, wish you'd die-- Why, you've still the sunshine left you And the big blue sky. -- Robert W. Service %% Say's Law: Supply creates its own demand. %% Say, did you hear that the Challenger astronauts were on the radio? ... and on the console and on the heat tiles and on pieces of the wings and on .... %% Says an airlining wanton named Vi: "I'm a pantyless stew when I fly. To a muffer's delight, I'll take head on a flight, So the guy can have pie in the sky." %% Scan Conversion - Religious experience at a speed reading clinic. %% Scan for vessels in pursuit. Scanning. Indications are negative, at this time. Did I...get it right? -- Kirk and McCoy, "ST III: The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% Scanlines - Monthly newsletter of the Scan converts. %% Scars are like memories. We do not have them removed. -- Chmeee "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Scenary is here, wish you were beautiful. %% Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Schapiro's Explanation: The grass is always greener on the other side -- but that's because they use more manure. %% Scheduled changes always mean cutbacks. -- Steve Ross %% Scheduled changes always mean cutbacks. (Minor schedule adjustments always affect your bus (train, whatever)) -- Steve Ross %% Schematologists do it haltingly. %% Schizophrenia beats being alone. %% Schizophrenia rules. OK. OK. %% Schlattwhapper, n.: The window shade that allows itself to be pulled down, hesitates for a second, then snaps up in your face. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Schmidt's Observation: All things being equal, a fat person uses more soap than a thin person. %% Schmitt triggers do it only once (*sigh*). %% Schnapps and hock are my favorite Teutonics. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% Schnuffel, n.: A dog's practice of continuously nuzzling in your crotch in mixed company. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% School is a job. %% School's out! School's out! Teacher let the monkeys out! One was jailed! One prevailed! Both asked God: "How have I failed?" -- traditional grad school chant "Life in Hell" %% Schools are for training people how to listen to other people. %% Schrodinger might have been here. %% Schrodinger, Erwin! Professor of Physics! Wrote daring equations! Confounded his critics! Win saw that the theory that Newton'd invented By Einstein's discov'ries had been badly dented. "What now?" wailed his colleagues. Said Erwin, "Don't panic, No grease monkey I, but a quantum mechanic. Consider electrons. Now these teeny articles Are sometimes like waves, and then sometimes like particles. If that's not confusing, the nuclear dance Of electrons and suchlike is governed by chance! No sweat though--my theory permits us to judge Where some of 'em is, and the rest of 'em was." %% Schshschshchsch. -- The Gorn, "Arena," stardate 3046.2 %% Schubert had a horse named Sarah. He rode her to a big parade, And all the time, the band was playing, Schubert's Sarah neighed. %% Schubert was dead, but only on alternate Thursdays. %% Schwiggle, n.: The amusing rotation of one's bottom while sharpening a pencil. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Sci-fi is a perversion practiced by two consenting adults, one non-consenting non-adult, and a spayed gerbil, taking place in a bathroom using a walnut. -- Jerry E. Pournelle %% Science Fiction, Double Feature. Frank has built and lost his creature. Darkness has conquered Brad and Janet. The servants gone to a distant planet. Wo, oh, oh, oh. At the late night, double feature, Picture show. I want to go, oh, oh, oh. To the late night, double feature, Picture show. -- Rocky Horror Picture Show %% Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Science asks why. I ask why not. %% Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently. -- Werner von Braun %% Science fiction is the archaeology of the future. %% Science fiction is to the totalitarian state what Aesop's fables were to the institution of slavery in the sixth century B.C. It is, of course, subversive. by taking ideas too seriously, it ridicules people. But it depends, for its subversive power, on people who are smart enough to be afraid of laughter. Modern history, especially as it expresses itself in the totalitarian hockey puck, has an excess of almost everything except a genuine appreciation of the ludicrous. -- John Leonard, New York Times (1982) %% Science is a flickering light in our darkness, it is but the only one we have and woe to him who would put it out. -- Morris Cohen %% Science is a history of superseded theories. %% Science is a wonderful thing, but it has not succeeded in maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and that's all we asked of it. %% Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. -- Jules Henri Poincare %% Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science. -- Henri Poincair'e %% Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it. -- Aubrey Eben %% Science is nothing but developed perception, integrated intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope. -- C. P. Snow %% Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war. -- Edward Abbey %% Science is what happens when preconception meets verification. %% Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break. -- Earl Wilson %% Science may someday discover what faith has always known. %% Science seeks generally only the most useful systems of classification: these it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented, as true. -- S. I. Hayakawa %% Science transcends mere politics. As recent history demonstrates, scientists are as willing to work for a Tojo, a Hitler, or a Stalin as for the free nations of the West. -- Edward Abbey %% Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise? Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree? -- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), "Science, a Sonnet" %% Science: preconception meeting verification. %% Scienta sine arte nihil est: ars sine scientia nihil est. -- Author unknown %% Scientific Computations Law: a. Decimal points are misplaced. b. Positive powers of ten are in fact negative, and vice-versa. This law is responsible for interesting results such as 40.8E-3 angstroms for the earth's circumference, or 3.2E2 Gigafarads in and RLC circuit. %% Scientific and humanist approaches are not competitive but supportive, and both are ultimately necessary. -- Robert C. Wood %% Scientific innovation sometimes sounds like poetry, and I would claim that it is, at least in the earliest stages. The ideal scientist can be said to think like a poet, work like a clerk, and write like a journalist. -- Edward O. Wilson, "Biophilia" %% Scientific method: There's a madness in the method. -- Edward Abbey %% Scientists Produce Psychopathic Holy Girl. %% Scientists and engineers set high performance standards for themselves; therefore, performance appraisal and career planning are perfunctory. -- Richard F. Moore %% Scientists are Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity. -- Arthur Koestler %% Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it. -- William Buckley %% Scientists discover life causes cancer. %% Scientists do it experimentally. %% Scientists have invented a love drug, but it only works on bugs. %% Scientists still know less about what attracts men than they do about what attracts mosquitos. -- Dr. Joyce Brothers, "What Every Woman Should Know About Men" %% Scientists tell us that the earth will fall into the sun within 400 billion years. What can we, as citizens, do? %% Scientists were preparing an experiment to ask the ultimate question. They had worked for months gathering one each of every computer that was built. Finally the big day was at hand. All the computers were linked together. They asked the question, "Is there a God?". Lights started blinking, flashing and blinking some more. Suddenly, there was a loud crash, and a bolt of lightning came down from the sky, struck the computers, and welded all the connections permanently together. "There is now", came the reply. %% Scientists who dislike the restraints of highly organized research like to remark that a truly great research worker needs only three pieces of equipment: a pencil, a piece of paper, and a brain .... But they quote this maxim more often at academic banquets than at budget hearings. -- Don Price %% Scientists will study your brain to learn more about your distant cousin, Man. %% Scintillate, scintillate, Aster menific! Fain do I fathom thy nature specific; Loftily poised in the ether capacious, Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous! %% Scintillate, scintillate, aster minific. %% Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific, Fain how I pause at your nature specific, Loftily poised in the ether capacious, Highly resembling a gem carbonaceous. Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific, Fain how I pause at your nature specific. %% Scintillation is not always identification for an auric substance. %% Scnatterly's Summing Up Of The Corollaries: If anything can't go wrong, it will. %% Scorpio (Oct 23 - Nov 21) : Art Garfunkel, Elke Sommer, Rock Hudson,Roy Rogers, Roy Scheider, Tatum O'Neal, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dale Evans, Imogene Coca %% Scorpions often hide under tripe rations. %% Scorpios do not believe in astrology. -- Ngaire Woods %% Scotsmen do it with Amazing Grace. %% Scott's First Law: No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right. Scott's Second Law: When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found to have been wrong in the first place. Corollary: After the correction has been found in error, it will be impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation. %% Scott's first Law: No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right. %% Scottish country dancers are reel people %% Scotty: Captain, we din' can reference it! Kirk: Analysis, Mr. Spock? Spock: Captain, it doesn't appear in the symbol table. Kirk: Then it's of external origin? Spock: Affirmative. Kirk: Mr. Sulu, go to pass two. Sulu: Aye aye, sir, going to pass two. %% Scratch the average female and you'll find a purring bundle... at the ready to love and honor, bake a torte and still produce quintuplets. -- Edgar Berman %% Scratch the disks! Drop the core! Roll the tapes across the floor! %% Screw up your courage! You've screwed up everything else. %% Script writer: "Rrrah! I smell Emmy!!" Marshall: [frown] [sniff] [sniff] -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% Scrolls of fire are useful against fog clouds. %% Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% Scrute the inscrutable, eff the ineffable. %% ScumOS: /skuhm'os/ or /skuhm'O-S/ n. Unflattering hackerism for SunOS, the UNIX variant supported on Sun Microsystems's UNIX workstations (see also {sun-stools}), and compare {AIDX}, {terminak}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {HP-SUX}. Despite what this term might suggest, Sun was founded by hackers and still enjoys excellent relations with hackerdom; usage is more often in exasperation than outright loathing. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Se Habla Espanol. %% Sean asked me to marry him, but he didn't say it out loud. So I read his mind back to him. -- Madonna %% Sears has everything. %% Seattle is so wet that people protect their property with watch-ducks. %% Seaver Sucks Donkey Dicks. %% Second Coming Still Vaporware After 2,000 Years %% 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. %% Second Law of Final Exams: In your toughest final-- for the first time all year-- the most distractingly attractive student in the class will sit next to you. %% Second Law of Hacking: first in, first out. %% Second fiddles do it vilely. %% Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. %% Secret Agent Man, they've given you a number and taken away your name. %% Secret headquarters of Clown for Crime. Bozo speaking. %% Secret sources are more credible. -- Ron Nessen %% Secretaries do it with no mistakes. %% Secretaries do it with their fingers. %% Secretary's Lament: Around here I'm a very responsible person. If anything happens, I'm responsible. %% Secretary's rule of meetings: The time taken up by a meeting will always be at least 5 times the time needed by the secretary to do the job. %% Security Team Two reports they've discovered a puddle of blood outside the Selay quarters, and they can't find one of the delegates... "Lieutenant, this couldn't have waited a moment?" It's good to see you sir. The problem is that one of the cooks has just been asked to broil reptile for the Anticans...and it looks like the Selay delegate. -- Yar and Riker, "Lonely Among Us", stardate 41249.3 %% Security by Obscurity! %% Security check: INTRUDER ALERT! %% Security is mostly a superstition. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. -- Helen Keller %% Security is the individual's responsibility. %% Security is your responsibility. %% Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? [Who guards the Guardians?] %% Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide. -- Stanislaw Lem, "The Cyberiad" %% Seductive joyousness. %% See Dick and Jane. %% See Spot run. %% See how you can be? %% See if you can shout at just the right frequency. %% See label for sequence. %% See me - come to my office, I'm lonely -- Glossary of important business terms %% See me, feel me, touch me, heal me. -- Tommy %% See the happy moron, He doesn't give a damn. I wish I were a moron. My God! Perhaps I am! -- "Eugenics Review", July 1929, 86/2 %% See the world! Learn helicopter maintenance. %% See you around... %% See your dealer, or send a check to me: Joe Isuzu %% Seeing is believing. You wouldn't have seen it if you hadn't believed it. %% Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" %% Seek companionship, love and social activity at home. %% Seek domestic happiness and faithful friends. %% Seek simplicity -- and distrust it. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% Seeking duration too hastily brings misfortune persistently. Nothing that would further. %% Seems a PhD was driving past Agnews State Hospital, on his way to Stanford U to give a lecture. Just as he was passing the hospital, his left front tire blew. The PhD pulled to the side of the street, got out the jack and spare and went to work. He carefully put the wheel nuts in the hubcap. About then, a big truck went by hit the hubcap and scattered the wheel nuts in the bushes. So the PhD was really upset by this, as he was getting late for his lecture. So there he was, crawling on his hands and knees in the bushes trying to find his wheel nuts. About that time, one of the patients in the hospital walked over to the chain link fence, while putting a hat full of water on his head, mumbling to himself and asked the PhD what he was trying to do. So the PhD described the incident fully and was getting more frustrated looking for the wheel nuts and the passage of time on his Rolex. All of a sudden, the patient suggested to the PhD that he take one nut off each of the other three wheels and mount the spare on the car with those. Astonished, the PhD said, "What a smart idea, what are you doing in this place?" With that the patient replied, .............. "I AM IN HERE BECAUSE I AM NUTS, NOT STUPID!" %% Seems human enough to me. -- Guinan after stabbing Q's hand with a fork, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Seen in TV Guide, describing the Star Trek episode "Amok Time": "Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and nearly kills Captain Kirk." %% Seen in a computer manual: "Do not write on this line. This line has been left blank intentionally." %% Seen in an article in the Wall Street Journal -- "Mommy, do all fairy tales beginning with `Once upon a time'?" "No, dear. Nowadays, lots of them start with `If I am elected...'." %% Seen near the Stanford Linear Accelerator: Beware of Quantum Ducks, Quark! Quark! %% Seen on a Saab: Key Mow %% Seen on a T-Shirt: "Get even. Live long enough to be a problem to your kids." %% Seen on a T-shirt: It's all fun and games, until someone loses an eye, then it's a sport. %% Seen on a bathroom wall: Q. When Santa and all the male reindeer go out on Christmas eve, where do all the female reindeer go? A. They go to town to blow a few bucks! %% Seen on a bumper sticker: "51% sweetheart 49% bitch Don't push it." %% Seen on a button at an SF Convention: Veteran of the Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force. 1990-1951. %% Seen on a desk: Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. Seen on a bumper sticker: I don't smoke, but I chew. You don't blow your smoke on me, and I won't spit on you! Heard from Steve Martin: "You're sitting in this classy restaurant, and a guy leans over and says 'Hey, buddy. Do you mind if I smoke?' I feel like telling him 'Nope. Do you mind if I fart? It's one of my habits. I hear they have a special section for me on airplanes, now. It's hard to quit. I tried to quit once, but I gained a lot of weight... And after sex, I really have the urge to "light one up."'" %% Seen on a plummer's truck: In my business, a flush beats a full house. %% Seen on a sign on I-75 in Ohio: All signs metric next 20 miles %% Seen on a sign: Detour sign in Kyushi, Japan: Stop: Drive Sideways. %% Seen on a wall in a school: "Kids leave home soon, before you forget you know everything!" %% Seen on bumper sticker: Beam me up, Scotty, it ate my phaser. %% Seen on cars in Apple Computer parking lots --- Honk if you hate the IBM PC %% Seen on local vending machine: "Anti-theft device prevents obtaining free product." %% Seen on the marquee of a disused porn theatre in New York City: "What urge will save us now that sex won't?" -- David Goldfarb, goldfarb@ocf.berkeley.edu %% Seen on the wall in a New York subway station: "There are no integers n > 2 and x, y, z > 0, such that x^n + y^n = z^n I have found a truly wonderful proof of this. Unfortunately, my train is coming. %% Seen on two signs from a Majorcan shop entrance: -- English well talking. -- Here speeching American. %% Seen outside a computer center in Washington, DC: "This place guarded by a false sense of security" %% Seen under an ubiquitous "Kilroy was here": "Heisenberg might have been here"! %% Seers and soothsayers read crystal balls to find the future. Less lucky men read junk--with more success. -- Richard N. Farmer %% Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow! -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% Selections from "New Crossbred `ISMs' for the 90s": Blaspheminism: "Take the patriarchy and stuff it up your Messiah." Andy Capitalism: "Lend me five quid, luv?" "Cor, you're not investing in S&Ls again!?" Superegotism: "My conscience is bigger than yours." Christmasochism: "It's December 23rd! I must get to the mall!" -- Ranjit Bhatnagar %% Seleznick's Theory of Holistic Medicine: Ice Cream cures all ills. %% Seleznick's Theory of Holistic Medicine: Ice Cream cures all ills. Temporarily. %% Self Test for Paranoia: You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's your own fault. %% Self-Esteem: An erroneous appraisal. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Self-abuse is the sincerest kind. -- Solomon Short %% Self-centered people are those who spend so much time talking about themselves we never get a chance to talk about ourselves. %% Self-checking systems tend to have a complexity in proportion to the inherent unreliability of the system in which they are used. -- Tom Gibb %% Self-defense is nature's oldest law. -- Dryden %% Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Self-love is the greatest of flatterers. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Self-pity is a destructive, useless emotion. %% Sell before date stamped on carton. %% Semi-Conductor - a person hired to lead an orchestra before he has graduated from director's school. %% Semiconductor - part time band leader -- Data communications glossary %% Seminars, n.: From "semi" and "arse", hence, any half-assed discussion. %% Semper Fi, dude. %% Sen. Danforth: "There is nothing on the face of the album which would notify you if the record has pornographics material or material glorifying violence?" Tipper Gore: "No, there is nothing that would suggest that to me." Frank Zappa: "I would say that a buzz saw blade between the guy's legs on the album cover is good indication that it's not for little Johnny." -- The Senate Commerce Committee hearing on rock lyrics, from The Village Voice, 6 Oct 1985 %% Senate, n.: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Senator Alan Simpson, R-Wyoming, has a stock answer when asked his church preference. He often says: "Red brick." %% Send for clips to see how I write. If you don't, frogs will sneak into your house and eat your fingers. -- John Corcoran %% Send lawyers, guns, and money, The shit has hit the fan. -- Warren Zevon %% Send some filthy mail. %% Send your questions to ``ASK ZIPPY'', Box 40474, San Francisco, CA 94140, USA %% Sendmail can safely be made setuid to root. -- Eric Allman, "Sendmail Install & Operation Guide" %% Sennel's Law: It doesn't take all kinds. We just HAVE all kinds. %% Sense switches and data switches should only be used as warm furry buttons: they don't do anything but when you push them they push back, and make you feel loved, i.e. for selective printing and tracing in debug. %% Senseless killing is immoral, but killing for a purpose, can quite often be ingenious. -- Cyrus Redblock, "The Big Goodbye", stardate 41997.7 %% Sensors show lifeforms aboard, but I am unable to ascertain whether they are awake or dormant. However their propulsion system is inactive so I would hypothesize that the crew is asleep. However, I could be in error. -- Data, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Sentient plasmoids are a gas. %% Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a thousand books. -- Edward Abbey %% Sentimental, Lieutenant? Efficiency Commander. -- Riker and Worf, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% September 12 -- In the ongoing hearings, Sen. Joseph Biden pledges to consider the Bork nomination "with total objectivity," adding: "You have that on my honor not only as a Senator, but also as the Prince of Wales." -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% September 17 -- The market-savvy McDonald's corporation, capitalizing on the popularity of the movie "Fatal Attraction," introduces a new menu item, Boiled McRabbits. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% September 2 -- In Washington, reporters notice that at some point -- possibly during a speech by Sen. Inouye, when everybody was asleep -- the ongoing Iran-Contra hearings turned into the ongoing confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% September 21 -- Professional football players go on strike, demanding the right to "have normal necks." Negotiations begin under the guidance of mediator Mario Cuomo. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% September 28 -- Tensions ease in the Persian Gulf as a Delta Air Lines flight, en route from Boston to Newark, successfully lands on the U.S. carrier Avocado. -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% September 8 -- Researcher Shere Hite releases her scientific new book, "Men Are Scum." -- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987" %% Serenity through viciousness. %% Serfs up! -- Spartacus %% Serial Interface : A spoon. %% Serocki's Stricture: Marriage is always a bachelor's last option. %% Service Conditions as given on specifications will be exceeded. %% Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. -- Muhammad Ali, in "Time", 1978 %% Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence. %% Serving the scum of Paris for over 300 years %% Sesame Street is a production of the Children's Television Workshop. %% Sesame Street was brought to you today by the letter 'Q' and the number 3.14159 %% Set mode=Extremely verbose %% Set the cart before the horse. -- John Heywood %% Set the controls for the heart of the sun. %% Setting right what has been spoiled by the father. If there is a son, No blame rests upon the departed father. Danger. In the end good fortune. %% Setting right what has been spoiled by the father. One meets with praise. %% Setting right what has been spoiled by the father. There will be little remorse. No great blame. %% Setting right what has been spoiled by the mother. One must not be too persevering. %% Seven days on honeymoon make one hole weak. %% Seven friends once pulled this at my college cafeteria. One put a hot water bottle filled with pea soup down his chest; he sat at the head of a table, with the other six friends sitting along the sides. When the cafeteria was pretty full of people, he made a loud noise (to attract attention), stood up, bent over and squeezed his chest. This caused a huge gush of green liquid to spew all over the table; the other six immediately began to eat this green liquid. I think a lot of food went uneaten that night. %% Seven years of college, down the drain. -- John Blutarski %% Several feet away is a warm pair of gloves. %% Several years ago, an international chess tournament was being held in a swank hotel in New York. Most of the major stars of the chess world were there, and after a grueling day of chess, the players and their entourages retired to the lobby of the hotel for a little refreshment. In the lobby, some players got into a heated argument about who was the brightest, the fastest, and the best chess player in the world. The argument got quite loud, as various players claimed that honor. At that point, a security guard in the lobby turned to another guard and commented, "If there's anything I just can't stand, it's chess nuts boasting in an open foyer." %% Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a big store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at reasonable prices? Then they decided, nah, the hell with that, let's build a home center. And before long home centers were springing up like crabgrass all over the United States. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% Sex and drugs and UNIX. %% Sex and drugs and rock and roll, Is all my brain and body need. Sex and drugs and rock and roll, Are very good indeed. Take your silly ways, Throw them out the window, The wisdom of your ways, I've been there and I know, Lots of other ways... -- Ian Drury, "New Boots and Panties" %% Sex drive: A physical craving that begins in adolescence and ends at marriage. %% Sex is a job. %% Sex is a misdemeanor -- the more I miss, de meaner I get. %% Sex is a natural bodily process, like a stroke. %% Sex is better than chess, because sex has two winners. -- Solomon Short %% Sex is better than grass, if you have the right pusher. %% Sex is dirty, but only if you do it right. %% Sex is friction. Preferably, friction with a friend. And preferably well-lubed. After that, it's all a matter of taste. -- Solomon Short %% Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn. -- Garrison Keillor %% Sex is great, Sex is grand, Sex around here, Is mostly by hand. %% Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won't either. -- Joseph Fischer %% Sex is just a sublimation of the math urge. %% Sex is just one damp thing after another. %% Sex is like a bridge game -- If you have a good hand no partner is needed. %% Sex is like air. It's only a big deal if you can't get any. %% Sex is like snow... You never know how many inches you're going to get or how long it will last. %% Sex is like software: For everyone who pays for it, there are hundreds getting it free. %% Sex is nobody's business except the three people involved. %% Sex is not compulsory, reply the fetus lovers. True: but we're not talking about sex--we're talking about maternity. -- Edward Abbey %% Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer. -- Swami X %% Sex is nothing but Love misunderstood. %% Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation ... the other eight are unimportant. -- Henry Miller %% Sex is only a pain in the arse if you miss %% Sex is only dirty if it's done right %% Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. -- J. D. Salinger %% Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated. -- M. C. Reed %% Sex is the poor man's opera. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Sex is what women have and men want. %% Sex on TV can't hurt you unless you fall off! %% Sex on the Beach: 1. In a shot glass mix equal parts of Amaretto and Rum. Some people chase with beer. Ack!!! 2. Mix equal parts of Amaretto, Vodka, and Irish Cream (Baileys if someone else is footing the bill). Serve on ice. This one isn't half bad. Several females of my choice seem to like this one, since it has a sweet taste, and doesn't taste too strong. %% Sex on the Beach: Equal portions of: Pineapple juice, Vodka, Midori and Chambord! %% Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. -- Woody Allen %% Sex without love is an empty meaningless experience. But as empty meaningless experiences go its pretty good. %% Sex, Sex, Sex... the pleasure of having a 1 track mind. %% Sex: the most fun you can have without laughing. %% Sexual Harrasment starts at the office. %% Sgt. Pepper went into a strawberry field And turned into the walrus Climbing into bed for peace In love with a Japanese woman Hated by an international YMCA ex-Jesus freak Who blew him off the mountain Martin dreamed about While the CIA didn't say anything Hoping no one would imagine Psychiatric head doctor connections Or Manchurian Candidates Warmaker's behavior modification master plan Killing men of peace While the queen of diamonds reshuffled the deck Turning up the Ronalds - Reagan and MacDonalds -- John Trudell %% Sha-na-na-na, sha-na-na-na-na ... get a job. %% Shading within a garment may occur. %% Shah, shah! Ayatulla you so! %% Shake it up! %% Shake it up, baby. Twist and Shout. %% Shake your groove thing! %% Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II? -- Edward Abbey %% Shall I compare thee to a Summer day? No, I guess not. %% Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?... I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. -- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" %% Shall I take you to a restaurant that's got glass tables? You can watch yourself while you are eating! %% Shall I tell you what true evil is? It is to submit to you. It is when we surrender our freedom, our dignity, instead of defying you. -- Picard to Armus, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3 %% Shall we dance? %% Shall we go there now or remain and play? "Play?" At love. Unless you don't enjoy that. -- Rivan and Riker, "Justice", stardate 41255.6 %% Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary? -- J. M. Barrie %% Shame is an improper emotion invented by pietists to oppress the human race. -- Robert Preston [Toddy], "Victor/Victoria" %% Shamus, n. [Yiddish]: A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the temple, and makes sure everything is in working order. A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagog functionaries, and there's a joke about that: A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the middle of a service, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The cantor, not to be bested, also cries out, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, "Look who thinks he's nobody!" -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Shannon's Observation Nothing is so frustrating as a bad situation that is beginning to improve. %% Shapeless body, flapping maw, Holds what you give it without any hands, And will be with you, back to back, though it never stands. A backpack %% Shards of a broken mirror are dangerous to play with. %% Share and Enjoy %% Share and enjoy, share and enjoy. Journey through life with a plastic boy or girl by your side. Let your pal be your guide. And when it breaks down or starts to annoy, or grinds when it moves and gives you no joy, 'cause it digs up your hat, or has sex with your cat, sprays oil on your wall or rips off your door, and you get to the point you can't stand any more. Bring it to us, we won't give a shit. We'll tell you: "Go stick your head in a pig". %% Share your happiness with others today--commit suicide. %% Share your happiness with others today. %% Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. %% Shareware author dies: .GIF at eleven! %% Sharing an orbit with god is no small experience. -- Troi, "Justice", stardate 41255.6 %% Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent. -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know" %% Sharon Sharalike %% Sharp as a tack and twice as flat. %% Shave a cedar shingle thin. %% Shaving is a human art form, Data. Technological perfection can shave too close. -- Geordi, "Code of Honor", stardate 41235.25 %% Shazaam!! %% Shazbat! %% She asked me if I loved her still. "Yes," I replied. "I've never had you any other way." %% She balanced dignity on the tip of her nose. %% She been married so many times she got rice marks all over her face. -- Tom Waits %% She begged and she pleaded for more. I said, "We've already had four, And I'm sure that you've heard, Though its somewhat absurd, That eros spelt backwards is sore." %% She blinded me with science. %% She called her parakeet Onan, because he spilled his seed. %% She came from planet Clair. %% She can kill all your files; She can freeze with a frown. And a wave of her hand brings the whole system down. And she works on her code until ten after three. She lives like a bat but she's always a hacker to me. -- Apologies to Billy Joel %% She can wade in a drop of dew. She don't come and I don't follow ..waits backstage while I sing to you. -- The Grateful Dead %% She could have had as fulfilling a life as any woman. If only... if only. -- Kirk, "Turnabout Intruder," stardate 5923.5 %% She developed a persistent troubled frown which gave her the expression of someone who is trying to repair a watch with his gloves on. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% She doesn't wrestle very well,but you should see her box. %% She drove a Plymouth Satellite faster than the speed of light. %% She had a coming out party, but they made her go back again. %% She had a face lift, tummy lift, and buttock lift, and now she's two feet off the ground. -- Steve Connelly %% She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in the process of leaving or regaining faith in Mother church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) %% She had read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that, if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," it is almost certain to disagree wit you, sooner or later. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if ... the vandal who smashed a statue was greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child was greater than the mother who had given it birth ... For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, or establish dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man. %% She has a body that won't quit; the problem is getting it started in the first place. %% She has an alarm clock and a phone that don't ring - they applaud. %% She has as much originality as a Xerox machine. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% She hates testicles, thus limiting the men she can admire to Democratic candidates for president. -- John Greenway, "The American Tradition", on feminist Elizabeth Gould Davis %% She is a stone cold bitch. %% She is blonde/tall/beautiful, and as a Z80 for a brain %% She is capable of running over 60 trillion calculation a second, and you have her working as a cocktail waitress. -- Admiral Haftel about Lal, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to. -- Gypsy Rose Lee %% She is not refined. She is not unrefined. She keeps a parrot. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% She is so fat that when she sits on your face you can't here the stereo %% She is the treasure of the house. Great good fortune. %% She is what moves in the soul of a dove. -- Deep Purple %% She just lost ten pounds, she brushed her teeth. %% She liked him; he was a man of many qualities, even if most of them were bad. %% She loves you. %% She made a thing of soft leather, And topped off the end with a feather. When she poked it inside her She took off like a glider, And gave up her lover forever. %% She meant well. %% She missed an invaluable opportunity to give him a look that you could have poured on a waffle ... %% She neglects her heart who studies her glass. -- Lavater %% She never did in the first place! %% She never liked zippers, she said, Until she opened one in bed. %% She often gave herself very good advice [though she very seldom followed it]. -- Lewis Carroll %% She passes by her ancestor And meets her ancestress. He does not reach his prince And meets the official. No blame. %% She said I should think of her like a sister. I said I did, but not my sister. %% She said she would go through anything for me and she wanted to start with my bank book. %% She said she would love me till the end of time. But then she said my time was up. %% She said she wouldn't keep my company unless I owned it. %% She said, `I know you ... you cannot sing'. I said, `That's nothing, you should hear me play piano.' -- Morrisey %% She sells cshs by the cshore. %% She sells sea shells by the sea shore. %% She should not follow her whims. She must attend within to the food. Perseverance brings good fortune. %% She slipped on the ice and apparently her legs went in separate directions in early December. %% She states that her husband took downers and she took uppers so the relationship did not work out. %% She stood there and peeled off her clothes, And begged for a bang : goodness knows I am surely impure And I sizzled to scrure, But the push had gone out of my hose. THE HIGHER LEARNING %% She that paints her face thinks of her tail. -- Poor Richard %% She thinks she loves you. %% She thinks that she could easily win your heart. %% She told he was just a traveling companion, but I sensed arrival. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% She was a farmer's daughter but she couldn't keep her calves together. %% She was a girl from Birmingham, she just had an abortion. %% She was a town-and-country soprano of the kind often used for augmenting grief at a funeral. -- George Ade (1866-1944) %% She was another one of his near Mrs. %% She was asking her insurance agent: 'If I were to take out a $250,000 insurance policy on my husband and he should die the next day, what would I get?' He answered, 'Life.' %% She was coming round the mountain doin' ninety, When the chain on her motorcycle broke, Now she's lying in the grass, With the muffler up her ass, And her tits a-playin' Dixie on the spokes. %% She was only the stableman's daughter, but all the horsemen knew her. %% She was so fat that I had to run her down 'cause I didn't think I had enough gas to drive around her. %% She was so fat that if you fly around her you lose a day... %% She was so fat that making love to her was like using TSO. %% She was so fat that she had ring around the collar on the outside of her shirt %% She was so fat, we would take her to MacDonalds to watch the numbers change. %% She was so fat, when she got a shoeshine she had to take their word for it. %% She was so fat, when she stood on a corner, a cop would come along and tell her to break it up. %% She was so fat, when she'd walk out onto the beach after swimming in the ocean, three guys from Greenpeace would try to throw her back in the water. %% She was so ugly her mother used to babyfeed her with a slingshot. %% She was so ugly she could make a freight train take a dirt road. %% She was so wild that when she made French toast she got her tongue caught in the toaster. -- Rodney Dangerfield %% She was taken to surgery on the 9th, as per operative report. She made a good postoperative recovery and was seen in the clinic the morning following surgery. Following that, she was lost in confusion, and repeated attempts to locate her through the hospital information center failed to locate the patient until the morning of the 15th when she phoned me stating that she was still in the hospital in room 5309 ... Her unusual length of stay in the hospital was not intentional and it was due to misunderstanding and confusion and inability to locate the patient until Tuesday ... The patient's hospital course was uneventful and she was discharged. %% She was the sort of person whose personality would be greatly improved by a terminal illness. %% She was wearing a very tight skirt, and when she tried to board the Fifth Avenue bus she found she couldn't lift her leg. She reached back and unzipped her zipper. It didn't seem to do any good, so she reached back and unzipped it again. Suddenly the man behind her lifted her up and put her on the top step. "How dare you?" she demanded. "Well, lady," he said, "by the time you unzipped my fly for the second time I thought we were good friends." %% She wasn't what one could call pretty And other girls offered her pity, So nobody guessed That her Wasserman test Involved half the men in the city. %% She whines him around her little finger. %% She who falls in love with herself will have no rivals. %% She will have boobs and brains. %% She won' go Warp 7, Cap'n! The batteries are dead! %% She'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-bird away. %% She's a May bride, she may or may not get married. %% She's fine, upstanding, and wonderful laying down. %% She's genuinely bogus. %% She's got the personality of a halibut. %% She's learned to say things with her eyes that others waste time putting into words. %% She's so fat, she doesn't have measurements: she has time zones. %% She's so fat, when she hauls ass it takes two or three trips. %% She's so self-centered she occupies a special place in her heart. %% She's so tough she won't take 'yes' for an answer. %% She's so ugly that not even the tide would take her out. %% She's so ugly, Peeping Toms ask her to pull down her shades. %% She's such a kinky girl, The kind you don't take home to mother. She will never let your spirits down Once you get her off the street. %% She's the kind of woman who lets bygones be 'I told you so's.' %% She's the one. %% Shedenhelm's Law: All trails have more uphill sections than they have downhill sections. %% Sheep do it when led astray. %% Sheepish voters beget wolfish politicians. %% Shell to DOS... come in DOS... Do you copy? %% Sherry [Thomas Sheridan] is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Shhh! Don't talk, just listen! Meet me at the corner of Broad and Main and bring the girl. %% Shick's Law: There is no problem a good miracle can't solve. %% Shift to the left, Shift to the right, Mask in, mask out, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE !!! %% Shifting in the midst of a thrust, the thief knocks you unconscious with the haft of his stiletto. %% Shin - a device for finding furniture in the dark.. %% Ship it. %% Ships are safe in harbor, but they were never meant to stay there. %% Shit Happens. %% Shock brings ruin and terrified gazing around. Going ahead brings misfortune. If is has not yet touched one's own body But has reached one's neighbor first, There is no blame. One's comrades have something to talk about. %% Shock brings success. Shock comes\(emoh, oh! Laughing words\(emha, ha! The shock terrifies for a hundred miles, And he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice. %% Shock comes and makes one distraught. If shock spurs to action One remains free of misfortune. %% Shock comes bringing danger. A hundred thousand times You lose your treasures And must climb the nine hills. Do not go in pursuit of them. After seven days you will get them back. %% Shock comes\(emoh, oh! Then follow laughing words\(emha, ha! Good fortune. %% Shock goes hither and thither. Danger. However, nothing at all is lost. Yet there are things to be done. %% Shock is mired. %% Shoe-bee-doo-bee-doo. %% Shoes are getting full of sand. I just hate that, don't you. -- Geordi to Bochra, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2 %% Sholom aleicheim. %% Sholom. %% Shop, shop 'til you drop. %% Shopkeeper administration out of order. %% Shopkeepers accept creditcards, as long as you pay cash. %% Shopkeepers often have strange names. %% Shopping at this grody little computer store at the Galleria for a totally awwwsome Apple. Fer suure. I mean Apples are nice you know? But, you know, there is this cute guy who works there and HE says that VAX's are cooler! I mean I don't really know, you know? He says that he has this totally tubular VAX at home and it's stuffed with memory-to-the-max! Right, yeah. And he wants to take me home to show it to me. Oh My God! I'm suure. Gag me with a Prime! %% Short man who dance with tall woman gets bust in mouth. %% Short people are vertically challenged. %% Short people got no reason to live. %% Short term success with voters on any side of a given issue can be guaranteed by creating a long-term special study commission make up of at least three divergent interest groups. -- Ray Connolly %% Shortly after John F. Kennedy blocked the hike in steel prices in 1961, he was visited by a businessman who expressed wariness about the national economy. "Things look great," said JFK. "Why, if I wasn't president, I'd be buying stocks myself." "If you weren't president," said the businessman, "so would I." %% Shortly after arriving at their honeymoon destination, the still-nervous groom became worried about the state of his bride's innocence. Deciding on a direct confrontation, he quickly undressed, pointed at his exposed manhood and asked his mate, "Do you know what this is?" Without hesitation, she blushingly answered, "That's a wee-wee." Delighted at the idea of instructing his naive wife in the ways of love, the husband whispered, "From now on, dearest, this will be called a prick." "Oh, come now," the girl chided. "I've seen lots of pricks and I assure you, that's a wee-wee." %% Shot down in Flames! %% Should I do my BOBBIE VINTON medley? %% Should I get locked in the PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE today -- or have a VASECTOMY?? %% Should I incapacitate him, Commander? -- Worf, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% Should I or shouldn't I?... Too late, I did! %% Should I start with the time I SWITCHED personalities with a BEATNIK hair stylist or my failure to refer five TEENAGERS to a good OCULIST? %% Should I stay, or should I go? %% Should I weed the lawn or say it's a garden? %% Should South Florida legalize casino gambling? As with any important issue, there are pros and cons. Here they are: PROS: Everybody would get rich. CONS: Everybody would get killed by gangsters. -- Dave Barry %% Should you or any member of your I.M. force be caught or killed, The Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. %% Shouted Frosty the Snowman "Hooray! I'm agog with excitement today! And the reason of course, A reliable source, Said the snow blower's heading this way!" %% Show me Santa's helpers and I'll show you subordinate clauses. %% Show me a burned-out post office and I'll show you a case of blackmail. %% Show me a cat that just ate a lemon and I'll show you a sourpuss. %% Show me a female ... I'll show you a problem. %% Show me a good mouser and I'll show you a cat with bad breath. %% Show me a good sportsman and I'll show you a player I'm looking to trade. -- Leo Durocher %% Show me a man who is a good loser and I'll show you a man who is playing golf with his boss. %% Show me a man who sees both sides of an argument, and I'll show you a man who has nothing at stake in it. %% Show me a pharaoh who ate crackers and I'll show you a crummy mummy. %% Show me a squirrel's nest and I'll show you a nutcracker suite. %% Show me a stolen sausage and I'll show you a missing link. %% Show me a swine in the rain and I'll show you hogwash. %% Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I'll show you a failure. -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% Show me the country in which there are no strikes and I'll show that country in which there is no liberty. -- Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) %% Show me the way to go home. I'm tired and I want to go to bed. Well I had a little drink about an hour ago and its gone right to my head. Wherever I may go on land, on sea, or snow, you will always find me singing this song. Show me the way to go home. %% Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a communist plot. %% Show respect for age. Drink good Scotch for a change. %% Show us a home with young children and we'll show you a home where every pack of cards counts out at between 37 and 51. -- Bill Vaughan %% Show your affection, which will probably meet with pleasant response. %% Showerbath: Natural venue for sexual adventures-- wash together, make love together: only convenient overhead point in most apartments or hotel rooms to attach a partner's hands. Don't pull down the fixture, however-- it isn't weightbearing. See Discipline. -- "The Joy of Sex" %% Showing more cheek than usual. %% Showing up is 80 percent of life. -- Woody Allen %% Shtee da ka-sha, pee-sha na-sha -- Automatic Vendors %% Shub-Internet: /shuhb in't*r-net/ [MUD: from H. P. Lovecraft's evil fictional deity `Shub-Niggurath', the Black Goat with a Thousand Young] n. The harsh personification of the Internet, Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting; the hideous multi-tendriled entity formed of all the manifold connections of the net. A sect of MUDders worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no avail --- its purpose is malign and evil, and is the cause of all network slowdown. Often heard as in "Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing her down." (A forged response often follows along the lines of: "Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps happily.") Also cursed by users of {FTP} and {telnet} when the system slows down. The dread name of Shub-Internet is seldom spoken aloud, as it is said that repeating it three times will cause the being to wake, deep within its lair beneath the Pentagon. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Shubert didn't finish it. %% Shut up and dance. %% Shut up and deal! -- F. D. R. %% Shut up and stop your sniveling, you little shit! %% Shut up, Q! -- Geordi, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Shut up, Wesley! -- Dr. Crusher, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4 %% Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% Si Dios no hubiera descansado el domingo habria tenido tiempo de terminar el mundo. (If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.) -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Los Funerales de Mama Grande", 1974 %% Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. [If youth but knew, if old age but could]. -- Henri Estienne %% Si six scies scient six saucissions, six cent six scies scieront six cent six saucissions. (If 6 saws saw 6 sausages, 606 saws will saw 606 sausages. %% Sibling rivalry is for kids. %% Sic F*cks, The %% Sic Transit Gloria Thursdi. %% Sic transit gloria Monday! %% Sic transit gloria mundi. -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Sic transit gloria mundi. [So passes away the glory of this world] -- Thomas a Kempis %% Sick Building Migration: The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in unhealthy office environments or workplaces affected by the Sick Building Syndrome. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Sighed a neat little package named Annie : "I've the tits and the twat and the fanny, Plus the yen, but the men Only call now and then-- Can it be I've B.O. in my cranny?" %% Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art. %% Sigmund Freud is alleged to have said that in the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry. %% Sigmund's wife wore Freudian slips. %% Sign at Institute Laue-Langevin (Grenoble): If we understood what we were doing it wouldn't be research. %% Sign here please:_______________________Thanks %% Sign here without admitting guilt. %% Sign in a cluttered, old-fashioned hardware store: "We've got it, if we can find it." %% Sign in a loan company window: "Now you can borrow enough money to get completely out of debt." %% Sign in a restaurant: "We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone." %% Sign in an office: "People who believe that the dead never come back to life should be here at quitting time." %% Sign in hardware store: No color paint Will be mixed For any man Without a note From his wife. %% Sign my PETITION. %% Sign on Closed Nuclear Power Plant... "Gone Fission" %% Sign on a bumper-sticker: "I brake for hallucinations." %% Sign on a clothing store - Come inside and have a fit. %% Sign on a hospital bulletin board: Colloquium announcement: Research shows the first five minutes of life can be the most risky. Hand-written note underneath: The last five minutes aren't so hot either. %% Sign on bank: "FREE BOTTLE OF CHIVAS WITH EVERY MILLION-DOLLAR DEPOSIT." %% Sign seen in service station: An extra charge of 30% will accompany any work done correctly. %% Sign seen on the L.A. Xpressway: Next Exit: Gas, Food, and Ammo %% Signito ergo sum - I sign therefore I am. %% Signs of crime: screaming or cries for help. -- from the Brown Security Crime Prevention Pamphlet %% Silence can be the biggest lie of all. We have a responsibility to speak up; and whenever the occasion calls for it, we have a responsibility to raise bloody hell. -- Herbert Block %% Silence gives consent, or a horrible feeling that nobody's listening. -- Franklin P. Jones %% Silence is one great art of conversation. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% Silence speaks with eloquence. -- R. Reiley (Sometimes... [ed]) %% Silence your dog, Captain. -- T'bok about Worf, "The Neutral Zone", stardate 41986.0 %% Silhouette: After Etienne de Silhouette (1709-67) with reference to his evanescent career (March-November 1759) as French controller-general. %% Silver Book: n. Jensen and Wirth's infamous `Pascal User Manual and Report', so called because of the silver cover of the widely distributed Springer-Verlag second edition of 1978 (ISBN 0-387-90144-2). See {{book titles}}, {Pascal}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Silverman's Paradox: If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will. %% Silvester Stallone: father of the RISC concept. %% Simon says: don't be so suggestible. %% Simon's Law: Everything put together falls apart sooner or later. %% Simon: "How did he get in there anyhow?" Marshall: "Does the word mega-eerie-voodoo-weirdness mean anything to you?" -- "Scariest Home Videos", Eerie Indiana %% Simon: "People say they run things. People say you'd better do as they say." Marshall: "Have people noticed they're a bunch of goons in stupid hats? C'mon." -- "The Loyal Order of Corn", Eerie Indiana %% Simon: "Think we should call a doctor?" Marshall: "Simon, he's a werewolf. An animal." Simon: "Should we call a vet?" -- "Mr. Chaney", Eerie Indiana %% Simon: "You know what's weird?" Marshall: "Besides Eerie?" Simon: "They always tell you you can't buy friends. But I think you can. You know, guys like Nick and Eddie. But it's like buying expensive tennis shoes. They cost way too much and they don't last very long." Marshall: "Can I use that?" [high five] -- "The ATM Machine", Eerie Indiana %% Simon: "Radford, what's going on here?" Radford: "You've heard the expression you break it, you buy it?" Simon: "Yeh" Radford: "These guys are buying everything in the store." -- "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% Simon: "Y'know Mr. Radford." Radford: "Yes, young man?" Simon: "How are we supposed to know for sure if you're the real Mr. Radford?" Radford: "You don't." Simon: "Oh. Thanks." -- "Hole in the Head Gang", Eerie Indiana %% Simple Simon: Simple Simon met a pieman Asked him, "What's the price?" "A dollar fifty!", said the pieman "For a skinny slice!" "Inflationary!", Simple Simon screamed "My business you are losing!" "I'd charge much more", the pieman said "If sugar I were using!" %% Simple advice is the best advice. %% Simple conduct. Progress without blame. %% Simple diet is best; for many dishes bring many diseases; and rich sauces are worse than even heaping several meats upon each other. -- Pliny %% Simple grace. No blame. %% Simplicity and clarity should be your theme in dress. %% Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. %% Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass. -- Edward Abbey %% Simplicity is the true test. -- Ron Randall %% Simplified Swedish Tax Form: How much did you earn? How much do you have left? Send it in. -- Hans Alfredson and Tage Danielsson %% Simulated picture. %% Sin boldly. -- Martin Luther %% Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) %% Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is NOT a sin--just stupid.) -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Since Bush became president... Americans in prison: +177,122 (up 28%) Americans on death row: +464 (up 22%) Violent crimes: +95,278 (up 21%) %% Since Bush became president... Americans unemployed for 6 months or longer: +1,127,000 (up 133%) %% Since Bush became president... Budget deficit: +$244,500,000,000 (up 157%) %% Since Bush became president... Children living in poverty: +500,000 (up 4%) %% Since Bush became president... Families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children: +944,000 (up 25%) Median monthly payment to those families: -$49.26 (down 12%) %% Since Bush became president... Hourly earnings for blue-collar workers: -$1 (down 10%) %% Since Bush became president... Mean annual income of the wealthiest 5% of US families: +$7,286 (up 5%) Mean annual income of the poorest one-fifth: -$54 (down .5%) %% Since Bush became president... National debt: +$1,477,000,000,000 (up 57%) %% Since Bush became president... Number of millionaires: +28,100 (up 81%) Americans with no health insurance: +4,600,000 (up 15%) %% Since I hurt my pendulum My life is all erratic. My parrot, who was cordial, Is now transmitting static. The carpet died, a palm collapsed, The cat keeps doing poo. The only thing that keeps me sane Is talking to my shoe. -- My Shoe %% Since Perot has withdrawn from the presidential race, he's being called The Yellow Ross of Texas. %% Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. -- John Dewey (1859-1953) %% Since a top-heavy maiden from Yonkers Is equipped to make tit men go bonkers, Poet Goldsmith might say, Were he living today, That whenever she stoops, sir, she conquers! %% Since aerosols are forbidden, the police are using roll-on Mace! %% Since attaining the full use of my reason no one has ever heard me laugh. -- Earl of Chesterfield %% Since before the Earth was formed and before the sun burned hot in space, cosmic forces of inexorable power have been working relentlessly toward this moment in space-time -- your receiving this fortune. %% Since blue-sky projects are targeted for major breakthroughs, they are relatively immune from planning and control. -- Richard F. Moore %% Since computers do the sending, however, it's possible to address a single package to a mailing list of recipients with a shared interest in the subject matter -- be it cold fusion or hot pornography. -- Joe Abernathy <(C) 1990 Houston Chronicle> %% Since everything in life is but an experience perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter. -- Long Chen Pa %% Since money can't buy happiness, you'll just have to rent some. -- Jason, jcborkow@remus.rutgers.edu %% Since no matter can be created or destroyed (excluding nuclear and cafeteria substances), as one attempts to remove unwanted material (i. e., trash) from one's living space, the remaining material mutates so as to occupy 30 to 50 percent more than its original volume. %% Since poverty is no disgrace, may you never know shame. %% Since prehistoric man, no battle has ever gone as planned. -- Donal Graeme %% Since the generality of persons act from impulse much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them. -- Hare %% Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer...we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. -- Werner Heisenberg %% Since the star [Sirius] advances one day every four years, and in order that the holidays celebrated in the summer shall not fall into winter, as has been and will be the case if the year continues to have 360 and 5 additional days, it is hereby decreed that henceforth every four years there shall be celebrated the holidays of the Gods of Euergetes after the 5 additional days and before the new year, so that everyone might know that the former shortcomings in reckoning the seasons of the year have henceforth been truly corrected by King Euergetes. -- Ptolemy III Euergetes (238 B.C.) %% Since this Galaxy began, vast civilizations have risen and fallen, risen and fallen, risen and fallen so often that it's quite tempting to think that life in the Galaxy must be (a) something akin to seasick - space-sick, time sick, history sick or some such thing, and (b) stupid %% Since we began restoring pride in the United States of America... flag sales have taken off. -- President George Bush %% Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get. %% Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos. -- Tom Stoppard %% Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive. -- John Sloan (1871-1951) %% Since we're all here, we must not be all there. -- Bob "Mountain" Beck %% Sincere in the good. Good fortune. %% Sincere joyousness. Good fortune. Remorse disappears. %% Sincerity is like traveling in a plain beaten road, which commonly brings a man sooner to his journey's end than byways, in which men often lose themselves. -- Tiliotson %% Sincerity is often the measure of your adaptability to adjust to the opinions of those who can fire you. -- John Francis Putnam (1964) %% Sincerity toward disintegrating influences is dangerous. %% Sing a song of sixpence: Sing a song of spillage, A tanker's fouled the shore, Four and twenty blackbirds, They were white before! %% Sing a song of sixpence Pocket full of rye. Four-and-twenty blackbirds Baked in a pie. And when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing! So I put them in the microwave And waited for the ding. %% Sing and Dance the New Deal Away -- A button from Our People's Underworld %% Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily. %% Singing makes all the sad people happy because it is the voice of happiness. -- Joseph Shabalala %% Single tasking: Just Say No. %% Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Sink or Swim with Teddy! %% Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my heart and my hand to this vote. -- Daniel Webster %% Sir, I suggest Commander Riker or Data would better serve special emissary K'Ehleyr. "Are there any personal reasons that you don't want the assignment?" Yes. "Any professional reasons?" No. I withdraw my request, Captain. "Good." -- Worf and Picard, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% Sir, he is reading as fully human. "What is there, an echo in here?" 'I am sensing an emotional presence, Captain. I would normally describe it as being terrified.' "How rude." -- Data, Q, and Troi, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Sir, if you'd like my opinion. I think I'm aware of your opinion, Commander. This is a briefing, I'm not seeking your consent. -- Riker and Picard, "Yesterday's Enterprise", stardate 43625.2 %% Sir, it's very possible this asteroid is not stable. -- CP30 %% Sir, may I say your attempt to hold the away team with a non-functional weapon was an act of unmitigated gall. "Didn't fool you, huh?" I admire gall. -- Worf and Kevin, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% Sir, shall we send for Dr. Crusher? Why, is someone ill? -- Riker and Picard, "Where No One Has Gone Before", stardate 41263.1 %% Sir, the cow she walks. She talks. She's full of chalk. The lactose secretions of the female of the bovine species are highly desirable to the n'th degree. -- A West Point Cadet's answer to, "How's the Cow?", which roughly translates to, "How many servings of milk are left upon the table?". (The "n'th" indicates the number of servings). %% Sir, the purpose of this gathering confuses me. "Oh. How so?" My thoughts are not for Tasha, but for myself. I keep thinking how empty it will be without her presence. Did I miss the point? "No you didn't, Data. You got it." -- Data and Picard, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3 %% Sirius is paved with gold So I've heard it said By nuts who then go on to say "See Tau before you're dead." I'll gladly take the high road Or even take the low, But if you have to take me apart to get me there Then I, for one, won't go. [Chorus] Take me apart, take me apart, You must be off your head, And if you try to take me apart to get me there I'll stay right here in bed. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Sirs, adulation is a fatal thing -- Rank poison for a subject, or a king. -- Dr. Wolcot %% Sit down, you're rocking the boat! %% Sit on a happy face. %% Sit on it, Malph. %% Sitting here with nothing to do, sitting here thinking only of you. %% Sitting on the pedestal is a flaming torch, made of ivory. %% Six of one, 110 (base 2) of another. %% Six people were flying in a small airplane. One was the pilot, and the five passengers were, in order; Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, a priest, and a hippie. During mid-flight, the pilot comes into the passenger compartment, and says "We seem to have developed some engine trouble. Since I'm the pilot, I'm going to bale out. There are only five parachutes." Then the pilot gave a wave and jumped out with a parachute. Ronald Reagan said, "Well, I'm the President, so, well, umm, bye!" Then Jimmy said, "There are some things that Ronnie hasn't learned yet." Then, Jimmy jumped out. Now only Henry Kissinger, the priest and the hippie were left in the plane. Henry Kissinger looked at the others and announced, "I am surely the smartest man in the world so I'm out of here!" The priest says to the hippie, "Well, son, I've lived a long and full life---you take the parachute!" The hippie says, "Hey man, we're cool. The smartest man in the world just jumped out with my radical backpack!" %% Sixteen'll get you twenty. %% Sixtus V, Pope from 1585 to 1590 authorized a printing of the Vulgate Bible. Taking no chances, the pope issued a papal bull automatically excommunicating any printer who might make an alteration in the text. This he ordered printed at the beginning of the Bible. He personally examined every sheet as it came off the press. Yet the published Vulgate Bible contained so many errors that corrected scraps had to be printed and pasted over them in every copy. The result provoked wry comments on the rather patchy papal infallibility, and Pope Sixtus had no recourse but to order the return and destruction of every copy. %% Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. -- Will Durant, in "National Enquirer", 1980 %% Sixty years from now, you'll start to doubt that the only way to fail in life is by not trying. %% Skating away on the thin ice of a new day. %% Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsence. -- Carl Sagan %% Skepticism, like chastity should not be relinquished too readily. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% Skiing is so much fun. The bright blue above you ... AND THE BRIGHT BLUE BELOW YOU! %% Skill in manipulating numbers is a talent, not evidence of divine guidance. -- G. O. Ashley %% Skillfully, you catch the boomerang. %% 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. %% Skip's Lament: Given any problem containing N equations, There will be n+1 unknowns. %% Skoal! %% Skunks do it instinctively. %% Sky and earth were two flat plates, infinitely wide, pressed together; and men were microbes crawling between the plates . . . -- "Ringworld" %% Skydiver Daniel McDopp Used to masturbate right from the top. Whenever he fell, He jerked off like hell. He was good to the very last drop. %% Skydivers do it in the air %% Skydivers go down faster. %% Slander meets no regard from noble minds; only the base believe what the base only utter. -- Beller %% Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. -- Carl Sandburg, in "New York Times", 1959 %% Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work. %% Slash! Your blow lands! That one hit an artery, it could be serious! %% Slash! Your stroke connects! The # could be in serious trouble! %% Slave to no sect, who takes no private road But looks through nature up to nature's God. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.... I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension: they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. -- Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) %% Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink. -- W. C. Fields %% Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle. -- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) %% Sleep? Sleep is when you're not logged in... -- tlw %% Sleeping in an old abandoned beach-house, getting wasted in the heat. %% 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. %% Slightly deaf students will have instructors who mumble. -- M. M. Johnston %% Slightly higher in California. %% Slim Sley and the Tongues %% Slime Sisters' SUPER DIET for MEN -- LOSE 6 INCHES IN JUST MINUTES %% Slippery when wet. %% Slit your wrists - it will lower your blood pressure. %% Slits, The (all female) %% Slogans that never made it off the drawing board: Acme Elevators: "We never let you down!" Acme Diet Plan: "You can't lose!" Acme Pregnancy Test: "Be positive every time!" "Sink your life savings in an Acme boat!" "Acme razors are a cut above the competition!" "Take Ex-Lax, for that 'get-up-and-go' feeling!" %% Sloppy, raggedy-assed old life. I love it. I never want to die. -- Dennis Trudell %% Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Slous' Contention: If you do a job too well, you'll get stuck with it. %% Slow day. Practice crawling. %% Slower Traffic Keep Right - Is that so difficult? %% Slowly and surely the unix crept up on the Nintendo user ... %% Slug Sautee: a hors of a different d'oeuvre. %% Sluggish idleness -- the nurse of sin. -- Spenser %% Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. -- Cyril Connolly, "The Unquiet Grave" 1945 %% Slurm, n.: The slime that accumulates on the underside of a soap bar when it sits in the dish too long. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Small change can often be found under seat cushions. %% Small changes pick up the reins from nowhere. %% Small children, given a playground, a meadow or a stretch of street, will at once begin to create a sport based on the relationships of trees, posts, benches or whatever. When the code is complete and sides chosen, woe to the child who makes the aberrant move in the game. There are cries of "You can't do that. It's the rule!" The odd phrase "It's the rule," shouted by children all over the world in different languages, is an impassioned demand for the maintenance of an orderly world. -- Heywood Hale Broun (1888-1939) %% Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned. %% Small habits well pursued, betimes, May reach the dignity of crimes. -- Hannah More %% Small is beautiful. -- Schumacher's Dictum %% Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises. -- Demosthenes %% Small programs are for small minds. %% Small things make base men proud. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI" %% Smash forehead on keyboard to continue %% Smash the government postal monopoly. %% Smear the road with a runner!! %% Smile - it makes 'em wonder what you're up to. %% Smile if you are Jesus %% Smile! Cthulhu loves you %% Smile! You're on Candid Camera. %% Smile! You're on Candid Cookie! %% Smile, and the world smiles with you. Frown, and you frown alone. %% Smile, smile, then smile again. %% Smile...it makes people wonder what you're thinking. %% Smiley faces were meant to be annoying. %% Smith and Dunbar were on a cruise up the Nile. Though good friends, they had a falling out over a woman. Enraged, Smith, much the larger and stronger of the two, took hold of his friend and threw him bodily into the river, in amongst the crocodiles. Within moments Smith was filled with remorse. He made the captain stop, and went back in a dinghy to search for his friend, but had no luck. He left the cruise and spent the next month looking for Dunbar -- no luck. Smith went back to Cairo. There he heard rumors that Dunbar had survived and was in town. A long search proved futile, so Smith hired a private detective. In a few days the detective found Dunbar, still very jittery from his terrible experience and drinking heavily. He reported back to Smith: ``The Dunbar you have Niled is a sot and nervous at this time...'' %% Smoke a little dope and walk out in the air: the stars are all connected to the brain. -- The Who %% Smokes two packs per day and consumes one quart of alcohol per day for past 10 years. Admitted with diagnosis of shortness of breath and increasing abdominal girth, etiology unknown. %% Smokey the Bear says, "Only you can prevent forest fires." %% Smoking Prohibited. Absolutely no ifs, ands, or butts. %% Smoking a woman is like kissing a fish. %% Smoking is a leading cause of statistics. %% Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. -- Fletcher Knebel %% Smoking will kill you. Either stop now or don't ever start. %% Smurf exterminator. %% 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" %% Snails are hermaphrodites, both male and female at once. When they mate they shoot little calcium darts with attached hoses into each other and winch in the hoses. Semen is then swapped through the hoses. -- Paul Johnson (paj@gec-mrc.co.uk) %% Snails are the only creatures on earth that have retractable horns. Both the shape of an animal and its habits are inseparably linked with the kind of food it eats. Small creatures, the early mammals came into their own with the death of giant reptiles. Rodents are the commonest mammals. Come, let me be your guide through the animal kingdom. %% Snakes are often found under worthless objects. %% Snakes do it in the grass. %% Sniff sniff... Hey! Who farted? %% Snipers do it with a bang. %% Snobol programmers do it in strings. %% Snoopy has fleas. %% Snow Day - stay home. %% Snow White: "Gee guys, I've always dreamed of getting seven inches... but not an inch at a time! %% Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough. %% Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together. %% Snowstorms are God's way of saying, "You've been working too hard." %% So I'm a comma to Ameriga forra vacation anna first thing, I'm up inna ma hotel room anna theres only one-a shit onna bed [one sheet on the bed] - so I'm a call up the maid and tell er I wanna two shit. She tell me, "so usea da toilet." I say "You no unnerstant! [The tag line of the joke] I wanna two shit on the bed!" And she say, "You better no shit onna bed, you sonna na bitch!" [The remaining episodes have-a da same, I mean have the same flavor...] Ima go in fora breakfast and the waitress she only bring-a me one piss a toast. So I tell her I wanna two piss. She tell me use the bathroom... I say "You no unnerstant! I wanna two piss here onna table!" She tell me "you better no piss onna table, you sonna na bitch!" Then she bringa my silverware, and she bring a knife anna spoon, but no fock. I tell er I wanna fock. She tell me everybody wanna fock. I say "You no unnerstant! I wanna fock here onna table." She say, "Whatta you, crazy? You sonna na bitch!" ... So, as Ima inna airport to go home, thissa guy come up to me anna say "Peace on you!" So I say, "pees on you too, buddy! You sonna na bitch!" Next time Ima gonna go to Holland... %% So St. Peter was questioning a certain black fellow at the Pearly Gates: ``So, what achievements have you made in your lifetime?'' ``Well, I once won a basketball game with a slam dunk in the last second!'' ``Hey, that's pretty good! When did this happen?'' ``Well, for that one you hafta go back `bout ten years''. ``Hmmm, that's kind of a long time ago. Have you done anything of merit more recently?'' ``Well, I once ran 100 meters in less than 10 seconds!'' ``Wow, no one up here has done that before! When did this happen?'' ``That was 5 years ago, back in high school. It was wind-aided.'' ``Hmmm, that's still very impressive. One more thing and you're in. Anything at all more recent?'' ``Well, OK, how about this. I once made love to a white woman under the bleachers at a Ku-Klux-Klan rally.'' ``Holy Smokes! That takes real courage! Few men have done that before! When did this happen?'' ``Oh, jus' about 10 minutes ago. . .'' %% So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate your current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and hurl it into a dumpster. Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast array of 8-millimeter video equipment. %% So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate your current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and hurl it into a dumpster. Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast array of 8-millimeter video equipment. ... OK! Got everything? Well, *too bad, sucker*, because while you were gone the electronics industry came up with an even newer format that makes your 8-millimeter VCR look as technologically advanced as toenail dirt. This format is called "3.5 hectare" and it will not be made available until it is outmoded, sometime early next week, by a format called "Elroy", so *order yours now*. -- Dave Barry, "No Surrender in the Electronics Revolution" %% So do the noble fall. For they are ever caught in a trap of their own making. A trap - walled by duty, and locked by reality. Against the greater force they must fall - for, against that force they fight because of duty, because of obligations. And when the noble fall, the base remain. The base - whose only purpose is the corruption of what the noble did protect. Whose only purpose is to destroy. The noble: who, even when fallen, retain a vestige of strength. For theirs is a strength born of things other than mere force. Theirs is a strength supreme... theirs is the strength - to restore. -- Gerry Conway, "Thor #193" %% So dry & yet so wet. %% So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% So from the depths of its enchantment, Terra was able to calculate a course of action. Here at last was an opportunity to consort with Dirbanu on a friendly basis -- great Durbanu which, since it had force fields which Earth could not duplicate, must of necessity have many other things Earth could use; mighty Durbanu before whom we would kneel in supplication (with purely- for-defense bombs hidden in our pockets) with lowered heads (making invisible the knife in our teeth) and ask for crumbs from their table (in order to extrapolate the location of their kitchens). -- Theodore Sturgeon, "The World Well Lost" %% So here was this fellow of Strensall Whose pecker was shaped like a pencil, Anemic, 'tis true, But an interesting screw, Inasmuch as the tip was prehensile. %% So how's it been here, Number One? Same old routine job? -- Picard to Riker, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% So it came to pass that Quasimoto wanted to retire, so he put an ad in the paris times for a bell ringer. The interviews were scheduled for tuesday in the belltower at notre dame. uas lined up three applicants and explained the job was fairly simple but had to done well. With that he gave a demonstration, he grabbed the bell rope swung over the tower's central well and back pushing way the hell out of the tower and came back in hitting the largest bell in the full frontal mode with total body contact causing a pure and dulcet tone to emanate from the bell. The first applicant gave it shot, didn't swing out very far and produced a sort of clank. Our hero disqualified him. The second applicant did well but the tone was still dull. The third guy being in desperate need of a job (probably a former stock broker) and wanting to learn a new skill (yup) swung way the hell swung back in and made a perfect full frontal hit, causing a clank - thud tone to ring out and unfortunately knocking himself unconscious and falling many stories to the base of the tower and of course died. the police arrived and when quasimoto climbed down the police approached him and asked: "do you know this man ?" Quas replied "nope, his face sure doesn't ring any bells with me" %% So it seems that McCormick and McPherson have been the closest of friends since they were wee laddies, and now they've grown old and McCormick is very ill. He calls McPherson to his bedside...and McPherson is terribly upset, crying and wailing "oh, my old friend McCormick, ye can't be dyin'"... McCormick speaks: "I want ye to do me one last wish when I'm dead and in my grave" - to which McPherson starts wailing even louder: "oh my old friend, anything you want, of course (boo hoo hoo)" McCormick speaks: "Over on that shelf is a bottle of the finest Scotch Whiskey, which I've saved for over 60 years. When I'm dead and buried, I want you to take that whiskey and pour it all over my grave." McPherson: "Of course I will McCormick, anything ye say... but would ye mind terribly if I strained it through me kidneys first?" %% So just tell me to 'Shut up, Wesley' and I will. -- Wesley, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4 %% So just what ARE time flies, and why do they like an ARROW? %% So live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip. %% So long as you are ready to die for humanity, the life of your country is immortal. -- Giuseppe Mazzini %% So many bytes, so few cps. %% So many damsels, so little time %% So many lawyers, so few bullets. %% So many men, so few straight. %% So many men, so many opinions; every one his own way. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) %% So many pedestrians, so little time! %% So many things you cannot do, so little time to do them all in. -- Ambidextrous Rex %% So many toys, so little time... %% So many women, and so little time! %% So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. %% So much time and so little to do. -- Willie Wonka %% So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. -- William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheel Barrow" %% So of cheerfulness, or of good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% 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 %% So so is good, very good, very excellent good: and yet it is not; it is but so so. -- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It" %% So sure are you! Tried have you? Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing that I say? Try not. Do! Do! Or do not. There is no try. -- Yoda %% So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. -- Psalms 90:10 %% So there were these two good ol' boys out hunting in the woods. One of them stepped into the brush to take a leak. Just at that moment, a rattlesnake struck and bit him in a spot which would not normally be vulnerable :-) His buddy did not really know what to do about snakebites, so he ran all the way back to the nearest town and asked a doctor what to do about snakebite. "Well, first make a small incision about the wound, and then suck the venom out- you have to suck hard to make sure you get it all." Thinking this over as we made his way back to camp, he finally arrived and announced to his friend: "Bad new Joe: you're gonna die." %% So they're building this tunnel between France and England. England drives on the left side of the road. France drives on the right side of the road. That's going to be one busy lane!!!! %% So this elderly couple were sitting in their tiny old water flat on the lower East Side when the husband said, "Doris, we're in bad shape. Inflation has eaten up out Social Security check. The next one isn't due for a week and we've got no money left for food." "Could I do anything to help?" she asked. "Yes," he said. "I hate to see you do this but it's the only way. You're going to have to go out and hustle." "Me?" she asked. "At the age of sixty-five?" "It's the only way," he said. Resigned to the situation, she went out into the warm night. She came staggering in early the next morning. "How did you do?" asked the husband. "Here," she said, "I've got four dollars and ten cents." "Four dollars and ten cents," he said. "Who gave you the ten cents?" "Everybody," she said. %% So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think. -- Anita Loos %% So this is the end of Part one. My friends, I have only begun to speak of light verse that will only get worse with each part. You'll be glad when I'm done. [dep] %% So this is what it feels like to be potato salad %% So this it it. We're going to die. %% So this traveling salesman got an audience with the Pope. "Hey, father," he said. "Have you heard the joke about the two Polacks who --" "My son," the Pope said. "I'm Polish." The salesman thought for a moment. "That's okay, Father," he said. "I'll tell it very slowly." %% So this young lady walks into a pet store to buy a parrot. Well the guy behind the counter says that he only has one and that it's a real "smart-ass" with an vulgar vocabulary and rude temperment. The YL says thats OK I know how to handle assholes like that, I want the parrot anyways. _SO_ the YL gets the bird home puts it in her room, and starts to get ready for bed. After she removes her blouse, and then her bra... the parrot blurts out, "AWK... GREAT TITS BABY LETS SEE YA SHAKE UM". Well the the YL isn't gonna take this shit so she takes the bird out of the cage and puts it in the freezer for 5 min. _WELL_ the parrot has lots of time to think, and remorse gives way to desperation, and finally to anger so that the adrenalin will allow him to continue to live. _FINALLY_ the YL opens the freezer door take out the near frozen parrot and asks... "Well, have you learned your lesson?" The parrot still shivering and barely able to speak says... "AWK... YEA YEA SURE SURE, BUT I JUST HAVE ONE QUESTION..." The YL says... "You May Ask It" The parrot says "AWK... WHAT DID THE TURKEY DO, ASK FOR A BLOW JOB" %% So we follow our wandering paths, and the very darkness acts as our guide and our doubts serve to reassure us. -- Jean-Pierre de Caussade, eighteenth-century Jesuit priest %% So we grew together, like to a double cherry, seeming parted but yet a union in partition, two lovely berries moulded on one stem; so, with two seeming bodies, but one heart. -- William Shakespeare %% So what are you saying? That the Dremans are fated to die? "It's something that needs to be considered." Well consider it considered and rejected. -- Geordi and Riker, "Pen Pals", stardate 42695.3 %% So what else is new? -- Walter Cronkite %% So what you do is do the best you can, express the genuine concern you feel for the environment... but not take irresponsible action to guard against incidents of this nature. -- President George Bush, commenting on the Exxon Valdez oil spill for the first time, seven days after it happened %% So where the sheer incompetence of politicians and generals used to start wars, the sheer incompetence of us computer people has now put an end to it. No mean feat. For centuries humanity has been looking for the Weapon That Would End War Forever. We have found it. War has ended, not with the bang of a bomb, but with the gentle whisper of crashing software. -- Gerard Stafleu (gerard@uwovax.uwo.ca) %% So you fucked up... you trusted us! -- Animal House %% So you kept your little treasure chest of grief that you would open when you want to peek at your old little pains and multiply a little grief that lasted seconds into a novel of "woe is me" - and make us read the boring text and thus excuse yourself of all your crimes - just because life's been so unkind. %% So you mean I'm drunk. I feel strange, but also good. Because, because you have lost the capacity for self-judgement. Now, alcohol does this, Wesley. -- Wesley and Picard, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand %% So you're back... about time... %% So! You've found me! Well you won't stop me! Tomorrow I unleash Microbe X! %% So, I guess this means the engagement's off. %% So, how's your love life? Still holding your own? %% So, if there's no God, who changes the water? -- [two goldfish in a bowl, New Yorker Cartoon] %% So, if we convert SUPPLY-SIDE SOYBEAN FUTURES into HIGH-YIELD T-BILL INDICATORS, the PRE-INFLATIONARY risks will DWINDLE to a rate of 2 SHOPPING SPREES per EGGPLANT!! %% So, what's with this guy Gideon, anyway? And why can't he ever remember his Bible? %% So, your daughter got voted "most likely to conceive", and you're still drinking ordinary scotch? %% So...so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell? Blue skies from pain? Can you tell a green field From a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Did they get you to trade Your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? Cold comfort for change? Did you exchange A walk on part in a war For the lead role in a cage? -- Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here" %% So? %% Soaking the brain in alcohol does not preserve the mind. %% Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Soccer players do it for kicks. %% Social Democracy rests on the assumption that it is desirable to preserve the capitalist system of private enterprise, and that the evils of this system can be sufficiently corrected by the democratic method of procedure. -- Carl Becker %% Social groups are generally in disarray. To protect themselves from other groups, especially the groups just below them, groups will attempt to convey an appearance of interior order and purpose they do not possess. -- Arthur Herzog %% Social institutions will change only at the speed required to protect them from attack--slowly or fast to the degree required, but usually slowly. They will put off change as long as possible. -- Arthur Herzog %% Social legislation cannot repeal physical laws. -- Dalin B. Oaks %% Social values and habits dictate economic activity and not the other way around. -- Alexander Hamilton %% Socialism is bureaucracy of the people, by the people, and for the people. %% Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes. -- Oswald Spengler %% Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty. %% Socialism is workable only in heaven where it isn't needed, and in hell where they've got it. -- Cecil Palmer %% Socialism works, but nowhere as efficiently as in the beehive and the anthill. %% Societies will, of course, wish to exercise prudence in deciding which technologies -- that is, which applications of science -- are to be pursued and which not. But without funding basic research, without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, our options become dangerously limited. -- Carl Sagan %% Society can only pursue its normal course by means of a certain progression of changes. -- John, Viscount Morley %% Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it can never forgive the preaching of a new gospel. -- Frederic Harrison (1831-1923) %% Society heaps honors on the unique, creative personality, but not until he has been dead for fifty years. -- Charles Merrill Smith %% Society is a mule, not a car...If pressed too hard, it will kick and throw off its rider. %% Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface. He, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice. -- Washington Irving %% Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top. -- Edward Abbey %% Society, Kira, is a stupendous whole. If you write a whole line of zeroes, it's still -- nothing. -- Kira Argounova %% Sociogenetics, Second Law of: The law of heredity is that all undesirable traits come from the other parent. %% Sock it to me with apathy. %% Sock it to me! %% Socrates eats hemlock! %% Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice... They killed him. %% Sod's Law #9:The comfort of your lecture hall seat is inversely proportional to the length of the lecture. %% Sodd's Second Law: Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to occur. %% Soderquist's Paradox: There are more horse's asses than horses. %% Sodomy is a pain in the ass. %% Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty, Father, why do these words sound so nasty? -- Hair %% Soft errors encountered in last hour = %% Soft soap often has a high percentage of lye in it. -- Salada tea %% Softly seductive young Brenda Wants a man who is sweet, kind, and tender, And thoughtful and bright And sexually right But mostly a very big spender. %% Software - typically silk nighties, nylons, garter belts. Contrast with hardware. %% Software Engineering: How to program if you cannot. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% Software Independent: Won't work with ANY software. %% Software engineering? That's like military intelligence, isn't it? -- sysmgr@king.eng.umd.edu (Doug Mohney) %% Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct because no two parts are alike. If they are, we make the two similar parts into a subroutine -- open or closed. In this respect, software systems differ profoundly from computers, buildings, or automobiles, where repeated elements abound. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% Software means never having to say you're finished %% Software will be a science when programmers stand on each other's shoulders instead of each other's toes. %% Software, n.: Formal evening attire for female computer analysts. %% Soldiers do it standing erect. %% Soldiers in WWII referred to canned or powered milk as 'armored cow'. %% Soldiers who wish to be a hero Are practically zero, But those who wish to be civilians, They run into the millions. %% Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K. A. Arsdall %% Some Harvard men, stalwart and hairy, Drank up several bottles of sherry; In the Yard around three They were shrieking with glee: "Come on out, we are burning a fairy!" -- Edward Gorey %% Some actions have an end but no beginning; some begin but do not end. It all depends upon where the observer is standing. -- Frank Herbert %% Some are weatherwise, some are meteorologists. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% Some assembly required. %% Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some to be chewed and digested. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Some books leave us free and some books make us free. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Some boys wanted to run away with Nasrudin's slippers. They crowded around him and said, "Mullah, no one can climb this tree." "Of course they can," Nasrudin said. "I will show you how." He removed his slippers, but then, sensing something amiss, stuck them in his waistband and proceeded up the tree. The discomfited boys asked, "Why do you not leave your slippers here on the ground?" Nasrudin replied, "If this tree has never been climbed, how do I know there is not a road up there?" %% Some calisthenics programs are better than others. -- K'Ehleyr to Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Some changes are so slow, you don't notice them. Others are so fast, they don't notice you. %% Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. (1862) -- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) %% Some days I wish I was that I was then I wish I was what I am now. %% Some days he was inconsolable and would run down the beach, reviling himself saying, "Run, you fat pig! Little wonder no woman will look at you!" %% Some days you're a bug, some days you're a windshield. %% Some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant! %% Some days, nothing goes left. %% Some decent, regulated pre-eminence, some preference given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolite. -- Edmund Burke %% Some do, some don't. %% Some don't prefer the pursuit of happiness to the happiness of pursuit. %% Some equipment shown is optional. %% Some farewells are easier than others. -- P. Marlowe %% Some folks can look so busy doing nuthin' that they seem indispensable. -- Kin Hubbard %% Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was He before creation? How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression ... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. -- The Mahapurana, Jinasena %% Some force seems to be protecting you from the flames for the time being. In any case, you are unharmed. %% Some gentlemen born under Aries Are likely to go by contraries. They're apt to ignore The sweet girl next door And feel much attracted to fairies. %% Some grow with responsibility, others just swell. %% Some hae meat that canna eat, And some would eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, Sae let the Lord be thankit. -- Burns %% Some invisible force prevents you from passing through the gate. %% Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once. -- Edward Abbey %% Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them. -- Ed Howe %% Some men are so interested in their wives continued happiness that they hire detectives to find out the reason for it. %% Some men become proud and insolent because they ride a fine horse, wear a feather in their hat or are dressed in a fine suit of clothes. Who does not see the folly of this? If there be any glory in such things, the glory belongs to the horse, the bird and the tailor. -- St. Frances de Sales %% Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name. -- Lucan %% Some men feel that the only thing they owe the woman who marries them is a grudge. -- Helen Rowland %% Some men put me in mind of half-bred horses, which often grow worse in proportion as you feed and exercise them for improvement. -- Greville %% Some men rob you with a six-gun -- others with a fountain pen. -- Woodie Guthrie %% Some men see things as they are and ask, "Why?" I dream things that never were and say, "Why not?" -- Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968), quoted in "Esquire" %% Some men who fear that they are playing second fiddle aren't in the band at all. %% Some minds are like concrete - all mixed up and permanently set. %% Some mistakes we must carry with us. -- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld" %% Some monster encountered a strange trap. %% Some monsters can be tamed. I once saw a hacker with a tame Dragon! %% Some more unanswered questions to cast out to be trodden under foot of men: How can a book print explicit instructions for manufacturing illegal drugs and get away with it because of a disclaimer about the book being for entertainment purposes only? Whatever happened to the manned Mars mission that President Bush promised us? How could a backwards nation like the Soviet Union become our main rival? If time stopped, would we notice it? Why doesn't any businesses want to take a MINOR credit card? %% Some mountain-climbing equipment is for sale. %% Some mountaineers are proud of having done all their climbs without bivouac. How much they have missed! And the same applies to those who enjoy only rock climbing, or only the ice climbs, only the ridges or the faces. We should refuse none of the thousand and one joys that the mountains offer us at every turn. We should brush nothing aside, set no restrictions. We should experience hunger and thirst, be able to go fast, but also know how to go slowly and to contemplate. -- Gaston Rebuffat, "Starlight and Storm" %% Some nights when the knights sat down to dine, Sir Claude would say: 'That girl of mine Makes every woman jealous when she sees her.' Then someone else would shout: 'Behave, Thou malapert and scurvy knave, Or I will smite thee one upon the beezer!' And then next morning in the lists They'd take their lances in their fists And mount a pair of chargers, highly mettled: And when Sir Claude, so fair and young, Got punctured in the leg or lung, They looked upon the argument as settled. -- P. G. Wodehouse %% Some of it plus the rest of it is all of it. %% Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war. -- Edward Abbey %% Some of my best friends are continuous functions, i just wouldn't want my sister to marry one. %% Some of my readers ask me what a "Serial Port" is. The answer is: I don't know. Is it some kind of wine you have with breakfast? %% Some of the benefits of the Anthony Dollar ... to the consumer ... The new dollar coin is ... Easy to find in pocket or change purse since it is sized between the quarter and half dollar and weighs 1/3 as much as four quarters -- "the dollar of the future", flyer of the Federal Reserve Board, ca. 1978 %% Some of the greatest love affairs I've known have involved one actor -- unassisted. -- Wilson Mizner %% Some of the more environmentally aware dinosaurs were worried about the consequences of an accident with the new Iridium enriched fusion reactor. "If it goes off only the cockroaches and mammals will survive..." they said. %% Some of the things that live the longest in peoples' memories never really happened. %% Some of the trademarks mentioned in this product appear for identification purposes only. %% Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you. Some of them want to abuse you, everybody's looking for something. -- Eurythmics %% Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry. -- Gloria Steinem %% 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. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% Some of your objects are no longer here. %% Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The `#', `$', `>', and `&' characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, `#' in many assembler-programming cultures, `$' in the 6502 world, `>' at Texas Instruments, and `&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also {splat}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Some parts of the past must be preserved, and some of the future prevented at all costs. %% Some people LOVE cats for what they are; others ARE cats for what they love. %% Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them. -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" %% Some people are discovered; others are found out. %% Some people are like a callus; they always show up when the work is finished %% Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches. -- Marvin G. Gregory %% Some people are so nice to be nasty to. %% Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week. -- William Dean Howells %% Some people carve careers, others chisel them. %% Some people cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. %% Some people have a great ambition: to build something that will last, at least until they've finished building it. %% Some people have a way about them that seems to say: "If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a jerk." %% Some people have no respect for age unless it's bottled. %% Some people have parts that are so private they themselves have no knowledge of them. %% Some people hope to achieve immortality through their works or their children. I would prefer to achieve it by not dying. -- Woody Allen %% Some people in this department wouldn't recognize subtlety if it hit them on the head. %% Some people live life in the fast lane. You're in oncoming traffic. %% Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book. %% Some people need a good imaginary cure for their painful imaginary ailment. %% Some people only open up to tell you that they're closed. %% Some people who boast about how broadminded thay are may just be too lazy to find out which side they're on. %% Some people who slap you on the back are trying to help you swallow what they just told you. %% Some people will believe anything if it is whispered to them. %% Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing. -- Edward Abbey %% Some people's Yosemite is the Vortex, the P.O. Wall, Astroman; I look back several years and see that my Yosemite, more than anything on El Cap or the cookie, is scarfing. The other day a gorgeous score presented itself to me on a nearby restaurant table. I couldn't scarf it: no guts, and I haven't kept my hand in. I'm older and more dignified, and about to start a "real" job. (Horrors!) It was like coming back with a rope to a climb you once soloed, and not being able to do it anymore. -- Alison Osius, "The Scarfers Handbook" %% Some peoples mouths work faster than their brains. They say things they haven't even thought of yet. %% Some performers on television appear to be horrible people, but when you finally get to know them in person, they turn out to be even worse. -- Avery %% Some play for gain; to pass time others play For nothing; both play the fool I say: Nor time nor coin I'll lose, or idly spend; Who gets by play, proves loser in the end. -- Heath %% Some points to remember [about animals]: (1) Don't go to sleep under big animals, e.g., elephants, rhinoceri, hippopotamuses; (2) Don't put animals with sharp teeth or poisonous fangs down the front of your clothes; (3) Don't pat certain animals, e.g., crocodiles and scorpions or dogs you have just kicked. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Some primal termite knocked on wood. And tasted it, and found it good. And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlor floor today. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% Some quotes from "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" by Ed Post: The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. * Real Programmers do List Processing in FORTRAN. * Real Programmers do String Manipulation in FORTRAN. * Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in FORTRAN. * Real Programmers do Artificial Intelligence programs in FORTRAN. If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing. Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language. %% Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall. %% Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction, ice Is also great And would suffice -- Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice" %% Some scholars are like donkeys, they merely carry a lot of books. -- Folk saying %% Some settling of contents may occur during shipping. %% Some sparkling little baubles are at your feet. %% Some sweat-hoggin' mama with a face like a gent said my "get-up-and-go" musta got up and went. Well, I got good news, she's a real good liar, 'cuz my backstage boogie'll set your pants on fire! -- Aerosmith %% Some text has been burned here in the floor. %% Some things have got to be believed to be seen. %% Some thought Edgar Allan Poe was a raven lunatic. %% Some time ago, pedestrian traffic signals would show the words "WALK" or "DON'T WALK" as appropriate. There was a button you could press if you wanted to cross. Then the signs were improved, by replacing the words with pictures -- one of a hand, one of a man walking. This was done for the benefit of people who can't understand printed words. There followed a long period of stability, with little or no innovation. Yesterday, as I was crossing the street, I noticed that the signals have once again been enhanced. There is now a little sign above the button with a printed explanation of what the pictures mean. This was, of course, done for the benefit of people who can't understand pictures. %% Some will always be above the others. Destroy the equality today, and it will appear again tomorrow. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Some women are like musical glasses. To keep them in tune they must be wet. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% Some women should be beaten regularly, like gongs. -- Noel Coward %% Some worn-out batteries have been discarded nearby. %% Some years ago a friend of mine was taking a magnetic computer tape through customs in Egypt. The customs staff on discovering the tape started to unreel it onto the floor. When my friend asked what they were looking for they told him that they were checking the film for pornographic scenes. %% Somebody forgot to logoff, so this .signature is a product of vandals. Send mail to hell. %% Somebody interrupted Chubb--with both hands! -- Poul, ROBOTS OF DEATH %% Somebody is trying some trickery here ... %% Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear. %% Somebody should have warned the Trojans. Beware of gifts bearing Greeks. -- Solomon Short %% Somebody tries to rob you, but finds nothing to steal. %% Somebody's terminal is dropping bits. I found a pile of them over in the corner. %% Someday God will log you out. %% Someday I may surprise you and say something nice.... But don't hold your breath. %% Someday I'm going to be rich and famous. I don't know how, but ... %% Someday somebody has got to decide whether the typewriter is the machine, or the person who operates it. %% Someday there is going to be a book about a middle aged man with a good job, a beautiful wife and two lovely children who still manages to be happy. -- Bill Vaughan %% Someday we will live in a world free of shallow people who make judgements based on physical appearance. Until then, make your color and perm appointment at the Jon Giannos Salon. -- From an ad for the salon %% Someday you'll get your big chance -- or have you already had it? %% Someday you'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car. %% Someday your prints will come. %% Someday, perhaps, a state or city will pass up the names of famous people and name new facilities "Taxpayer Stadium." -- Bill Vaughan %% Somehow Will found the summit cairn and a log- book inside an old can. "Our best climb," he wrote. "My only climb," I told Will. If I wasn't a real climber then, at least I knew I could have a chance at it. When we finally stumbled back down into the valley I felt as if I'd been jogging in Afghanistan for about two weeks. Despite the sling of pitons, the hammer, and the Robbins boots arrayed upon me, I plunged straight into the Merced river, swallowing, and didn't surface till my belly felt 10 months pregnant. -- John Long, Direct North Buttress, Middle Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley %% Somehow he got in [to law school]; he talked his way in. -- James Quayle, Dan's father %% Somehow you escaped the shop without paying! %% Somehow, I just can't picture you in a garter belt and stockings. %% Somehow, the world always affects you more than you affect it. %% Someone broke into the Wilmington, Delaware police department and stole all of the plumbing fixtures. The police say that they currently have nothing to go on. %% Someone carrying a large bag is casually leaning against one of the walls here. He does not speak, but it is clear from his aspect that the bag will be taken only over his dead body. %% Someone does indeed increase him. Ten pairs of tortoises cannot oppose it. Supreme good fortune. %% Someone does indeed increase him; Ten pairs of tortoises cannot oppose it. Constant perseverance brings good fortune. The king presents him before God. Good fortune. %% Someone has compared Southern California to a granola cereal; when you take away the fruits and the nuts, all you have left are the flakes. %% Someone is speaking well of you. %% Someone is speaking well of you. But the listener is unbelieving. %% Someone is speaking well of you. That same person is known for gross exaggerations.. %% Someone is talking about you behind your back. %% Someone is unenthusiastic about your work. %% Someone is unenthusiastic about your work...guess who? %% Someone who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learned the first proposition, asked Euclid, "But what shall I get by learning these things?" whereupon Euclid called his slave and said "Give him three-pence since he must make gain out of what he knows. -- Johannes Stobaeus (5th C. A.D.) %% Someone whom you reject today, will reject you tomorrow. %% Someone will try to honk your nose today. %% Something better #1 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Obvious: Excuse me. Is that your nose or did a bus park on your face. %% Something better #10 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Commercial: Hi, I'm Earl Schibe and I can paint that nose for $39.95. %% Something better #11 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Polite: Ah. Would you mind not bobbing your head. The orchestra keeps changing tempo. %% Something better #12 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Melodic: Everybody! "He's got the whole world in his nose." %% Something better #13 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Sympathetic: Oh, What happened? Did your parents lose a bet with God? %% Something better #14 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Complementary: You must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on. %% Something better #15 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Scientific: Say, does that thing there influence the tides. %% Something better #16 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Obscure: Oh, I'd hate to see the grindstone. %% Something better #17 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Inquiry: When you stop to smell the flowers, are they afraid? %% Something better #18 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna French: Say, the pigs have refused to find any more truffles until you leave. %% Something better #19 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Pornographic: Finally, a man who can satisfy two women at once. %% Something better #2 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Meteorological: Everybody take cover. She's going to blow. %% Something better #20 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Religious: The Lord giveth and He just kept on giving, didn't He. %% Something better #21 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Disgusting: Say, who mows your nose hair. %% Something better #22 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Paranoid: Keep that guy away from my cocaine! %% Something better #23 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Aromatic: It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and smell the coffee . . . in Brazil. %% Something better #24 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Appreciative: Oooo, how original. Most people just have their teeth capped. %% Something better #25 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Dirty: Your name wouldn't be Dick, would it? %% Something better #3 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Fashionable: You know, you could de-emphasize your nose if you wore something larger. Like ... Wyoming. %% Something better #4 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Personal: Well, here we are. Just the three of us. %% Something better #5 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Punctual: Alright gentlemen. Your nose was on time but you were fifteen minutes late. %% Something better #6 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Envious: Oooo, I wish I were you. Gosh. To be able to smell your own ear. %% Something better #7 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Naughty: Pardon me, Sir. Some of the ladies have asked if you wouldn't mind putting that thing away. %% Something better #8 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Philosophical: You know. It's not the size of a nose thats important. It's what's in it that matters. %% Something better #9 from Roxanne starring Steve Martin & Darryl Hanna Humorous: Laugh and the world laughs with you. Sneeze and its goodbye Seattle. %% Something flutters out onto the floor. %% Something is engraved here on the floor. %% Something is rotten in the state of confusion. %% Something is written here in the dust. %% Something is written in a very strange way. %% Something like " Everybody should get a labotomy(sp) " %% Something seems funny about the feel of the buoy. %% Something seems to be holding you. %% Something to ponder: If 7-11 stores are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, then why are there locks on the doors? %% Something to tell the grandchildren." -- TRB in THE NEW REPUBLIC %% Something you're carrying won't fit through the tunnel with you. You'd best take inventory and drop something. %% Something's rotten in the state of Denmark. -- William Shakespeare %% Something's wrong...I can't suspend %% Sometime in 1993 NANCY SINATRA will lead a BLOODLESS COUP on GUAM!! %% Sometime when you least expect it, Love will tap you on the shoulder... and ask you to move out of the way because it still isn't your turn. -- N. V. Plyter %% Sometime, you've gotta break the rules. %% Sometimes I am very sly Other times a trade I ply Over the billows swift I fly Now pray tell me what am I? Craft %% Sometimes I feel like I'm fading away, Looking at me, I got nothin' to say. Don't make me angry with the things games that you play, Either light up or leave me alone. %% Sometimes I feel like the next guy that everybody is always better off than. %% Sometimes I live in the country, And sometimes I live in town. And sometimes I have a great notion, To jump in the river and drown. -- Big Bill Broonzy %% Sometimes I simply feel that the whole world is a cigarette and I'm the only ashtray. %% Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits. %% Sometimes I sits hear and thinks, and sometimes I just sits. %% Sometimes I think my ears are hearing voices. %% Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever. -- Samuel Beckett, "Endgame" %% Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. -- Lily Tomlin %% Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% Sometimes a feeling is all we humans have to go on. -- Kirk, "A Taste of Armageddon," stardate 3193.9 %% Sometimes a man will tell his bartender things he'll never tell his doctor. -- Dr. Phillip Boyce, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown. %% Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood. -- Augusto Pinochet %% Sometimes enough faster covers for a little wrong :> %% Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. -- Seneca %% Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do. -- Lin Yutang %% Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?" -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Sometimes it was difficult to remember that the individuals within an alien species could differ as thoroughly as humans did. -- "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Sometimes it's easier to look for the way in, and then work backwards. -- 5th Doctor, FRONTIOS %% Sometimes luck isn't enough. -- L. Luciano %% Sometimes monsters are more likely to fight each other than attack you. %% Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Sometimes pain can drive a man harder than pleasure. -- Kirk, "the Alternative Factor," stardate 3088.7 %% Sometimes the best law of all is no law at all. Not all the world's ills are susceptible to legislative correction. -- Pierre S. du Pont %% Sometimes the best medicine is to stop taking something. %% Sometimes the crowd is right. %% Sometimes the light is all shining on me, Other times I can hardly see. Lately it occurs to me What a long strange trip it's been. -- The Grateful Dead, "American Beauty" %% Sometimes the things you most wish for are not to be touched. -- Into the Woods %% Sometimes there's no point in giving up. -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Sometimes they just grow, and grow, and grow... %% Sometimes what a person escapes to is worse than what they escapes from. %% Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I feel very peculiar. I feel like I've just got to bite a cat! I feel like if I don't bite a cat before sundown, I'll go crazy! But then I just take a deep breath and forget about it. That's what is known as real maturity. -- Snoopy %% Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.' -- Lillian Carter %% Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't %% Sometimes you get an almost irresistible urge to go on living. %% Sometimes you get the elevator and sometimes you get the shaft. %% Sometimes, Number One, you just have to...bow to the absurd. -- Picard, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% Sometimes, at the end of the day, when I'm smiling and shaking their hands, I want to kick them. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% Sometimes, it is better to keep your mouth shut and appear the fool, than to speak and prove yourself one. %% Sometimes, too long is too long. -- Joe Crowe %% Sometimes, when I think of what that girl means to me, it's all I can do to keep from telling her. -- Andy Capp %% Sometimes, where a complex problem can be illuminated by many tools, one can be forgiven for applying the one he knows best. -- Robert Machol %% Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind - but don't make it a habit. %% Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind. %% Sometimes, you just gotta say "What the fuck." -- Risky Business %% Somewhat to the north, identical stone statues face each other from pedestals on opposite sides of the corridor. The statues represent Guardians of Zork, a military order of ancient lineage. They are portrayed as heavily armored warriors standing at ease, hands clasped around formidable bludgeons. %% Somewhere in DOWNTOWN BURBANK a prostitute is OVERCOOKING a LAMB CHOP!! %% Somewhere in Tenafly, New Jersey, a chiropractor is viewing "Leave it to Beaver"! %% Somewhere in suburban Honolulu, an unemployed bellhop is whipping up a batch of illegal psilocybin chop suey!! %% Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma. -- Hendrik Willem Van Loon %% Somewhere nearby is colossal cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave. I will be your eyes and hands. Direct me with commands of 1 or 2 words. I should warn you that I look at only the first five letters of each word, so you'll have to enter "northeast" as "ne" to distinguish it from "north". (should you get stuck, type "help" for some general hints. For information on how to end your adventure, etc., type "info".) --- This program was originally developed by Willie Crowther. Most of the features of the current program were added by Don Woods (don @ su-ai). If you have any questions, comments, etc. send mail to ark. %% Somewhere, just out of sight, the unicorns are gathering. %% Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan %% Son, someday a man is going to walk up to you with a deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. And he is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Ace of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ears. But son, do not bet this man, for you will end up with a ear full of cider. -- Sky Masterson's Father %% Song Title of the Week: "They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me." %% Song title: They can put me in jail for loving you, but they can't stop my face from breaking out. %% Sookin Sin.. %% Sooner or later you must pay for your sins. (Those who have already paid may disregard this cookie). %% Sooner or later, generals will own you. %% Sooner will men hold fire in their mouths than keep a secret. %% Sophisticated - So complicated you have to read the manual for a few days straight before you can do anything with it. Most people don't read the manual, however. User-friendly - So simple-minded that after an hour you've got it all figured out. The next day, you can't discover any other use for it. The exact opposite of sophisticated. If something is supposed to be both sophisticated and user-friendly, you know they're lying. %% Sophisticated - So complicated you have to read the manual for a few days straight before you can do any- thing with it. Most people don't read the manual, how- ever. %% Sopranos do it in unison. %% Sorrow seems sent for out instruction, as we darken the cages of birds when we would teach them to sing. -- Richter %% Sorry 'bout that sweat, honey. That's just holy water. -- Little Richard %% Sorry -- this must be your first command. Better luck next time! %% Sorry about that, Chief! -- Maxwell Smart %% Sorry about your Rectocranial Inversion. %% Sorry can't talk right now! This building is about to blow up! %% Sorry never means having you're say to love. %% Sorry sir, I seem to be commenting on everything. -- Data to Riker, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% Sorry, I'm busy with debugging. Try again later. %% Sorry, You can't play hack now %% Sorry, but I am not allowed to give more detail. I will repeat the long description of your location. %% Sorry, but I no longer seem to remember how it was you got here. %% Sorry, my english is not very good. No punt intended. %% Sorry, no fortune this time. %% Sorry, no fortune this time. Better luck next time! %% Sorry, no obscene fortunes. Don't want to offend anyone. (Now that's obscene!) %% Sorry, only one incantation to a customer. %% Sorry, this attempt at running the fortune program has failed. %% Sorry, wrong species. -- Selay delegate to Riker, "Lonely Among Us", stardate 41249.3 %% Sorry, you're savefile is out of date. %% Sorry. I don't "do" COBOL. %% Sorry. I forget what I was going to say. %% Sorry. Nice try. %% Soubcon is French for a small amount, only morceau. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% Sound is worth money. %% Sound of artillery fire in the distance. A lone harmonica plays Red River Valley. A voice, barely past adolescence... 'Sarge... Sarge?' A gruffer voice responds. 'Yeah, kid what is it?' 'Sarge.....do you ever...do you ever get scared?' 'Sure, kid, I guess everybody does' 'Well....then...then what do you do about it, Sarge?' 'Well, kid, I wait for the tone and then I leave my name and a short message. Joe always gets back to me.' 'Thanks Sarge' %% Soundalike slang: similar to Cockney rhyming slang. Often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples: Boston Globe => Boston Glob Herald American => Horrid (Harried) American New York Times => New York Slime Dime Time => Slime Time historical reasons => hysterical raisins government property - do not duplicate (seen on keys) => government duplicity - do not propagate Often the substitution will be made in such a way as to slip in a standard jargon word: Dr. Dobb's Journal => Dr. Frob's Journal creeping featurism => feeping creaturism Margaret Jacks Hall => Marginal Hacks Hall %% Sounds like a personal problem to me. %% Sounds travel slowly. Sometimes the things you say to your kids don't reach them till they're in their 40s. %% Soup is the essence of meat. %% Sour discontent that quarrels with our fate May give fresh smart, but not the old abate; The uneasy passion's disingenuous wit, The ill reveals but hides the benefit. -- Sir Richard Blackmore %% Sour grapes usually make sour whine... -- Solomon Short %% Source: A colleague at Dept. of Information Systems in Olympia, WA. Know what HECK is? It's where people go when they don't believe in GOSH! %% Source: Classified (Person to Person) in Chicago Tribune 12/6/91 WILL the lady who left her 11 kids at Lambeau Field please pick them up. They're beating the Packers 21-0. %% South Carolina law prohibits pants with hip pockets, as furnishing too convenient a place for pint bottles. %% South of the border: The Hispanics despise the mestizos, the mestizos look with contempt on *Los Indios*, the Indians take it out on their women and dogs. -- Edward Abbey %% Southside Johnny prefers singing to sex. %% Souvent femme varie, bien fol est qui s'y fie (Often does a woman change, and only a fool trusts her) %% Soviet Method: Set working methods in complicated rules and numerous authorizations. Nothing will therefore happen, for which no blame can be put on you. %% Soviet Venereal Disease - by Itl Rotchakokoff %% Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureaucracy, no police, no standing army. -- V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) %% Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. %% Space People read our mail. %% Space expands to house the people to perform the work that Congress creates. -- Haynes Johnson %% Space is an illusion, disk space doubly so. %% Space is big. Really big. %% Space is not the final frontier. The final frontier is the human soul. Space is merely the place where we are most likely to meet the challenge. The victory will occur in the continual process of challenging and testing our limits -- both as individuals and as a species -- and not in the amount of territory conquered. -- Solomon Short %% Space is to place as eternity is to time. -- Joseph Joubert %% Space is vast, excellency. %% Space tells matter how to move and matter tells space how to curve. -- Wheeler %% Space turkey. %% Space, humans next goal in the race for immortality. -- Anmar Mirza %% Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship ENTERPRISE. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. %% Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before. -- Captain James T. Kirk %% Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam ... Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam ... %% Spanish Civil War Communique: Our troops advanced today without losing a foot of ground. %% Spare no expense to save money on this one. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% Sparing your helpless enemy who surely would have destroyed you, you demonstrated the advanced trait of mercy, something we hardly expected. We feel that there may be hope for your kind. Therefore you will not be destroyed. It would not be civilized. -- The Metron, "Arena," stardate 3046.2 %% 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. %% Sparrows do it for a lark (hearsay). %% Spartacus, like Jesus, was also crucified by the Romans. And for equally good reasons. -- Edward Abbey %% Speak little and well, if you would be esteemed as a man of merit. -- Trench %% Speak of the Devil and he will hear about it. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Speak roughly to your little VAX, And boot it when it crashes; It knows that one cannot relax Because the paging thrashes! Wow! Wow! Wow! I speak severely to my VAX, And boot it when it crashes; In spite of all my favorite hacks My jobs it always thrashes! Wow! Wow! Wow! %% Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy Because he knows it teases. Wow! wow! wow! I speak severely to my boy, And beat him when he sneezes: For he can thoroughly enjoy The pepper when he pleases! Wow! wow! wow! -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland" %% Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword. %% Speak softly and own a big, mean Doberman. -- Dave Millman %% Speak softly. Others carry big sticks. %% Speak the language of the country you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. -- Chesterfield %% Speak the truth, but leave immediately after. %% Speak with authority; however, only expound on the obvious and proven facts. %% Speaker to Enzymes %% Speaker-to-Animals: We can't go back, Louis. Louis Wu: No, of course not. Speaker-to-Animals: Not until we can deliver our secret to our respective worlds. And acquire an intact ship. -- "Ringworld" %% Speaking as a man, it's not a woman's issue. Us men are tired of losing our women -- Vice President Dan Quayle talking about breast cancer %% Speaking as someone who has delved into the intricacies of PL/I, I am sure that only Real Men could have written such a machine-hogging, cycle-grabbing, all-encompassing monster. Allocate an array and free the middle third? Sure! Why not? Multiply a character string times a bit string and assign the result to a float decimal? Go ahead! Free a controlled variable procedure parameter and reallocate it before passing it back? Overlay three different types of variable on the same memory location? Anything you say! Write a recursive macro? Well, no, but Real Men use rescan. How could a language so obviously designed and written by Real Men not be intended for Real Man use? %% Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him. -- Colton %% Speaking of Godzilla and other things that convey horror: With a purposeful grimace and a Mongo-like flair He throws the spinning disk drives in the air! And he picks up a Vax and he throws it back down As he wades through the lab making terrible sounds! Helpless users with projects due Scream "My God!" as he stomps on the tape drives, too! Oh, no! He says Unix runs too slow! Go, go, DECzilla! Oh, yes! He's gonna bring up VMS! Go, go, DECzilla!" * VMS is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation * DECzilla is a trademark of Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death, Inc. -- Curtis Jackson %% Speaking of Software Problem Reports, this one in the VAX System Dispatch caught my eye: OPERATING SYSTEM: VAX/VMS V2.1 PRODUCT: VAX/VMS COMPONENT: LOGINOUT GRPNAM SECURITY HOLE IN LOGIN PROBLEM STATEMENT: The GRPNAM privilege is an evil demon, allowing the user to invoke its secret entrance for all manner of nefarious purposes not originally intended. RESPONSE FROM DEC: The great wizard VMS confronted the demon, raised his great oaken staff carved in ancient runes, and spoke the magic incantation: "$SETPRV IMAGEACTIVATIONENHANCEDPRIVILEGES $CMKRNL!!" There was a blinding flash of light and puff of smoke, and the demon, reduced to harmlessness, scurried off into the distance. Where his secret entrance had been was naught but a little pile of ashes, which the wind slowly drifted into letters spelling the words "FIXED IN V2.3". %% Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love; Husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very _____least he can do is to Shut Up! -- Tom Lehrer, "That Was the Year that Was" %% Speaking of purchasing a dog, never buy a watchdog that's on sale. Everyone knows a bargain dog never bites! %% Speaking on the record to a journalist is like feeding noodles to a tiger. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% Speaking only for myself, one of my many tricks. %% Special Science Feature: All-Purpose METRIC Conversion Table. 1 snail eater = 7.3 snail liters 1 pack + 1 liter = 1 liter of the pack 5 parking meters = 8.2 parking centimeters 10 scents = 1 stink 50,000 decibels = 1 Twisted Sister concert Cost of 1 ear operation = Mega-bucks (see last entry) 1 Tidal Wave = 47.92 Microwaves 64 kilobytes = Next to nothing %% Special tonight, the best toot in town at prices you won't believe!! Also, the finest dope, brought all the way from Columbia by spirited young adventurers. All available tonight, as usual, in the graduate students bullpen from 11: pm on, usual terms and conditions. Faculty members especially welcome. %% Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes. -- Walter Gropius %% Specify what? %% Spectacularism: A fascination with extreme situations. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Speed Kills (The Doors) %% Speed Pays -- the doctor, the hospital, the mortuary. %% Speed bumps are of negligible effect when the vehicle exceeds triple the desired restraining speed. %% Speed is just a question of money, How much do you want to go? %% Speed is subsittute fo accurancy. %% Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading: The visibility of an error is inversely proportional to the number of times you have looked at it. %% Spell chequers dew knot work write. %% Spell-casting requires magic dust. %% Spelling is a lossed art. %% Spelling problems? use "error-correcting" modems! %% Spence's Admonition: Never stow away on a kamikaze plane. %% Spend extra time on hobby. Get plenty of rolling papers. %% Spice is the variety of life. %% Spies do it under cover. %% Spilling your guts out is just as charming as it sounds. %% Spinach, carrot, and a melon - a meal fit for a nurse! %% Spirits of peace, where are ye? Are ye all gone? And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye? -- William Shakespeare %% Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church. -- Eleanor Roosevelt %% Spirituality is the consciousness of victory over self. -- Victor L. Brown %% Spirtle, n.: The fine stream from a grapefruit that always lands right in your eye. -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends" %% Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language. -- Charles Dickens %% Splitting Apart. It does not further one To go anywhere. %% Spock: The odds of surviving another attack are 13562190123 to 1, Captain. %% Spock: We suffered 23 casualties in that attack, Captain. %% Spoken inarticulations: Words such as "mumble", "sigh", and "groan" are spoken in places where their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such noises in a com link. Another expression sometimes heard is "complain!" %% Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen. -- Steve Wright %% Sponges grow in the ocean. That kills me. Imagine how deep the ocean would be if you took them out! -- Steven Wright %% Spoove me, baby! %% Sports makes Higher Education palatable for Students who do not belong. -- Veblen %% Spouse, n.: Someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single. %% Spraypainted on a wall in an urban getto "If you lived here, you'ld be home now" %% Spreading peanut butter reminds me of opera!! I wonder why? %% Spreadsheet - A program that gives the user quick and easy access to a wide variety of highly detailed reports based on highly inaccurate assumptions. Word Processor - Software that magically transforms its user into a professional author. Business Graphics - Popular with managers who understand neither decimals, fractions, Roman numerals, nor PI but have more than a passing acquaintance with pies and bars. Database Manager - A program that allows the user to manipulate data in every conceivable way except the absolutely essential one he or she conceives of the day after entering 20 Megabytes of raw data. Integrated Software - A single product that deftly performs hundreds of functions the user never needs and awkwardly performs the half-dozen he uses constantly. Windows - A method of dividing a computer screen into two or more unusably tiny portions. -- From the Government Computer News, November 21, 1988 Issue %% Spreadsheet: A program that gives the user quick and easy access to a wide variety of highly detailed reports based on highly inaccurate assumptions. %% Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911 %% Spring is God's way of saying, "One more time!" %% Spring is here, spring is here, Life is skittles and life is beer. %% Springer's Observation: There are no failures at a class reunion. %% Sprinkle's law: Things always fall at right angles. %% Sprung from cages on highway 9, chrome wheels fuel injected and stepping out over the line. %% Squeeze my Lemon, till the juice runs down my leg... %% Squires: The most common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their frantic attempts to recreate a semblance of Eisenhower-era plenitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job life-styles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and knickknacks. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Squirming: Discomfort inflicted on young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures: Karen died a thousand deaths as her father made a big show of tasting a recently manufactured bottle of wine before allowing it to be poured as the family sat in Steak Hut. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Squirrels eating squirrels, my God, that's sick. %% St. Matthew did it passionately. %% St. Peter and the Devil had an agreement to take turns keeping the gate between H****n and H**l closed. One day St. Peter found the gate open and called out to the Devil that it was the Devil's turn to close it. The Devil yelled back that it was St. Peter's turn. St. Peter got angry and said "If you don't take your turn closing the gate, I'll get an attorney and sue you." The Devil laughed and replied "Oh yeah? Where you gonna get an attorney?" %% Stability is more essential to success than brilliance. -- Richard Lloyd Jones %% Stability itself is nothing else than a more sluggish motion. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% Stack mmu: SDR 1 DOESN'T match u.u_segmts for code %% Staff meeting in the conference room in 3 minutes. %% Stale's Law: No matter how careful one is in resealing the inner liner in a cereal box, it will tear where it is glued to the box. %% Stalin dies and goes to hell (of course). But the devil is worried that he might take over, so he won't let him in the gates. Stalin wanders around outside the gates, looking for help, for 3 years. Finally some Hungarians killed in the 1956 uprising come by. Even they feel sorry for poor Stalin, and one of them offers to help. He tells Stalin to climb into a potato sack, and three of them carry it to the wall. They yell up at Satan: "Hey, have you got a fellow named Karl Marx in there ?" The devil says: "Yes, why ?" They toss the sack with Stalin over the wall. "Tell him to come collect the interest on his `Kapital'." %% Stalin is giving a speech in a small auditorium. During a pause, someone in the audience sneezes. Looking up, Stalin asks, "Who sneezed?" No one answers. Stalin orders the guards to escort the last three rows of people outside, where they are executed. Stalin then asks, "So, who sneezed?" Again, no one answers. Again, Stalin orders the guards to escort the last three rows outside. Shots are heard. Again, Stalin asks, "Now! Who sneezed??" A small, bespectacled man in the second row raises his hand and says, "Um, I did, comrade." To which Stalin replies, "Bless you." %% Stamp out Sizesm %% Stamp out distemper -- but don't step in it. %% Stamp out organized crime!! Abolish the IRS. %% Stamp out philately! %% Stamp out reality!! %% Stamp out terminologicalinexactituditarianism. %% Stand on the toilet, get high on pot. %% Standard - Similar to something else on the market. %% Standard Deviation %% Standards are industry's way of codifying obsolescence. %% Standing at the very center of the plaza is a stone monument to some forgotten hero. In one majestically upraised arm he holds a rather nasty looking stone sword. %% Standing at the very center of the plaza is a stone monument to some forgotten hero. It appears some vandal has made off with whatever our hero may once have brandished so bravely in his outstretched arm. %% Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down. %% Standing on your head makes a smile of a frown, but the rest of your face is also upside down. %% Standing there making a sitting target of himself. %% Standstill is giving way. Good fortune for the great man. "What if it should fail, what if it should fail?" In this way, he ties it to a cluster of mulberry shoots. %% Standstill. Evil people do not further The perseverance of the superior man. The great departs; the small approaches. %% Stanford women are responsible for the success of many Stanford men: the give them another reason to stay in and study every night. %% Stanley Planet and His Throbbing Unit %% Stanley, we wanna help you do things right. %% Star Trek Lives! %% Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to pur'ee of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up! -- Harlan Ellison %% Star light, star bright, firststarIseetonightIwishImayIwishImight whatever. Stars,like fireflys in the sky, well, not really, actually they're a bit larger than fireflys, and smaller too, and not quite as complex in structure, as far as we know, but a hell of a lot hotter, but its better than a bunch of black. Roses are roses, Violets are violets, Poses are poses, What the hell rhymes with "violets"? Oranges Poranges. Who says? Poems, like fireflys in the sky, ah forget it. I gave my love a cherry, like a red red rose or a violet violet violet, or a pink pink piece of Bazooka. Yeah, that's what love's all about, three cents a piece, and not a drop to drink. By the way, nice necklace, is that pure albatross? Forget I asked. Hark! What light through how does that go again? Mark! What a light through that window! Marc! Can I fly over you? Marque! Parque! Walks in the darque! IknowElektraalthoughnotpersonallybutIreadallaboutherandIwouldn'tmindifsheandIwellyouknowno?wellyououghttoknow'causeIdoandIain'ttelling. If you buy my book I promise to donate the proceeds to charity Charity begins at home on the range gas or electric? -- KU KU EMMINGS %% Stardust on thursday is the only wrong. %% Starfleet is not a military organization, it's purpose is exploration. -- Picard to Sirna Kolrami, "Peak Performance", stardate 42923.4 %% Starfleet's finest. Fancy meeting you here. -- Picard, "Conspiracy", stardate 41775.5 %% Starkle, starkle, little twink, who the hell you are I think I'm not as drunk as thinkle peep I'm just a little slort of sheep. Tee martoonis make a guy, feel so woozy, I don't know why. So mass the pixer and kill my fup I've all day sober to sunday up. %% Stars scribble in our eyes the frosty sagas, The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. -- Hart Crane %% Starship trouper, flying high and low... %% Start every day off with a smile and get it over with. -- W. C. Fields %% Start from scratch. %% Start the day with a smile. After that you can be your nasty old self again. %% Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable. %% Start! %% Starting brings misfortune. Perseverance brings danger. When the talk of revolution has gone the rounds three times, One may commit himself, And men will believe him. %% Starting up a suspended game.... %% State capitalism is a contradiction in terms. %% State-of-the-art - When referring to hardware: about five years behind the best research labs. When referring to software: about ten years behind the best research labs. For example, The Unix system is a state-of-the-art operating system written in 1969. %% State: A state is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again. %% Statements by respected authorities which tend to agree with a writer's viewpoint are always handy. -- Amrom Katz %% Statisticians do it approximately normally. %% Statisticians do it continuously but discretely. After all, it's only normal. %% Statisticians do it with 95% confidence. %% Statisticians do it with a little deviance. %% Statisticians do it with deviates. %% Statisticians do it with probability 1. %% Statisticians have a statisticaly significant chance of doing it. %% Statisticians probably do it. %% Statistics are a highly logical and precise method for saying a half-truth inaccurately. %% Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. -- Aaron Levenstein %% Statistics are no substitute for judgement. -- Henry Clay %% Statistics: A system for expressing your political prejudices in convincing scientific guise. %% Statistics: Numbers looking for an argument. %% Status Substitution: Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: "Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Status quo: The mess we're in. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% Stay away from flying saucers today. %% Stay away from hurricanes for a while. %% Stay clear of the level of no return. %% Stay in with the Outs (the Ins will make so many mistakes you can't afford to alienate the Outs). %% Stay out of the road, if you want to grow old. -- Pink Floyd %% Stay sweet and innocent. %% Stay the curse. %% Stay together, drag each other down. %% Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time, There's something wrong here, there can be no more denying, One of us is changing, or maybe we just stopped trying, And it's too late, baby, now, it's too late, Though we really did try to make it, Something inside has died and I can't hide and I just can't fake it... It used to be so easy living here with you, You were light and breezy and I knew just what to do Now you look so unhappy and I feel like a fool. There'll be good times again for me and you, But we just can't stay together, don't you feel it too? But I'm glad for what we had and that I once loved you... But it's too late baby... It's too late, now darling, it's too late... -- Carol King, "Tapestry" %% Stayin' alive! Stayin' alive! -- V. Dracula %% Steady movement is more important than speed, much of the time. So long as there is a regular progression of stimuli to get your mental hooks into, there is room for lateral movement. Once this begins, its rate is a matter of discretion. -- Corwin, "Prince of Amber" %% Steal my cash, car and TV - but leave the computer! %% Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly. %% Stealing people's mail on a Friday night. %% Stealth condoms: she'll never even see you coming... %% Steckel's Rule to Success: Good enough is never good enough. %% Steel workers do it hotter. %% Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy: Everybody should believe in something -- I believe I'll have another drink. %% Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter. %% Step #1. Collect a medium quantity of *fresh* dogsh*t, and/or cowpies, place into a box. Step #2. Freeze the contents of the box, thereby removing the odors. Step #3. Nicely wrap the box, and refreeze. Step #4. Give the gift to the victim. Step #5. It thaws...... %% Step back, unbelievers! Or the rain will never come. Somebody keep the fire burning, someone come and beat the drum. You may think I'm crazy, you may think that I'm insane, But I swear to you, before this day is out, you folks are gonna see some rain! %% Sterility is hereditary. %% Steve Martin, on his "Wild and Crazy Guy" album, was talking about what he learned in college, and says, "We learned philosophical questions, such as "Does the Pope shit in the woods?" %% Stewart's Law of Retroaction: It is easier to get forgiveness than permission. %% Stick a boulder in your behind! %% Stick an extra parenthesis at the end and see if it works. %% Sticks and stones may break my bones But whips and chains excite me! %% Still I hope and I pray that maybe someday you'll walk in the room with my heart. %% Still crazy after all these years. %% Still looking for the glorious results of my misspent youth... say, do you have a map to the next joint? %% Still more questions for you to stick in the warheads and ship to Russia: Why do smokers think they have the right to litter the world with cigarette butts? Why do places that are open 24 hours have locks on their doors? Does anyone actually like the lemon flavored Trix? Why does the lighter flame always drop to an unusable height in the middle of a bong load? If every beer is made from the finest barley, selected grains, and choicest hops, who makes beer with the inferior stuff? If time stopped, would we notice it? Why doesn't any businesses want to take a MINOR credit card? Why didn't they design compact discs to hold ninety minutes? Where does the G in GNU actually come from? %% Still waters run deep. %% Still, no matter what Webster's says, to me a date is going out with a guy you like, and he opens the doors for me, and I comb my hair and try to be civilized. A date is planned out in advance, so you have plenty of time to get nervous about it. -- Thumper in alt.romance %% Stock Market Axiom: The public is always wrong. %% Stock brokers do it on the margin. %% Stock's Observation: You no sooner get your head above water but what someone pulls your flippers off. %% Stockbroker's Declaration: The market will rally from this or lower levels. %% Stockmayer's Theorem: If it looks easy, it's tough. If it looks tough, it's damn near impossible. %% Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom. -- Bergen Evans %% Stone Age: n., adj. 1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanical {dinosaur}s. Sometimes used for the entire period up to 1960--61 (see {Iron Age}); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms of a `Bronze Age' era of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-{core} machines with drum or CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury delay lines and/or relays). See also {Iron Age}. 2. More generally, a pejorative for any crufty, ancient piece of hardware or software technology. Note that this is used even by people who were there for the {Stone Age} (sense 1). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Stone trees are all very well, but in the next forest I walk through, I want them all to be made of wood. -- Barbara, THE DALEKS %% Stop air pollution -- quit breathing. %% Stop day dreaming about success. Go out and obtain it. %% Stop entropy. %% Stop it, Dave. Please stop, Dave! %% Stop me, before I kill again! %% Stop searching forever. Happiness is unattainable. %% Stop searching forever. Your TECO buffer is circular. %% Stop searching forever. Happiness is just next to you. %% Stop searching forever. Happiness is nearby. %% Stop searching. Happiness is right next to you. %% Stop searching. Happiness is right next to you. Now, if they'd only take a bath ... %% Stop searching. Happiness is always on the previous bus. %% Stop smoking! %% Stop taking yourself seriously, nobody else does. %% Stop the world! I want to get off!! %% Stop trying to find yourself...the search isn't worth it. %% Stop watching MTV. %% Stop your searching. Happiness is unattainable. %% Stop! There was first a game of blindman's buff. Of course there was. And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and Scrooge's nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human nature. %% Storm Troopers of Death %% Stragglers do it in the rear. %% Straight, square, great. Without purpose, Yet nothing remains unfurthered. %% Stranded in the park and forced to confess to hiding on the backstreets. %% Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring. %% Strange faces peering out from the bathroom can be pretty frightening if you are not in good health or spirits. -- Robert Benchley %% Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle--that 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--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" %% 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! -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Mysterious Stranger" %% Strange, this map is not as I remember it. %% Strange... I didnt know you had that ring. %% Strangelove Reproduction: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Strangers from the city, bring her gifts, but when I come walking she smiles pretty, she knows I want to be Candy's boy. %% Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts. %% Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy. -- Felicia Hermans %% Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile... Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant... Death is irrelevant. -- The Borg, "The Best of Both Worlds," stardate 43989.1 %% Strength lies not in defense but in attack. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf", 1933 %% Stress has been pinpointed as a major cause of illness. To avoid overload and burnout, keep stress out of your life. Give it to others instead. Learn the "Gaslight" treatment, the "Are you talking to me?" technique, and the "Do you feel okay? You look pale." approach. Start with negotiation and implication. Advance to manipulation and humiliation. Above all, relax and have a nice day. %% Strike any key to continue. %% Strike any user when ready. %% Strike while your employer has a big contract. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Strip mining prevents forest fires. %% Strive to look tremendously important. %% Stroking a furry pussy will get you scratched. %% Strong people always have strong weaknesses. %% Strong reasons make strong actions. -- William Shakespeare %% Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle. %% Structured programmers do it repeatedly or else. %% Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. -- Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" %% Student's snack -- cramberries -- Raymond D. Love %% Students may like nitrates, they're cheaper than day rates. %% Students who obtain an A for a course will claim that the instructor is a great teacher. -- M. M. Johnston %% Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it's worse when they are wearing dark glasses and have streamers and ornaments in their antlers because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot. -- Ellen DeGeneris %% Stult's Report: Our problems are mostly behind us. What we have to do now is fight the solutions. %% Stupid and Dangerous %% Stupid country song titles #10: "It's commode huggin' time in the valley" %% Stupid country song titles #11: "If you want to keep the beer real cold, put it next to my ex-wife's heart" %% Stupid country song titles #12: "My wife ran off with my best friend, and I miss him" %% Stupid country song titles #13: "Don't cut any wood baby, 'cause I'll be comin' home with a load" %% Stupid country song titles #14: "I loved her face, but I left her behind for you" %% Stupid country song titles #1: "It took a hell of a man to take my Ann, but it sure didn't take him long" %% Stupid country song titles #2: "She ain't much to see, but she looks good thru the bottom of a glass" %% Stupid country song titles #3: "I wouldn't take you to a dog fight, even if I thought you could win" %% Stupid country song titles #4: "Don't cry down my back baby, you might rust my spurs" %% Stupid country song titles #5: "If fingerprints showed up on skin, I wonder who's I'd find on you" %% Stupid country song titles #6: "If you get the feeling that I don't love you, feel again" %% Stupid country song titles #7: "I'm ashamed to be here, but not ashamed enough to leave" %% Stupid country song titles #8: "I've been flushed from the bathroom of your heart" %% Stupid country song titles #9: "It's the bottle against the bible in the battle for daddy's soul" %% Stupid people shouldn't breed. %% Stupid, n.: Losing $25 on the game and $25 on the instant replay. %% Stupidity cometh from using it and not knowing that it is there. %% Stupidity got us into this mess -- why can't it get us out? %% Stupidity is not an impeachable offense. %% Stupidity is the only universal capital crime. %% Stupidity may be masked by sincerity, but it is still stupidity. %% Stupids: n. Term used by {samurai} for the {suit}s who employ them; succinctly expresses an attitude at least as common, though usually better disguised, among other subcultures of hackers. There may be intended reference here to an SF story originally published in 1952 but much anthologized since, Mark Clifton's `Star, Bright'. In it, a super-genius child classifies humans into a very few `Brights' like herself, a huge majority of `Stupids', and a minority of `Tweens', the merely ordinary geniuses. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Style may not be the answer, but at least it's a workable alternative. %% Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique. -- Edward Abbey %% Subject to CAB approval. %% Subject: New Yorker Humor From Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "You're strapped into a cramped cockpit staring at a row of gauges on a metallic-black dashboard. Cruising at your top speed of about 240 mph, you know you've got another six hours of flying time left before you reach your target over the battle-torn Pacific. You're hoping the gunnery mates facing the sky and protecting your back will be ready if a squadron of German fighters pops out from behind the clouds." New Yorker comment: "You're clearly lost." %% Subject: Performance Appraisal Time... The scene: in a vast desert, a cowboy faces his horse. Cowboy: "Well, you've been a pretty good hoss, I guess. Hardworkin'. Not the fastest critter I ever come acrost, but..." Horse: "No, stupid, not feedBACK. I said I wanted a feedBAG. %% Subject: longest turnaround time in the world "Rumor has it that when they closed down the 7094 at MIT in 1973, they found a low-priority job that had been submitted in 1967 and had not yet been run." %% Subpoena, n.: From the root "sub", below, and the Latin "poena" for male organ or penis. Therefore, "below the penis" or "by the balls." %% Substantial penalty for early withdrawal. %% Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way before it is understood. %% Subvert the dominant paradigm! %% Success always necessitates a degree of ruthlessness. Given the choice of friendship or success, I'd probably choose success. -- Sting (Gordon Summer), 1980 %% Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view. %% Success can be insured only by devising a defense against the contingency plan. -- Charles P. Boyle %% Success goes to your head, failure to your heart. %% Success in management -- at any level -- depends on the ability to pick the right people for the right jobs. %% Success in marriage is not so much finding the right person as it is being the right person. %% Success is a journey, not a destination. %% Success is being able to hire someone to mow the lawn while you play golf for exercise. %% Success is doing what you like to do and making a living at it. %% Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get. %% Success is just a matter of luck, just ask any failure. %% Success is like a fart -- only your own smells nice. -- James P. Hogan %% Success is not a harbor but a voyage with its own perils to the spirit. The game of life is to come up a winner, to be a success, or to achieve what we set out to do. Yet there is always the danger of failing as a human being. The lesson that most of us on this voyage never learn, but can never quite forget, is that to win is sometimes to lose. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% Success is overrated. Incompetence is what we should revere -- it marks us off from animals. -- Stephen Pile %% Success is something I will dress for when I get there, and not until. %% Success is the brand on the brow of the man who has aimed too low. -- John Masefield (1878-1967) %% Success is the child of audacity. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% Success is the result of behavior that completely contradicts the usual expectations about the behavior of a successful person. -- Felix R. Paturi %% Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf", 1933 %% Success isn't how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started. %% Success lies in achieving the top of the food chain. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% Success makes us intolerant of failure, and failure makes us intolerant of success. -- William Feather %% Success often hinges on choosing a reliable partner. -- Remus %% Success provides more opportunities to say things than the number of things a pundit has worth saying. -- Douglas Pike %% Success seems to be that which forms the distinction between confidence and conceit. Nelson, when young was piqued at not being noticed in a certain paragraph of the newspapers, which detailed an action wherein he had assisted. "But never mind," said he, "I will one day have a gazette of my own." -- Colton %% Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good. -- Joe Paterno %% Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue. -- Seneca %% Successful research impedes further successful research. -- Keith J. Pendred %% Successophobia: The fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one will no longer have one's childish needs catered to. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring. %% Such a foolish notion, that war is called devotion, when the greatest warriors are the ones who stand for peace. %% Such a house broke! So noble a master fallen! All gone and not One friend to take his fortune by the arm And go along with him. -- William Shakespeare %% Such evil deeds could religion prompt. -- Titus Lucretius Carus %% Such labored nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze the unlearned, and make the learned smile. -- Alexander Pope (Front cover of E&S C Style Guide) %% Such language in a high-class establishment like this! %% Such monsters do not exist in this world. %% Such stuff drams are made of. -- Sleeping Beauty %% Sudden prayers make God jump. %% Suddenly a sinister, wraithlike figure, cloaked and hooded, appears seeming to float in the air before you. In a low, almost inaudible voice he says, "I welcome you to the ranks of the chosen of Zork. You have persisted through many trials and tests and have overcome them all. One such as yourself is fit to join even the implementers!" He then raises his oaken staff and, chuckling, drifts away like a wisp of smoke, his laughter fading in the distance. %% Suddenly one of the Vault's guards enters! %% Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realizes he has come to the seminar without his duck ... %% Suddenly, as you wait in the dark, you begin to feel somewhat disoriented. The feeling passes, but something seems different. As you regain your composure, the cloaked figure appears before you and says, "You are now ready to face the ultimate challenge of Zork. Should you wish to do this somewhat more quickly in the future, you will be given a magic phrase which will at any time transport you by magic to this point. To select the phrase, say INCANT, and you will be told your own magic phrase to use by saying INCANT, Good luck, and choose wisely!" %% Suddenly, the Guardians realize that someone is trying to sneak by them in the structure. They awake and, in perfect unison, hammer the box and its contents (including you) to a pulp. Satisfied, they resume their posts. %% Suddenly, the dungeon collapses. %% Suddenly, the rainbow appears to become solid and, I venture, walkable (I think the giveaway was the stairs and bannister). %% Suddenly, the room appears to have become very large. %% Sufficient monies to the job correctly the first time are usually not available; however, ample funds are much more easily obtained for repeated major redesigns. %% Suffocating together ... would create heroic camaraderie. -- Khan Noonian Singh, "Space Seed," stardate 3142.8 %% Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier. %% Suicide is simply a case of mistaken identity. %% Suicide is the sincerest form of self-criticism. -- Donald Kaul %% Suicide's an alternative ------------------------ Sick of people no one's real Sick of chicks they're all bitches Sick of you you're hip Sick of life it sucks Suicide's an alternative Sick of trying what's the point Sick of talking no one listens Sick of listening it's all lies Sick of thinking just end up confused Sick of moving never get nowhere Sick of myself don't want to live Sick and tired and no one cares Sick of life it sucks Suicide's an alternative Sick of politics for the rich Sick of power only oppresses Sick of government full of tyrants Sick of school total brainwash Sick of music top 40 sucks Sick of myself don't want to live Sick and tired and no one cares Sick of life it sucks Sick of life it sucks Sick and tired no one cares Sick of myself don't want to live Sick of living gonna die %% Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it. -- Edward Abbey %% Suicide ------- Once I wished to end it all. To take the coward's way out of life. But I was too much the coward to face Death so boldly. But now, even though 'tis not easier, I can face life, because I have Life. And now I fear neither Death with its known mysteries, nor Life with its unknown miseries and joys, But I still don't like both all the time. They simply are. To be endured, to be enjoyed. Life is a bittersweet cup; the breath of Heaven and Hell. Is an eternal song of rapturous glories and unspeakable horrors. I will drink my cup to and 'til its final drop, whene'er that be. And my cup is as empty or a full as I let it be. -- (c) 1988 kim dong hwan c60a-1et@web.berkeley.edu %% Sum quod eris. %% Sum quod eris. (I am what you will be.) %% Sumo Wrestling: survival of the fattest. %% Sun in the night, everyone is together, Ascending into the heavens, life is forever. -- Brand X (Moroccan Roll/Sun in the Night) %% Sunbathing: A fry in the ointment. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. %% Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius %% Supercomputer users do it in parallel %% Supercomputer: Turns CPU-bound problem into I/O-bound problem. -- Ken Batcher %% Superior ability breeds superior ambition. -- Spock, "Space Seed," stardate 3141.9 %% Superior firepower is an invaluable tool when entering into negotiations. -- Gen. George S. Patton %% Superman does it faster than a speeding bullet. %% Superman gets into Clark Kent's pants every morning. %% Supernovae are a Blast %% Superstition renders a man a fool, and scepticism makes him mad. -- Fielding %% Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a-begging. -- Martin Luther %% Supervisor (drawing a graph): "This function has no nodes." (Pause) "How does it smell?" %% Support Bingo, keep Grandma off the streets. %% Support Mental Health. Or I'll kill you. %% Support bacteria -- it's the only culture some people have! %% Support free enterprise -- legalize prostitution. %% Support free trade--smuggle! %% Support organizations can always prove success by showing service to someone ... not necessarily you. -- Douglas Evelyn %% Support public welfare, give someone a new leach on life. %% Support sustained spaceflight: fight the soi-disant "Planetary Society"! -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% Support the American Kidney Foundation. Don't wear your motorcycle helmet. %% Support the Girl Scouts! (Today's Brownie is tomorrow's Cookie!) %% Support the helpless victims of computers. %% Support the rich. %% Support the right of unborn males to bear arms! -- A public service announcement from Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic Church, and the National Rifle Association %% Support wildlife -- vote for an orgy. %% Support your local Search and Rescue unit -- get lost. %% Support your local church or synagogue. Worship at Bank of America. %% Support your local dentist, eat a Hershey bar today. %% Support your local hooker! Play rugby! %% Support your local maillist: Give to the March of Electrons %% Support your local police force -- steal!! %% Support your local thieve's guild--leave your doors unlocked %% Support your right to bare arms! -- A message from the National Short-Sleeved Shirt Association %% 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 %% Suppose that there is something which a person cannot understand. He happens to notice the similarity of this something to some other thing which he understands quite well. By comparing them he may come to understand the thing which he could not understand up to that moment. If his understanding turns out to be appropriate and nobody else has ever come to such an understanding, he can claim that his thinking was really creative. -- Hideki Yukawa %% Supposedly, if two people stare into one another's eyes for 60 seconds or more, they will presently be either fighting or making love. %% Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. -- William Butler Yeats %% Sure God created man before woman.. but then you always make a rough draft before The Final Masterpiece. %% Sure eating yogurt will improve your sex life. People know that if you'll eat that stuff, you'll eat anything. %% Sure he's sharp as a razor ... he's a two-dimensional pinhead! %% Sure is a damn ugly nothing. -- Geordi about Nagilum, "Where Silence has Lease", stardate 42193.6 %% Sure it's good, but who's gonna care next year? %% Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% Sure, Reagan has promised to take senility tests. But what if he forgets? %% Sure, and of course I would vote for a woman for president! Quite naturally, we wouldn't have to pay her so much. %% Surely every human being ought to attain to the dignity of the unit. Surely it is worth while to be one, and to feel that the census of the universe would be incomplete without counting you. Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and all depths; that there are no walls or fences, or prohibited places, or sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that you hold all in fee, and upon no condition, and by no tenure, whatsoever; that in the world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation, and from the ignorant tyranny of majorities. Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. Surely it is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigotry can devise no prison, no dungeon, no cell in which for one instant to confine a thought; that ideas cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, nor burned with fire. Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all worlds and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), "The Free Soul" %% Surely happiness is reflective like the light of heaven; and every countenance, bright with smiles and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror, transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and evershining benevolence. -- Washington Irving %% Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts: The sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above, seems to impart a quiet to the mind. -- Edwards %% Surf's up, everybody to the beach! %% Surfers do it standing up. %% Surgeons do it incisively. %% Surgeries: Appendectomy, T&A, and bilateral breast bi-zippies. %% Surprise due today. Also the rent. %% Surprise your boss. Get to work on time. %% Surprise! You are the lucky winner of random I.R.S. Audit! Just type in your name and social security number. Please remember that leaving the room is punishable under law: Name # %% Surrender Dorothy %% Surveillance should precede salientation. %% Survey taker to resident: Do you realize that that choice puts you in the two- percent lunatic fringe? -- Bernhardt %% Survival Pack, aircraft, FT107/35, All Purpose, Strategic Air Command: 1 45 caliber automatic, 2 boxes ammunition. 4 days concentrated emergency rations. 1 drug issue containing: antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizing pills. 1 miniature combination Russian phrase book and bible. 100 dollars in Rubles, 100 dollars in gold, 9 packs of chewing gum, 1 issue of prophylactics, 3 lipsticks, 3 pair of nylon stockings. -- From Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb %% Survivulousness: The tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last remaining person on earth. "I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman. -- Edward Abbey %% Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind. -- William Shakespeare %% Suzie COBOL: /soo'zee koh'bol/ 1. [IBM: prob. from Frank Zappa's `Suzy Creamcheese'] n. A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain English. Also (fashionable among personkind wishing to avoid accusations of sexism) `Sammy Cobol' or (in some non-IBM circles) `Cobol Charlie'. 2. [proposed] Meta-name for any {code grinder}, analogous to {J. Random Hacker}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Swahili, n.: The language used by the National Enquirer to print their retractions. -- Johnny Hart %% Swap error, you lose your mind. %% Swap read error, you lose your core image. %% Swap read error. You lose your mind. %% Sweat is the mortal enemy of modern civilization. %% Sweater, n.: A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly. %% Sweer's Impossibility Theorem: Nothing can be both completely general and internally consistent at the same time. %% Sweet April showers do spring May flowers. -- Thomas Tusser %% Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, And good in everything. -- William Shakespeare %% Sweet dreams are made of these; who am I to disagree? %% Sweet dreams are made of this? %% Sweet is the hour of rest, Pleasant the wind's low sigh, And the gleaming of the west, And the turf whereon we lie. -- Mrs. Hemans %% Sweet limitation brings good fortune. Going brings esteem. %% Sweet sixteen is beautiful Bess, And her voice is changing - from "No" to "Yes". %% Sweet speaking oft a currish heart reclaims. -- Sidney %% Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! -- Captain Ahab, "Moby Dick" %% Swimmers do it in the water. %% Swimmers do it under water. %% Swimmers do it with strokes. %% Swimming is not allowed in this dungeon. %% Swimming is too much like...bathing. -- Worf, "Conspiracy", stardate 41775.5 %% Swinehood hath no remedy. %% Swipple's Rule of Order: He who shouts the loudest has the floor. %% Swish, two, three, four! Swish, two, three, four! %% Switch Blade Murderer Survives Electric Chair For Eleventh Time. %% Synch code - SOS from the Titanic -- Data communications glossary %% Syndi: "Hey, aren't you at least going to rough him [Marshall] up?" Policeman: "Maybe later, Mam." -- "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% Syndi: "'Revenge of the Corn Critters' is a good monster movie sequel. It's got all the gore of the original plus some romance, but never gets all mushy [so] as to gunk it all up. You won't be sorry." Marshall: "Since when did you become such a cinephile?" Syndi: "You better watch your mouth." -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% Syndi: "Hey Mom, what di you think of my drawing?" Mom: "Ah, well, I'm not quite sure. Is it upside down, abstract, autobiograhpical?" -- "Who's Who", Eerie Indiana %% Syndi: "The Wilson twins give it two fingers up." Simon: "Which finger?" [laughs] -- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana %% Synonym: The word you use when you don't know how to spell the one you want to use. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% SysVile: /sis-vi:l'/ n. See {Missed'em-five}. %% System Crash (A)bort (R)etry (T)hrowup %% System Manager: A fat man with black hair and a beard who knows everything and does nothing %% System checkpoint complete. %% System crashes and burns. %% System going down at 1:45 this afternoon for disk crashing. %% System going down at 5 this afternoon to install scheduler bug. %% System going down at noon for disk crashing party. %% System going down in 5 minutes. %% System programmers do it in overlays. %% System restarting, wait... %% System root file corrupted - need to reboot %% System/3! System/3! See how it runs! See how it runs! Its monitor loses so totally! It runs all its programs in RPG! It's made by our favorite monopoly! System/3! %% Systemantics Basic Definition: Systems in general work poorly or not at all. %% Systemantics Functionary's Fallacy: People in systems do not do what the system says they are doing. %% Systemantics Generalized Uncertainty Principles: Complicated systems produce unexpected outputs. The total behaviour of large systems cannot be predicted. A large system, produced by expanding the dimensions of a smaller system, does not behave like the smaller system. %% Systemantics Law of Growth: Systems tend to grow, and as they grow they encroach. Alt. formulation - Systems tend to expand to fill the known universe.) %% Systemantics failure theorems: The crucial variables are discovered by accident. When a fail-safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe. %% Systems Programmers do it with pointers. %% Systems display antics. -- Dr. John Gall %% Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub-systems and so on ad infinitum -- which is why we're always starting over. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% Systems in general work very poorly or not at all. -- Dr. John Gall %% Systems people do it with a small, but clean, interface. %% Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult. -- R. S. Barton %% Systems programmers just want to have fun. %% Systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach. -- Dr. John Gall %% T [from LISP terminology for "true"] 1. Yes. Usage: used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the "-P" convention). See NIL. 2. See TIME T. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% T sdel-lal groo-boo-yoo oh-sheeb-ku. Xa-Xa-Xa! %% T-shirt in the 21st century: "Disco STILL sucks!" %% T-shirt of the Week: I'm not excited, I'm cold! %% T.V. O.D. %% T: One big monster, he called TROLL. He don't rock, and he don't roll; Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies. He just Love To Eat Them Roguies. -- The Roguelet's ABC %% T: /T/ 1. [from LISP terminology for `true'] Yes. Used in reply to a question (particularly one asked using the `-P' convention). In LISP, the constant T means `true', among other things. Some hackers use `T' and `NIL' instead of `Yes' and `No' almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. When a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may well respond `T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead. As it happens, most hackers (particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants) like tea at least as well as coffee --- so it is not that big a problem. 2. See {time T} (also {since time T equals minus infinity}). 3. [techspeak] In transaction-processing circles, an abbreviation for the noun `transaction'. 4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of {tee}. 5. A dialect of {LISP} developed at Yale. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TABER'S LAW OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH: If you can't understand it, name it. %% TABER'S LAW OF SUPERMARKETS: The shorter the line, the slower it moves. %% TACKY: Serving grape kool-aid at religious functions. %% TAIL RECURSION n. See TAIL RECURSION. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TAILFINS!! ...click... %% TAILORS make it fit. %% TAKE FORCEFUL ACTION: Do something that should have been done a long time ago. %% TALK MODE See COM MODE. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TANK: A means of transportation the Soviet army uses to visit its friends. %% TANSTAAFL %% TANSTAAFL: /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert A. Heinlein's classic `The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at an ugly design requirement or the prospect of using an unpleasantly {heavyweight} technique. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see Appendix B). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TAPPING? You POLITICIANS! Don't you realize that the END of the "Wash Cycle" is a TREASURED MOMENT for most people?! %% TASTE n. (primarily MIT-DMS) The quality in programs which tends to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also, TASTY, TASTEFUL, TASTEFULNESS. "This feature comes in N tasty flavors." Although TASTEFUL and FLAVORFUL are essentially synonyms, TASTE and FLAVOR are not. %% TAURUS (Apr.20 - May 20) Take advantage of this opportunity to get a little extra sleep, because you're going to miss the bus again today anyway. You will decide to lose weight today, just like yesterday. %% TAX OFFICE: Den of inequity. %% TAXI DRIVERS do it all over town. %% TAXIDERMIST: A man who mounts animals. %% TAXIDERMISTS mount anything. %% TAYLOR'S 2nd LAW OF ADMINISTRATION: If a program isn't working, expand it. %% TAYLOR'S LAW OF REGULATORY AGENCIES: For every action there is an equal and opposite government program. %% TCB: /T-C-B/ [IBM] n. 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to neglect. Compare {heisenbug}. Not to be confused with: 2. Trusted Computing Base, an `official' jargon term from the {Orange Book}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TCP/IP: handling tomorrow's loads today OSI: handling yesterday's loads someday -- Henery Spencer %% TEAMWORK: Having someone to blame. %% TEAR LEATHER: To become excited, as in the sentence "Robin Hood tore his leather jerkin' off." %% TEARING OFF A QUICKY: Gunning the jump. %% TECO (tee'koe) [acronym for Text Editor and COrrector] 1. n. A text editor developed at MIT, and modified by just about everybody. If all the dialects are included, TECO might well be the single most prolific editor in use. Noted for its powerful pseudo-programming features and its incredibly hairy syntax. 2. v. To edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite forms; sometimes used to mean "to edit" even when not using TECO! Usage: rare at SAIL, where most people wouldn't touch TECO with a TENEX pole. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TECO (tee'koe) [cont.] [acronym for Text Editor and COrrector] [Historical note: DEC grabbed an ancient version of MIT TECO many years ago when it was still a TTY-oriented editor. By now, TECO at MIT is highly display-oriented and is actually a language for writing editors, rather than an editor. Meanwhile, the outside world's various versions of TECO remain almost the same as the MIT version of ten years ago. DEC recently tried to discourage its use, but an underground movement of sorts kept it alive.] [Since this note was written I found out that DEC tried to force their hackers by administrative decision to use a hacked up and generally lobotomized version of SOS instead of TECO, and they revolted. - MRC] -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TECO Madness: a moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret. -- Dave Moon %% TECO Madness: a moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret. -- Dave Moon Emacs: a lifetime of convenience, a moment of regret. %% TECO: /tee'koh/ obs. 1. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite variations (see below). 2. vt.,obs. To edit even when TECO is *not* the editor being used! This usage is rare and now primarily historical. 2. [originally an acronym for `[paper] Tape Editor and COrrector'; later, `Text Editor and COrrector'] n. A text editor developed at MIT and modified by just about everybody. With all the dialects included, TECO might have been the most prolific editor in use before {EMACS}, to which it was directly ancestral. Noted for its powerful programming-language-like features and its unspeakably hairy syntax. It is literally the case that every string of characters is a valid TECO program (though probably not a useful one); one common hacker game used to be mentally working out what the TECO commands corresponding to human names did. As an example of TECO's obscurity, here is a TECO program that takes a list of names such as: Loser, J. Random Quux, The Great Dick, Moby sorts them alphabetically according to surname, and then puts the surname last, removing the comma, to produce the following: Moby Dick J. Random Loser The Great Quux The program is [1 J^P$L$$ J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FX1 @F^B $K :L I $ G1 L>$$ (where ^B means `Control-B' (ASCII 0000010) and $ is actually an {alt} or escape (ASCII 0011011) character). In fact, this very program was used to produce the second, sorted list from the first list. The first hack at it had a {bug}: GLS (the author) had accidentally omitted the `@' in front of `F^B', which as anyone can see is clearly the {Wrong Thing}. It worked fine the second time. There is no space to describe all the features of TECO, but it may be of interest that `^P' means `sort' and `J<.-Z; ... L>' is an idiomatic series of commands for `do once for every line'. In mid-1991, TECO is pretty much one with the dust of history, having been replaced in the affections of hackerdom by {EMACS}. Descendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty PDP-11 operating systems, however, and ports of the more advanced MIT versions remain the focus of some antiquarian interest. See also {retrocomputing}, {write-only language}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TELEPHONE CO. EMPLOYEES let their fingers do the walking. %% TELEVISION -- movies where people don't step on your feet. MOVIES -- television where people don't interrupt with unexpected visits. %% TELLERS can handle all deposits and withdrawals. %% TELNET: /tel'net/ vt. To communicate with another Internet host using the {TELNET} protocol (usually using a program of the same name). TOPS-10 people used the word IMPCOM, since that was the program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN /T-N/. "I usually TN over to SAIL just to read the AP News." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TEN COMMANDMENTS, or Rules and Conditions: 1. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not make unto thee graven images, to bow down thyself before them; save and except they be of an Eagle, or a flag, or something similarly patriotic. 2. Though shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; but he shall be held guiltless who taketh it to put it upon his currency, and likewise he who sweareth falsely by it in matters of National Security. 3. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it wholly miserable for thyself and thy neighbors. 4. Honor thy father and thy mother; but Medicare is going too far. 5. Thou shalt not kill the innocent babe in the womb. After it's born -- open season. 6. Thou shalt not commit adultery, women especially. 7. Thou shalt steal. 8. Thou shalt declare for business against big labor. 9. Thou shalt not call up thy neighbor's wife. 10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house; but thou shalt work thy buns off, or better yet cause others to work their buns off for thy sake, and thereby acquire a house as thy neighbor shall covet of thee. -- NOT THE BIBLE, Tony Hendra and Sean Kelly %% TENENBAUM'S LAW OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS: The most interesting results only happen once. %% TENNIS PLAYERS have fuzzy balls. %% TENSE adj. Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly bummed, but sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever display routine by Mike Kazar: "This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes. Much thanks to Craig Everhart and James Gosling for inspiring this hack attack." A tense programmer is one who produces tense code. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TERPRI (tur'pree) [from the LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP) function to start a new line of output] v. To output a CRLF (q.v.). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TEUTONIC: Not enough gin. %% TEX is potentially the most significant invention in typesetting in this century. It introduces a standard language for computer typography, and in terms of importance could rank near the introduction of the Gutenberg press. -- Gordon Bell %% TEXAN: A wet-back that didn't make Oklahoma. %% THE 1988 CAMPAIGN "Huh?" AWARD: "George Bush has the experience, and with me the future -- a future committed to our family, a future committed to the freedom." -- Senator Dan Quayle %% THE BEATLES: Paul McCartney's old back-up band. %% THE BEST THING TO SPEND ON YOUR CHILDREN IS TIME %% THE BLUE VAX - World War I medal honoring high-powered computing. Also (modern): a VAX made by Smurfs. %% THE COURSE OF PROGRESS: Most things get steadily worse. %% THE COURT: Now, as we begin, I must ask you to banish all present information and prejudice from your minds, if you have any. -- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court" %% THE DAILY PLANET SUPERMAN SAVES DESSERT! Plans to "Eat it later". -- Ambush Bug %% THE FUNDAMENTAL FAILURE-MODE THEOREM: Complex systems usually operate in failure mode. %% THE GROCERY BAG LAW: The candy bar you planned to eat on the way home from the market is hidden at the bottom of the grocery bag. %% THE HACKER'S PHILOSOPHY: Let the world pass in its time-ridden race; never get caught in its snare. Remember, the only acceptable case for being in any particular place is having no business there. %% THE IBM POLLYANNA PRINCIPLE: Machines should work. People should think. TRUTH ABOUT THE IBM POLLYANNA PRINCIPLE: Machines don't often work, people don't often think. %% THE LAST LAW: If several things could hae gone wrong that haven't, hindsight will tell that they should have. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #14 -- VALGOL VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y*KNOW. Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTALLY operators. Other operators include the "California booleans", FERSURE and NOWAY. VALGOL is characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message GAG ME WITH A SPOON! A successful compile may be termed MAXIMALLY AWESOME! %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17 -- DOGO Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Obedience Training, DOGO heralds a new era of computer-literate pets. DOGO commands include SIT, STAY, HEEL, and ROLL OVER. An innovative feature of DOGO is "puppy graphics", a small cocker spaniel that occasionally leaves a deposit as he travels across the screen. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #19 -- REAGAN This language was also developed in California, but is now widely used in Washington D.C. It is the current subset of the international bureaucratic language known as DOUBLESPEAK. Commands include REVENUE_ENHANCEMENT, STOCKMAN, CAP_WEINBERGER, MALCOMB_BALDRIDGE, CABINET, CHOP_WOOD, LAXALT and SCENARIO. WATT and BURFORD have been removed from the commands while there is a current effort to add MEESE. The operating system used is NEW_RIGHT and the designated memory is THE_RANCH. The compile SCENARIO is a compile with NANCY followed by a link with BONZO resulting in a SNOOZE. COMMIES (program bugs) are removed with the GRENADA command. A REAGAN program commences with LANDSLIDE and terminates with SENILITY. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #20 -- RENE Named after the famous French philosopher and mathematician Rene DesCartes, RENE is a language used for artificial intelligence. The language is being developed at the Chicago Center of Machine Politics and Programming under a grant from the Jane Byrne Victory Fund. A spokesman described the language as "Just as great as dis [sic] city of ours." The center is very pleased with progress to date. They say they have almost succeeded in getting a VAX to think. However, sources inside the organization say that each time the machine fails to think it ceases to exist. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #21 -- VALGOL From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL and Y*KNOW. Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and +TOTALLY operators. Other operators include the California Booleans, AX and NOWAY. Repetitions of code are handled in FOR - SURE loops. VALGOL is characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message: GAG ME WITH A SPOON!! %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #5 -- LAIDBACK LAIDBACK was developed at the (now defunct) Marin County Center for T'ai Chi, Mellowness and Computer Programming, as an alternative to the more intense languages of nearby Silicon Valley. The Center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while they worked. Unfortunately, few programmers could survive there long, since the Center outlawed pizza and RC Cola in favor of bean curd and Perrier. Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and nonthreatening language. For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message SORRY MAN, I CAN'T DEAL BEHIND THAT. %% THE MX IS GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY. One important reason we have a Defense Department is that when we give it money, it spends it, which creates jobs, whereas if we left the money in the hands of civilians, we don't know what they'd do with it. Probably put it in open trenches and set it on fire. The MX will create an especially large number of jobs because of the number of warheads it carries. It carries a total of 10 warheads. This creates a great deal of employment, because you have your Warhead Makers, your Warhead Lifters, your Persons Who Tap the Warheads Gently with Rubber Mallets to Wedge Them All Snugly Into the Nose Cone, your Persons Who Just Walk Around Playing Soothing Cassettes by Recording Artists such as Perry Como So We Don't Have Any More Episodes Where a Worker Who is Experiencing Some Strain Sticks a Warhead in the Employee Cafeteria Microwave and Sets It On Roast, etc. We are talking about a lot of jobs. -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against Political Fallout" %% THE NEW RIGHT: A javelin team that elects to receive. %% THE PERFECT WOMAN: Four feet tall, no teeth and a flat head so you can rest your drink. %% THE PESSIMIST'S GUIDE TO ENGINEER-TALK: What They Say: "So we've eliminated XXX." What They Mean: "It's probably XXX, but it's bloody hard to get at." %% THE PESSIMIST'S GUIDE TO ENGINEER-TALK: What They Say: "That's interesting." What They Mean: "Shit! I've never seen anything remotely like that before." %% THE PESSIMIST'S GUIDE TO ENGINEER-TALK: What They Say: "We've noticed some failure evidence" What They Mean: "Something's burning..." %% THE PETER PRINCIPLES: 1. In a hierarchy, individuals tent to rise to their level of incompetence. 2. The cream rises until it sours. 3. For every job that exists in the world, there is someone, somewhere, who can't do it. Given enough promotions, that incompetent will get the job. 4. All useful work is done by individuals who haven't yet reached their level of incompetence. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% THE RAVENOUS BUGBLATTER BEAST OF TRAAL: A mind-bogglingly stupid animal. It assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very very ravenous... -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% THE SMURFS AND THE CARBON-DIOXIDE INDUSTRIAL LASER (1987) A sequel to THE SMURFS AND THE CUISINART (1986). The lovable and somewhat mangled surviving Smurfs encounter the lovable piece of high-tech welding equipment, which teaches them to become greasy smoke. Heartwarming fun for the entire family. %% THE SMURFS AND THE CUISINART (1986) The lovable (to the sort of people who like Care Bears and saccharine greeting cards) little blue Smurfs encounter the lovable (to Yuppies) small kitchen appliance, which invites them to play. The Smurfs learn a valuable (if sometimes fatal) lesson. %% THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS 1 - A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2 - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3 - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. -- Isaac Asimov," Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058" %% THE TRUTH ABOUT THEORY Y: Self starters will not. %% THE UNSPEAKABLE LAW: As soon as you mention something... ...if it's good, it will go away, ...if it'S bad, it'll happen. %% THE VAX OF LIFE - Everything you always wanted to know about the birds and the bees (and the bugs in the VAX). %% THE WATERGATE PRINCIPLE: Government corruption is always reported in the past tense. %% THEED'S 1st LAW OF MANAGEMENT -- It dosen't exist. %% THEED'S FOURTH LAW OF MANAGEMENT: Some people manage by the book while being completely ignorant of who wrote the book or what's in it. %% THEED'S FOURTH LAW OF MANAGEMENT: The inefficiency and stupidity of the staff is a subset of the inefficiency and stupidity of the management. %% THEIR CLICHES ARE DOWN %% THEORY: System of ideas meant to explain something, chosen with a view to originality, controversialism, incomprehensibility, and how good it will look in print. %% THIESSMAN'S LAW OF GASTRONOMY: The hardness of the butter is directly proportional to the softness of the roll. %% THIRD LAW OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING: If a program is useful, it will have to be changed. %% THIRD LAW OF THE MARKETPLACE: Weekend specials, aren't. %% THIS IS YOUR BRAIN. ___ /(()\ \__\| THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON THE INTERNET. ___ +-----+ /(()\ | VAX | \__\|===+_____+ %% THIS definitely takes, eats and shits the cake. %% THOM'S THIRD LAW OF MACHINES: If it jams, force it; If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. %% THOREAU'S THEORIES ON ADAPTION 1. After designing a routine to go around a bug, the system will be revised and the bug removed, leaving you with a useless routine. 2. Efforts in improving a computers user friendliness often ends up improving ones computer literacy 3. "Thats not a bug! Thats a FEATURE!" %% THORNY: A thailor at thea. %% THRASH v. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Swapping systems which are overloaded waste most of their time moving pages into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation), and are therefore said to thrash. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% THREE-BAG UGLY: That's when you put one bag over her head, one bag over your head in case her's falls off, and one over the dog's to keep it from howling. %% TILLIS' LAW OF ORGANIZATION: If you file it, you'll know where it is, but never need it. If you don't file it, you'll need it and never find it. %% TIME T n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1. "We'll meet on campus at time T or at Louie's at time T+1." 2. SINCE (OR AT) TIME T EQUALS MINUS INFINITY: A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TINGLER'S LAW OF MONITARY EQUALIZATION: A fool and your money are soon partners. %% TINSTAFL!--There is no such thing as free love. -- Solomon Short %% TIRED of calculating components of vectors? Displacements along direction of force getting you down? Well, now there's help. Try the amazing "Dot-Product", the fast, easy way many professionals have used for years and is now available to YOU through this special offer. Three out of five engineering consultants recommend "Dot-Product" for their clients who use vector products. Mr. Gumbinowitz, mechanical engineer, in a hidden-camera interview... "Dot-Product really works! Calculating Z-axis force components has never been easier." Yes, you too can take advantage of the amazing properties of Dot-Product. Use it to calculate forces, velocities, displacements, and virtually any vector components. How much would you pay for it? But wait, it also calculates the work done in Joules, Ergs, and, yes, even BTU's. Divide the Dot-Product by the magnitude of the vectors and it becomes an instant angle calculator! Now, how much would you pay? All this can be yours for the low, low price of $19.95!! But that's not all! If you order before midnight, you'll also get "Famous Numbers of Famous People" as a bonus gift, absolutely free! Yes, you'll get Avogadro's number, Planck's, Euler's, Boltzmann's, and many, many, more!! Call 1-800-DOT-6000. Operators are standing by. That number again... 1-800-DOT-6000. Supplies are limited, so act now. This offer is not available through stores and is void where prohibited by law. %% TLA: /T-L-A/ [Three-Letter Acronym] n. 1. Self-describing abbreviation for a species with which computing terminology is infested. 2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this looser usage argue that not all TLAs have three letters, just as not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of `ETLA' (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms. The term `SFLA' (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym) has also been reported. See also {YABA}. The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TMRC: /tmerk'/ n. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 `Dictionary of the TMRC Language' compiled by Peter Samson included several terms which became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. {foo} and {frob}). By 1962, TMRC's legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity (and has grown in the thirty years since; all the features described here are still present). The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were {scram switch}es located at numerous places around the room that could be thwacked if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock on the dispatch, board, which was itself something of a wonder in those bygone days before cheap LEDS and seven-segment displays (no model railroad can begin to approximate the scale distances between towns and stations, so model railroad timetables assume a fast clock so that it seems to take about the right amount of time for a train to complete its journey). When someone hit a scram switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word `FOO'; at TMRC the scram switches are therefore called `foo switches'. Steven Levy, in his book `Hackers' (see the Bibliography in {appendix C}), gives a stimulating account of those early years. TMRC's Power and Signals group included most of the early PDP-1 hackers and the people who later bacame the core of the MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that connection is still very much alive, and this lexicon accordingly includes a number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC Dictionary. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TNT Transistor : This type of transistors has been considered the most ingenious creation since the invention of the PNP transistors. This kind of transistors behaves identical to the PNP transistors, except when the bias current exceeds a certain amount, at which point the transistors would simply explode with the energy the equivalent of 15 lbs of TNT. Modern Combat Magazine recommands the secret installation of this transistors in the amplifiers of neighbors who always play their stereo too loud. %% TO THE CLASS OF 1987: "Unfortunately, a full 16% of you will be functionally illiterate. I'm afraid you'll have a hard row to hoe in the job market; after all, there are only so many staff positions at USA Today." -- A. Whitney Brown %% TO VAX ELOQUENT - The act of preparing a glossary for the VAX. %% TODAY: A nice place to visit, but you can't stay here for long. %% TODD'S POLITICAL PRINCIPLES: 1. No matter what they're telling you, it's not the truth. 2. No matter what they're talking about, they're talking about money. %% TOGG'S LAW OF ABSENCE When you do things right, nobody will be there to see it. %% TOM GIBB'S LAWS OF UNRELIABILITY 1. At the source of every error which is blamed on a computer you will find at least 2 human errors, one of which being the one who blamed it on the computer. 2. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable 3. Undetectable system errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors which by definition are limited 4. Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done. %% TOM'S LAW: A brain is as strong as it's weakest think. %% TONY RANDALL! Is YOUR life a PATIO of FUN?? %% TOOL v.i. To work; to study. See HACK (def #9). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TOP PSYCHICS CONCUR THAT ALIENS REVEALED SECRET OF MYSTERY WONDER DIET TO ELVIS BEFORE HE DIED!! %% TOP TEN SILLY WORDS: 1) Oxnard 2) Pugnacious 3) Chthonic 4) Eigenvector 5) Chroolupoid 6) Smegma 7) Deoxyribonucleic 8) Snollygoster 9) Betelgeuse 10) Flatulate %% TOP TEN THINGS A SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR DOES NOT WANT TO HEAR OR NAMES OF DWARVES 10. Grumpy 9. "I seem to be missing one of the source files you left on your account for everyone. Could you please send me chown.c?" 8. Doc 7. Balin 6. "Hey, I noticed csh had the suid bit turned on, so I went ahead and set it for the rest of the files in /usr/bin, just to be consistent." 5. Sleepy 4. "I keep getting this strange mail from somebody named worm, but it says 'user unknown' when I try to reply. Do you know who worm is?" 3. "How come root is hogging all the ports? He must be logged in on at least twenty different terminals!" 2. Bashful 1. "I really don't appreciate that obscene e-mail I received from you last night!" %% TOPS-10:: /tops-ten/ n. DEC's proprietary OS for the fabled {PDP-10} machines, long a favorite of hackers but now effectively extinct. A fountain of hacker folklore; see {appendix A}. See also {{ITS}}, {{TOPS-20}}, {{TWENEX}}, {VMS}, {operating system}. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from `bottoms-ten') as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TOPS-20:: /tops-twen'tee/ n. See {{TWENEX}}. %% TOURIST: A pretty girl in Oklahoma. %% TRACEY'S TIME OBSERVATION: If it's fun, you'll have to quit tomorrow, if it's a drag, it'll hang around forever. %% TRAFFIC LIGHT -- apparatus that automatically turns red when your car approaches it. %% TRAGEDY: A busload of lawyers driving off a cliff with three empty seats. %% TRANSACTION CANCELLED - FARECARD RETURNED %% TRANSFER: A promotion you receive on the condition that you leave town. %% TRANSIT COMPANY- group that complains of bad business when all passengers get seats. %% TRANSPARENT: Being or pertaining to an existing, nontangible object. "It's there, but you can't see it" -- IBM System/360 announcement, 1964. VIRTUAL: Being or pertaining to a tangible, nonexistent object. "I can see it, but it's not there." -- Lady Macbeth %% TRANSVESTITE: Someone who spends his junior year at college abroad. %% TRAP 1. n. A program interrupt, usually used specifically to refer to an interrupt caused by some illegal action taking place in the user program. In most cases the system monitor performs some action related to the nature of the illegality, then returns control to the program. 2. v. To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor." Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor traps all input/output instructions." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TRAVEL: Something that makes you feel like you're getting somewhere. %% TRUCK DRIVERS have bigger dipsticks. %% TRUCKERS carry bigger loads. %% TRUST ME: Los Angeles for "Fuck you, your mother, and the horse she rode in on." %% TRUST: Two cannibals having oral sex. %% TSMT Programmers .... Great at working in the dark. But we like it better in the light! %% TSMT Programmers .... The Unstrung Heros %% TTR is a trademark of Trans-Temporal Research: When it ABSOLUTELY has to be there yesterday...TTR. %% TTTTTTTTTT UU UU RRRRRRRRR BBBBBBBBB OOOOOOOO !! TT UU UU RR RR BB BB OO OO !! TT UU UU RR RR BB BB OO OO !! TT UU UU RR RR BB BB OO OO !! TT UU UU RRRRRRRRRR BBBBBBBBB OO OO !! TT UU UU RR RR BB BB OO OO !! TT UU UU RR RR BB BB OO OO !! TT UU UU RR RR BB BB OO OO !! TT UUUUUUUUUU RR RR BBBBBBBBB OOOOOOOO !! %% TTY (titty) n. Terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print quality. Usage: antiquated (like the TTY's themselves). Sometimes used to refer to any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal controlling a job. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TUGWELL'S BASIC ASSUMPTION: Reality is a hypothesis. %% TUTHER: of two or more. "Yew can take one or tuther!" -- Texan Dictionary %% TV Personality's Bizarre Claim: 'Computer Scientists Planted Mind Control Device In My Head'. %% TV anchorpeople have hair that is different from the hair of other humans %% TV evangelists do more than lay people. %% TV is chewing gum for the eyes. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% TWEAK v. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with TWIDDLE. See FROBNICATE and FUDGE FACTOR. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TWENEX n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC. So named because TOPS-10 was a typically crufty DEC operating system for the PDP-10. BBN developed their own system, called TENEX (TEN EXecutive), and in creating TOPS-20 for the DEC-20 DEC copied TENEX and adapted it for the 20. Usage: DEC people cringe when they hear TOPS-20 referred to as "Twenex", but the term seems to be catching on nevertheless. Release 3 of TOPS-20 is sufficiently different from release 1 that some (not all) hackers have stopped calling it TWENEX, though the written abbreviation "20x" is still used. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% TWENEX:: /twe'neks/ n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC --- the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 --- preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not {{ITS}} or {{WAITS}} partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that `krans' meant `funeral wreath' in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply `wreath'; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it {{TWENEX}} (a contraction of `twenty TENEX'), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 UNIX and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation `20x' was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as UNIX or ITS --- but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 hackers to convert to {VMS}, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to UNIX. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% TYLCZAK'S PROBABILITY POSTULATE: Random events tend to occur in groups. %% TYPING MOLE uncovered as SPACE ALIEN -- SECRET MESSAGES DECODED %% TYPISTS do it in triplicate. %% Taber's First Law of Manufacturing Information Systems: If a system does not have a payback for a given individual in the information chain, the information will get corrupted at the level of that individual, and become worse as it travels up the chain. -- Pat Taber %% Taber's Second Law of Manufacturing Information Systems: People perceive machines as people. -- Pat Taber %% Table manners are for people who have nothing better to do. %% Tablet: A small table. %% Tachyon: A gluon that's not completely dry. %% Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far. -- Jean Cocteau %% Tact is rubbing out another's mistakes instead of rubbing them in. -- Marvin J. Ashton %% Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head. %% Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy. -- Howard W. Newton %% Tact, n.: The unsaid part of what you're thinking. %% Tactless Person: Someone who says what everyone else is thinking. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Take a cannibal to lunch. %% Take a lesson from the whale; the only time he gets speared is when he raises to spout. %% Take a long worm from the rear, according to its mate it's a lot more fun. %% Take a look around you, tell me what you see, A girl who thinks she's ordinary lookin' she has got the key. If you can get close enough to look into her eyes There's something special right behind the bitterness she hides. And you're fair game, You never know what she'll decide, you're fair game, Just relax, enjoy the ride. Find a way to reach her, make yourself a fool, But do it with a little class, disregard the rules. 'Cause this one knows the bottom line, couldn't get a date. The ugly duckling striking back, and she'll decide her fate. (chorus) The ones you never notice are the ones you have to watch. She's pleasant and she's friendly while she's looking at your crotch. Try your hand at conversation, gossip is a lie, And sure enough she'll take you home and make you wanna die. (chorus) -- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Fair Game" %% Take a sheet of cardboard or a throw away magazine, form a cone with it. Take the cone, a coin, and a liquid refreshment (water causes least damage) in a bottle or a cup, of course you will be pretending its your drink. Challenge the victim (bet a sum), that they can not drop the coin, placed on their forehead, with their eyes closed, into the top of the cone shoved into their pants at the waist within so many tries. To prove that it is possible, demonstrate the procedure a few times, you'll be surprised that it is possible. (practice before hand) When the victim tries it, as soon as the eyes close, pour the liquid down the cone. %% Take a trip and never leave the farm. %% Take advantage of the pleasurable opportunities that come your way. %% Take an astronaut to launch. %% Take any religious mystery, any theological proposition: expressed in ordinary terms it will read like sheer nonsense to the outsider, from the ritualistic, symbolic eating of human flesh and blood practiced by all the Christian sects to the outright cannibalism practiced by some savages. -- Major Whitey Ardmore %% Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Take care to be an economist in prosperity; there is no fear of your not being one in adversity. -- Zimmerman %% Take comfort in the saying "beauty is only skin deep" %% Take cowardly lessons from a heavy object! %% Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement. -- William Shakespeare %% Take everything in stride. Trample anyone who gets in your way. %% Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada" %% Take heart, programs never run the first time (and complex programs never run at all). %% Take it easy on me, it should be easy to see I'm getting lost in the crowd and for crying out loud Just want you to know, I know that you have to go Its all up to you, but whatever you do take it easy on me -- Little River Band %% Take it easy, we're in a hurry. %% Take it off, take it ALL off! %% Take me drunk, I'm home. %% Take me home--furry people need love too %% Take me to the river, drop me in the water. %% Take my Worf...please. -- Data, "The Outrageous Okona", stardate 42402.7 %% Take my advice, I don't use it anyway. %% Take no prisoners. %% Take not a maiden who, when she sees a man of bronze, Loses possession of herself. Nothing furthers. %% Take nothing but a single shot, Leave nothing but a death card, Kill nothing but the intended target. -- Edward Godwin %% Take out the word 'Quayle' and insert the word 'Bush' wherever it appears, and that's the crap I took for eight years. Wimp. Sycophant. Lap dog. Poop. Lightweight. Boob. Squirrel. Asshole. George Bush. -- President George Bush %% Take rather than give the tone to the company you are in. If you gave parts you will show them more or less upon every subject; and if you have not, you had better talk sillily upon a subject of other people's than of your own choosing. -- Chesterfield %% Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. -- Ovid %% Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!" So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve ... -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence" %% Take thy correction mildly. Kiss the rod. -- William Shakespeare %% Take time to be friendly - it is the road to happiness. %% Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go on. -- Andrew Jackson %% Take time to develop your personality, it's a little negative at the present. %% Take time to develop your personality. %% Take time to reflect on all the things you have, not as a result of your merit or hard work or because God or chance or the efforts of other people have given them to you. %% Take time to travel; your troubles will unravel. %% Take what you can use and let the rest go by. -- Ken Kesey %% Take your Senator to lunch this week. %% Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms, and they'll call you crazy. -- "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" %% Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd. -- Walter Savage Landor %% Taken from : Powerful Puffery -- by Dave Barry (06/05/88) without any permission at all. [ He talks about the ] fine research being done at the famous Tobacco Institute, which is staffed by leading tobacco-industry scientists using sophisticated equipment and wearing state-of-the-art leashes. These scientists have been researching for years, but they are darned if they can find any solid evidence that smoking is bad for you. Although naturally they are continuing to look just as hard as they can: First scientist: Well, Ted, for the 13,758th consecutive experiment, all of the cigarette-smoking rats developed cancer! What do you make of it? Second scientist: Beats me, Bob! First scientist: It's a puzzle, all right! Hey, look at this: These rats have arranged their food pellets to form the words "CIGARETTES CAUSE CANCER YOU ZITBRAINS." What could this possible mean? Second scientist: I'm totally stumped, Bob! Back to square one! Third scientist (entering the room): Hey, can you two guys lend me a hand? I need to screw in a light bulb. %% Taken from The American Mathematical Monthly: "I do not remember ever having seen a sustained argument by an author which, starting from philosophical premises likely to met with general acceptance, reached the conclusion that a praiseworthy ordering of one's life is to devote it to research in mathematics." -- Sir Edmund Whittaker (1873-1956). The quotation is from Scientific American, Volume 183, September 1950, page 42 %% Taken. (But nobody saw you) %% Taking a day off, Jesus and St. Peter decide to play golf. At one part of the course, they came up to a short shot over a shallow pond. St Peter tees up first. He stops and thinks for a moment and then states, "I'm going to use a 6 iron." St. Peter swings and lands a beautiful shot about three feet away from the cup. Jesus tees up next. He ponders the shot, and then declares, "Jack Nicholas would use a 7 iron." He takes his 7 iron, pulls back, and swings. The ball goes too high in the air and lands in the middle of the pond. Jesus casually walks on the water, retrieves his ball, and tees up. He swings and, again, his shot ends up in the pond. "Why don't you use a 6 iron?" asked St. Peter. "No!" retorts Jesus. "Jack Nicholas would use a 7!" This goes on for several shots - swing, splash, walk on water, recover ball, and tee up again. By this time, other golfers have caught up to Jesus and St. Peter. After watching Jesus walk on water several times to retrieve is ball one baffled golfer turns to St. Peter and asks, "Who does that guy think he is? Jesus Christ?" "No," replies St. Peter. "Jack Nicholas." %% Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. -- Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881) %% Talent does what it can, genius does what it must, I do what I'm paid to do. %% Talent in staff work or sales will recurringly be interpreted as managerial ability. -- Charles P. Boyle %% Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you. %% Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherent; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% Talk about Alaska food prices. A women went to the store to buy a couple heads of lettuce, but when she saw the price at $2.00 she told the grocer, "Do you know what you can do with this lettuce?" "No thanks, lady, I've got a $2.00 cucumber up there now." %% Talk about eating rich foods! %% Talk behind my back I'm off the beaten track. %% Talk dirty to me. %% Talk is cheap because Supply exceeds Demand. %% Talk not of comfort, 'tis for lighter ills; I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair. -- Addison %% Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow %% Talk of revolution is one way of avoiding reality. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Talk of the devil, and his horns appear. %% Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. -- Euripides %% Talkers are no good doers. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI" %% Talking is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental constitution of the man who devours many books. A full mind must have talk, or it will grow dyspeptic. -- William Matthews %% Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra and sank. -- John Mason Brown [drama critic] %% Tame a troll and it will learn you fighting. %% Tammy Bakker's face is like a ski slope - 4 feet of base and 8 inches of powder. %% Tampons $1 a dozen! No strings attached! %% Tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred, Tan me hide when I'm dead. So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, It's hanging there on the shed. All together now ... Tie me kangaroo down, sport, Tie me kangaroo down. Tie me kangaroo down, sport, Tie me kangaroo down. %% Tanj! There ain't no justice! -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Tanstaafl!!! %% Target prices? How that works? I know quite a bit about farm policy. I come from Indiana, which is a farm state. Deficiency payments - which are the key - that is what gets money into the farmer's hands. We got loan, uh, rates, we got target, uh, prices, uh, I have worked very closely with my senior colleague, (Indiana Sen.) Richard Lugar, making sure that the farmers of Indiana are taken care of. -- Vice President Dan Quayle on being asked to define the term "target prices." Quayle's press secretary then cut short the press conference, after two minutes and 30 seconds. %% Tariff: A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer from the greed of his customer. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Tart words make no friends; a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Tasha, you're not supposed to be here. "Where am I supposed to be?" Dead. "Do you know how?" No. But, I do know that it was an empty death, a death without purpose. -- Guinan and Tasha Yar, "Yesterday's Enterprise", stardate 43625.2 %% Taste makes the difference. %% Taunting someone for using Andrew is like laughing at a slave because he has lash marks on his back: in bad taste. -- Robert Firth %% Taurus (Apr 20 - May 20) : Sigmund Freud, Orson Wells, Glenda Jackson, Jimmy Stewart, James Mason, Glenn Ford, David Hartman, Cloris Leachman %% Taurus Excretum Ad Infinitum.... %% Tax reform means "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree." -- Russell Long %% Taxation: how the sheep are shorn. -- Edward Abbey %% Taxes are going up so fast, the government is likely to price itself out of the market. %% Taxes should hurt. I just mailed my own tax return last night and I am prepared to say `ouch!' as loud as anyone. -- Ronald W. Reagan %% Taxes, n.: Of life's two certainties, the only one for which you can get an extension. %% Taylor's Laws of Programming ============================ (*) Never write it in C if you can do it in `awk'. (*) Never do it in `awk' if `sed' can handle it. (*) Never use `sed' when `tr' can do the job. (*) Never invoke `tr' when `cat' is sufficient. (*) Avoid using `cat' whenever possible. -- mirk@system-simulation.co.uk (Mike Taylor) %% Tchaikovsky did it pathetically. %% TeX:: /tekh/ n. An extremely powerful {macro}-based text formatter written by Donald E. {Knuth}, very popular in the computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced UNIX `troff(1)', the other favored formatter, even at many UNIX installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case `TeX' is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to proliferate names from the word `TeX' --- such as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monumental `Art of Computer Programming' (see {Knuth}, also {bible}). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of `The Art of Computer Programming' has yet to appear as of mid-1991. The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as a bit of tool-building on the way to something else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander scale than most. TeX{} has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but high-quality software. Knuth used to offer monetary awards to people who found and reported bugs in it; as the years wore on and the few remaining bugs were fixed (and new ones even harder to find), the bribe went up. Though well-written, TeX{} is so large (and so full of cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug in every Pascal it has been compiled with. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Tea! thou soft, thou sober sage, and venerable liquid; -- thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moments of ny life, let me fall prostrate! -- Colley Cibber %% Teach children to be polite and courteous in the home, and, when he grows up, he will never be able to edge his car onto a freeway. %% Teach someone something new. %% Teacher from the Black Lagoon %% Teacher: "Bart, give us an example of a modern-day paradox." Bart: "Damned if you do, damned if you don't." -- "Bart the Genius", from The Simpsons %% Teachers do it with class. %% Teachers have class. %% Teaching is the art of casting false pearls before REAL swine. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% Team: Charlie Brown--Manager, pitcher Schroeder--Catcher Linus--Second base Snoopy--Shortstop Franklin--First base? Shermy--Third base? Lucy, Patti, Violet--Outfield (in some order which escapes me) (possibly Lucy--RF, Patti--CF, Violet--LF, since I seem to remember Lucy turning to her right to talk to her teammates) %% Teamwork is essential. It gives them another target. %% Teamwork is essential...it allows you to blame someone else. %% Tears in floods, sighing and lamenting. Good fortune. %% TechRef: /tek'ref/ [MS-DOS] n. The original `IBM PC Technical Reference Manual', including the BIOS listing and complete schematics for the PC. The only PC documentation in the issue package that's considered serious by real hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Techies (as in stage hands) do it in the dark %% Techies do it behind the scenes. %% Technicality, n. In an English court a man named Home was tried for slander in having accused a neighbor of murder. His exact words were: "Sir Thomas Holt hath taken a cleaver and stricken his cook upon the head, so that one side of his head fell on one shoulder and the other side upon the other shoulder." The defendant was acquitted by instruction of the court, the learned judges holding that the words did not charge murder, for they did not affirm the death of the cook, that being only an inference. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Technique?" said the programmer turning from his terminal, "What I follow is Tao -- beyond all technique! When I first began to program I would see before me the whole problem in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off. %% Techno Pagan. %% Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -- Aldous Huxley, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", 1956 %% Technology favors horrible people. %% Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it. -- Max Frisch %% Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand. %% Technology is the expression of the society; it is an expression of the values and the abilities of the people that generate it. It is indeed a most revealing indicator of our society. and the fact is that technology in turn shapes the values of a society and of its people. -- George Bugliarello %% Ted Mucus and the Membranes %% Teddy Kennedy: A Blond in Every Pond! %% Teddy Roosevelt did it softly, but with a big stick. %% Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses--they tie--who cares? And why? -- Edward Abbey %% Teela, you did not complain when you learned that puppeteers had manipulated the heredity of my race. They sought to produce a docile kzin. . . . You gloated that this crime was to the benefit of your species. Now you complain. Why? -- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld" %% Teen Angel, can you hear me? %% Teen-age prostitution: the problem is mounting! %% Teenage mating rituals? -- Wesley, "The Big Goodbye", stardate 41997.7 %% Tehee quod she, and clapte the wyndow to. -- Geoffrey Chaucer %% Tele-parablizing: Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: "That's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!" -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Telephone books are like dictionaries -- if you know the answer before you look it up, you can eventually reaffirm what you thought you knew but weren't sure. But if you're searching for something you don't already know, your fingers could walk themselves to death. -- Erma Bombeck %% Telephone, n.: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Teleportation lessens your orientation. %% Telerat: /tel'*-rat/ n. Unflattering hackerism for `Teleray', a line of extremely losing terminals. Compare {AIDX}, {terminak}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Teletypewriter - talk it over with your Smith-Corona -- Data communications glossary %% Television - a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done. -- Ernie Kovacs %% Television does not honor tradition. Most of the time, it doesn't even recognize it. Therefore, it can only destroy. -- Solomon Short %% Television enables people with nothing to do to watch people who can do nothing. %% Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn't have in your home. -- David Frost %% Television is a gift of God, and God will hold those who utilize his divine instrument accountable to Him. -- Philo T. Farnsworth (one of television's inventors) %% Television is a wonderful communication device, you can get London & Tokyo on it. And there's the window, with it open you can get Chile at night. %% Television is now so desperately hungry for material that it is scraping the top of the barrel. -- Gore Vidal %% Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want. -- Clive Barnes, in "New York Times", 1969 %% Television only proves that people will look at anything -- rather than each other. %% Tell 'em about the pilot who called Air Traffic Control wanting to know what time it was. The controller asked, "what airline was that request from?" Sez the pilot, "why do you want to know that?" "Well, sir, if you're American, it's 2:30. If you're United, it's 1430 hours. If you're TWA, it's 1930 Zulu. And if you're Continental, it's Thursday." %% Tell a man that there are 300 billion stars in the universe, and he'll believe you.... Tell him that a bench has wet paint upon it and he'll have to touch it to be sure. %% Tell her there's a spot out in angles darkness, tell her there's a darkness on the edge of town. %% Tell her...I am fine. -- Spock to Sarek, "ST IV:The Voyage Home," stardate 8390 %% Tell me about your childhood. %% Tell me about your ship, Riker. It's the Enterprise isn't it? "No, the name of my ship is the Lollipop." I have no knowledge of that ship. "It's just been commissioned. It's a good ship." -- Capt. Rice and Riker, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2 %% Tell me what kind of character you are: %% Tell me what to think!!! %% Tell me, O Octopus, I begs, Is those things arms, or is they legs? I marvel at thee, Octopus; If I were thou, I'd call me us. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% Tell someone the sun is millions of miles away and they'll believe you. Tell them the fence has just been painted and they'll feel it to check it out. %% Tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound your adversaries. -- Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639) %% Tell you what. Let me sweeten the deal a bit for you... -- Beelzebub %% Tell yourself that a dull life is a sign of a fulfilled person. %% Tellarites do no argue for reasons; they simply argue. -- Sarek of Vulcan, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.4 %% Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it? -- Anthony Hope %% Temper is what gets most of us into trouble. Pride is what keeps us there. %% Tempest half a man cradling a hurricane gripping for life trying to caress, to sooth the malevolent currents, bowing and bending to keep a place, hoping the roots are deep while seeking the baffles which dissipate an unwanted fate. (a simple reed holding ground thru obeisance to a temporal wind) yet to find his other half a surreal paradise lying in her center its serenity marred by the dark yellow winds which tear and the grey green clouds which boil along the periphery blurring the view with a small streak of fear. knowing the maelstrom which lies in wait to rip and twist in a fury that only is, its path and purpose known only to god or the wind. to love a tempest is folly, yet fascination lies not in the danger but the soul, finding freedom in the eye, in her eyes to become whole, in her arms to lose time, inside her to find peace, turning the inside out, letting the winds rage away. %% Tempt me with a spoon! %% Tempt not a desperate man. -- William Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet" %% Tempus fuget... et non cumbackabus! %% Ten Top Ways to Tell if Your Kid is Watching Too Much Sesame Street 10) Always pointing out that "one of these things is not like the others". 9) Knows everybody in the neighborhood, and what they do, and can sing a little song about it. 8) Whenever running or jumping, is trailed by six afterimages. 7) Checks under garbage cans for furry legs. 6) Eats an entire box of cookies (including the box) in less than a minute. 5) Insists that pigeons have fascinating personalities. 4) Complexion starting to resemble terrycloth. 3) Laughs and counts during thunderstorms. 2) Feels sorry for frogs because they are green. 1) Thinks that letters and numbers sponsor TV programs. %% Ten decimals are sufficient to give the diameter of the earth to the fraction of an inch. -- S. Newcomb %% Ten little gigabytes, waiting on line One caught a virus, then there were nine. Nine little gigabytes, holding just the date, Someone jambed a write-protect, then there were eight. Eight little gigabytes, should have been eleven, Then they cut the budget, now there are seven. Seven little gigabytes, involved in mathematics Stored an even larger prime, now there are six. Six little gigabytes, working like a hive, One died of overwork, now there are five. Five little gigabytes, trying to add more Plugged in the wrong lead, now there are four. Four little gigabytes, failing frequently, One used for spare parts, now there are three. Three little gigabytes, have too much to do Service man on holiday, now there are two. Two little gigabytes, badly over run, Took the work elsewhere, now just need one. One little gigabyte, systems far too small Shut the whole thing down, now there's none at all. %% Ten persons who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent. -- Napoleon I %% Ten score years ago, defeat the kingly foe. A wondrous dream came into being. Tame the trackless waste, no virgin land left chaste. Those shining eyes were never seeing: Beneath the noble bird, Between the proudest words, Behind the beauty cracks appear. Once with heads held high, they sang out to the sky. Why do their shadows bow in fear? The guns replace the plow, facades are tarnished now. The principles have been betrayed. The dream has gone stale, but still let hope prevail. But history's debt won't be repaid. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% Ten sir said the tensor. %% Ten thousand years from now, the only story this civilization will tell will be in its junk piles--so observe what is important! -- Richard N. Farmer %% Ten years of experience should add up to more than one year's experience multiplied by ten. %% Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing. -- R. Geis %% Tennis players do it in sets. %% Tennis players do it with a racket. %% Tennyson is a beautiful half of a poet. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Tension- Finding yourself behind a Pinto and in front of an Audi 5000 %% Tequila my girl, is deceiving: Take two at the very most. Take three and you're under the table, Take four and you're under the host. %% 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 %% Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die. -- C. S. Lewis %% Terminal - what most people have to be before consenting to see a doctor. %% Terminal Emulation : Function performed by canines when commanded to lie on their backs with legs in the air. %% Terminal Wanderlust: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Terminat hora diem; terminat auctor opus. %% Terminator bumpersticker: I TIME TRAVEL NAKED. %% Termiter's argument that God is His own grandmother generated a surprising amount of controversy among Church leaders, who on the one hand considered the argument unsupported by scripture but on the other hand were unwilling to risk offending God's grandmother. -- Len Cool, "American Pie" %% Terran insects. Aerodynamically impossible for them to fly, but they do it. I'm rather fond of bumblebees. -- 4th Doctor, ROBOTS OF DEATH %% Terri Soderstrom is a babe! %% Territories. You would measure territories against a man's life? -- Tomalak to Picard, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2 %% Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people. -- Edward Abbey %% Terrorist, n.: An individual who behaves like a government. %% 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." Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. -- C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types (Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church). %% Test Question: Unix is written in Pascal.(T/F) %% Test Tube Baby: Half Jack Daniels and half peppermint schnapps... %% Test for paraquat: Take amount of grass used in one joint, and wash in 5 cc's of water, agitating gently for 15 minutes. Strain out leaves, leaving a brownish-yellow solution. Add 100 mg each of sodium bicarbonate and sodium dithionite. If paraquat is present, the solution will turn blue-green. %% Test makers do it sometimes/always/never. %% Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones. %% Testators do it willingly. %% Testifying before the Senate Delux Committee on wild abandon, Lance Major Hugo Arbonoth announced that he had been advised by his counsel to take the Fifth. Informed that the Fifth was already taken, Arbuthnot asked about the Third. The committee said it would check but advised Arbuthnot that it usually runs out of single-digit amendments and cheese Danishes by about 9:30 A.M. %% Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow; the force of it depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force though shot by a child. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% Testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% Tex SEX! The HOME of WHEELS! The dripping of COFFEE!! Take me to Minnesota but don't EMBARRASS me!! %% Texas A&M football coach Jackie Sherrill went to the office of the Dean of Academics because he was concerned about his players' mental abilities. "My players are just too stupid for me to deal with them", he told the unbelieving dean. But at this point, one of his players happened to enter the dean's office. "Watch what I mean", said Sherrill, and he told the player to run over to his office to see if he was in. "Ok, Coach", the player said, and was off. "See what I mean?" Sherrill asked. "Yeah", replied the dean. "He could have just picked up this phone and called you from here." %% Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they took my baby away from me. %% Texas Toilet paper, it don't take s**t off anyone. %% Texas is Hell on woman and horses. -- Wayne Oakes %% Texas law forbids anyone to have a pair of pliers in his possession. %% Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds. -- J. Finnegan, USC %% Th' MIND is the Pizza Palace of th' SOUL %% Thank God I'm an athiest! %% Thank God a million billion times that you don't live in Texas. -- Me (from a somewhat different Karl quote) %% Thank God a million billion times you live in Texas. -- Karl %% Thank God for the Duchess of Gloucester, She obliges all who accost her. She welcomes the prick Of Tom, Harry or Dick, Or Baldwin, or even Lord Astor. %% Thank god!! ... It's HENNY YOUNGMAN!! %% Thank goodness modern convenience is a thing of the remote future. -- Pogo, by Walt Kelly %% Thank heaven for little girls. %% Thank you for Paris. -- Janice to Picard, "We'll Always Have Paris", stardate 41697.9 %% Thank you for holding your breath while I smoke. %% Thank you for observing all safety precautions. %% Thank you for onlining with ITS - Be sure to patronize us again for your next fix. %% Thank you for shopping in Dirk's store! %% Thank you for the tea and crumpets. I'll be on my way. -- Dr. Pulaski to Moriarty, "Elementary, Dear Data", stardate 42286.3 %% Thank you for your contribution to restock this recently plundered shop. %% Thank you for your cooperation. %% Thank you very little. %% Thank you very much. It really hit the spot. %% Thank you very much. I was rather thirsty, probably from all this talking. %% Thank you, it was delicious! %% Thanks to sex, a young woman named Carol Looked delightful in model's apparel. The slimming effect Was best, I suspect, When her man had her over a barrel. %% Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. -- Charles Kuralt %% Thanks. I needed that. %% Thanksgiving at Three Mile Island: a two pound turkey and a twenty pound cranberry. -- Johnny Carson %% That Harvard don down at El Djim -- Oh, wasn't it nasty of him, With the whole harem randy, The sheik himself handy, To muss up a young camel's quim. %% That Xanthippe's husband should have become so great a philosopher is remarkable. Amid all the scolding, to be able to think! But he could not write: that was impossible. Socrates has not left us a single book. -- Heine %% That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest number. %% That ain't so good English! %% That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% That boy's about as sharp as a pound of wet liver -- Foghorn Leghorn %% That cannot be turned. %% That cause is strong, which has not a multitude, but a strong man behind it. -- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) %% That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball. %% That does not compute. %% That dog food was delicious! %% That food really hit the spot! %% That girl at the end of the bar wants you to know that she doesn't want to know you! %% That girl could suck the chrome off a bumper. %% That idea doesn't seem to be valid here. %% That incantation seems to have been a failure. %% That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed in profit. -- Amos Bronson Alcott %% That is how a Klingon lures a mate. "Are you telling me to yell at Salia?" No, no, no. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects. And claw at you. "What does the man do?" He reads love poetry. He ducks a lot. "Worf, it sounds like it works great for the Klingons, but...I think I need to try something a little less...dangerous?" Go to her door, beg like a human. -- Worf and Wesley, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8 %% That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended -- civilizations are built up -- excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. -- C. S. Lewis %% That is utterly preposterous. %% That isn't necessary, the ship will clean itself. Well...good for the bloody ship. -- Riker and Brenna O'Dell, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% That life is long which answers life's great end. -- Young %% That mistake will not be repeated. There are plenty of mistakes left that haven't been tried yet. -- Andy Tanenbaum %% That money talks, I'll not deny, I heard it once, It said "Good-bye. -- Richard Armour %% That must be wonderful: I don't understand it at all. -- Moliere %% 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." %% That only with propriety be styled refinement which, by strengthening the intellect, purifies the manners. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% That politics has a bearing on business confidence is unproven. -- Mark Epernay %% That really bites the big one. %% That satiated your stomach! %% That secret pact you made back when your love could save you from the tenderness. %% That secret you've been guarding, isn't. %% That segment of the community with which one has the greatest sympathy as a liberal inevitably turns out to be one of the most narrow-minded and bigoted segments of the community. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% That spell has no obvious effect. %% That such have died enables us The tranquiler to die; That such have lived, certificate For immortality. -- Emily Dickinson %% That takes the cake -- and eats it, too. %% That tendency to err that programmers have been noticed to share with other human beings has often been treated as if it were an awkwardness attendant upon programming's adolescence, which like acne would disappear with the craft's coming of age. It has proved otherwise. -- Mark Halpren %% That that is is not that that is not. %% That that is is that that is not is not. %% That the birds of worry and care fly above your head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent. %% That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call tragedy... The miserable fraction of Science which our United Mankind, in a wide universe of Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence, imparted to all? -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% That truth cannot be material in any respect, is contrary to the nature of things. No tribunal, no codes, no systems can repeal or impair this law of God, for by his eternal laws it is inherent in the nature of things ... It is evident that if you cannot apply this mitigated doctrine for which I speak ... you must for ever remain ignorant of what your rulers do. I can never think this ought to be; I never did think the truth was a crime; I am glad the day is come in which it is to be decided; for my soul has ever abhorred the thought, that a free man dared not speak the truth. -- Alexander Hamilton %% That unit is a woman. A mass of conflicting impulses. -- Spock and Nomad, "The Changeling," stardate 3541.9 %% That was ZEN -- this is TAO %% That was not a request I was simply...talking to myself. A human idiosyncrasy, triggered by a fascination with a particular set of facts, or sometimes brought about by senility, or used as a means of weighing information before reaching a conclusion, or as a - Thank you sir, I comprehend. -- Data and the ENTERPRISE computer, "Conspiracy", stardate 41775.5 %% That was not manual override. -- Data, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% That was simply transmigration of object. There's a great deal of difference between that and pure science, you know. -- Third Doctor, AMBASSADORS OF DEATH %% That was the stun setting, this is not. -- Data, "The Ensigns of Command", stardate unknown %% That was then, but this is now. %% That which does not kill me makes me smarter %% That which goes contrary to the prevailing taste is, for me, the most precious of things.... Whatever is scorned, despised or not understood by the society in which one lives has prospects for the future. -- Andre Masson (1896-?) %% That which has not been taught directly can never be taught directly. %% That which is bright rises twice: The image of Fire. Thus the great man, by perpetuating this brightness, Illumines the four quarters of the world. %% That which is good to be done, cannot be done too soon; and if it is neglected to be done early, it will frequently happen that it will not be done at all. -- Bishop Mant %% That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee. %% That which is used develops. That which is not used wastes away. -- Hippocrates (460?-377? B.C.) %% That which is won ill, will never wear well, for there is a curse attends it, which will waste it; and the same corrupt dispositions which incline men to the sinful ways of getting, will incline them to the like sinful ways of spending. -- Matthew Henry %% That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another. -- Adlai Stevenson %% That which we acquire with the most difficulty we retain the longest; as those who have earned a fortune are usually more careful with it than those who have inherited one. -- Colton %% That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% That word is henceforth replaced with DUNGEON. %% That would be a good trick. %% That would be cheating, try rolling drunks next time. %% That would involve quite a contortion! %% That'll be $67.50 CCCHHHHHIIIIINNNNGGGG!!!! %% That's S O M E beer ! %% That's [growing old] been happening to men and women for a long time. I've got the feeling it's one of the pleasanter things about being human, as long as you grow old together. -- Zefrem Cochrane, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3220.3 %% That's a physical impossibility. %% That's a super-conducting magnet isn't it? -- Salia, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8 %% That's a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion. -- William Shakespeare %% That's all folks! %% That's all life is -- one big word game. Don't lie to yourself about it anymore. P.S. You are now enlightened. -- Carl Frederick, "est: Playing the Game the New Way" %% That's all water over the bridge now. %% That's always the way when you discover something new; everyone thinks you're crazy. -- Evelyn E. Smith %% That's entertainment! -- Vlaad the Impaler %% That's funny, my watch stopped, too. %% That's funny; I never have any trouble with service when I'm shopping. -- K. Kong %% That's history. -- George Bush, on the 1988 campaign %% That's impossible, and besides he doesn't like it. %% That's inches away from being millimetre perfect. %% That's life for you, said McDunn. Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving something more than that thing loves them. And after awhile you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more. -- Ray Bradbury, "The Fog Horn" %% That's life in the food chain. %% That's life. What's life? A magazine. How much does it cost? Two-fifty. I only have a dollar. That's life. %% That's no moon... -- Obi-wan Kenobi %% That's not a bug, that's a feature!: The {canonical} first parry in a debate about a purported bug. The complainant, if unconvinced, is likely to retort that the bug is then at best a {misfeature}. See also {feature}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% That's not funny, that's sick! -- National Lampoon %% That's not writing, that's typing! -- Truman Capote %% That's odd. That's very odd. Wouldn't you say that's very odd? %% That's ok 'cause she has no neck. %% That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. -- Neil Armstrong %% That's one thing about these babies. They never learned to read. -- Joe Patroni %% That's only true because it's true. %% That's the problem with believing in a supernatural being. Trying to determine what he wants. -- Troi, "Who Watches the Watchers?", stardate 43173.5 %% That's the silliest thing I've every heard. %% That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. -- Larry Niven and Jerry E. Pournelle "Oath of Fealty" (1981) %% That's the trouble with directors - always biting the hand that lays the golden egg. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% That's the trouble with this country. The whole place is filled with penniless patriots. -- Rosa Bombolini %% That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on a ball. -- Bill Veeck %% That's the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) I like it. %% That's what she said. %% That, Sir, is the good of counting. It brings everything to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% That, by the way, was what I call a travel-experience! -- H. P. Lovecraft, 3/12/1930 %% That, that is, is. That, that is not, is not. That, that is, is not that, that is not. That, that is not, is not that, that is. %% The "Encyclopedia Galactica" defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With." The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes"... -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% The "Environmental Engineering News" published some rather sobering information about punishment for drunk driving convictions in other countries. In Australia, the names of drunk drivers are printed in newspapers under the caption, "He's drunk and in jail." In Malaysia the driver is jailed and, if married, the spouse is jailed. In the United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden there's an automatic jail term of one year. In Turkey, drunk drivers are driven 20 miles out of town and forced to walk back. In Bulgaria, a second drunk-driving conviction results in capital punishment. In El Salvador, your first offense is your last -- execution by firing squad. -- from the August "Road & Track" %% The "bad sprain" will inevitably turn out to be a "clean break". %% The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years. -- Edward Abbey %% The "think positive" leader tends to listen to his subordinates' premonitions only during the postmortems. -- Charles P. Boyle %% The # already breaks the beam. %% The # bows his head to you in greeting. %% The # burns inside the receptacle. %% The # cannot be closed. %% The # catches fire and is consumed. %% The # catches fire. %% The # contains: %% The # drops to his knees, staggered. %% The # drops to his knees, unconscious. %% The # falls to the ground. %% The # goes through it. %% The # has died. %% The # is already in the #. %% The # is battered into unconsciousness. %% The # is carrying: %% The # is closed. %% The # is disarmed by a subtle feint past his guard. %% The # is empty. %% The # is knocked out! %% The # is momentarily disoriented and can't fight back. %% The # is now on. %% The # is open, but I can't tell what's beyond it. %% The # is slashed on the arm, blood begins to trickle down. %% The # is staggered and drops to his knees. %% The # isn't sleeping. %% The # must be on the ground to be boarded. %% The # passes through the wall and vanishes. %% The # receives a deep gash in his side. %% The # side of the room is divided by a wooden wall into small hallways to the #east and #west. %% The # slowly regains his feet. %% The # struggles and you cannot tie him up. %% The # takes a final blow and slumps to the floor dead. %% The #'s weapon is knocked to the floor, leaving him unarmed. %% The $357.73 Theory: Auditors always reject any expense account with a bottom line divisible by 5 or 10. %% The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P" to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: "Foodp?" "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!" "State-of-the-world-P?" (Straight) "I'm about to go home." (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state." [One of the best of these is a Gosperism (i.e., due to Bill Gosper). When we were at a Chinese restaurant, he wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" --GLS] %% The 100% American is 99% a fool %% The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R. B. Greenberg %% The 11th COMMANDMENT - Thou shalt not be a smartass! %% The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon resulted in many dogfights between Syrian and Israeli jet fighters. In the end, the Syrians lost over 80 planes and had a number of SAM batteries knocked out, while the Israelis lost no planes. Sometime later the Syrian Defense Minister was shopping for weapons in Moscow. His host, the Soviet Defense Minister, was embarrassed about the scorecard from Lebanon. He told his Syrian guest, "Take anything you want - our best tanks, rifles, or surface-to-air missiles." "No, no - you don't understand!" the Syrian replied. "Last time you gave us surface-to-air missiles. This time we need surface-to-jet missiles!" %% The 20/80 Law: 20 percent of the customers account for 80 percent of the turnover, 20 percent of the components account for 80 percent of the cost, and so forth. -- Vilfredo Pareto %% The 486 is to a modern CPU as a Jules Verne reprint is to a modern SF novel. -- Henery Spencer %% The 5,000 best looking men in the world are gay. %% The 80's -- when you can't tell hairstyles from chemotherapy. %% The ABCs of Appliance Repair: a) At the first sign of electrical or mechanical trouble, gently wipe the outside of the appliance with a damp cloth. This should correct the problem. b) If that doesn't work, don't do anything. Appliances will often repair themselves if allowed plenty of rest. Make the appliance comfortable and do not disturb for a couple of days. This should correct the problem. c) An appliance responds to a caring attitude. Show that you understand its feelings and that you are going to try to be more sensitive to its needs in the future. d) Don't take the appliances moods too seriously. Most bad behavior is just an attempt to get your attention. e) If the problem still persists, a direct threat (like holding the appliance over the toilet) will help reestablish your authority. f) All mechanical adjustments can be easily made with one simple, all-purpose tool: a claw hammer. This should correct the problem. -- "Sunday Magazine" %% The Abrams' Principle: The shortest distance between two points is off the wall. %% The Abysmal repeated. If you are sincere, you have success in your heart, And whatever you do succeeds. %% The Advertising Agency Song: When your client's hopping mad, Put his picture in the ad. If he still should prove refractory, Add a picture of his factory. %% The Alcoholic's version of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star": Starkle, starkle, little twink Who the heck I are you think I'm not under the affluence of incohol As some thinkle peep I are, So give me tee more martoonees-- I fool so feelish. %% 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." %% The Almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to create Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill (1942) %% The American Republic and American business are Siamese twins; they came out of the same womb at the same time; they are born in the same principles, and when American business dies, the American republic will die, and when the American Republic dies, American business will die. -- Josiah W. Bailey %% The American people aren't interested in details. -- Lyn Nofziger %% The American sister states: Mary Land, Ida Ho, Louisa Anna, & Minne Sota. %% The American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it. -- Al Capone (1899-1947) %% The Analytical Engine weaves Algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. -- Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace [the first programmer] %% The Android greets his friends politely And veils behind his lowered lids The jealousy which plagues him nightly Because he can't have sex, or kids. %% The Angels want to wear my red shoes. -- E. Costello %% The Angriest Dog in the World is bound so tightly with tension and anger that he approaches the state of rigor mortis. %% The Anthony Blunt excuse There is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything, but security prevents its disclosure. %% The Arkansas legislature passed a law that states that the Arkansas River can rise no higher than to the Main Street bridge in Little Rock. %% The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. -- Tom Lehrer %% The Army is a place where you get up early in the morning to be yelled at by people with short haircuts and tiny brains. -- Dave Barry %% The Army needs leaders the way a foot needs a big toe. -- Bill Murray %% The Army. The army needs perseverance And a strong man. Good fortune without blame. %% The Banana Principle: Heuristic devices don't tell you when to stop. %% The Beat-Inflation garden we planted so enthusiastically just two months ago is to be rededicated as an ecological exhibit. It illustrates zero growth. %% The Belgian government has decided that the British system of driving on the left side of the road may have significant advantages over their present right side of the road system, so they have scheduled an experiment: Starting on the first of January, and for the next six months, all cars in Belgium will be required to drive on the left side of the road. If, as expected, the experiment is a success, then trucks will also start driving on the left ... %% The Bible is a window in this prison of hope, through which we look into eternity. -- John Sullivan Dwight %% The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% The Bible is true this I know, For the Bible tells me so. -- Jordan Henderson, (jordan@neosoft.com) %% The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% The Bible on letters of reference: Are we beginning all over again to produce our credentials? Do we, like some people, need letters of introduction to you, or from you? No, you are all the letter we need, a letter written on your heart; any man can see it for what it is and read it for himself. -- 2 Corinthians 3:1-2 [New English translation] %% The Bible says that woman was the last thing God made. Evidently He made her on Saturday night. She reveals his fatigue. -- Dumas %% The Big One! %% The Bird of Time has but a little way to fly ... and the bird is on the wing. -- Omar Khayyam %% The Board of Trustees of (fill in University here) want to find out if the profs. really know their stuff. So they decide to ask the profs. "What's two plus two?" They go to the Math Dept. and the response is "Oh, that's easy, it's four." So they write that down and go to the Physics Dept. and the response is "Oh, it's 4.00000000 with an uncertainty of another place." Then they go to the College of Engineering and the response is "Just a minute while I get my handbook." Finally, they go to the School of Management and the Accounting Dept. and there the response is (said in a low voice) "What do you want it to be?" The Board of Trustees, not convinced by the performance in the previous joke, decides to test the profs. again. First they take a Math prof. and put him in a room. Now, the room contains a table and three metal spheres about the size of softballs. They tell him to do whatever he want with the balls and the table in one hour. After an hour, he comes out and the Trustees look in and the balls are arranges in a triangle at the center of the table. Next, they give the same test to a physics prof. After an hour, they look in, and the balls are stacked one on top of the other in the center of the table. Finally, the give the test to an Engineering prof. After an hour, they look in and one of the balls is broken, one is missing, and he's carrying the third out in his lunchbox. %% The Bougourre Factor changes the equation to fit the Universe. %% The Brain-Eye Law: To a certain extent, observational power can compensate for mental weakness. %% The Briggs/Chase Law of Program Development: To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program, take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one, and convert to the next higher units. %% The British are coming! The British are coming! %% The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha -- which is to demean oneself. -- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" %% The Bugs Of Wrath -- John Steinbug %% The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language. %% The CS Sage says: Seek new employment prior to the imposition of performance penalties on your project. %% The Cabinet is a pig, a serpent, a tiger and an ox brought together and told to produce offspring. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% The Cafeteria Law: The item you had your eye on the minute you walked in will be taken by the person in front of you. %% The Caldron. Supreme good fortune. Success. %% The California Paiute Indian Reservation's laws forbid a mother-in-law to spend more than thirty days a year with her children. %% The Captain has been altered by the borg... He IS a borg. -- Data & Worf, "The Best of Both Worlds," stardate 43989.1 %% The Captain said, "Four hundred ninety-seven and a half feet of rope? What you got that for?" And the first mate said, "Oh, I just carry it." %% The Cat And The Candy We drove to Uncle's in the car you called home, and I kissed the person you had been when I kissed you. Alone now, Christmas day, I want to tumble outside, but I catch myself asleep again, waiting for my present. Pills they think help me to get out of these walls. -- Jeremy Michael Mullen %% The Cat in the Hat comes back. %% The Charge of the Light Brigade excuse It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual which has now been dealt with under internal disciplinary proceedings. %% The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "What's Wrong with the World" %% The Christian notion of the possibility of redemption is incomprehensible to the computer. -- Vance Packard %% The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma of the church. %% The City of Palo Alto, in its official description of parking lot standards, specifies the grade of wheelchair access ramps in terms of centimeters of rise per foot of run. A compromise... %% The Clinging. Perseverance furthers. It brings success. Care of the cow brings good fortune. %% The Cold War is over and we won. But recent celebration over the disintegration of the Communist bloc and the bankruptcy of socialism should not blind us to a consequent ecological tragedy - the endangered-species status of the western leftist. The greater and lesser western leftists have lent color and absurdity to our political landscape for nearly a century now. Who, having ever encountered them in their once-numerous herds, can forget their odd and brightly colored plumage, their adept camouflages of ideological directions, their skill at posing for the media, and the endearingly complete stupidity with which they confronted a huge range of issues from superpower relations to energy policy? But, my friends, we are now in serious danger of losing this source of memetic variety to galloping habitat erosion. As it becomes clearer that socialism is a one-way ticket to economic failure and eventual political collapse, whole populations of western leftists are falling silent and dying off. Biomes in the entertainment industry, organized labor, institutional religion and the federal beaureaucracy that were once dominated by these creatures have been taken over by newer political species. Perhaps only the American professoriat and the so-called "underground" media still support viable breeding colonies. I call on all libertarians, centrists, and conservatives concerned with the encouragement of ecopolitical variety - we must act now, before it is too late! A world without Mother Jones and Alexander Cockburn and infinite fatuities about "agrarian reformers" would be a smarter and happier place, yes - but also duller. If we don't move to establish protected habitats now, the American leftist may well follow such lost species as the Whig, the Monarchist and the Know-Nothing into extinction within a decade. And then who would we have to kick around? Act Now - Help Save the Vanishing Leftist! %% The Commandments of the EE: 1: Beware of lightning that lurketh in an uncharged condenser lest it cause thee to bounce upon thy buttocks in a most embarrassing manner. 2: Cause thou the switch that supplieth large quantities of juice to be opened and thusly tagged, that thy days may be long in this earthly vale of tears. 3: Prove to thyself that all circuits that radiateth, and upon which the worketh, are grounded and thusly tagged lest they lift thee to a radio frequency potential and causeth thee to make like a radiator too. 4: Tarry thou not amongst these fools that engage in intentional shocks for they are not long for this world and are surely unbelievers. %% The Communist system must be based on the will of the people, and if the people should not want that system, then that people should establish a different system. -- Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894-1971) %% The Comprehensive Schools excuse It's only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have streched supervisory resources beyond the limit. %% The Concorde excuse It was a worthwhile expirement now abandoned, but not before it provided valuable data and considerable employment. %% The Constitution ... speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty. -- Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes %% The Constitution of the United States guarantees every individual the right to make a damn fool of himself -- in public or private, however he chooses. -- Solomon Short %% The Consultant's Curse: When the customer has beaten upon you long enough, give him what he asks for, instead of what he needs. This is very strong medicine, and is normally only required once. %% The Corners of the Mouth. Perseverance brings good fortune. Pay heed to the providing of nourishment. And to what a man seeks To fill his own mouth with. %% The Creative works sublime success, Furthering through perseverance. %% The Crown is full of it! -- Nate Harris, 1775 %% The Crystal Cave Old miseryguts hates the whole world Just for having been born. He looks at the blue roof over our heads And curses what cruel life has done to him. All my life I have dreamt of the starships Heading out into the deep unknown and returning. Nyneve: she trapped me on this earth And left me without love to soldier on, My mother the witch: I had no father; Devil. And the girls in their summer dresses have floated by, The rollcall reaches back into childhood. And the heroes in their quiet courage have died for me, McAuliffe and Grissom; Gagarin and Icarus, The rollcall reaches back into eternity. The poetry is gone now, it was an illusion, The bubble in the heart is burst. White horses of the sea, black horses on the page, White streaks of the rocketships carry on the dream: To escape from Hell into the immortal world of Love. That is only done in the imagination. All's true is the look of love in a girl's eye. Savour it sweetly. It has to last a lifetime. `There are many stars and I want them.' The computers hum, the screens scroll, The best and the brightest are playing games, We'll put up another Challenger. %% The Czech's in the mail. Sending Frenchman by FAX. %% The Czechs announced after Sputnik that they, too, would launch a satellite. Of course it would orbit not Earth but Sputnik. %% The DREA Law: Under the most rigorously controlled conditions, the experimental apparatus will do exactly as it pleases. %% The Department of Defense has taken over this computer. World War III will start in 25 minutes. %% The Diddle factor changes things so that the equation and the universe appear to fit, without requiring any real change in either. This has the characteristic of eliminating differences by dropping the subject under discussion to zero importance. %% The Director of Research should know as little as possible about the specific subject of research he is administering. %% The District of Columbia has a law forbidding you to exert pressure on a balloon and thereby cause a whistling sound on the streets. %% The Doctor's good is my evil. -- The Black Guardian, MAWDRYN UNDEAD %% The Donald: "Hey, it's the American way." Marshall: "Listen, mister. Nobody turns my family into zombies and gets away with it." The Donald: "They're not zombies, they're consumers." Dash-X: "Yeah, besides, how can you tell the difference?" -- "Zombies in P.J.s", Eerie Indiana %% The Dowager Duchess of Spout Collapsed at the height of a rout; She found strength to say As they bore her away: "I should never have taken the trout." -- Edward Gorey %% The Dream Police, they live inside of my head. %% The Dry Ice Time Bomb Get a small plastic container with lid (back in the metallurgy dept. at OSU, we used the small plastic cans that hold the coaters used for large-format Polaroid film, because we had jillions of 'em lying around. A film cannister would probably work; the key is, it should seal tightly and take a fair amount of effort to open). Now, place a chunk of dry ice in the can, and put on the lid without quite sealing it. Put the assembled, bomb, time-delay, CO2, M1A1 in your pocket, or behind your back. Approach the victim and engage in normal conversation. When his attention is drawn away, quickly seal the lid on the bomb, deposit it somewhere within a few feet of the victim, out of obvious sight, and then leave. Depending on variables (you'll want to experiment, first), you'll hear a loud "pop" and an even louder "Aarrggghhh! " within a minute, when the dry ice warms and the CO2 pressure becomes sufficient to blow off the lid. In a cluttered film lab, this is doubly nasty, because the odds are the victim will never figure out what made the noise. %% The Earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the Earth. %% The Earth is a laboratory designed to test our faith. %% The Earth is our Mother; Our nine months are up. %% The Earth makes one resolution every 24 hours. %% The Eighteen Bottles I had eighteen bottles of whiskey in my cellar and was told by my wife to empty the contents of each and every bottle down the sink, or else... I said I would and proceeded with the unpleasant task. I withdrew the cork from the first bottle and poured the contents down the sink with the exception of one glass, which I drank. I then withdrew the cork from the second bottle and did likewise with it, with the exception of one glass, which I drank. I then withdrew the cork from the third bottle and poured the whiskey down the sink which I drank. I pulled the cork from the fourth bottle down the sink and poured the bottle down the glass, which I drank. I pulled the bottle from the cork of the next and drank one sink out of it, and threw the rest down the glass. I pulled the sink out of the next glass and poured the cork down the bottle. Then I corked the sink with the glass, bottled the drink and drank the pour. When I had everything emptied, I steadied the house with one hand, counted the glasses, corks, bottles, and sinks with the other, which were twenty-nine, and as the houses came by I counted them again, and finally I had all the houses in one bottle, which I drank. I'm not under tha affluence of incohol as some tinkle peep I am. I'm not half as thunk as you might drink. I fool so feelish I don't know who is me, and the drunker I stand here, the longer I get. %% The Eighth Commandment of Frisbee: In any crowd of spectators at least one will suggest that razor blades could be attached to the disc. ("You could maim and kill with that thing.") -- Dan Roddick %% The Eighth Law of Project Management: Project teams detest progress reporting because it vividly manifests their lack of progress. %% The Elephant Yam - (We actually made an animated short on this one: DISTINGUISHED POTATO: (Shocked) Oh my God! It's an animal! (Frightened screams) DISFIGURED YAM: I am not an animal! (slurping wheeze) I am a vegetable! I am... A yam! In Cold Spud - (We did a publicity photo consisting of a potato with a knife stuck in it in front of some venetian blinds.) Tater vs. Tater My Three Spuds Nospatatu the Yampire Goodbye, Mr. (potato) Chips I Was a Teenage French Fry Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Spud The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Told by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Spud %% The Emperor's New mall: The popular notion that shopping malls exist only on the insides and have no exterior. The suspension of visual belief engendered by this notion allows shoppers to pretend that large, cement blocks thrust into their environment do not, in fact, exist. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% The Empire State Building has over 6,400 windows. %% The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% The Enterprise crew when off work Will fuck like an Ottoman Turk. Uhura the Zulu Is shacked up with Sulu, And Spock shares a crew girl with Kirk. %% The Enterprise girls, so one hears, Have chased Spock for several years. His look of disdain Has spared them great pain, For his prick is as sharp as his ears. %% The Extended Murphy's Law: If a series of events can go wrong, it will do so in the worst possible sequence. %% The Eye-Brain Law: To a certain extent, mental power can compensate for observational weakness. %% The F-15 Eagle: If it's up, we'll shoot it down. If it's down, we'll blow it up. -- A McDonnel-Douglas ad from a few years ago %% The FALAFEL SANDWICH lands on my HEAD and I become a VEGETARIAN... %% The FROBOZZ Company, Ltd., created, owns, and operates this dungeon. %% The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his own. -- "Ringworld" %% The Family. The perseverance of the woman furthers. %% The Fifth Commandment of Frisbee: The best catches are never seen. ("Did you see that?"--"See what?") -- Dan Roddick %% The Fifth Rule: You have taken yourself too seriously. %% The Fifth SNAFU Equation: In any human endeavor, once you have exhausted all possibilities and fail, there will be one solution, simple and obvious, highly visible to everyone else. %% The Finagle Factor is characterized by changing the Universe to fit the equation. %% The First Commandment of Frisbee: The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just beyond reach. This force is technically called "car suck". -- Dan Roddick %% The First Law Of Air Travel: The earlier you arrive at the airport for your flight, the later your flight will depart. %% The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (For experts only): Don't do it yet. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% The Force is what holds everything together. It has its dark side, and it has its light side. It's sort of like cosmic duct tape. %% The Force. It surrounds us; It enfolds us; It gets us dates on Saturday nights. -- Obi Wan Kenobi, Famous Jedi Knight and Party Animal %% The Forces of Nature Gravity works near and far To bind a planet to a star; Coulombic forces forge atomic links. Weak forces turn decay paths on, The strong force glues the nucleon, But the strongest force in sports is still The Jinx. Its fevered fear attacks the line The icy chill creeps up each spine And saps from every coach his very breath. No matter how well practice goes The week will end in fitful throes For no one can escape the Kiss of Death. As Notre Dame was heading west To face its toughest Trojan test The lucky Irish stars shone bright above her, And I shouted joyously, "O, my!" When the postman brought my new S.I. For I saw that Southern Cal was on The Cover. I ran out yelling, "Lookie, lookie, Call my broker, call my bookie, Bet the house and car on Gold and Blue!" And savoring now the victory, I set these facts for history, And pen these lines to S.I.: "Sirs, thank you." %% The Fourth Commandment of Frisbee: The higher the costs of hitting any object, the greater the certainty it will be struck. (Remember--the disc is positive --both cops and old ladies are clearly negative). -- Dan Roddick %% The Fourth Law of Computing: On a slow day, you can wait forever. %% The Fourth SNAFU Equation: Interchangeable devices won't. %% The French defence isn't... %% The Generalized Thermodynamic Law (Systems Theory): More probable states are more likely to be observed than less probable states, unless specific constraints exist to keep them from occurring. %% The Generalized Thermodynamic Law (Systems Theory): The things we see more frequently are more frequent: (1) because there is some physical reason to favor certain states or (2) because there is some mental reason. %% The Gentle. Success through what is small. It furthers one to have somewhere to go. It furthers one to see the great man. %% The Germ : 25 Million of your population die due to germ warfare. %% The German has no idea how much the people must be misled if the support of the masses is required. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf" %% The Golden Rule is of no use to you whatever unless you realize it is your move. -- Frank Crane %% The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences: Whoever has the gold makes the rules. %% The Gordian knot couldn't be untied either. %% The Gorgons had long snakes in their hair. They looked like women only more horrible. %% The Great Bald Swamp Hedgehog: The Gerat Bald Swamp Hedgehog of Billericay displays, in courtship, his single prickle and does impressions of Holiday Inn desk clerks. Since this means him standing motionless for enormous periods of time he is often eaten in full display by The Great Bald Swamp Hedgehog Eater. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The Great Tragedy of the 20th century is that Clinton's name isn't on the Wall. -- John De Armond, WD4OQC, jgd@dixie.com %% The Grecians were famed for fine art, And buildings and stonework so smart. They distinguished with poise The men from the boys, And used crowbars to keep them apart. THE BEY OF ALGIERS (II) The long-peckered Bey of Algiers Loved to spear chubby lads in their rears. A demon for semen, This buffersome he-man Shot the chute till it seeped from their ears. %% The Guardian notices a wooden structure creeping by, and his suspicions are aroused. %% The Guardians awake and, in perfect unison, destroy you with their stone bludgeons. Satisfied, they resume their posts. %% The Gym-Goer's Maxim: The bulges on your body that you want most to get rid of are the ones least affected by exercise. %% The Heavy Metal moto : "If it's too loud, you're too old." %% The Hebrew school teacher asked one of his students if she said prayers before meals. The proud little girl answered, "Oh, not me. I don't have to - my dad's a good cook." %% The Heineken Uncertainty Principle: You can never be sure how many beers you had last night. %% The Hindmost had a working droud . . . and [Louis Wu] hated himself for wanting it. -- "The Ringworld Engineers" %% The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. Most importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a non-hitchhiker discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, flask, gnat spray, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the non- hitchhiker will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that he may have "lost". After all, any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with. %% The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V ... use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wave your towel in emergencies, and, of course, dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. %% The How Come It All Landed On Me Law: Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed. %% The Hubbell works fine; all that stuff IS blurry! %% The IBM 2250 is impressive ... if you compare it with a system selling for a tenth its price. -- D. Cohen %% The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided by the number of people in the group. %% The IRS does it to EVERYBODY. %% The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes... -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" %% The Illiterati Programus Canto 1: A program is a lot like a nose: Sometimes it runs, and sometimes it blows. %% The Illustrious Ancestor Disciplines the Devil's Country. After three years he conquers it. Inferior people must not be employed. %% The Irish Leprechaun is the Faeries' shoemaker and is known under various names in different parts of Ireland: Cluricaune in Cork, Lurican in Kerry, Lurikeen in Kildare and Lurigadaun in Tipperary. Although he works for the Faeries, the Leprechaun is not of the same species. He is small, has dark skin and wears strange clothes. His nature has something of the manic-depressive about it: first he is quite happy, whistling merrily as he nails a sole on to a shoe; a few minutes later, he is sullen and morose, drunk on his home-made heather ale. The Leprechaun's two great loves are tobacco and whiskey, and he is a first-rate con-man, impossible to out-fox. No one, no matter how clever, has ever managed to cheat him out of his hidden pot of gold or his magic shilling. At the last minute he always thinks of some way to divert his captor's attention and vanishes in the twinkling of an eye. -- From: A Field Guide to the Little People by Nancy Arrowsmith & George Moorse. %% The Israelites were all waiting anxiously at the foot of the mountain, knowing that Moses had had a tough day negotiating with God over the Commandments. Finally a tired Moses came into sight. "I've got some good news and some bad news, folks," he said. "The good news is that I got Him down to ten. The bad news is that adultery's still in." %% The Jackal only eats bad food. %% The Jovian invaders sort a Bunch of captives in the nude: These for breeding, those for slaughter, And the fattest ones for food. %% The Joyous. Success. Perseverance is favorable. %% The Junior God now heads the roll In the list of heaven's peers; He sits in the House of High Control, And he regulates the spheres. Yet does he wonder, do you suppose, If, even in gods divine, The best and wisest may not be those Who have wallowed awhile with the swine? -- Robert W. Service %% The Kennedy Constant: Don't get mad -- get even. %% The Killer Ducks are coming!!! %% The King named Oedipus Rex Who started this fuss about sex Put the world to great pains By the spots and the stains Which he made on his mother's pubex. %% The King plugged the Queen's ass with mustard To make her fuck hot, but got flustered, And cried, "Oh, my dear, I am coming, I fear, But the mustard will make you come `plus tard'." %% The Korean War must have been fun. %% The Kosher Dill was invented in 1723 by Joe Kosher and Sam Dill. It is the single most popular pickle variety today, enjoyed throughout the free world by man, woman and child alike. An astounding 350 billion kosher dills are eaten each year, averaging out to almost 1/4 pickle per person per day. New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton says "The kosher dill really changed my life. I used to enjoy eating McDonald's hamburgers and drinking Iron City Lite, and then I encountered the kosher dill pickle. I realized that there was far more to haute cuisine then I'd ever imagined. And now, just look at me." %% The L.A. courts are so backed up with trials against all the looters, they've opened up a 10 items or less counter!! -- George Wallace %% The Lab called,..... Your brain is ready! %% The Last One's Law of Program Generators: A program generator creates programs that are more "buggy" than the program generator. %% The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan. -- Edward Abbey %% The Law Conservation of Energy: The total amount of energy in the universe is constant. -- Dr. John Gall %% The Law of Fashion: The same dress is: indecent 10 years before its time daring 1 year before its time chic in its time dowdy 3 years after its time hideous 20 years after its time amusing 30 years after its time romantic 100 years after its time beautiful 150 years after its time -- James Laver %% The Law of Happy Particularities: Any general system law will have at least two particular applications. -- Gerald Weinberg %% The Law of Medium Numbers: For medium number systems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly. (This is more succinctly expressed by Murphy: Anything that can happen, will happen.) %% The Law of Moses contains 613 rules. The Lord summed it up in Ten Commandments. Christ summarized it in two: Love God, Love thy Neighbor. %% The Law of Raspberry Jam - The wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets. -- Alvin Toffler, "The Culture Consumers", 1964 %% The Law of Raspberry Jam: The wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets. -- Stanley Edgar Hyman %% The Law of Selective Gravitation: A dropped tool will land where it will do the most damage. %% The Law of Selective Gravity, or the Buttered-Side Down Law: An object will fall so as to do the most damage. %% The Law of Software Development and Envelopment at MIT: Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail. %% The Law of Software Envelopment Every program at MIT attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can. %% The Law of Unhappy Peculiarities: Any general system law will have at least two peculiar exceptions. -- Gerald Weinberg %% The Law of the Perversity of Nature: You cannot determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter. %% The Law of the Too Solid Goof: In any collection of data, the figures that are obviously correct beyond all need of checking contain the errors. Corollary 1: No one you ask for help will see the error either. Corollary 2: Any nagging intruder, who stops by with unsought advice, will spot it immediately. %% The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the street, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% The Laws of Cartoon Physics: 1: No shotgun ever runs out of ammunition. (Related law: Shotgun barrels can be reversed on the fly so that the user takes the blast full in the face.) 2: Supplies of sticks of dynamite and "bowling-ball" bombs are unlimited. 3: Baseball bats and other large bludgeons can be carried concealed in one's hip pocket. (Corollary: All cartoon characters have hip pockets whether they have clothes or not.) 4: Major implements of destruction -- steamrollers, tanks, and cannons -- can be produced on demand from out of nowhere. %% The Leprechaun Gold Tru$t is no division of the Magic Memory Vault. %% The Leprechauns hide their treasure in a small hidden room. %% The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, With an indolent expression and an undulating throat Like an unsuccessful literary man. -- Hilaire Belloc, "The Llama" %% The Lone Ranger and Tonto are travelling along, when suddenly they are surrounded by "Injuns"... Injuns to the West, Injuns to the East, Injuns to the North, Injuns to the South... The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, "Well, old buddy, looks like we're in a bit of trouble now." Tonto turns to the Lone Ranger and replies, "What you mean we, paleface?" %% The Lone Ranger, while hunting down some low-down-murderous scum, is captured. Fortunately, Silver escapes. The bad guys decide to take Loney out into the desert and tie him down, naked, to stakes. Once they are satisfied that he is secured, they leave him to die slowly. Silver appears at the scene. The Lone Ranger says to him, "Silver, go to town and get the posse!" Silver rears back, whinnies, and charges off to town, many miles away. All day, in the blistering sun, the Lone Ranger survives. Just as he thinks the end is near, night falls. Though relieved at first, he begins to get colder and colder. By shear power of will, he manages to survive the night. As dawn breaks, he hears the thundering of horse hooves. Up gallops Silver with a naked woman on his back. "God Damnit, Silver, I said 'POSSE'" %% The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them. -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" %% The Lord giveth, Uncle Sam taketh away. %% The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Fickle, fickle Lord. -- Solomon Short %% The Lord made grass, Man made booze; Who CAN you trust? %% The Lord made grass, Man made booze; Who CAN you trust? [Actually, ethanol is a natural product -- generated normally by the human body.] %% The Lump Law: If we want to learn anything, we mustn't try to learn everything. %% The Majority already has its roads and hotels. Only a small minority enjoy art galleries, libraries, and universities. Yet no one would suggest making these facilities into bowling alleys, circuses, or hot dog stands just because more people would use them. Quality has a claim as well as quantity. -- Robert Marshall %% The Man of Steel. %% The Marines: The few, the proud, the not very bright. %% The Marrying Maiden. Undertakings bring misfortune. Nothing that would further. %% The Merry Pranksters welcomes the Hell's Angeles. %% The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead -- all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated. -- Rabbi Meir Kahane %% The Meta-Turing Test: I'll call something intelligent when it attempts to construct objects and apply Turing tests to them. -- Lew Mammel, Jr. %% The Mets did it in 69. %% 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?" %% The Middle East is certainly the nexus of turmoil for a long time to come -- with shifting players, but the same game: upheaval. I think we will be confronting militant Islam -- particularly fallout from the Iranian revolution -- and religion will once more, as it has in our own more distant past -- play a role at least as standard-bearer in death and mayhem. -- Bobby R. Inman, Admiral, USN, Retired, former director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the DIA, former director of the NSA, deputy director of Central Intelligence, former chairman and CEO of MCC. %% The Ming vase drops with a delicate crash. %% The Mintakans are beginning to believe in a god, and the one they've chosen is you. -- Riker to Picard, "Who Watches the Watchers?", stardate 43173.5 %% The Modelski Chain Rule: 1: Look intently at the problem for several minutes. Scratch your head at 20-30 second intervals. Try solving the problem on your Hewlett-Packard. 2: Failing this, look around at the class. Select a particularly bright-looking individual. 3: Procure a large chain. 4: Walk over to the selected student and threaten to beat him severely with the chain unless he gives you the answer to the problem. Generally, he will. It may also be a good idea to give him a sound thrashing anyway, just to show you mean business. %% The Moses film project was abandoned after they'd seen the rushes. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all they Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. %% The Munish Agreement excuse It occured before important facts were known, and cannot happen again. (The important fact being that Hitler wanted to conquer Europe) %% The Murphy Philosophy: Smile ..... tomorrow will be worse. %% The NICS-TARE experience. What a fun party! %% The NJ state gemstone is concrete %% The National Association of Theater Concessionaires reported that in 1986, 60% of all candy sold in movie theaters was sold to Roger Ebert. -- D. Letterman %% The National Short-Sleeved Shirt Association says: Support your right to bare arms! %% The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirits weak. -- Edward Abbey %% The New IBM PERSONAL SYSTEM COMPUTERS: Engineered... by Lawyers -- Jeff Meyer %% The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system. But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. -- Matthew 5:37 %% The New York Penal Code states that anyone who arrests a dead man for debt is guilty of a misdemeanor. %% The New York State Vehicle and Traffic Laws state that "Two vehicles which are passing each other in opposite directions shall have the right of way." %% The Ninth Commandment of Frisbee: The greater your need to make a good catch, the greater the probability your partner will deliver his worst throw. (If you can't touch it, you can't trick it.) -- Dan Roddick %% The Nixon principle: If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. %% The Norwegian Blue stuns easily. %% The Official MBA Handbook on business cards: Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India" or "Director of Corporate Planning." %% The Official MBA Handbook on doing company business on an airplane: Do not work openly on top-secret company cost documents unless you have previously ascertained that the passenger next to you is blind, a rock musician on mood-ameliorating drugs, or the unfortunate possessor of a forty-seventh chromosome. %% The Official MBA Handbook on the use of sunlamps: Use a sunlamp only on weekends. That way, if the office wise guy remarks on the sudden appearance of your tan, you can fabricate some story about a sun-stroked weekend at some island Shangri-La like Caneel Bay. Nothing is more transparent than leaving the office at 11:45 on a Tuesday night, only to return an Aztec sun god at 8:15 the next morning. %% The Official Offline Reader of The Lunatic Fringe! %% The Official Santa Clara County Richter Scale: 3.0-3.9: Motion comparable to upset stomach after bad burrito. Freeways impassable. 4.0-4.9: Slight fizz noticed in refrigerated mineral water. Freeways impassable. 5.0-5.9: Wine racks upset. Freeways impassable. 6.0: Difficult to jog. White caps in hot tubs. Freeways impassable. 7.0: U-storage facilities collapse. Tsunamis in waterbeds. Small cars upset. Freeways impassable. 7.9: RVs overturned. Suction-cups Garfields jarred off car windows. Freeways impassable. 8.0: Malls evacuated. Hackers notice movement. Freeways beginning to clear. 8.9: Jack-in-the-Box restaurants close. Freeways clear. %% The Ohio General Code provides: "A person assaulted and lynched by a mob may recover from the county in which the assault is made a sum not to exceed five hundred dollars." %% The Old Left: "I like New York," she said, "because there I feel close to the masses." -- Edward Abbey %% The Open Kimono - by U. Seymore Hair %% The Osmonds! You are all Osmonds!! Throwing up on a freeway at dawn!!! %% The PILLSBURY DOUGHBOY is CRYING for and END to BURT REYNOLDS movies!! %% The PINK SOCKS were ORIGINALLY from 1952!! But they went to MARS around 1953!! %% The Pavlov dog and the Schroedinger cat Side by side in my forebrain sat With Shakespeare's monkeys crowding in behind. . . . . . it's all in your mind. -- Visual Purple %% The Pearl Harbor: 5 parts pineapple juice, 4 parts vodka, 1 part Midori. The reason behind the name is twofold -- first, the pine juice gives it a rather murky color, not unlike the water in Pearl Harbor itself -- and second, it's sweet enough to launch a sneak attack on your body... :) %% The Pep Boys: Manny, Moe, and Jack! %% The Peter Principle: People are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. %% The Phone Booth Rule: A lone dime always gets the number nearly right. %% The Pig, if I am not mistaken, Gives us ham and pork and Bacon. Let others think his heart is big, I think it stupid of the Pig. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The Poems, all three hundred of them, may be summed up in one of their phrases: "Let our thoughts be correct". -- Confucius %% The Pope and some Cardinals were sitting around one afternoon. One of the Cardinals strolled to the window and looked outside. To his surprise he saw Jesus walking toward the building. Very excitedly the Cardinal ran over to the Pope and said, "Excellency. Excellency. I have just seen Jesus walking toward us in the garden. He's here! It's the second coming!" The Pope replied, "Quick. Everybody look busy." %% The Pope died and went to heaven. When he got there, he found a lawyer in line in front of him at the Pearly Gates. Saint Peter came over and told the Pope, "Just a minute, I'll be right back". At that, Saint Peter took the lawyer away. When Saint Peter came back, he told the Pope, "Follow me to your new quarters." Along the way they passed many people in their heavenly abodes, and they happened to pass by the quarters of the lawyer who had preceded Saint Peter through the Pearly Gates. The Pope was awe-struck by the opulence and splendor of the lawyer's quarters. There were fine silks, rare foods and drinks, soft music, and attractive young women to serve him for eternity. Saint Peter and the Pope finally arrived at the Pope's new quarters. The Pope looked in and saw a 6 foot y 9 foot room with bare walls, a plain bed and a Bible for entertainment. The Pope said, "I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I am wondering why the lawyer gets such a magnificent room and I get this small room. Saint Peter said, "Well, you see, we have a great many popes here in heaven, but only ONE lawyer." %% The Postal Service is raising its rates for storing mail. %% The Power of the Great. Perseverance furthers. %% The Power separates Thrint from Animal. %% The Preacher, the Politician, the Teacher, Were each of them once a kiddie. A child, indeed, is a wonderful creature. Do I want one? God Forbiddie! -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive. -- Vice President Dan Quayle remarks to oil spill clean-up workers at Prince William Sound, May, 1989 %% The President is my shepherd, I am in want. He maketh me to lie down on park benches, he leadeth me beside still factories, he restoreth my doubt in the Republican party. He guideth me to the path of unemployment for his party's sake. I am still hungry. I fear evil for thou art against me. Thou anointest my income with taxes, so my expenses runneth over my income. Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me all the days of the Republican administration, and I shall live in a rented house forever. %% The President of these overly-united States was shaking hands with the NY Yankees one day -- apparently during summer. When he got to Babe Ruth, the Bambino opened with, "Hot as Hell, ain't it, Prez?" %% The President publicly apologized today to all those offended by his brother's remark, "There's more Arabs in this country than there is Jews!". Those offended include Arabs, Jews, and English teachers. -- Baltimore, Channel 11 News, on Jimmy Carter %% The Principle of Indifference: Laws should not depend on a particular choice of notation. %% The Professor enters the classroom, looks around and bids his charges a hearty 'Good Morning!'. The freshmen respond with 'Good morning, Professor!' The sophomores just mutter 'Morning!' The juniors just grunt. The seniors simply write down the Professor's greeting in their notes. %% The Professor: "The computer is down..." The Wizard: "Could you be more specific?" The Professor: "The computer is down AGAIN." -- Jeff MacNelly, "Shoe" %% The Programmer's Twelve Days of Christmas On the twelfth day of Christmas My true love gave to me Twelve plotters plotting, Eleven printers grinding, Ten punches jamming, Nine nixies blinking, Eight drums a-spinning, Seven screens a-scrolling, Six mice a-clicking, Five write rings, Four coding sheets, Three punch cards, Two paper tapes, And a cartridge in a P.C. %% The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink. -- Edward Abbey %% The Psblurtex is an 18-inch long anaconda that hides in the gentlemen's outfitting departments of Amazonian stores and is often bought by mistake since its colors are those of the London Reform Club. Once tied around its victim's neck, it strangles him gently and then claims the insurance before running off to Germany where it lives in hiding. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The Public is merely a multiplied "me." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), "History of England" %% The QAPR that ate SDRC. See the movie! %% The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer day: The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts And took them quite away! -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% The Queue Principle: The longer you wait in line, the greater the likelihood that you are standing in the wrong line. %% The REVERSE function works on the opposite SEXPR. %% The Rabbits The Cow Here is a verse about rabbits The cow is of the bovine ilk; That doesn't mention their habits. One end is moo, the other, milk. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The Rain falls equally on everybody, But there are some people who have the best umbrellas.... %% The Ranger isn't gonna like it, Yogi. %% The Receptive brings about sublime success, Furthering through the perseverance of a mare. If the superior man undertakes something and tries to lead, He goes astray; But if he follows, he finds guidance. It is favorable to find friends in the west and south, To forego friends in the east and north. Quiet perseverance brings good fortune. %% The Republican administration has failed to enforce the Prohibition law; is guily of trafficking in liquor permits, and has become the protector of violators of this law. The Democratic Party pledges to respect and enforce the Constitution and all laws. -- Democratic National Platform, 1924 %% The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher Called a girl a most elegant creature. So she laid on her back And, exposing her crack, Said, "Fuck that, you old Sunday School Teacher!" %% The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher Called a hen a most elegant creature. The hen, pleased with that, Laid an egg in his hat -- And thus did the hen reward Beecher. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% The Right Honorable Gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts. -- Sheridan %% The Ringworld is an engineering compromise between a Dyson Sphere and a normal planet. %% The Rockettes are so perfect you'd think they were Xeroxed. -- Irene Peter %% The Roman Rule The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it. %% The Romans would never have had time to conquer the world if they had been obliged to first learn Latin. %% The Ruffed Pandanga of Borneo and Rotherham spreads out his feathers in his courtship dance and imitates Winston Churchill and Tommy Cooper on one leg. The padanga is dying out because the female padanga doesn't take it too seriously. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The Russian dictatorship of the proletariat has made a a farce of the whole Marxist vision: developing a powerful, privileged ruling class to prepare for a classless society, setting up the most despotic state in history so that the state may wither away, establishing by force a colonial empire to combat imperialism and unify the workers of the world. -- Herbert J. Muller %% The Russians have put a small ball up in the air. That does not raise my apprehensions one iota. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower %% The SAME WAVE keeps coming in and COLLAPSING like a rayon MUU-MUU ... %% The Safety Nazis won't be satisfied until the drinking age is 55 and the speed limit 21 -- Jeff Chan, chan@shell.portal.com %% The San Diego Freeway...Official Parking Lot of the 1984 Olympics! -- "Bumper Snickers" %% The San Francisco police are nothing if not sensitive to the mood of the community. The word is that Dirty Harry has been replaced by Bitchy Gerald. %% The Schizophrenic: An Unauthorized Autobiography %% The Schwine-Kitzenger Institute study of 47 men over the age of 100 showed that all had these things in common: (1) They all had moderate appetites. (2) They all came from middle class homes (3) All but two of them were dead. %% The Scottsman asked the stablemaster if he could rent a horse. The stablemaster asked, "How Long?" The Scotsman replied, "The longest you got. We've got five going." %% The Scottsman comes to his friend in tears. "My beautiful comb. I broke a tooth on it an now I can't use it anymore. What am I going to do? Now I'll have to buy another one." "Well," said his friend, "you don't need to buy another just because you lost one tooth on your comb." "But you don't understand. It was the last tooth." %% The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe: %% The Second Amendment doesn't grant the right to keep and bear arms. You already have that right. The Constitution just prohibits the government from taking it away from you. %% The Second Commandment of Frisbee: The higher the quality of a catch or the comment it receives, the greater the probability of a crummy throw. (Good catch = bad throw.) -- Dan Roddick %% The Second Law Of Air Travel: The amount of time saved by your plane arriving early at your destination is equal to the amount of extra time you have to wait for your luggage. %% The Second Order Rule of Bureaucracy: The more directives you issue to solve a problem, the worse it gets. -- Jack Robertson %% The Second SNAFU Equation: An object or bit of information most needed will be least available. %% The Senate Deluxe Committee on Wild Abandon got back to Arbuthnot on the amendment situation after determining that only the 17th (which guarantees the right to free, lighted parking) and 29th (the "get-out-of-jail-free" amendment) were available. %% The Seventh Commandment of Frisbee: The most powerful hex words in the sport are--"I really have this down--watch." (Know it? Blow it!) -- Dan Roddick %% The Seventh Edition licensing procedures are, I suppose, still in effect, though I doubt that tapes are available from AT&T. At any rate, whatever restrictions the license imposes still exist. These restrictions were and are reasonable for places that just want to run the system, but don't allow many of the things that Minix was written for, like study of the source in classes, or by individuals not in a university or company. I've always thought that Minix was a fine idea, and competently done. As for the size of v7, wc -l /usr/sys/*/*.[chs] is 19271. -- Dennis Ritchie, 1989 %% The Seventh Law of Project Management: A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned project will take only twice as long. %% The Shah of the Empire of Persia Lay for days in a sexual merger. When the nautch asked the Shah, "Won't you ever withdraw?" He replied with a yawn, "It's inertia." %% The Shuttle is now going 5 times the sound of speed. -- Dan Rather [first landing of Columbia] %% The Sixth Commandment of Frisbee: The greatest single aid to distance is for the disc to be going in a direction you did not want. (Goes the wrong way = Goes a long way.) -- Dan Roddick %% The Sixth SNAFU Equation: Badness comes in waves. %% The Soviet news agency TASS reported that one of the leaders of the failed Soviet coup committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. He died after the third bullet entered his head. %% The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average Russian's readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the arrangement of some pieces of wood. Indeed, the Russians' predisposition for quiet reflection followed by sudden preventive action explains why they led the field for many years in both chess and ax murders. It is well known that as early as 1970, the U.S.S.R., aware of what a defeat at Reykjavik would do to national prestige, implemented a vigorous program of preparation and incentive. Every day for an entire year, a team of psychologists, chess analysts and coaches met with the top three Russian grand masters and threatened them with a pointy stick. That these tactics proved fruitless is now a part of chess history and a further testament to the American way, which provides that if you want something badly enough, you can always go to Iceland and get it from the Russians. -- Marshall Brickman, Playboy, April, 1973 %% The Space People think factories are musical instruments. Each song lasts from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. No music on weekends. %% The Space People think that TV news programs are comedies, and that soap operas are news. %% The Space People will contact us when they can make money by doing so. %% The Special Investigations Committee of the Loyal Order of Oddfellows, Lodge No. 57, traded Senator Sam Nunn to a committee that still is working on its name in return for two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the right to yell "Manucher Ghorbanifar" in a crowded movie theatre. %% The Squirrels' Motto ("The Hell's Angels of Nature"): "Live fast, die young, and leave a flat patch of fur on the highway!" %% The Stanley Cup, hockey's most coveted championship award, was presented by Governer-General Lord Stanley in 1893. Its original cost - $48.67 (tax unknown) %% The State of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity. -- Ronald W. Reagan %% The State of Delaware has a law against pawning your wooden leg. %% The Stones, I love the Stones. I watch them whenever I can. Fred, Barney... -- Steven Wright %% The Strip was deserted late Friday night We were buggin' each other while we sat out the light We both popped the clutch when the light turned green You shoulda heard the whine from my screamin' machine I flew past LaBrea, Schwabs, and Crescent Heights And all the Jag could see was my six taillights He passed me at Doheny and I started to swerve But I pulled her out and there we were - at Dead Man's Curve. %% The Submarine of the Usenet %% The Supreme Court does it with all deliberate speed. %% The Supreme court says three may keep a secret, if two of them used to work for the CIA. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% The Surgeon General has determined that: Continued serious computer use may be hazardous to your health. %% The Surgeon General says always wear your rubbers. %% The Swartzberg Test: The validity of a science is its ability to predict. %% The Synthetic Fuels Corporation, like the egg roll, is shrimp surrounded by dough. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% The Taming Power of the Great. Perseverance furthers. Not eating at home brings good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. %% The Taming Power of the Small Has success. Dense clouds, no rain from our western region. %% The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the yin and yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it. -- The Tao of Programming %% The Tens: The first decade of a new century. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% The Tenth Commandment of Frisbee: The single most difficult move with a disc is to put it down. (Just one more.) -- Dan Roddick %% The Theorem Theorem: If if, then then. %% The Third Commandment of Frisbee: One must never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than, "Watch this!" (Keep 'em guessing.) -- Dan Roddick %% The Third Law Of Air Travel: The number of taxis at an airport is inversely proportional to the number of flights arriving. %% 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. %% The Third SNAFU Equation: Any device requiring service or adjustment will be least accessible. %% The Thought Police are here. They've come To put you under cardiac arrest. And as they drag you through the door They tell you that you've failed the test. -- Buggles, "Living in the Plastic Age" %% The Three Laws of Infernal Dynamics: 1. An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction. 2. An object at rest will always be in the wrong place. 3. The energy required to change either of these states will always be more than you wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task appear prospectively impossible. -- Solomon Short %% The Three Laws of Thermodynamics: 1) You can't win. 2) You can't break even. 3) You can't even get out of the game. %% The Three Laws of Thermodynamics: 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. %% The Three Lies of the 80's: 1) The check is in the mail. 2) I love you. 3) 100% IBM compatible. %% The Titanic was insured for only over three million dollars. Betty Grable's legs were insured for a cool quarter of a million, while Jimmy Durante's nose for $140,000. %% The Top 15 Advertising Slogans for Delta Air Lines: 1. Delta: We're Amtrak with wings. 2. Join our frequent near-miss program. 3. Ask about our out-of-court settlements. 4. Noisy engines? We'll turn 'em off! 5. Complimentary champagne in free-fall. 6. Enjoy the in-flight movie in the plane next to you. 7. The kids will love our inflatable slides. 8. You think it's so easy, get your own damm plane! 9. Delta: Our pilots are terminally ill and have nothing to lose. 10. Delta: We might be landing on your street! 11. Delta: Terrorists are afraid to fly with us. 12. Bring a bathing suit. 13. So that's what these buttons do! 14. Delta: A real man lands where he wants to. 15. Delta: We never make the same mistake three times. -- David Letterman %% The Tree of Learning bears the noblest fruit, but noble fruit tastes bad. %% The U.S. Surgeon General warns that if you make a really ugly face, it could get stuck that way. -- Dave Barry's 1989 In Review %% The UARTs won't take this speed, Captain %% The US government will make no concessions to terrorists. It will not pay ransoms, release prisoners, change its policies or agree to other acts that might encourage additional terrorism. -- From the final report of the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism, 1986 %% The US has a vital interest in that area of the country. -- Vice President Dan Quayle Referring to Latin America. %% The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledegook than the rest of the world put together. -- Sir Peter Medawar %% The UnCola. %% The Unapplicable Law: Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work. %% The Uncertainty Principle, according to the Mountaintop Guru: "Life is like...life. ...But not exactly." %% The United States Army; 207 years of proud service, unhampered by progress. %% The United States also has its native Fascists who say that they are "100 percent American"... -- U. S. Army (1945) %% The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him. -- Jim Samuels %% The Universe is a big place... perhaps the biggest %% The Universe is populated by stable things. -- Richard Dawkins %% 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." %% The VAX has a new instruction, Halt and Catch Fire. Please update your programs. %% The VAX was developed by DEC. Detractors assert it's a wreck. Perkin-Elmer and Prime Are still biding their time, Hoping someone will buy from them yet. %% The VFW represents many who died to give this country a second chance to make it what it is supposed to be -- God's guest house on earth. -- John Wayne %% The Value, or <> of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power. And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer, determines the price. -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) %% The Vaporizer : 25 Million of your population vanish overnight. %% The Vatican Express Card. Don't leave Rome without it. %% The Venusians, out on a mission, Found Earth in a puzzling condition. They could understand part of our laws and our art But got stuck in the eighteenth position. %% The Vice Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does. -- Bill Vaughan %% The Virginia Code (1930) has a statute "to prohibit corrupt practices or bribery by any person other than candidates." %% The Waiting Principle: Whichever line you pick to stand on, the other one moves faster. %% The Wanderer. Success through smallness. Perseverance brings good fortune To the wanderer. %% The Well. The town may be changed, But the well cannot be changed. It neither decreases nor increases. They come and go and draw from the well. If one gets down almost to the water And the rope does not go all the way, Or the jug breaks, it brings misfortune. %% The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. >From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walking": %% The Wh-words of English: Who, What, When, Where, How, and sometimes Why. %% The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty ?" he asked. "Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll %% The Windfall Theorem: Any unexpected gift of money is immediately equalled in amount by an unexpected expense. %% The World Health Organization recently did a research in determining the function of the knob at the end of the penis. The Russians put in a million dollars and came up with the results saying that the knob is there merely to please a man during sexual encounters. The French also put in a million dollars but came up with a different conclusion citing that the knob is there for the pleasure of a woman. The Poles put in $2.98 and discovered that the function of a knob is to prevent the hand from slipping off!!!! %% The Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, N. C., covered about 100 feet. Now some planes are twice that long. %% The Yeti, whom we know of only By the tracks he leaves behind, Hunts the mountains, sad and lonely, For a mate to breed his kind. %% The [Ford Foundation] is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some. -- Dwight MacDonald %% The [human] species is capable of much affection. -- Deela the Scalosian, "Wink of an Eye," stardate 5710.5 %% The \fIting\fR has rings of jade. Great good fortune. Nothing that would not act to further. %% The \fIting\fR has yellow handles, golden carrying rings. Perseverance furthers. %% The `loner' may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself. -- Sidney Harris %% The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare {angle brackets}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% The abbess of a nunnery was instructing a group of novices on the house rules of her particular order. The indoctrination period, which went on for hours, began with "No washing of undies in the founts," and ended with "Lights out at nine. Candles out at ten." %% The ability of our people to deceive themselves is the highest art of the nation. %% The ablest men marry the prettiest girls. %% The absence of labels [in ECL] is probably a good thing. -- T. Cheatham %% The absent are always in the wrong. %% The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves. -- Charles Reade %% The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% The absent-minded professor on the subway was strap-hanging with one hand and carried a bundle of books in the other. He looked worried. "Can I help you?" asked a friendly traveler. "Oh, thank you. Would you hold onto this strap while I get my fare out?" %% The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth. -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it. -- Edward Abbey %% The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power. -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" %% The abyss is dangerous. One should strive to attain small things only. %% The abyss is not filled to overflowing, It is filled only to the rim. No blame. %% The accessibility, during recovery of small parts which fall from the work bench, varies directly with the size of the part -- and inversely with its importance to the completion of work underway. %% 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." %% The acronym formed by the first letters of the phrase "GLOBAL OZONE DEPLETION" is GOD. %% The actions of your companion or close allies will help you to make an important decision. %% The actor who took the role of King Lear played the king as though he expected someone to play the ace. -- Eugene Field %% The acts of this life are the destiny of the next. %% The actual theory is that all life forms evolved from the lower levels to the more advanced stages. -- Spock, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," stardate 5730.2 %% The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech. -- Clifton Fadiman %% The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal. -- Dr. Karl Menninger, "The Human Mind", 1930 %% The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving. -- Russell Green %% The advantage of being celibate is that when one sees a pretty girl one does not need to grieve over having an ugly one back home. -- Paul Leautaud %% The advantage of modern means of communication is that they enable you to worry about things in all parts of the world. %% The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% The advice your son rejected is now being given by him to your grandson. %% The affections are like lightening; you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen. -- Jean Baptiste Lacordaire %% The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over ... every major advance in the technological competence of man has enforced revolutionary changes in the economic and political structure of society. -- Barry Commoner %% The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of values. -- Dean William R. Inge %% The aim of learning is not knowledge but action. %% The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. Seek simplicity and distrust it. -- Whitehead %% The air is positively magic in here. Better wear a negative armor. %% The alternative to the totalitarian state is the cooperative commonwealth. -- Norman Thomas %% The amount of effort put into a campaign by a worker expands in proportion to the personal benefits that he will derive from his party's victory. -- Milton Rakove %% The amount of entropy in the universe is constant -- except when it increases. -- Solomon Short %% The amount of flak on any subject is inversely proportional to the subject's true value. %% The amount of junk carried is in direct proportion to the amount of space available. -- Tony Hogg %% The amount of litter in the street is proportional to the local rate of unemployment. -- David Lloyd-Jones %% The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.... Noise is a torture to all intellectual people. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% The amount of pleasure derived from a cigarette is directly proportional to the number of the non-smokers in the vicinity. -- Raj K. Dhawan %% The amount of quaint, authentic, rustic charm varies inversely with the pounds per square inch of water pressure in the shower. High charm, low pressure. -- Frank Mankiewicz %% The amount of research devoted to a topic in human behavior is inversely proportional to its importance and interest. -- Bernard I. Murstein %% The amount of success is in inverse proportion to the effort in attaining success. -- Felix R. Paturi %% The amount of time you have to wait for a bus is directly proportional to the inclemency of the weather. -- John Corcoran %% The amount of trash accumulated within the space occupied is exponentially proportional to the number of living bodies that enter and leave within any given amount of time. %% The amulet of Frobozz %% The analogy to athletics must be pressed until all recognize that in the exercise of intellect those who lack the muscles, coordination, and will power can claim no place at the training table, let alone on the playing field. -- Jacques Barzun %% The anatomy professor says, "Now, class, I've a few questions for ya about the homewerrk. Miss MacGregor! Stand please." [She stands.] "What organ expands to ten times its normal size when excited?" Miss MacGregor flushes and fidgets. Finally the professor tells her to be seated. "Mister Campbell: stand please and answer the same question." "It's the pupil of the eye, sir." "Very good, Mister Campbell. Miss MacGregor, I have three things to say to you. First, ya haven't done yerr homewerrk. Second, ya have a derrty mind. Third, yerr in for a *big* disappointment." %% The ancient sage who concocted the maxim, "Know Thyself" might have added, "Don't Tell Anyone!" -- H. F. Henrichs %% The anger of a woman is the greatest evil with which you can threaten your enemies. -- Bonnard %% The angry man always thinks he can do more than he can. -- Albertano of Brescia %% The annual meeting of the "You Have To Listen To Experience" Club is now in session. Our Achievement Awards this year are in the fields of publishing, advertising and industry. For best consistent contribution in the field of publishing our award goes to editor, R. L. K., [...] for his unrivaled allegiance without variation to the statement: "Personally I'd love to do it, we'd ALL love to do it. But we're not going to do it. It's not the kind of book our house knows how to handle." Our superior performance award in the field of advertising goes to media executive, E. L. M., [...] for the continually creative use of the old favorite: "I think what you've got here could be very exciting. Why not give it one more try based on the approach I've outlined and see if you can come up with something fresh." Our final award for courageous holding action in the field of industry goes to supervisor, R. S., [...] for her unyielding grip on "I don't care if they fire me, I've been arguing for a new approach for YEARS but are we SURE that this is the right time--" I would like to conclude this meeting with a verse written specially for our prospectus by our founding president fifty years ago -- and now, as then, fully expressive of the emotion most close to all our hearts -- Treat freshness as a youthful quirk, And dare not stray to ideas new, For if t'were tried they might e'en work And for a living what woulds't we do? %% The answer is... 42. %% The answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" is not 42 -- this is just an integer approximation. %% The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything was released with the kind permission of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons. %% The apathy of the born freeman is worse than the docility of the born slave. -- Grant Singleton (1890-?) %% The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead. -- William Lloyd Garrison %% The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey. %% The appreciation of the average visual graphisticator alone is worth the whole suaveness and decadence which abounds!! %% The area around you appears to have once been part of a great plaza. The plaza is circular and paved with stone. %% The area around you is now completely dark. You cannot see. %% The aristocrat is right in that only a few people in any society make a real difference, but the democrat is more deeply right when he insists that we cannot predict where such valuable people are coming from and therefore have an obligation to keep all lines open. -- Sydney J. Harris %% The aristocrat is the democrat ripe and gone to seed. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The army retreats. No blame. %% The arrow on the compass rose now indicates #. %% The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about maps, But Biography is about chaps. -- Edmund Clerihew Bentley, "Biography for Beginners" %% The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds. -- Jawaharlal Nehru %% The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one. -- Russell Lynes %% The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. -- William James %% The art of government is the organization of idolatry. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does. -- Lewis Mumford %% The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition. -- Edward Abbey %% The artist isn't made by a haberdasher and a left-wing editorial. He's made by the explosive in him that bears the label, "Beware Uniformity." -- Ben Hecht (1894-?) %% The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.... -- Edward Abbey %% The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their live into the sting they give. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The ass is still an ass, e'en though he wears a lion's hide. -- William Shakespeare %% The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% The astronauts in the Sea of Tranquility were amazed to discover that the moon actually did contain large underground deposits of cheese. Once outside the LEM, they climbed into the LTV and drove across the lunar surface to obtain samples. In one location they discovered a large deposit of brie and collected 25 pounds to bring back to earth. They drove to a second location and collected 50 pounds of camembert. In a third location they hit a vein of cheddar and collected another 50 pounds of samples. Mission Control crackled through their headsets that it would not be satisfied unless they brought back at least another 25 pounds of brie. The astronauts turned their LTV around and proceeded to the first location where they collected another 25 pounds of the cheese. The astronauts were almost back to the LEM when Mission Control radioed that it wanted another 25 pounds of brie. Disgruntled, one of the astronauts sarcastically snapped into his microphone, "Have you ever seen such a site in your life as brie mined thrice?" %% The athiest has no hope. -- J. F. Clarke %% The atom bomb is a paper tiger... Terrible to look at but not so strong as it seems. -- Mao Zedong %% The atom was not meant to be explored -- Its splitting was the work of brazen fools. Let's march until the Stone Age is restored, With rocks and flints our kind of splitting tools. Atomic Power? Seal it in its grave. We are Progressive. Onward to the cave! -- Jack Kirwan %% The atomic age is here to stay -- but are we? -- Bennett Cerf %% The attacker must vanquish; the defender need only survive. %% The attempt to tear down our president's leadership with the knowledge of the issues has not failed. -- Vice President George Bush %% The attention paid to an instructor is a constant regardless of the size of the class. Thus as class size swells, the amount of attention paid per student drops in direct ratio. -- Richard J. Herrnstein %% The attractive and grief-stricken widow had been living in seclusion at the home of her deceased husband's younger brother for several weeks. One evening, when she could no longer control her emotions, she barged into her brother-in- law's study and pleaded, "James, I want you to take off my dress." Shyly, the brother-in-law did as she requested. "Now," she continued, "take off my slip." He again complied. "And now," she said, with a slight blush, "remove my panties and bra." Once more James obeyed her command. Then, regaining her composure, she stared directly at the young man and boldly announced, "I have only one more request, James. Don't ever let me catch you wearing my things again." %% The author should gaze at Noah, and ... learn, as they did in the Ark, to crowd a great deal of matter into a very small compass. -- Sydney Smith, Edinburgh Review %% The author: an imaginary person who writes real books. -- Edward Abbey %% The avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert which sucks in all the rain and dew with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others. -- Zeno %% The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another. -- J. Frank Dobie, "A Texan in England", 1945 %% The average income of the modern teenager is about 2AM. %% The average individual's position in any hierarchy is a lot like pulling a dogsled -- there's no real change of scenery except for the lead dog. %% The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman -- any woman -- with beautiful legs. -- Marlene Dietrich %% The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%. -- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) %% The average time between deleting a file and realizing you really need it, is about two days. %% The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. %% The avoidance of taxes is the only pursuit that still carries any reward. -- John Maynard Keyes %% The axe bounces harmlessly off the dragon's thick scales. %% The axe cleaves the air viciously but fails to cleave you. %% The axe crashes against the rock, throwing sparks. %% The axe gets you right in the side. Ouch! %% The axe hits your # and sends it spinning. %% The axe is too dull. %% The axe knocks your # out of your hand. It falls to the floor. %% The axe misses and lands near the bear where you can't get at it. %% The axe sweeps past you as you jump aside. %% The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence. -- Edward Abbey %% The axletrees are taken from the wagon. %% The babe, with a cry brief and dismal, Fell into the water baptismal; Ere they'd gathered its plight, It had sunk out of sight, For the depth of the font was abysmal. -- Edward Gorey %% The baby's in the potato salad! %% The bag that breaks is the one with the eggs. %% The balloon descends. %% The balloon has landed. %% The balloon inflates as it fills with hot air. %% The balloon is inflated, and there is a # burning in the receptacle. %% The balloon is not tied to anything. %% The balloon is tied to the hook. %% The balloon leaves the ledge. %% The balloon slowly rises from the ground. %% The ballot is stronger than the bullet. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% The balls of sight are so formed, that one man's eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart from within. -- Johnson %% The bar is welded into your hand! %% The barium enema on the phone was within normal limits. %% The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities. Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want. I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie" on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular, whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall parking lots. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% The basic menu item, in fact the ONLY menu item, would be a food unit called the "patty," consisting of -- this would be guaranteed in writing -- "100 percent animal matter of some kind." All patties would be heated up and then cooled back down in electronic devices immediately before serving. The Breakfast Patty would be a patty on a bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, Ba-Ko-Bits, Cheez Whiz, a Special Sauce made by pouring ketchup out of a bottle and a little slip of paper stating: "Inspected by Number 12". The Lunch or Dinner Patty would be any Breakfast Patties that didn't get sold in the morning. The Seafood Lover's Patty would be any patties that were starting to emit a serious aroma. Patties that were too rank even to be Seafood Lover's Patties would be compressed into wads and sold as "Nuggets." -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" %% The basic question is this: Why should *anything* exist? *Nothing* would be tidier. -- Edward Abbey %% The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology--the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically. -- Edward Abbey %% The basket is at the other end of the chain. %% The basket is lowered to the bottom of the shaft. %% The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven; The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change. These signs forerun the death or fall of kings. -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II" %% The beach has come to an abrupt end as it runs into a spur from the mountains overhead which extends outward into the surf. The only obvious direction to proceed is to the east, where the beach widens considerably. %% The beach here becomes wider, curving around the bay. Among the rocks at the foot of the cliffs here an opening may be espied. The beach continues to the southwest and east. %% The beach here stretches both to the west and to the east. At this point, the beach is fairly wide and is composed mostly of sand and small pebbles. The beach is bounded on the south by a high wall of cliffs from which an opening gapes. %% The beam is now interrupted by a # lying on the floor. %% The bear eagerly wolfs down your food, after which he seems to calm down considerably and even becomes rather friendly. %% The bear is confused; he only wants to be your friend. %% The bear is locked to the wall with a golden chain! %% The bear is still chained to the wall. %% The bear lumbers toward the troll, who lets out a startled shriek and scurries away. The bear soon gives up the pursuit and wanders back. %% The beautiful are never desolate, But someone always loves them. -- Bailey %% The beauty of America is that the average person always thinks he is above average. -- Sam Levenson %% The bed is split at the edge. Those who persevere are destroyed. Misfortune. %% The bed is split up to the skin. Misfortune. %% The bed is very wide and long, and is raised about two feet off the floor. Its surface is absolutely featureless, but it is extremely soft. There appear to be no blankets or sheets, nor is there any visible means for tucking them in. The edges of the bed blend smoothly into the yellow walls and floor, as if they were made of one piece of material. %% The bedroom has lost its decorum. With group sex, it's more like a forum. It once was avowed That three was a crowd, But today it's not even a quorum. %% The bedsprings next door jounce and creak : They have kept me awake for a week. Why do newlyweds Select squeaky beds To develop their fucking technique? A TOAST %% The beginning of eternity The end of time and space The beginning of every end The end of every race What am I? The letter 'E' %% The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% The beginnings and the endings of all human undertakings are untidy. -- John Galsworthy (1867-1933) %% The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation or an organization to action is one of mankind's oldest beliefs. -- Andrew Hacker %% The bell has a pure sweet mellow sound, and is tuned to middle c. %% The best American writers have come from the hinterlands--Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college. -- Edward Abbey %% The best approximation of service conditions in the laboratory will not begin to meet those conditions encountered in actual service. %% The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything--while the music lasts. -- Edward Abbey %% The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito. -- Austin O'Malley %% The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman. %% The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep. -- W. C. Fields %% The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. -- Edward Abbey %% The best defense against logic is ignorance. %% The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank. -- Scotty %% The best effect of the search for success is that it makes us re-create ourselves. %% The best equipment for your work is, of course, the most expensive. %% The best equipment for your work is, of course, the most expensive. However, your neighbor is always wasting money that should be yours by judging things by their price. %% The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% The best gift of all: the presence of a happy family wrapped up in one another. %% The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back. -- Abigail Van Buren %% The best investment you can make is hard work. %% The best laid plans of mice and men are usually about equal. -- Blair %% The best laid plans of mice and men so often go astray. %% The best laid plans often go a fowl. -- Wile E. Coyote %% The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft agley, And lea'e us nought by grief and pain, For promised joy. -- Burns %% The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-glay. %% The best length for television programs is either 30 seconds or 8 hours. %% The best man for the job is often a woman. %% The best may slip, and the most cautious fall; He's more than mortal that ne'er err'd at all. -- Pomfret %% The best mental effort in the game of business is concentrated on the major problem of securing the customer's dollar before the other fellow gets it. -- Stuart Chase (1888-?) %% The best of seers is he who guesses well. -- Euripides %% The best part of you dripped down your daddy's leg %% The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills. -- Edward Abbey %% The best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. -- Wordsworth %% The best programmers, designers, and architects are lazy. -- Dick Munroe %% The best prophet of the future is the past. %% The best rules to form a young man are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it. -- Sir William Temple %% The best safety device on a car is a rear view mirror with a policeman in it. -- Gil Stern %% The best security against revolution is in constant correction of abuses and the introduction of needed improvements. It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary. -- Richard Whately (1787-1863) %% The best simpleminded test of expertise in a particular area is an ability to win money in a series of bets on future occurrences in that area. -- Graham Allison %% The best sort of revenge is not to be like him who did the injury. -- Antoninus %% The best substitute for experience is being sixteen. %% The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938) %% The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book. -- Edward Abbey %% The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time. %% The best thing about war is that it makes it all right to hate. -- Solomon Short %% The best things come when you aren't expecting them. %% The best things in life are chocolate. %% The best things in life are for a fee. %% The best time for marriage will be towards thirty, for as the younger times are unfit, either to choose or to govern a wife and family, so, if thou stay long, thou shalt hardly see the education of thy children, who, being left to strangers, are in effect lost; and better were it to be unborn than ill-bred; for thereby thy posterity shall either perish or remain a shame to thy name. -- Sir Walter Raleigh %% The best time to look for work is after you get the job. %% The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right. -- Lord Hailsham %% The best way out is always through. -- Robert Frost %% The best way out of a problem is through it. %% The best way to accelerate a Mac is at -9.8 m/s} %% The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, "I've got responsibilities." %% The best way to be an organ donor is to buy a motorcycle and ride it without a helmet. The severe brain damage that follows results in slow death, and emergency services often arrive fast enough so that good, healthy organs can be taken. In fact, this is such a common method that people working in organ transplants refer to motorcycles as ``donorcycles.'' -- Jon Webb %% The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The best way to convince a fool he is wrong is to let him have his own way. %% The best way to cope with change is to help bring it about. %% The best way to cut off a cat's tail is to repossess his Jaguar. %% The best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% The best way to get and keep good people is to give them room to grow. %% The best way to get rid of unwanted flying insects is to have strong body odor. %% The best way to get rid of worries is to let them die of neglect. %% The best way to get something done is to begin. %% The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant-- and let the air out of the tires. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% The best way to keep friends is not to give them away. %% The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new. -- Cato %% The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away. %% The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them is a match. -- Will Rogers %% The best way to make children good is to make them happy. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The best way to preserve a right is to exercise it, and the right to smoke is a right worth dying for. %% The best way to publicize a governmental or political action is to attempt to hide it. -- Mark B. Cohen %% The best way to touch money is by the edges. %% The best way to win an argument is to be right. %% The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest. %% The best you get is an even break. -- Franklin Adams %% The best-educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed. -- Helen Keller %% The best-laid plans of mice and men ... are filed away somewhere. %% The better part of valor is discretion. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV" %% The better part of valor is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV" %% The big burly store manager blocks your way. %% The big difference between UNIX and VMS: To do anything on UNIX, you need to know an obscure command. To do anything on VMS, you need to know an obscure option to SET. -- Peter da Silva, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com %% The big guys always win. -- Jeffrey F. Chamberlain %% The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery without almost noticing them. -- Gunnar Myrdal %% The big question is why in the course of evolution the males permitted themselves to be so totally eclipsed by the females. Why do they tolerate this total subservience, this wretched existence as outcasts who are hungry all the time? %% The bigger the man, the less likely he is to object to caricature. -- Guernsey Le Pelley %% The bigger the theory the better. %% The bigger they are, the harder they hit. %% The biggest Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) on the net: "Is this a FAQ?" %% The biggest difference between the psychiatrist and the patient is that the psychiatrist has learned how to live with it. -- Solomon Short %% The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst %% The biggest mistake that you can make is to believe that you are working for somebody else. %% The biggest step you can take is the one you take when you meet the other person halfway. %% The biggest thing college prepares young people for is the knowledge of what it's like to be broke. -- Jim Fiebig %% The biggest things are always the easiest to do because there is no competition. -- William Van Horne %% The bird is frightened right now and you cannot catch it no matter what you try. Perhaps you might try later. %% The bird meets with misfortune through flying. %% The bird was unafraid when you entered, but as you approach it becomes disturbed and you cannot catch it. %% The bird's nest burns up. The wanderer laughs at first, Then must needs lament and weep. Through carelessness he loses his cow. Misfortune. %% The birds are singing, the flowers are budding, and it is time for Miss Manners to tell young lovers to stop necking in public. It's not that Miss Manners is immune to romance. Miss Manners has been known to squeeze a gentleman's arm while being helped over a curb, and, in her wild youth, even to press a dainty slipper against a foot or two under the dinner table. Miss Manners also believes that the sight of people strolling hand in hand or arm in arm or arm in hand dresses up a city considerably more than the more familiar sight of people shaking umbrellas at one another. What Miss Manners objects to is the kind of activity that frightens the horses on the street ... %% The bishop of Alexandretta Loved a girl and he couldn't forget her. So he thought he'd enshrine her As the Holy Vagina In the Church of the Sacred French Letter. %% The bitter part of discretion is valor. -- Henry W. Nevinson %% The black [words obscured by postmark] was fascinating - I must get a snap shot of him. -- H. P. Lovecraft, postcard to E. Hoffmann Price, 7/23/1934 %% The black cliffs are unscalable. %% The black man in this country has been sitting on the hot stove for nearly 400 years. And no matter how fast the brainwashers and the brainwashed think they are helping him advance, it's still too slow for the man whose behind is burning on that hot stove! -- Malcolm X %% The blacksmith told me before he died And I have no reason to believe that he lied That no matter how he tried His wife was never satisfied! And so he built a bloody great wheel Harnessed to a cock of steel Two balls of brass were filled with cream And the whole damn thing was driven by steam Round and round went the bloody great wheel In and out went the cock of steel Till at last the maiden cried Enough! Enough! I am satisfied And now we come to the crucial bit There was no way of stopping it And she was split from hole to hole And the whole fucking thing was covered in shit... %% The bland leadeth the bland and they both shall fall into the kitsch. %% The blind daters had really hit it off and at the end of the evening, as they were beginning to undress each other in his apartment, the fellow said, "Before we go any further, Charmaine, tell me - do you have any special fetishes that I should take into account in bed?" "As a matter of fact," smiled the girl, "I do happen to have a foot fetish - but I suppose I'd settle for maybe seven or eight inches." %% The blind man looking in a mirror cannot see he has no eyes. So what? -- Solomon Short %% The blinded floating eye cannot defend itself. %% The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. -- Tertullian (180?-230?) %% The blow lands, making a shallow gash in the #'s arm. %% The blue button appears to be jammed. %% The blue stone is a star sapphire of immense rarity and beauty. The stone has been cut in a domed cavochon style to reveal the clarity and brilliance of the gem. %% The blush is nature's alarm at the approach of sin and her testimony to the dignity of virtue. -- Fuller %% The boat deflates. %% The boat has been pulled up against the rocky coast of Norst. A tower looms above you to the north. You can scramble up the rocky shore to the north, and the tower may be skirted to the northeast and southeast. %% The boat inflates and appears seaworthy. %% The boat must be on the ground to be inflated. %% The boat seems unwilling to move for you right now. %% The body is of wood, the head is of iron, and it has only one tooth. An axe %% The body is of wood, the shoe of iron, And he serves all those, living and dead. A spade %% The body of a huge green dead dragon is lying off to one side. %% The bogosity meter just pegged. %% The bolt can't be turned with your #. %% The bolt won't turn with your best effort. %% The book is open to page 569. %% The book you spent $20.95 for today will come out in paperback tomorrow. %% The books are old, but they chronicle the rise of Castrovalva up to the present day. -- Shardovan, CASTROVALVA %% The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most. -- Theodore Parker %% The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The booming voice asks: %% The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool. -- Elias Root Beadle %% The boss may not always be right, but he's always the boss. -- Solomon Short %% The bottle hits the far wall and is decimated. %% The bottle is closed. %% The bottle is full. You must empty it before you put something else in. %% The bottle is made of the best shatterproof plastic. It can't be broken. %% The bottle is now full of water. %% The bottle of water is now empty. %% The bottom-up approach always gets me buggered. -- Sidney J. Hurtubise %% The box has no door! %% The box is imbedded in the wall. %% The box is made of shiny black ebony wood. The corners and edges are bound with thin strips of brass. On certain corners there are small sliding panels stained with various bright colors. On the top in the upper left is a green panel. On the bottom in the upper left is a yellow panel. On the top side in the upper left is an orange panel. On the bottom side in the lower right is a white panel. On the left side in the upper right is a red panel. On the right side in the lower left is a purple panel. In the center of the top of the box a faint outline of a compartment can be seen. %% The box is not open, chomper! %% The box is rusted and will not open. %% The box makes no audible sound but is clearly doing something. %% The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working when you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get to the office. -- Robert Frost %% The brain of an American is full of wide open spaces %% The brain works from the moment of birth until you stand up to speak in public. %% The brave man is known only in war; the wise man in anger; the friend in time of need. %% The brazier consists of a brass tripod supporting a shallow pan beaten out of a sheet of brass. Inset in the brass is an intricate design showing a multitude of intertwined serpents. The brazier is extremely heavy, and it is fastened to the floor with large bolts. %% The bread and onions you ate this morning tasted better than any feast to a man who expects to eat again, and the sun through the grills overhead is brighter for you than for any man who expects to see it rise tomorrow. -- Pandarus the Gladiator %% The bread never falls but on its buttered side. %% The bread that you store up belongs to the hungry; the cloak that lies in your chest belongs to the naked; and the gold that you have hidden in the ground belongs to the poor. -- St. Basil (330?-379?) %% The broad mass of a nation... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf" %% The bronze door closes. %% The buck doesn't even slow down here! %% The buck stops here. And having stopped, moves on... %% The bucket rises and comes to a stop. %% The buffalo isn't as dangerous as everyone makes him out to be. Statistics prove that in the United States more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than are killed by buffalo. -- Art Buchwald %% The bug starts here. %% The bull wears himself out on the cape and never sees the sword. -- Dr. Randall Brooks %% The burden is equal to the horses strength. -- The Talmud %% The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. %% The bus that left the stop just before you got there is your bus. -- John Corcoran %% The bus was overflowing. %% The business of America is business. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% The business of living is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves. %% The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. -- John Swinton (1830-1901) %% The business that considers itself immune to the necessity for advertising sooner or later finds itself immune to business. -- Derby Brown %% The bustard's a remarkable fowl With surely no reason to growl He escapes what would be Illegitimacy By the grace of a fortunate vowel. %% The busy have no time for tears. -- Lord Byron %% The busy lawyer wanted an alert young woman to act as deceptionist. %% The butcher, the baker, the candlestick make her, why can't I? %% The butt of his stiletto cracks you on the skull, and you stagger back. %% The button becomes depressed. %% The button depresses with a slight click and pops back. %% The button is already depressed. %% The button is now on setting 'b'. %% The button pops back out. %% The button pops back to its original position. %% The cactus grows explosively, seemingly groping for the clouds above. %% The cactus is not big enough to climb. %% The cactus is not worth climbing. %% The cage is securely fastened to the iron chain. %% The cage shakes and is hurled across the room. %% The camel has a single hump; The dromedary two; Or else the other way around. I'm never sure. Are you? -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to untruth. -- Harold Evans, "Pictures on a Page", 1978 %% The canary chirps blithely, if somewhat tinnily, for a short time. %% The canary chirps, slightly off key, an aria from a forgotten opera. From out of the greenery flies a lovely song bird. It perches on a limb just over your head and opens its beak to sing. As it does so, a beautiful brass bauble drops from its mouth, bounces off the top of your head, and lands glimmering in the grass. As the canary winds down, the song bird flies away. %% The candidate who is expected to do well because of experience and reputation (Douglas, Nixon) must do better than well, while the candidate expected to fare poorly (Lincoln, Kennedy) can put points on the media board by simply surviving. -- Vic Gold %% The candles are already lit. %% The canyon here becomes too tight to go further south. %% The canyon runs into a mass of boulders -- dead end. %% The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The capitalist can only make a whole people go to war -- want war, clamor for war as, again and again, we have seen whole peoples doing -- by capturing the popular will. The only prophylactic against that situation is to make the public aware of the way in which it is being misled. -- Sir Norman Angell (1872-1967) %% The car you are driving is invisible to other motorists. %% The careful text books measure - let all who build beware the load, the stress, the pressure material can bear. So when the buckling girder lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder is laid upon the man. Not on the stuff, the man. -- Rudyard Kipling %% The caribou love [the Alaska oil pipeline]. They run up against it, and they have babies. -- George Bush, 1988 and again "New York Times", 3 April 1989 %% The cart has no place where a fifth wheel could be used. -- Herbert von Fritzlar %% The cart seems to be the main conveyance inside the mine. It has a two-person compartment with airtight lid and an air tank mounted in the back. Inside the cart there are four pedals. The dash of the cart has a number of switches with labels rotted off by the ages. %% The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it. %% The cat in gloves can do the pruning in the Rose Garden. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% The cat is always on the wrong side of the door. -- Solomon Short %% The cat is the most ruthless, most terrifying of animals. As far back as the sabertooth tiger. -- Spock, "Catspaw," stardate 3018.2 %% The cause of the riots were the rioters -- Vice President Dan Quayle giving an intelligent analysis of the LA riots %% The caustic waters destroy the layers of sediment that have built up on the sword. Fortunately, however, the sword itself is built of stronger stuff and is left unharmed. %% The cave is very windy at the moment, and your candles have blown out. %% The cell door is now closed. %% The censure of those who are opposed to us, is the highest commendation that can be given us. -- Seigneur de Saint-Evremond %% The chain is now unlocked. %% The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it. -- Hazlitt %% The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% The chair ... was upholstered in one of those flagrant chintzes, designed, apparently, by the art editor of a seed catalog. -- Alexander Woollcott %% The challenge of space exploration and particularly of landing men on the moon represents the greatest challenge which has ever faced the human race. Even if there were no clear scientific or other arguments for proceeding with this task, the whole history of our civilization would still impel men toward the goal. In fact, the assembly of the scientific and military with these human arguments creates such an overwhelming case that in can be ignored only by those who are blind to the teachings of history, or who wish to suspend the development of civilization at its moment of greatest opportunity and drama. -- Sir Bernard Lovell, 1962, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" %% The challenge was to write a paragraph that read one way when punctuated one way, and read the complete opposite when punctuated another way. Dear President Clinton, Dear President Clinton, I would like to compliment you. I would like to compliment you. I can't stop thinking that you are I can't. Stop thinking that you are one of the best Presidents we have one of the best Presidents. We have had. So many leaders go ahead and had so many leaders. Go ahead and propose policies and then botch the propose policies and then botch the job. We expect it. From you, in job. We expect it from you. In years to come, I know we will get years to come, I know we will get better results. better results. %% The chameleon may change its color, but it is the chameleon still. -- William Shakespeare %% The character of every act depends on the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) %% The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it possible with their help, and after suitable internal and external preparation...to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug. -- Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD %% The chasm probably leads directly to the infernal regions. %% The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% The checkout line at the hardware store was getting longer and longer as the clerk labored to get the new cash register to cooperate. At one point she wailed "Oh no, NOW what do I do ? It just rang up sixty-four thousand, five hundred seventy four dollars in sales tax on a ten-dollar sale !" Surprisingly, the customers in front of me didn't seem too upset by the delay. Some even chuckled sympathetically. It wasn't until I got near the front of the line that I saw the neatly hand-lettered sign in front of the register: WE ARE CURRENTLY DOING BATTLE WITH OUR NEW COMPUTER FOR CONTROL OF THE STORE---WE APPRECIATE YOUR PATIENCE. %% The cheerful live longest in years, and afterwards in our regards. Cheerfulness is the off-shoot of goodness. -- Christian Nestell Bovee %% The chemist labors, weak and weary, Searching for a wonder-drug That will prove his favorite theory ... And that doesn't melt the jug. %% The cheque is not in the mail. You're never getting the cheque. %% The chest was a mimic! %% The chicken that clucks the loudest is the one most likely to show up at the steam fitters' picnic. %% The chief cause of problems are solutions. -- Eric Sevareid %% The chief danger in life is that you may take too may precautions. -- Alfred Adler (1870-1937) %% The chief defect of a democracy is that only the political party out of office knows how to run the government. %% The chief pleasure (in eating) does not consist in costly seasoning, or exquisite flavor, but in yourself. Do you seek sauce by sweating? -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom. -- Cyril Parkinson %% The child is the father of the man. -- William Wordsworth %% The chimney is too narrow for you and all of your baggage. %% The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of a reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil. -- Howard Roark %% The church is actually patronized by the social order as a means of stabilizing and perpetuating the existing system. -- C. C. Morrison %% The church is near but the road is icy, the bar is far away but I will walk carefully. -- Russian Proverb %% The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted. -- William Ralph Inge %% The church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back. -- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) %% The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% The cigarette smoke always drifts in the direction of the non-smoker regardless of the direction of the breeze. -- Raj K. Dhawan %% The circumstances of the modern world make nonsense of the pretensions to moral or intellectual granduer. -- Lewis Lapham %% The citizen is influenced by principle in direct proportion to his distance from the political situation. -- Milton Rakove %% The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward, to his object, this is eloquence, or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence--it is action noble, sublime, godlike action. -- Webster %% The cliff is too steep for climbing. %% The climate of Bombay is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere. %% The climate of the Sahara is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere. %% The climax, when Josie engages, Is postponed for what seems to be ages. Out of self-preservation And to banish frustration She has three or four fellows--in stages. %% The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form. -- Stanley J. Randall %% The cloth bag is draped over the side. %% The clothes have no emperor. -- C. A. Hoare, about Ada %% The clothes you don't like are the most durable you have bought. -- Sydney J. Harris %% The coast was clear. -- Lope de Vega %% The coffin will not fit through this passage. %% The coldness here suggests that you put something warm on. %% The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness. -- Robert M. Hutchins %% The combination of a number of things to make existence worthwhile. Yes, the philosophy of 'nome,' meaning 'all.' -- Spock and Lincoln, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.4 %% The combined IQ of a committee is the sum of the IQs of the individuals, divided by the speed of light. %% The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, ... it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing -- even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters? -- Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) %% The common cormorant, or shag, lays eggs inside a paper bag. %% The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says, "No man should have so much." The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says, "All men should have as much." -- Phelps Adams %% The compass is an antique instrument finely crafted out of iron and gold. It seems to be of the 16-point variety, displaying directions such as 'ENE' as well as the usual collection. %% The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% The compromise will always be more expensive than either of the suggestions it is compromising. %% The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows. -- Frank Zappa %% The computer center is empty, Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans. I walk the rows of CPUs, My skin prickling with magnetic flux. I open a door, cold and hard, And watch the lights dancing on the panels. A machine without soul, men call it, But its soul is the sweat of my comrades, Within it lie the years of our lives, Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy, The algorithmic exultations, The long nights filled with thankless toil, I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter, And in the darkened offices The terminals shine like stars. -- The Zen of Programming %% The computer is a moron! %% The computer is the ultimate polluter: its shit is indistinguishable from the food it produces. %% The computer is to the information industry roughly what the central power station is to the electrical industry. -- Peter F. Drucker %% The computer will go down in 5 seconds! %% The computing field is always in need of new cliches. -- Alan J. Perlis %% The concept of using a # is certainly original. %% The concept seems to be clear by now. It has been defined several times by examples of what it is not. %% The conclusions of most good operations research studies are obvious. -- Robert E. Machol %% The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works. -- St. Augustine %% The confidence of the business executive in a President is inversely related to the state of business. -- Mark Epernay %% The confusion of a staff member is measured by the length of his memos. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous. -- Bjarne Stroustrup in "The C++ Programming Language" %% The conqueror is regarded with awe, the wise man commands our esteem, but it is the benevolent man who wins our affection. %% The consciousness of clean linen is in and of itself a source of moral strength only second to that of a clean conscience. A well-ironed collar, or a fresh glove, has carried many a man through the emergency in which a wrinkle or a rip would have defeated him. -- E. E. Phelps %% The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country. -- John Mitchell, Atty. General 1969-1972 %% The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it. -- Will and Ariel Durant %% The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own. -- Edward Abbey %% The construction of FCD #3 took 112 days from ground breaking to the dedication. It required a work force of 384 slaves, 34 slave drivers, 12 engineers, 2 turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. The work was managed by a command team composed of 234 bureaucrats, 2347 secretaries (at least two of whom could type), 12,256 paper shufflers, 52,469 rubber stampers, 245,193 red tape processors, and nearly one million dead trees. We will now point out some of the more interesting features of FCD #3 as we conduct you on a guided tour of the facilities. 1) You start your tour here in the dam lobby. You will notice on your right that ........... %% The container is rather small, square, with a loosely hinged lid. It is made mostly of light cardboard, although it does appear fairly sturdy. The outside is painted a bright green, and there is a large black "V" embossed on one side. %% The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster %% The contest has to be the dumbest thing I've ever seen. -- H. Cossell %% The contest was to predict the next, even nastier pitch for AT&T LD. A winner: "So I go to pick up Bobby from the daycare center and he's not there. I get home, the phone's ringing and it's them. The guy says, 'Lady, we've got your kid. Say something to mommy, Bob. (SCREAM). Please note, Mrs. Sanderson, the fiber-optic clarity of your son's ...'" -- From Advertising Age, January 7, 1991, p24 %% The contest was to predict the next, even nastier pitch for AT&T LD. Third Prize: I hear this crash and I find a rock, wrapped in paper, next to my living room window. I open up the note and it says, "You want it in writing? You got it. Next time, take the call. MCI. We know where you live." -- From Advertising Age, January 7, 1991, p24 %% The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. -- Hilaire Belloc %% The conventional wisdom is that power is an aphrodisiac. In truth, it's exhausting. -- Dom Bonafede %% The conversion of one species into another takes place by a leap. -- Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) %% The conviction of wisdom is the plague of man. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course it is none of my business, but --" is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% The corridor continues north and south. %% The corridor continues south. %% The corridor lights up around you, then fades. %% The corruption in a country is in inverse proportion to its state of development. -- Nathan Miller %% The cost of any action increases in direct proportion to the number of approvals required to take it. %% The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up! %% The cost of feathers has risen... Now even DOWN is up! %% The cost of living has gone up, another buck a fifth. %% The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity. %% The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down. %% The could neither of 'em speak for rage and so fell a sputtering at one another like two roasting apples. -- Congreve %% The countenance may be rightly defined as the title page which heralds the contents of the human volume, but like other title pages, if sometimes puzzles, often misleads, and often says nothing to the purpose. -- William Matthews %% The country dog's report on returning from a first trip to town: "Stand still, they fuck you to death; run and they eat your ass out." -- Edward Abbey %% The country girl who became a city madam has obviously gone from rags to rigids. %% The country's honor must be upheld at home and abroad. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% The couple had just gone to bed for the night when the wife shook her husband awake. 'There's a burglar in the kitchen and he's eating the meatloaf we had for dinner.' He replied, 'Go back to sleep - I'll bury him in the morning.' %% The course of nature is the art of God. -- Edward Young %% The court hadn't seen in an age The king in so vicious a rage; For the queen, so she said, Went to read in her bed, Where the king found her stuck to a page. %% The courtroom was pregnant (pun intended) with anxious silence as the judge solemnly considered his verdict in the paternity suit before him. Suddenly, he reached into the folds of his robes, drew out a cigar and ceremoniously handed it to the defendant. "Congratulations!" said the jurist. "You have just become a father!" %% The cow is nothing but a machine with makes grass fit for us people to eat. -- John McNulty %% The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The coward threatens when he is safe. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% The cowards never started -- and the weak died along the way. %% The crack is far too small for you to follow. %% The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The cream rises to the top. So does the scum. %% The creditor whose appearance gladdens the the heart of a debtor, may hold his head in sunbeams and his foot on storms. -- Lavater %% The crime problem is so bad in this city, the mayor's had to designate school-free drug zones. %% The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases in examination; of false, that it lessens. There is something, therefore, in true beauty that corresponds with the right reason, and it is not merely the creature of fancy. -- Grenville %% The critical mass of any do-it-yourself explosive is never less than half a bucketful. -- Eric Frank Russell %% The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. -- Edward Abbey %% The crotch of a lady from Trenton Was too tight to make much of a dent on. The fellows who tried Spread the news far and wide That she made of a hard-un, a bent-un. %% The crowd went crazy as Tommy hit the stage. Little Sally got lost as the police bossed the crowd back in a rage. ... Sixteen stitches put her right and her dad said, 'Don't say I didn't warn ya!' Sally got married to a rock musician she met in California. -- The Who %% The crucial memorandum will be snared in the out-basket by the paper clip of the overlaying correspondence and go to file. -- Charles P. Boyle %% The cruelest lies are often told in silence. -- Robert Louis Stevenson, "Virginibus Puerisque", 1881 %% The cruelest of creatures' the crab With claws that can pinch you or stab, And then when you dine On crab and white wine It gets you as well with the tab. %% The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Sandburg. -- Edmund Wilson %% The crusades ended several centuries ago after killing thousands of people. The most important issues arouse intense passions. Earmuffs to block the shouting are inappropriate, but filter the feedback. Joining a cause and leading a constituency are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they necessarily synonymous. Neither welfare no profits are "obscene". -- Pierre S. du Pont %% The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing. -- William J. Broad %% The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny... In war, then, as in peace, assert the freedom of speech and of the press. Cling to this as the bulwark of all our rights and privileges. -- William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) %% The crypt is already closed. %% The crystal ball computer interface: 1) Ideal for virtual memory implementation. No more "swap out the least recently used page". Instead let the crystal ball tell the operating system which page is not going to be used within the next X minutes, and the system can then swap that page out. . 2) Improved shutdown facility. Let the system perform an orderly shutdown 2 minutes before a power failure or system crash. . 3) Improved backup. The backup utility need only copy the files that you are actually going to need again. . 4) Write-ahead. Not just type-ahead. Let the computer perform the next write statement before it is actually executed. . 5) Improved SCCS / RCS: Let your source control system keep track not only of past versions of your source code, but also of future versions. Saves a lot of work. %% The crystal bridge has vanished! %% The cuckoo bird does not lay his own eggs. %% The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -- Ellen Parr %% The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone. -- Robert L. Heilbroner %% The curse begins to take its toll: Your bones ache, you've taken on 20 years in the last 5 minutes, and your hair is turning grey! %% The curse has been lifted, and just in time! %% The curtain dims slightly as the # passes through. %% The curtain is of such fullness That the polestars can be seen at noon. He meets his ruler, who is of like kind. Good fortune. %% The curtain is of such fullness That the polestars can be seen at noon. Through going one meets with mistrust and hate. If one rouses him through truth, Good fortune comes. %% The customs and history of your race show a unique hatred of captivity. Even when it's pleasant and benevolent, you prefer death. This makes you too violent and dangerous a species for our needs. -- The Keeper, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown. %% The cyclops appears to be getting more agitated. %% The cyclops breaks your leg with a staggering blow. %% The cyclops breaks your neck with a massive smash. %% The cyclops chops at you with the side of his hand and connects, but not solidly. %% The cyclops decks you. In fact, you are dead. %% The cyclops doesn't look like he'll let you pass. %% The cyclops gets a good grip and breaks your arm. %% The cyclops grabs but you twist free, leaving part of your cloak. %% The cyclops grabs you and almost strangles you before you wiggle free, breathless. %% The cyclops grabs you by the arm, and you drop your #. %% The cyclops grabs your #, tastes it, and throws it to the ground in disgust. %% The cyclops has just essentially ripped you to shreds. %% The cyclops ignores all injuries to his body with a shrug. %% The cyclops is apparently not thirsty at the moment and refuses your generous gesture. %% The cyclops is moving about the room, looking for something. %% The cyclops is moving toward you in an unfriendly manner. %% The cyclops is not so stupid as to eat that! %% The cyclops is rather heavy and doesn't take kindly to being grabbed. %% The cyclops is so excited by his success that he neglects to kill you. %% The cyclops is standing in the corner, eyeing you closely. I don't think he likes you very much. He looks extremely hungry, even for a cyclops. %% The cyclops kicks your # out of your hand. %% The cyclops knocks the wind out of you with a quick punch. %% The cyclops knocks you silly, and you reel back. %% The cyclops knocks you unconscious. %% The cyclops lands a punch that knocks the wind out of you. %% The cyclops looks tired and quickly falls fast asleep (what did you put in that drink, anyway?). %% The cyclops may be hungry, but there is a limit. %% The cyclops misses, but the backwash almost knocks you over. %% The cyclops raises his arms and crushes your skull. %% The cyclops rushes you but runs into the wall. %% The cyclops says, "Mmm mmm! I love hot peppers! But oh, could I use a drink. Perhaps I could drink the blood of that thing." From the gleam in his eye, it could be surmised that you are 'that thing'. %% The cyclops seems somewhat agitated. %% The cyclops seems unable to decide whether to broil or stew his dinner. %% The cyclops sends you crashing to the floor, unconscious. %% The cyclops smashes his huge fist into your chest, breaking several ribs. %% The cyclops trips over his feet trying to get at you. %% The cyclops unleashes a roundhouse punch, but you have time to dodge. %% The cyclops was looking for salt and pepper. I think he is gathering condiments for his upcoming snack. %% The cyclops yawns and stares at the thing that woke him. %% The cyclops, having eaten the hot peppers, appears to be gasping. His enflamed tongue protrudes from his man-sized mouth. %% The cyclops, hearing the name of his deadly nemesis, flees the room by knocking down the wall on the north size of the room. %% The cyclops, momentarily overcome by remorse, holds back. %% The cyclops, no sportsman, dispatches his unconscious victim. %% The cyclops, perhaps affected by a drug in your drink, is sleeping blissfully at the foot of the stairs. %% The cyclops, tired of all your games and trickery, eats you. The cyclops says, "Mmm mmm! Just like mom used to make 'em." %% The cynic who doesn't believe in anything still wants you to believe him. %% The cynics are right nine times out of ten. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The daily press and the telegraph which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole world, fabricate more myths ... in a day than could have formerly been done in a century. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% The dam blocks your way. %% The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. -- Lord Acton (1834-1902) %% The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane. -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. %% The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life. %% The day of judgement has come. You've finished in sixth place. %% The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% 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 days are all empty and the nights are unreal. %% The days just prior to marriage are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book. %% The days of Chivalry are dead, Of which in stories I have read, When knights were bold and acted kind of scrappy; They used to take a lot of pains And fight all day to please the Janes, And if their dame was tickled they was happy. But now the men are mild and meek: They seem to have a yellow streak: They never lay for other guys, to flatten 'em: They think they've done a darned fine thing If they just buy the girl a ring Of imitation diamonds and platinum. -- P. G. Wodehouse %% The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. -- Robert Hutchins, "Great Books" 1954 %% The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often. -- Edward Abbey %% The death rate on Earth is: One per person. %% The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary? %% The deceased adventurer's useless lantern is here. %% The decent moderation of today will be the least human of things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they burn none at all. -- Maurice Maeterlinck %% The decision doesn't have to be logical, it is unanimous. %% The deed of greatness has been done He waits impatiently for praise to be sung listening intensely for the trumpets blare searching for the crashing fanfare but the greatness of the deed lies still woe be it but for the heartless and unknowing he would ride in glory Oh, how they undermine the achievements, The greatness. if only They could see the wonders of The feat in his mind He thinks not of the callous world outside that calls his exploits ordinary but only of the emptiness within that noone will fill He grieves for the tragic world ungifted with his clear vision bitter with resentment of his failure to find a follower for a hopeless cause. CAD, RMR 7/22/85 %% The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. -- William James %% The defense screens are now turned off. %% The deficiency will never show itself during the dry runs. -- Charles P. Boyle %% The deficit will be virtually eliminated by 1995. -- President George Bush, February 1991. A year later, his people estimated the deficit for fiscal 1992 at $399 billion. %% The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. -- Max Eastman (1883-1969) %% The degree of a country's development is measured by the ratio of the price of an automobile to that of the cost of a haircut. The lower the ratio, the higher the degree of development. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. -- F. Dostoyevski %% The degree of failure is in direct proportion to the effort expended and to the need for success. %% The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts --the less you know the hotter you get. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% The degree of technical confidence is inversely proportional to the level of management. %% The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% The demonstrably true statements of the sciences which, especially in recent times, have the uncomfortable inclination never to stay put, although, at any given moment they are, and must be, valid for all. -- Hannah Arendt %% The dense foliage bars your way. %% The dentist said my wisdom teeth were retarded. %% The descent to Hades is the same from every place. -- Anaxagoras %% The desire for modeling a prototype is inversely proportional to the decline of the prototype. %% The desire for racial integration increases with the square of the distance from the actual event. %% The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him. -- Immanuel Kant %% The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. -- Sterne %% The desire of power in excess caused angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity is no excess, neither can man or angels come into danger by it. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% The desire to impose upon the disorder of nature some orderly pattern or arrangement makes men into poets, painters and gardeners; it also makes them prey to the illusion that a highly organized state will be civilized and preferable to a disorganized and muddled one. -- Len Deighton (1929-) %% The desk is made of a large chunk of heavy dark wood, roughly carved. No attempt was made to beautify its extreme ruggedness. A sole vestige of grace was made in the form of a single small drawer, which peers out from under the thick top directly in the center. %% The desk is made of finest particle board. Manufacturer's suggested selling price (west coast) $3.21. %% The destruction, it is just very heart-rendering. -- Vice President Dan Quayle attempting to say the SF earthquake wreckage was heart-rending (Newsweek 10/30/89) %% The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values. -- Edward Abbey %% The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice" %% The devil could change. He was once an angel and may be evolving still. %% The devil does not stay where the music is. %% The devil finds work for idle circuits to do. %% The devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape. -- William Shakespeare %% The devil is a gentleman who never goes where he is not welcome. %% The devil is easy to identify. He appears when you're terribly tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn't grant. %% The devil is making his pitch. %% The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic. -- William Shakespeare %% The devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God ... But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil. %% The dew of compassion is a tear. -- Lord Byron %% The dial face contains only numbers. %% The dial now points to "#". %% The dial spins and comes to a stop pointing at "#". %% The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence. -- Leon Trotsky, "Terrorism and Communism", 1924 %% The dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing else than power based upon force and limited by nothing -- by no law and by absolutely no rule. -- V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) %% The die is cast. -- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) %% The difference between Heaven and Hell: Heaven: Hell: English are the cops English are the cooks French are the cooks French are the mechanics Germans are the mechanics Germans are the cops Italians are the lovers Swiss are the lovers Russians are the poets Russians are the inventors Americans are the inventors Americans are the poets South Africans supply raw materials South Africans take care of human rights Tahitias take care of human rights Tahitians supply raw materials its all organized by the Swiss its all organized by the Italians. %% The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that yogurt has culture. %% The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The difference between a career and a job is twenty or more hours a week. %% The difference between a chef and a cook seems to be in who cleans up the kitchen. -- Paul Sweeney %% The difference between a child and a hacker is the amount he flames about his toys. -- Ed Schwalenberg %% The difference between a good haircut and a bad one is seven days. %% The difference between a lawyer and a rooster, is that the rooster gets up in the morning and clucks defiance. %% The difference between a misfortune and a calamity? If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% The difference between a moral man and a man of honour is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught. %% The difference between a rabbit and a rock is the information content, and the difference between a living and a dead rabbit is in the availability or usability of the information. -- Dr. John A. Ball %% The difference between a rich man and a poor man is this -- the former eats when he pleases, the latter when he can get it. -- Sir Walter Raleigh %% The difference between a sorority girl and a bowling ball is that you can only get three fingers in a bowling ball. %% The difference between a successful career and a mediocre one sometimes consists of leaving about four or five things a day unsaid. %% The difference between an inside straight and a blamed fool is callin' the last bet! -- B. Maverick %% The difference between common-sense and paranoia is that common-sense is thinking everyone is out to get you. Paranoia is thinking that they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler %% The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right. -- Edward Simmons %% The difference between legal separation and divorce is that legal separation gives the man time to hide his money. %% The difference between like and love is the same as the difference between a spit and a swallow. %% The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't. %% The difference between philosophy and religion: If you have an argument over philosophy, you get red in the face. Over theology you throw bombs. %% The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting. -- Gloria Leonard %% The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you. -- Woody Allen, quoted in "New York Tribune", 1975 %% The difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money generally costs a lot less. -- Brendan Francis %% The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The difference between this place and yogurt is that yogurt has a live culture. %% The difference between this school and a cactus plant is that the cactus has the pricks on the outside. %% The difference between us is not very far, cruising for burgers in daddy's new car. %% The difference between women and girls is as much as twenty years in some states. %% The difference is that Reagan had principles and beliefs. [Bush] has no rudder. -- A senior GOP strategist, 1990 %% The difficult we do today; the impossible takes a little longer. %% The difficulty of finding any given trail marker is directly proportional to the importance of the consequences of failing to find it. -- Milt Barber %% The difficulty of getting anything started increases with the square of the of the number of people involved. -- Jim MacGregor %% The difficulty of the coordination task often blinds one to the fact that a fully coordinated piece of paper is not supposed to be either the major or the final product of the organization, but it often turns out that way. -- Amrom Katz %% The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect. -- John Updike %% The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), The Republic %% The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority. -- Stanley Milgram %% The discerning person is always at a disadvantage. %% The discipline of desire is the background of character. -- John Locke (1632-1704) %% The disks are getting full; purge a file today. %% The distance between the ticket counter and you plane is directly proportional to the weight of what you are carrying and inversely proportional to the time remaining before takeoff. -- Gary Witzenburg %% The distance from the gate from which you flight departs is inversely proportionate to the time remaining before the scheduled departure of the flight. -- Edward S. Mills %% The distance you have to park from your apartment increases in proportion to the weight of the packages you are carrying. %% The distinction between Freedom and Liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have been unable to find a living specimen of either. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% The distinction between the hit-and-run and the run-and-hit is an invention of Joe Garagiola. -- Pirates broadcaster John Sanders %% The distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by ... the pollution of the language. -- Arne Tiselius %% The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny. -- Edward Abbey %% The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity. -- John Adams (1735-1826) %% The doctor had just finished giving the young man a thorough physical examination. "The best thing for you to do," the M.D. said, "is give up drinking and smoking, get to bed early & stay away from women." "Doc, I don't deserve the best," said the patient. "What's next best?" %% The doctor hoped to save for science An abnormal baby, bred Of who knows what mad misalliance ... Too late. One head's already dead. %% The doctor says he has to amputate all of me. -- Rod Schmidt %% The doctor says you're terminally stupid. %% The doctor walked into the patient's room and said 'I've got some good news and I've got some bad news. First the bad news - we have to amputate both of you legs. Now the good news - the patient two beds over wants to buy your slippers. %% The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid. -- Gilbert K. Chesterson (1874-1936) %% The doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind. %% The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith. -- Roman Congregation decision against Galileo %% The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith. -- Roman Congregation decision against Galileo To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover. -- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) %% The dodo is a bird that is almost decent by now. %% The dog ate my .REP packet. %% The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% The dog's life is a good life, for a dog. -- Edward Abbey %% The dog named after the potato must die %% The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% The dome is unclimbable. %% The door cannot be opened. %% The door closes forever. %% The door crashes shut, and you hear someone barring it. %% The door is actually a mimic. %% The door is extremely rusty and refuses to open. %% The door is invulnerable. %% The door is locked from above. %% The door is locked! %% The door is locked, and there is evidently no key. %% The door is made of the finest hardwoods, reinforced with fiberglass and polyester. It resists your futile attempts to break it. %% The door is nailed shut. %% The door is securely fastened. %% The door is still under warranty. %% The door is the key. %% The door of the crypt is extremely heavy, but it opens easily. %% The door opens. %% The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase descending into darkness. %% The door swings shut and closes. %% The door to success is labeled PUSH. %% The door to the room seems to be blocked by sticky orange rubble from an explosion. Probably some careless adventurer was playing with blasting cakes. %% The door to the safe has no keyhole, dial, or handle -- there's no way to open it! %% The door won't budge. %% The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical. -- Nikos Kazantzakis %% The dossier is not the person. -- Dr. John Gall %% The draft that blows out a match makes a furnace burn better, and what prostrates a coward excites a brave man to action. %% The dragon consumes all of the soup, and hands back the empty bowl, saying "That was delicious!!! You must remember to give me the recipe someday." he then gets up and flies away, in search of the cauldron. %% The dragon is sprawled out on a Persian rug!! %% The dragon is very annoyed by your attempts to kill him, and decides to do something about it. He exhales a strong blast of fire, and burns you to a crisp. %% The dragon looks rather nasty. You'd best not try to get by. %% The dragon puts up a good fight, but you finally manage to find a vulnerable spot. He dies in a fit of agony. %% The dragon takes a sip of the soup. He then pours it out, saying "I do not like cold soup!" %% The dreadful burden of having nothing to do. %% The dream begins most of the time with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau, sometimes even poking you with a sharp stick called truth. -- Dan Rather %% The drive-in bank was established so that the real owner of a car could get to see it once in a while %% The drunk opens one yellowed, rheumy old eye, stares at her balefully, and replies, "Fuck you. Tennessee Williams..." %% The drunker I sit here, The longer I get. %% The duchess of Whiteside cried, "Rape!" When she found in her bedroom an ape. The ape said, "You ass! Go look in the glass," And left by the fire escape. %% The duck hunter trained his retriever to walk on water. Eager to show off this amazing accomplishment, he asked a friend to go along on his next hunting trip. Saying nothing, he fired his first shot and, as the duck fell, the dog walked on the surface of the water, retrieved the duck and returned it to his master. "Notice anything?" the owner asked eagerly. "Yes," said his friend, "I see that fool dog of yours can't swim." %% The dungeon is ALWAYS open (always room for one more). %% The dungeon master catches up with you. %% The dungeon master follows you. %% The dungeon master is quietly leaning on his staff here. %% The dungeon master is taken momentarily by surprise. He dodges your blow and then, with a disappointed expression on his face, he raises his staff and traces a complicated pattern in the air. As it completes you crumble into dust. %% The dungeon master says, "Excellent." %% The dungeon master says, "I will follow." %% The dungeon master says, "I will stay." %% The dungeon master says, "You are wrong. You have one more chance." %% The dungeon master says, "You are wrong." The dungeon master, obviously disappointed in your lack of knowledge, shakes his head and mumbles, "I guess they'll let anyone in the Dungeon these days." With that, he departs. %% The dungeon master, obviously pleased, says, "You are indeed a master of lore. I am proud to be at your service." The massive wooden door swings open, and the master motions for you to enter. %% The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman. -- Honore de Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage", 1829 %% The duty of the people is to tend to their affairs. The duty of government is to help them do it. This is the pasta of politics. The inspired leader, the true prince, no matter how great, can only be sauce upon the pasta. -- Italo Bombolini %% The dwarves' knives vanish as they strike the walls of the cave. %% The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression. -- Felix Frankfurter %% The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow. %% The early bird catches the worm as a rule, but the guy who comes along later may be having lobster Neuburg and crepes suzette. -- Charles Merrill Smith %% The early bird gets the coffee left over from the night before. %% The early bird gets the early worm. %% The early bird who catches the worm works for someone who comes in late and owns the worm farm. -- Travis McGee %% The early morning has gold in its mouth. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% The early sun is gold in the mouth. %% The early worm gets eaten by a bird. %% The early worm gets the bird. %% The early worm gets the late bird. %% The early worm has a death wish. %% The earlyts. -- Sheridan %% The earth above the lake: The image of Approach. Thus the superior man is inexhaustible In his will to teach, And without limits In his tolerance and protection of the people. %% The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier. %% The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality. -- Edward Abbey %% The earth's condition is receptive devotion. Thus the superior man who has breadth of character Carries the outer world. %% The earth, that's nature's mother, is her tomb. -- William Shakespeare %% The earthmen dump their cola-bottles, Cans and packs and empty jars, At random... so the aesthete throttles Those who made the mess on Mars. %% The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific computations. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% The easiest way to figure the cost of living is to take your income and add ten percent. %% The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement. -- Jack Rosenbaum %% The easiest way to keep a secret is not knowing what it is. -- Franklin P. Jones %% The easiest way to teach children the value of money is to borrow from them %% The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters. -- Jean-Paul Kauffmann %% The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress, of self-sacrifice as the moral imperative, of greed as the enemy, of love as the solution -- their threadbare phrases as sickeningly sweet as the odor of ether in a hospital. %% The education of a man is never completed until he dies. -- Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) %% The effective limitation of power is the most important problem of social order. -- Friedrich A. Hayek %% The effectiveness of a politician varies in inverse proportion to his commitment to principle. -- Sam Shaffer %% The efficiency of a committee meeting is inversely proportional to the number of participants and the time spent on deliberations. %% The effort expended by the bureaucracy in defending any error is in direct proportion to the size of the error. -- John Nies %% The effort required to correct course increases geometrically with time. %% The egg falls to the ground and is seriously damaged. %% The egg in the hotel, about to be cooked, was picked up by a priest on his way to a monastery, out of the frying pan into the friar. %% The egg is already open. %% The egg is now open, but the clumsiness of your attempt has seriously diminished its esthetic appeal. %% The egoist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man -- and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men. -- Howard Roark %% The election is this: the Great Communicator against the Great Depressor... We are going for the gold! -- Vice President George Bush, 1984 %% The elevator vanishes %% The eleventh commandment was `Thou Shalt Compute' or `Thou Shalt Not Compute' -- I forget which. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% The emperor has no clothes. %% The employer generally gets the employees he deserves. -- Walter Bilbey %% The employer puts his money into ... business and the workman his life. The one has as much right as the other to regulate that business. -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938) %% The emptiness of a ghost is too heavy to bear. %% The empty vessel makes the greatest sound. -- William Shakespeare %% The end for the # as your knife severs his jugular. %% The end is only the beginning of something else. The beginning is only the end of the thing before it. %% The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun. -- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) %% The end of labor is to gain leisure. %% The end of man is an action, and not a thought, though it were the noblest. -- Carlyle %% The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The end of the world will occur at 3:00 p.m., this Friday, with symposium to follow. %% The ends justify the means. -- after Matthew Prior %% The energy required to change either one of two states will always be more than you wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task impossible. -- David Gerrold %% The engravings translate to, "This space intentionally left blank". %% The engravings were incised in the living rock of the cave wall by an unknown hand. They depict, in symbolic form, the beliefs of the ancient peoples of Zork. Skillfully interwoven with the bas reliefs are excerpts illustrating the major tenets expounded by the sacred texts of the religion of that time. Unfortunately, a later age seems to have considered them blasphemous and just as skillfully excised them. %% The entire CHINESE WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL TEAM all share ONE personality -- and have since BIRTH!! %% The erosion problem in N.Y is getting worse. Today the stock market dropped three feet. %% The error-detection and correction capabilities of any system will serve as the key to understanding the type of errors which they cannot handle. -- Tom Gibb %% The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience. %% The essence of life is taking over. %% The essential ideas of Algol 68 were that the whole language should be precisely defined and that all the pieces should fit together smoothly. The basic idea behind Pascal was that it didn't matter how vague the language specification was (it took *years* to clarify) or how many rough edges there were, as long as the CDC Pascal compiler was fast. -- Richard A. O'Keefe %% The eternal feminine draws us upward. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe. -- Edward Abbey %% The evidence of the emotions, save in cases where it has strong objective support, is really no evidence at all, for every recognizable emotion has its opposite, and if one points one way then another points the other way. Thus the familiar argument that there is an instinctive desire for immortality, and that this desire proves it to be a fact, becomes puerile when it is recalled that there is also a powerful and widespread fear of annihilation, and that this fear, on the same principle proves that there is nothing beyond the grave. Such childish "proofs" are typically theological, and they remain theological even when they are adduced by men who like to flatter themselves by believing that they are scientific gents.... -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interr'd with their bones. -- William Shakespeare %% The evil you teach us, we will execute, and it shall go hard but we will better the instruction. -- William Shakespeare %% 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 (1809-1882) %% The exact center of the room is occupied by a large red table. %% The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date. -- Colton %% The excessively gaudy crown of Lord Dimwit Flathead is here. %% The existence of god implies a violation of causality. %% The expanding universe postulate states that the older you are, the faster you are moving relative to everyone else in the universe. This, coupled with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity explains why older people shrink, slow down, and gain weight. %% The expenditure of funds is critical -- engineers and scientists should not be permitted to authorize any purchase. -- Richard F. Moore %% The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting. -- Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), on sex %% The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds. -- Claude Bernard %% The expert judgement of an institution, when the matters involve continuation of the institution's operations, is totally predictable, and hence the finding is totally worthless. -- Robert N. Kharasch %% The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be correct. %% The extreme monotony of your life will cause you to hallucinate. %% The eye sees not itself but by reflection, by some other things. -- William Shakespeare %% The eyes of Texas are upon you, All the livelong day; The eyes of Texas are upon you, You cannot get away; Do not think you can escape them From night 'til early in the morn; The eyes of Texas are upon you 'Til Gabriel blows his horn. -- Univ. of Texas's school song %% The eyes of taxes are upon you. %% The eyes of the emperor are everywhere. -- Brodrig %% The face of war has never changed. Surely it is more logical to heal than to kill. -- Surak of Vulcan, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.5 %% The fact is, squire, the moment a man takes to a good pipe, he becomes a philosopher; it's the poor man's friend; it calms the mind, soothes the temper, and makes a man patient under troubles; it has made more good men good husbands, kind masters, indulgent fathers and honest fellows, than any other thing on this universal world. -- Richard Haliburton %% The fact that 47 PEOPLE are yelling and sweat is cascading down my SPINAL COLUMN is fairly enjoyable!! %% The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% The fact that it works is immaterial. -- L. Ogborn %% The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion. -- Saul Alinsky %% The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society, must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints. -- Samuel Hendel %% The faculty expands its activity to fit whatever space is available, so that more space is always required. -- Thomas L. Martin %% The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people: I was saved, they were damned ... Our hymns were loaded with arrogance--self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come judgement day. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% The fame of our Mame was her tushy, And the front of her cunt. (It was bushy.) But I heard that her Mike Preferred for his spike The place in her face that was skwooshy. %% The famous Nell Gwynn, stepping one day from a house where she had made a short visit into her coach, saw a great crowd assembled, and her footman all bloody and dirty; the fellow being asked by his mistress, the reason for of his being in that condition, answered, "I have been fighting, madam, with an impudent rascal who called your ladyship a whore." "You blockhead," replied Mrs. Gywnn, "at this rate you must fight every day of your life; why, you fool, all the world knows it." "Do they?" cries the fellow, in a muttering voice, after he had shut the coach door, "they shan't call me a whore's footman for all that." -- Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones" %% The famous politician was trying to save both his faces. %% The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% The fantastic advances in the field of communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual. -- Earl Warren %% The farther away from the entrance of the market (theater, or any other given location) that you have to park, the closer the space vacated by the car that pulls away as you walk up to the door. -- Judith deMille Berson %% The farther you go, the less you know. -- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching" %% The fashion wears out more apparel than the man. -- William Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing" %% The faster the plane, the narrower the seats. -- John H. Durrell %% The faster we go, the rounder we get. -- The Grateful Dead %% The fatal blow strikes the # square in the heart: he dies. %% The fatal thrust strikes the # square in the heart. %% The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off. -- Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) %% The father, passing through his son's college town late one evening on a business trip, thought he would pay his boy a surprise visit. Arriving at the lad's fraternity house, dad rapped loudly on the door. After several minutes of knocking, a sleepy voice drifted down from a second-floor window, "Whaddaya want?" "Does Ramsey Duncan live here?" asked the father. "Yeah," replied the voice. "Dump him on the front porch." %% The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. -- Ezekiel, 17:2 %% The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems. -- Roger Levian %% The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves that we are underlings. -- William Shakespeare %% The fawning, sneaking, and flattering hypocrite, that will do, or be anything, for his own advantage. -- Stillingfleet %% The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. -- Will and Ariel Durant %% The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. -- Edward Abbey %% The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. -- Proverbs 1:7 %% The fearless old bishop of Brest Put his faith in the Lord to the test. He fucked whores in the apse With chancres and claps, But first they were sprinkled and blessed. %% The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is, rather, born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. -- Eric Hoffer %% The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [Science Fiction] %% The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you. -- Kin Hubbard %% The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name. -- Edward Abbey %% The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else. -- Edward Abbey %% The fewer clear facts you have in support of an opinion, the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion. -- Anonymous %% The fewer functions any device is required to perform, the more perfectly it can perform those functions. %% The fewer our wants, the nearer we resemble the gods. -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% The fewer the words, the better the prayer. -- Martin Luther %% The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their side. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) "The Grapes of Wrath" %% The final answer will exceed the magnitude or precision or both of the calculator. %% The final lesson of Viet Nam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. -- George Bush, 1989 Inaugural Address %% The finding of threats to security by a security office is totally predictable, and hence the finding is totally worthless. -- Robert N. Kharasch %% The finest clothes turn to rags. Be careful all day long. %% The finest eloquence is that which gets things done. %% The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly welded by the fiercest fire. %% The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time. The last 10% of a project takes 90% of the time. %% The first Great Steward, Parrafin the Climber, was employed in King Chloroplast's kitchen as second scullery boy when the old King met a tragic death. He apparently fell backward by accident on a dozen salad forks. Simultaneously the true heir, his son Carotene, mysteriously fled the city, complaining of some sort of plot and a lot of threatening notes left on his breakfast tray. At the time, this looked suspicious what with his father's death, and Carotene was suspected of foul play. Then the rest of the King's relatives began to drop dead one after the other in an odd fashion. Some were found strangled with dishrags and some succumbed to food poisoning. A few were found drowned in the soup vats, and one was attacked by assailants unknown and beaten to death with a pot roast. At least three appear to have thrown themselves backward on salad forks, perhaps in a noble gesture of grief over the King's untimely end. Finally there was no one left in Minas Troney who was either eligible or willing to wear the accursed crown, and the rule of Twodor was up for grabs. The scullery slave Parrafin bravely accepted the Stewardship of Twodor until that day when a lineal descendant of Carotene's returns to reclaim his rightful throne, conquer Twodor's enemies, and revamp the postal system. -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% The first and last rounds are on you. %% The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself. All sin is easy after that. -- Baily %% The first blonde is the cheapest. %% The first child of a Mrs. Keats-Shelley Came to light with its face in its belly; Her second was born With a hump and a horn, And her third was as shapeless as jelly. -- Edward Gorey %% The first civilian on the Shuttle used to be an English teacher; now she is history. %% The first creation of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense, the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of the spirit. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% The first cup of coffee recapitulates phylogeny %% The first draught a man drinks ought to be for thirst, the second for nourishment, the third for pleasure, the fourth for madness. %% The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. -- Abbie Hoffman %% The first example of permanent press was an Egyptian mummy. -- Shelby Friedman %% The first example of superior principle is always inferior to the developed example of inferior principle. %% The first gift of maturity is the ability to look a child straight in the eye. -- John Francis Putnam (1964) %% The first golf balls were made out of small leather bags stuffed with feathers. %% The first guy that rats gets a belly-full of slugs in the head. Understand? -- Joey Glimco %% The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938) %% The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confuse good with immobility, and evil with activity. %% The first impression one gets of a new ruler and his brains is from seeing the men he has chosen to have around him. %% The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next, good sense, the third, good humor, and the fourth, wit. -- Sir William Temple %% The first lubricant for wheels was caster oil. %% The first mate was found to be drunk one day and that day it happened to be the captain's turn to write in the ship's log so he wrote : The first mate was drunk today. He begged and pleaded to the captain to remove that entry but the captain argued that once an entry was made in the company's log it couldn't be deleted. The first mate decided to get even. The next time it when it was the first mate's turn to write in the log, he wrote : The captain was sober today. %% The first myth of management is that it exists. %% The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill. -- Robert Heller %% The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. -- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) %% The first person to say talk is cheap was probably not a psychoanalyst. -- Franklin P. Jones %% The first person to say you can't take it with you was undoubtably with the Internal Revenue Service. %% The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" %% The first requisite for immortality is death. -- Stanislaw Lem %% The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he should be able and willing to pull his own weight. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% The first riddle I ever heard, one familiar to almost every Jewish child, was propounded to me by my father: "What is it that hangs on the wall, is green, wet -- and whistles?" I knit my brow and thought and thought, and in final perplexity gave up. "A herring," said my father. "A herring," I echoed. "A herring doesn't hang on the wall!" "So hang it there." "But a herring isn't green!" I protested. "Paint it." "But a herring isn't wet." "If its just painted its still wet." "But -- " I sputtered, summoning all my outrage, "-- a herring doesn't whistle!!" "Right, " smiled my father. "I just put that in to make it hard." -- Leo Rosten, "The Joys of Yiddish" %% The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Paul Erlich %% The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do. -- McCloctnik the Lucid %% The first sample is always the best. -- William K. Wright %% The first sign of a nervous breakdown is when you start thinking your work is terribly important. -- Milo Bloom %% The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left. %% The first step in fixing a broken program is getting it to fail repeatedly. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant. -- Cecil %% The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity, in a girl it is boldness. The two sexes have a tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue. -- D. Parker %% The first thing in the human personality that dissolves in alcohol is dignity. %% The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI", Part IV %% The first thing you learn as a life insurance salesman is never refer to premiums as the layaway plan. %% The first time I saw her face I realized the Romans were all wrong about Venus. It was day one, in Philosophy 101, when all the guys were drawing a bead on the babe situation. I was a freshman in college, when girls were Africa and I was Stanley; and any thoughts of following Dr. Willoughby's syllogisms were lost when I saw that face, the face of Rafaella Consuelo Portifino de Platta, niece of the Duchess of Alba, and heir to a dozen titles, blue-blooded and ravishing. After class, as she strode through the foyer, it was clear she carried herself superbly and that she didn't give a damn about you so long as you stared. Mine were not the only eyes undressing Senorita de Platta as she broke across the lawn towards Hanawalt Hall, the dorm for the monied girls. -- John Long, "A Fool and His Money" %% The first time i saw her it was 9:08. I know because that is when the clock stopped. %% The first time you buy a house you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It's the same with men. -- Lupe Velez %% The first time, it's a KLUDGE! The second, a trick. Later, it's a well-established technique! -- Mike Broido, Intermetrics %% The first two days of vacation are endless, then it flies. %% The first version always gets thrown away. %% The first year [1977] I spent getting my family moved to Washington. The second year I ran for re-election. Then as soon as I was elected, I started running for the Senate. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, describing his career in the House of Representatives %% The fish that escaped is the big one. %% The five most commonly used words in written English are: the, of, and, a, to. %% The five-alarm fire had been raging out of control for hours, pouring thick, black smoke over the street. At last the blaze was under control and the fire chief began accounting for his men. Two were missing, so he ordered a search. Captain Kelly finally rounded a fire truck parked in an alley and found, to his shock, one fireman with his trousers down leaning over a garbage can and another fireman screwing him in the ass. "What's the meaning of this?", the captain roared. "Jones here had passed out from smoke inhalation," the fireman on top panted. "You're supposed to give mouth to mouth resuscitation for that," the captain said. "I know. That's what started this," the fireman replied. %% The flagships of the British and American fleets were passing each other sometime ago. The admiral of the American fleet signaled to the British Admiral: 'How is the world's second largest navy?'. The British admiral signaled back: 'Very well thank you. How is the world's second best?' %% The flame is extinguished. %% The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love. -- Walter S. Landor %% The flashlight is getting dim -- time for new batteries. There may be some in the general store . . . %% The flask breaks into pieces. %% The flask breaks, and you smell a peculiar odor ... %% The flat of the troll's axe hits you delicately on the head, knocking you out. %% The flat of the troll's axe skins across your forearm. %% The flood of my tears washed out the bridge of my nose. %% The floor here seems too hard to dig in. %% The floor is littered with worthless shards of pottery. %% The flow chart is a most thoroughly oversold piece of program documentation. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month %% The flower vanishes in mid-air! %% The flush toilet is the basis of Western civilization. -- Alan Coult %% The folks at Smith-Barney do it "the old fashioned way". %% The following TRUE anecdote is taken from "The Portable Curmudgeon" by Jon Winokur: While Groucho Marx was dining at the Brown Derby, a priest came up to him and said, "Oh, Mr. Marx, I want to thank you for bringing so much joy into the world." Groucho quickly replied, "I want to thank you for taking so much out." %% The following appeared in my MCI bill this month: MCI> President Bush is proclaiming July 22 as Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy MCI> Family Appreciation Day, in honor of the 100th birthday of one of MCI> America's most beloved and respected citizens. Throughout her life, MCI> family has been of utmost importance to Mrs. Kennedy. Family MCI> Appreciation Day calls upon Americans to rededicate themselves to family MCI> values and relationships... [ they then go on to encourage people to use the telephone a lot. ] This Sunday, I encourage the following activities: 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 shreik 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 %% The following are new DCL commands: DDT Defoliate Directory Trees ETB Eat Tape and Belch EU Electrocute User RAU Ridicule All Users RBAO Ring Bell and Annoy Operator RD Rewind Disk %% The following is a BMW ad that appeared in the GLOBE and MAIL last April 1. It was a "genuine" BMW ad. BMW INTRODUCES ITS NEWEST INNOVATION: ROAD WARMERS. Having spend the last twenty years perfecting the sports sedan, BMW has now taken up the ultimate challenge - perfecting the road. Road Warmers are the result of twenty years of German engineering. And represent perhaps the single most important contribution to the automotive industry in the past decade. Road Warmers employ laser technology to ensure constant road conditions. The way in which they operate is simple. Underneath the car, four pivoting convex lasers are mounted in front of each wheel. The lasers are aimed at the pavement directly in front of the tread stance. They work in tandem with five speed turbo fans. So not only do they manage to melt snow and ice, they also dry the road of excess moisture. And virtually eliminate the need to clear your driveway during winter. Inside the car, the driver is continually apprised of climatic conditions through BMW's onboard computer and Active Check Control. This enables the driver to set the road to a temperature that best suits their level of performance. The result is a road that never changes. Four seasons become one. And performance is assured like never before. Eventually Road Warmers will be standard on all new BMWs. But as part of a special offer, your dealer will install them on your present car free of charge. But you should hurry. Currently offer is only available April 1st, so you would be a fool to miss this one. THE ULTIMATE DRIVING EXPERIENCE. BMW %% The following is a courtroom exchange between a defense attorney and a farmer with a bodily injury claim. It came from a Houston, Texas insurance agent. Attorney: "At the scene of the accident, did you tell the constable you had never felt better in your life?" Farmer: "That's right." Attorney: "Well, then, how is it that you are now claiming you were seriously injured when my client's auto hit your wagon?" Farmer: "When the constable arrived, he went over to my horse, who had a broken leg, and shot him. Then he went over to Rover, my dog, who was all banged up, and shot him. When he asked me how I felt, I just thought under the circumstances, it was a wise choice of words to say I've never felt better in my life. %% The following is a real problem report: Description Of Problem: Can't access any file servers. Need to get a file off of a particular file server for a presentation at tomorrow's forum. The Fix: Convinced him to do the forum without the paper. %% The following is a real sign in front of a small building here at CSUN: DEPT. OF COMMUNICATIVE DISORDES %% The following is allegedly a true story. A professor of freshman physics gave his students weekly quizzes, which he called "quizicals". One student did very poorly on the first one, and went to talk to the professor about it. She was on the verge of crying, and the professor tried to allay her fears by saying, "don't worry, it was only one of my quizicals." "If that's a quizical," she moaned, "I'd hate to see your TESTicals!". %% The following is quoted from an interview with Freeman Dyson in the Spring 1988 TECHNE Journal of Technological Studies from the VTS department at Stanford. There are lots of idiots, of course, in NASA, but my view of NASA is rather like the Royal Air Force used to be in the old days when I worked for the Royal Air Force during the war. If you had an officer who was a dud, you put him in the command headquarters because he would do less damage there than he would out in the squadrons. So all the duds accumulated at the headquarters - this is what has happened at NASA for the last thirty years or so. Actually, there are lots of very fine things, but they're all out in the stations. If you look at JPL out here in California, or you look at Goddard which is in Maryland, they're doing very well. I think JPL is running the Voyager missions, which of course have been beautifully done. The Voyager went to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and will go to Neptune next year. That's a fantastically good mission, which is run at JPL, and then there is the IUE, run at Goddard. So there are these very good, what NASA calls, the centers, these places where the technical work is done. And there is this terrible bunch of idiots in Washington at the headquarters which messes everything up. So I think if you just abolish the Washington office, NASA would be in very good shape. We actually tried that out during World War II. There was a very analogous problem we had in 1943. The German armaments industry was doing very well, they were producing a tremendous lot of armaments and we wanted to put a stop to that. We found out that all the head offices of these armament firms were in Dusseldorf and that was where all the paperwork was done. So we decided we would really destroy Dusseldorf and disorganize the whole system. We went in there one night and it was a very successful operation and Dusseldorf really burned down to the ground. And then, in the next few weeks, the armament production went up like a rocket. %% The following letter appeared in "Irish Times" (8th March, 1990): Sir, Arminta Wallace's feature on World Music (February 17th) was both interesting and informative. However, I feel I should point out that the small heading at the top of the page is not quite correct. It reads "Bee-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A- Wap-Bam-Boom", when in fact it should be either "Be-Bop-A- Lula" or "A-Wop-Bop-Aloo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom". Yeah! -- Yours, etc., EMMET CREEDON Bearna Gaoithe, Inchigeela, Macroom, Co Cork. %% The following list was compiled from the New York Times: Split 1/4 bottle .187 liters Half 1/2 bottle Bottle 750 milliliters Magnum 2 bottles 1.5 liters Jeroboam 4 bottles Rehoboam 6 bottles Not available in the US Methuselah 8 bottles Salmanazar 12 bottles Balthazar 16 bottles Nebuchadnezzar 20 bottles 15 liters Sovereign 34 bottles 26 liters Interesting notes: The Sovereign is a new bottle, made for the launching of the largest cruise ship in the world. The bottle alone cost 8,000 bucks to produce and they only made 8 of them. Most of the funny names come from Biblical people - Balthazar was one of the three wise men. Now you can wow them at the New Year's Eve party. %% The following new commands have been added to the computer: RID Read Invalid Data RLP Refill Light Pen RMF Ruin My files ROOP Run Out Of Paper RPM Read Programmer's Mind RST Rust SCCA Short Circuit on Correct Answer SCST Switch Channel to Star Trek %% The following new instruction has been added: CHSE Compare Half-words and Swap if Equal. Please update your programs. %% The following program is rated [G] for General users. %% The following quote is from page 4-27 of the MSCP Basic Disk Functions Manual which is part of the UDA50 Programmers Doc Kit manuals: As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector. . . . Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge of the hyper-cube. %% The following statement is not true. The previous statement is true. %% The following statement is not true: %% The following statement is true. The preceding statement is false. %% The following was a favorite saying of a former boss, who went to Harvard for graduate school: "You can always tell a Harvard Man...but you can't tell him much." %% The food that I like best -- the food that makes me hungry just to think of -- is very simple ... When I cook I try never to get too far away from that kind of simplicity. -- Jeremiah Tower %% The food's pretty good here, you should come back. %% The football team of Texas A&M took an IQ test. High point man was the Tackling Dummy. %% The footprints run crisscross. If one is seriously intent, no blame. %% The force of the explosion has caused the ledge to collapse belatedly. %% The force of your blow knocks the # back, stunned. %% The forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. -- Jawaharlal Nehru %% The forecast calls for Thunder...'89 T-Bird SC #28, Davey Allison #7, Alan Kulwicki 1993 IROC Champion 1992 Winston Cup Champion -- James P. Callison, callison@midway.ecn.uoknor.edu %% The foreman of a lumber camp put a new workman on the circular saw. As he turned away, he heard the man say, "Ouch". "What happened?" "Dunno," replied the man. "I just stuck out my hand like this, and -- well, I'll be damned. There goes another one!" %% The forest is safe because a lion lives therein and the lion is safe because it lives in a forest. Likewise the friendship of persons rests on mutual help. -- Laukikanyay %% The formalized CS education we have in Soviet Union yields really awful results - for example the quantity of grads capable to write real programs is about 2-3% after the CS Dept. of Moscow U (not the worst one, be sure) - and those students who CAN program all are self-educated hackers and as a rule they had terrible conflicts with educational authorities. Some of the most talented programmers here are still students in their 30s. Thus the practice is against Dijkstra. -- Vadim Antonov (avg@hq.demos.su) %% The fortune program is supported, in part, by user contributions and by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Inanities. %% The founding fathers tried to set up a system where a man got a fair trial, not a system to let him get off on technicalities. %% The fountain code has been tightened slightly so you can no longer dip objects into a fountain or drink from one while you are floating in mid-air due to levitation. Teleporting to hell via a teleportation trap will no longer occur if the character does not have fire resistance. -- README file from the NetHack game %% The four basic building blocks of a structured program: do while, do until, do case, do-wah-ditty. %% The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl. -- Dave Barry %% The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality, and Independence -- Edward Rickenbacker %% The four phases of alcohol are: jolicose, bellicose, lachrymose and comatose. %% The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion. %% The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose. -- Hada Bejar %% The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel; but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new hatched, unfledged comrade. -- William Shakespeare %% The fucking ain't worth the fighting. %% The full impact of parenthood doesn't hit you until you multiply the number of your kids by 32 teeth. %% The fullest instruction, and the fullest enjoyment are never derived from books, till we have ventilated the ideas thus obtained, in free and easy chat with others. -- William Matthews %% The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding point. -- Edward Abbey %% The function of freedom is to free somebody else. -- Toni Morrison %% The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions - which time and mediocrity can solve. -- Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Men and Events" %% The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level. -- Norman Mailer %% The function of the expert is not to be more right than other people, but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons. -- Dr. David Butler %% The function of the intellectual has always been confined, in the main, to embellishing the bored existence of the bourgeoisie, to consoling the rich in the trivial troubles of their life. The intelligentsia was the nurse of the capitalist class. It was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie -- that old and filthy fabric, besmeared so thickly with the blood of the toiling masses. -- Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) %% The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough. -- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) %% The fundamental idea of good is that it consists in preserving life, in favoring it, in wanting to bring it to its highest value, and evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering its development. -- Albert Schweitzer %% The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good. -- Ralph Barton Perry %% The further I go, the behinder I get. %% The further an individual is from the poorhouse, the more expert one becomes on the ghetto. -- James L. Davis %% The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The fury engendered by the misspelling of a name in a column is in direct ratio to the obscurity of the mentionee. -- Alan Deitz %% The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, required "blood, sweat and tears." -- Charles F. Kettering %% The future exists first in the imagination, then in the will, then in reality %% The future is a myth created by insurance salesmen and high school counselors. %% The future is like heaven - everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now. -- James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name", 1961 %% The future is no more uncertain than the present. %% The future is that time when you'll wish you'd done what you aren't doing now. %% The future isn't what it used to be. %% The future isn't what it used to be. (It never was.) %% The future lies ahead. %% The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it. -- George Meredith %% The future of "I give" is "you take." %% The future will be better tomorrow. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% The future will bring you great success in business and in your home life. %% The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy. %% The game of life is always called on account of darkness. -- Solomon Short %% The game's a little bit wide open again. %% The games have always strengthened us. Death becomes a familiar pattern. We don't fear it as you do. -- Proconsul Marcus Claudius, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4041.2 %% The gamester, if he die a martyr to his profession, is doubly ruined. He adds his soul to every other's loss, and by the act of suicide, renounces earth to forfeit heaven. -- Colton %% The garden is in mourning; The rain falls cool among the flowers. Summer shivers quietly On its way towards its end. Golden leaf after leaf Falls from the tall acacia. Summer smiles, astonished, feeble, In this dying dream of a garden. For a long while, yet, in the roses, She will linger on, yearning for peace, And slowly Close her weary eyes. -- Hermann Hesse, "September" %% The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way; But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor dies. -- Dryden %% The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials. %% The gene pool has no lifeguard. %% The general prizes most the fortress which took the longest siege. -- Edward Garrett %% The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. %% The genital area of Ann Will accommodate any size man, From the wee that cause titters To the mighty twat-splitters That cause screams peasants hear in Japan. %% The gent who wakes up and finds himself a success hasn't been asleep. %% The gentle journey jars to stop The drifting dream is done. The lurking goblins loom ahead; The deadly, that we thought were dead, Stand waiting, every one. -- Walt Kelly %% The gentlemen looked one another over with microscopic carelessness. %% The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End. %% The gift of happiness belongs to those who unwrap it. -- Andrew Dunbar %% The giraffe you thought you offended last week is willing to be nuzzled today. %% The girl is made of wax, Her heart is of linen, And her head of fire. A candle %% The girl told the lawyer, "Let's net us Enough so the jerk won't forget us! I said I'd cohabit; He fucked like a rabbit -- And so now I want half of his lettuce!" %% The girl who stoops to conquer usually wears a low-cut dress. %% The girls that go to see a man's etchings may not know art, but they know what they like. %% The glacier is unmoved by your ridiculous attempt. %% The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And a crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. -- W. H. Auden %% The glances over cocktails That seemed to be so sweet Don't seem quite so amorous Over the Shredded Wheat. %% The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity. And in the way our differences combine to create meaning and beauty. -- Dr. Miranda Jones and Spock, "Is There in Truth No Beauty?," stardate 5630.8 %% The glory of the nation rests in the character of her men. And character comes from boyhood. Thus every boy is a challenge to his elders. -- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) %% The gnome appears increasingly impatient. %% The gnome appears increasingly nervous. %% The gnome carefully places the # in the deposit box. "Let me show you the way out," he says, making it clear that he will be pleased to see the last of you. Then, you are momentarily disoriented, and when you recover, you are back at the Bank Entrance. %% The gnome glances at his watch. "Oops! I'm late for an an appointment." He disappears, leaving you alone on the shelf. %% The gnome looks impatient: "I may have another customer waiting; you'll just have to fend for yourself, I'm afraid." He disappears, leaving you alone in the bare room. %% The gnome says, "Well, I never!" and disappears with a snap of his fingers, leaving you alone. %% The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it. %% The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him. -- Russell Baker %% The goal of all life is death. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice. %% The goal of yesterday will be the starting point of tomorrow. -- Carlyle %% The goblet is resting, delicately, on the pillow. %% The goblin steps in front of you, blocking your passage. %% The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools. -- "Ringworld" %% The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines. They gave him love and he invented marriage. %% The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest. -- Sophocles %% The gods play games with men as pieces. -- Titus Maccius Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) %% The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell. -- Saint Augustine %% The good Lord never gives you more than you can handle. Unless you die of something. %% The good Wife is none of our dainty dames, who love to appear in a variety of suits every day new; as if a good gown, like a stratagem in War, were to be used but once. But our good Wife sets up a sail according to the keel of her husband's estate; and if of high Parentage, she doth not so remember what she was by birth, that she forgets what she is by match. -- Fuller %% The good are better made by ill, As odors crush'd are sweeter still. -- Rogers %% The good die young - because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good. %% The good doctor had been an inspiration to the jungle natives. He had cured their sick and taught them the religious and moral values of his own England. He was loved and respected by every native in the village, but on this particular afternoon the chief was obviously troubled as he entered the doctor's hut. "You live among my people long time now," said the chief. "You tell us not right for a man and girl to be close together before marriage and we believe what you say. This morning white child born to woman in village. You only white man in jungle. What I tell my people?" The doctor smiled and led the chief to a window. "My son," he said, "I'll won't attempt to give you a full scientific explanation for the phenomenon known as an albino. But look at the flock of sheep upon that hill. Every one is snow white except one. The white baby born to the woman in your village means nothing more or less than that one black sheep in the white flock. It is simply one of nature's mysterious accidents." The black chief became embarrassed and looked at his feet. "OK, doc," he said. "You no tell -- I no tell." %% The good life was so elusive It really got me down I had to regain some confidence So I got into camouflage %% The good need fear no law, It is his safety, and the bad man's awe. -- Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley %% The good news is that the horse is dead, but your mother's pregnant. %% The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired. -- Seneca %% The good time is approaching, The season is at hand. When the merry click of the two-base lick Will be heard throughout the land. The frost still lingers on the earth, and Budless are the trees. But the merry ring of the voice of spring Is borne upon the breeze. -- Ode to Opening Day, "The Sporting News", 1886 %% The gorilla munches down the fruit salad. He burps, and runs away. %% The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the _nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases. -- Sir Josiah Stamp %% The government builds more and more new roads to make it easier and easier to get to places which are less and less worth visiting. P A N I C ! ! ! %% The government has just completed work on a missile that turned out to be a bit of a boondoggle; nicknamed "Civil Servant", it won't work and they can't fire it. %% The government was contemplating the dispatch of an expedition to Burma, with a view to taking Rangoon, and a question arose as to who would be the fittest general to be sent in command of the expedition. The Cabinet sent for the Duke of Wellington, and asked his advice. He instantly replied, "Send Lord Combermere." "But we have always understood that your Grace thought Lord Combermere a fool." "So he is a fool, and a damned fool; but he can take Rangoon." -- G. W. E. Russell %% The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagra is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% The grass is always greener on the other side of your sunglasses. %% The grate is now locked. %% The grate is very solid and has a hardened steel lock. You cannot enter without a key, and there are no keys nearby. I would recommend looking elsewhere for the keys. %% The grating is unlocked. %% The grating opens to reveal trees above you. %% The grating opens. %% The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace. -- Andrew Marvell %% The great creative individual ... is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be. -- John Stuart Mill %% The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others. -- Tryon Edwards %% The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% The great god Ra whose shrine once covered acres Is filler now for crossword-puzzle makers. %% The great god Thor was sitting on his throne with basically nothing to do and decided to swing down to Earth to check up on the commoners. During his visit, he encountered a fair maiden, which he took to a cottage and *screwed* 26 times that night. When he finished he left without a word and returned to his throne. After a while he got to thinking....he had had sex with this maiden 26 times and departed without a word, maybe he should offer some explanation as to his sexual prowess, lest she think all men were endowed with such abilities. So the great god Thor again swings down to Earth and enters the cottage where he had left her (she was still lying on the bed). He proudly stands before her and in a god-like voice proclaims : " I am Thor!" to which the maiden retorts: "YOU'RE thor??? I can't even thit!!!" %% The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty. -- Johann von Schiller %% The great majority of people are only remembered when something for which they are responsible goes wrong. -- Lord Slim %% The great man changes like a tiger. Even before he questions the oracle He is believed. %% The great mass of men lead lives of quiet domestication. -- Solomon Short %% The great prince issues commands, Founds states, vests families with fiefs. Inferior people should not be employed. %% The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure. %% The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all. -- Edward Abbey %% The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is: WHAT DOES A WOMAN WANT? -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% The great secret known to internists, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning. -- Lewis Thomas %% The great secret of life is never to be in the way of others. -- Haliburton %% The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% The great truths are too important to be new. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% The great wall of China was built in 221 - 206 B.C. and stretches for 2,150 miles across the northern border of the Chinese Empire. The Wall's dimensions range from 15 to 39 feet high and is 32 feet thick. It took 10 years to build. %% The greater the number of laws, the greater the number of offenses against them. -- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) %% The greater the number of professionals (advanced degrees preferred) assigned to a project, the greater the progress. -- Richard F. Moore %% The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares. -- Edward Abbey %% The greatest battles in life are fought in the quiet chambers of the soul. -- David O. McKay %% The greatest danger to human beings is their consciousness of the trivialities of their aims. -- Gerald Brennen %% The greatest disloyalty one can offer to great pioneers is to refuse to move an inch from where they stood. %% The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason. -- Colton %% The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves. -- Sophocles %% The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters. %% The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% The greatest lies of all time: (1) I love you. (2) This won't hurt a bit. (3) The Mercedes is paid for. (4) The check is in the mail. (5) I was just going to call you. (6) I've always worn cowboy boots. (7) I swear I won't come in your mouth. (8) Of course I'll respect you in the morning. (9) We have a really challenging assignment for you. (10) I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you. %% The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none. -- Carlyle %% The greatest of fools is he who imposes on himself, and in greatest concern thinks certainly he knows that which he has least studied, and of which he is profoundly ignorant. -- Shaftesbury %% The greatest productive force is human selfishness. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% The greatest programming project of all took six days; on the seventh day the programmer rested. We've been trying to debug the ###!@? thing ever since. Moral: design before you implement. %% The greatest remedy for anger is delay. -- Seneca %% The greatest selling LP of all time is 'White Christmas' written by Irving Berlin - over 150 million copies. %% The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men. -- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), "Little Essays of Love and Virtue", 1922 %% The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think. -- Luther Burbank (1849-1926) %% The greatest truths are the simplest; so are the greatest men. %% The greatness of a man can nearly always be measured by his willingness to be kind. -- G. Young %% The greatness of kings is made at the margin; the greatness of legislatures, at the mean. That is to say, a monarch is judged by individual virtues and performance, but no legislature can be called great because it contained one or a few impressive individuals, to whom it paid no heed. The standard of judgement for monarchs and legislatures is always the same: the happiness and well-being of the people. -- Michael Scully %% The green bubble is glowing. %% The green button, gentlemen! -- Doctor 4, FULL CIRCLE %% The green fields to the south now seem to shimmer like a mirage. %% The green stone is flawless emerald of enormous size. Its many facets sparkle and glitter as the stone is moved. %% The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. His favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale. %% The guard dies, but never surrenders. -- Fougemont %% The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it. -- Edward Abbey %% The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him. %% The hacker as a mate/lover and the signs of trouble: -- The morning after note reads: Whiting, Barbara: I enjoyed last night. We really interfaced. You looked so cute I wanted to byte your ear. -- He believes Steve Wozniak offered the Apple to Adam. -- The people he tries to emulate are five years his junior. -- The last straw: Once again, your date has lost all track of time debugging a new program and shows up an hour late. You Don't...: make nasty asides regarding his 5-14 inch floppy. You Do...: remind him that "going down" doesn't necessarily indicate a malfunction. %% The haft of your blade knocks out the #. %% The hair ball blocking the drain of the shower reminded Laura she would never see her little dog Pritzi again. -- 1988 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest, runner up %% The handle of the \fIting\fR is altered. One is impeded in his way of life. The fat of the pheasant is not eaten. Once rain falls, remorse is spent. Good fortune comes in the end. %% The handle of the torch is made of roughly carved hardwood. There are blackened remains of some sort of fuel in a hollow at the end of the handle. %% The hangman let us down. %% The happiest day is that day in the past that you always run back to when the present proves unbearable. %% The happiest ending in the movies is when the guy next to you finally finishes his popcorn. -- Bobby Vinton %% The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think mush about it. -- Richard Whately (1787-1863) %% The happiest time of a person's life is after his first divorce. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% The hard questions always have more than one right answer. The easy questions have no answers at all. That's the universe's way of keeping things balanced. -- Solomon Short %% The harder to get the better to have. -- Into the Woods %% The harder you work, the luckier you get. -- Gary Player %% The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom. %% The hardest thing about time travel is the grammar. %% The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The hardest thing is to disguise your feelings when you put a lot of relatives on the train for home. %% The hardest tumble one can take is to fall over his own bluff. %% The hardness of the butter is in direct proportion to the softness of the butter. %% The hardware makes it a PC, the software makes it a Workstation, the unit sales make it a Mainframe. -- on the NeXT %% The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak. -- Edward Abbey %% The head of government of a certain East European country had in his office a telephone with an earpiece, but no mouthpiece. "What's that?" asked a visitor. "That's my private hotline to Moscow", was the reply. %% The headboard of a young bull. Great good fortune. %% The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens. -- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) %% 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. %% The heart has its prisons that intelligence cannot unlock. -- Marcel Jouhandeau, "De la grandeur" %% The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. -- Blaise Pascal %% The heart is not a logical organ. -- Dr. Janet Wallace, "The Deadly Years," stardate 3479.4 %% The heart is wiser than the intellect. %% The heart of an average adult male weighs 9 - 11 ounces. The average adult female, 7 - 9 ounces. %% The heart will break, yet brokenly live on. -- Lord Byron %% The heart, the liver, the spleen, the pancreas. All these miraculous organs work in _total_darkness_! -- Late Night with David Letterman %% The heat from the torch is so intense that the candles are vaporized. %% The heaviest human in thw world was Robert Earl Hughes born in 1926 in Illinois. He weighed 1069 lbs in Feb, 1958. %% The heaviest object in the world is the body of the woman you have ceased to love. -- Marquis de Lac de Clapiers Vauvenargues %% The hell with the prime directive--let's kill something %% The help people need most urgently is help in admitting that they need help. %% The henpecked husband and his wordy wife were visiting Spain. They were walking down a country road having one of their arguments in the usual way. This time he was wining though. Suddenly she turned and saw a bull charging down the road. There was no time to warn her husband so she jumped into a hedge. The bull caught the man on its horns and sent him spinning fifty feet into the air. He came down in a ditch. When he finally managed to crawl out he saw his wife standing on the road. "Hell," he said, "if you hit me like that again you'll really make me lose my temper!". %% The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers. %% The herd instinct among forecasters make sheep look like independent thinker. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence. To yield to its blandishments is so easy. The wrong, it seems, is venial... Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of adventurous youth. -- Benjamin Cardozo %% The hieroglyphics are all unreadable except for a notation on the back, which reads "Genuine authentic Egyptian papyrus. Guaranteed to be at least 5000 years old." %% The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling. -- George Orwell (1903-1950) %% The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his behind. -- Gen. Joe Stilwell %% The higher the buildings, the lower the morals. -- Noel Coward %% The higher the tuition, the fewer days they spend in school. -- Frank Mankiewicz %% The higher you go the more dependent you become on others. %% The higher, the fewer. %% The highest duty is to respect authority. -- Leo XIII (1810-1903) %% The highest exercise of charity is charity towards the uncharitable. -- J. S. Buckminster %% The highest of all our laws states your world is yours and will always remain yours. -- Kirk, "Friday's Child," stardate 3497.2 %% The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space. -- Edward Abbey %% The highway of life is always under construction %% The hinges are quite thoroughly rusted now and won't budge. %% The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards. -- Justice Felix Frankfurter %% The history of liberty is the history of resistance ... [it is a] history of the limitation of governmental power. -- Woodrow Wilson %% The history of the rise of Christianity has everything to do with politics, culture, and human frailties and nothing to do with supernatural manipulation of events. Had divine intervention been the guiding force, surely two millennia after the birth of Jesus he would not have a world where there are more Muslims than Catholics, more Hindus than Protestants, and more nontheists than Catholics and Protestants combined. -- John K. Naland, "The First Easter", Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2 %% The history of the world is the record of man in quest of his daily bread and butter. %% The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% The history of warfare is similarly subdivided, although here the phases are Retribution, Anticipation, and Diplomacy. Thus: Retribution: I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother. Anticipation: I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother. Diplomacy: I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it. %% The holder of the large bag just left, looking disgusted. Fortunately, he took nothing. %% The hole and the patch should be commensurate. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% The hole is getting deeper, but that's about it. %% The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money. %% The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. -- G. K. Chesterson %% The honest female orgasm is three to fifteen rhythmic contractions of the outer third of the vagina at .8 second intervals, which is approximately the beat of Surfing Safari" by the Beach Boys. Unless these contractions occur, you can regard her groaning, moaning, clawing, kicking, begging for mercy, and shouting filthy religious epithets as bargain-basement histrionics. -- John Hughes, National Lampoon %% The honeymoon is not actually over until we cease to stifle our sighs and begin to stifle our yawns. -- Helen Rowland %% The honeymoon is over -- it's time to get married Carol Burnett is "Pete 'n Tillie" %% The honeymoon is over when a quickie before dinner refers to a short drink. %% The honeymoon is over when he phones that he'll be late for supper -- and she has already left a note that it's in the refrigerator. -- Bill Lawrence %% The hookworm larvae enters the human body through the soul. %% The horror ... the horror! -- Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness", 1902 %% The hotel [in Kiev] checked us in very quickly. Unlike the one in Moscow, the door guard smiled, did not check our passes and did not wear a gun. The hotel serves excellent country food for lunch, including dumpling soup, pork and homemade ice cream. The waitress is friendly. Going from Moscow to Kiev is like going from New York to Texas. -- T. J. Rodgers, "High tech in the Ukraine", E. E. Times, 8/13/90, p. 16 %% The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality. -- Dante %% The house is empty except for the family dog. The telephone rings. The dog walks over to the phone, pushes the receiver off the hook with his paw, and says, "WOOF!" No response. The dog waits a moment, and once again says, "WOOF!" Still no response. The dog moves closer to the phone and says, "William, Oscar, Oscar, Frederick." %% The house shakes, and the ceiling of the room you're in collapses, turning you into a pancake. %% The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of "Ten Best". -- H. Allen Smith %% The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The human brain is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public. %% The human brain is like an enormous fish -- it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see. -- Monty Python %% The human brain is the only computer in the world made out of meat. -- Solomon Short %% The human heart is often the victim of the sensations of the moment; success intoxicates it to presumption, and disappointment dejects and terrifies it. -- Volney %% The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return. -- Marie Edgeworth %% The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. %% The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein -- it rejects it. -- Sir Peter Medawar %% The human race has been fascinated by sharks for as long as I can remember. Just like the bluebird feeding its young, or the spider struggling to weave its perfect web, or the buttercup blooming in spring, the shark reveals to us yet another of the infinite and wonderful facets of nature, namely the facet that it can bite your head off. This causes us humans to feel a certain degree of awe. -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV" %% The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The human race never solves any of its problems -- it only outlives them. -- Solomon Short %% The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. Then they go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races: then men who borrow, and the men who lend. -- Charles Lamb (1775-1834) %% The humble bureaucrat, like the bass, dwells at the bottom of the pond but grows fat. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of Error. -- William Jennings Byron %% The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. -- Mother Teresa, quoted in "Time", 4 December 1989 %% The hungover couple dawdled over a midafternoon breakfast, after a particularly wild all-night party held in their fashionable apartment. "Dearest, this is rather embarrassing," said the husband, "but was it you I made love to in the library last night?" His wife looked at him reflectively and then asked, "About what time?" %% The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, But, swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread. -- Milton, "Lycidas" %% The husband was disturbed by his wife's indifferent attitude towards him and the marriage counselor suggested he try being more aggressive in his lovemaking. "Act more like a romantic lover and less like a bored spouse," he was advised. "When you go home, make love to her as soon as you meet -- even if it is right inside the front door." At the next consultation, the adviser was pleased to hear that the husband had followed his instructions. "And how did she react this time?" the consultant asked. "Well, to tell you the truth," the husband replied, "she was still sort of indifferent. But one thing I've got to admit: her bridge club went absolutely wild!" %% The husband who doesn't tell his wife everything probably reasons that what she doesn't know won't hurt him. -- Leo J. Burke %% The husband wired home that he had been able to wind up his business trip a day early and would be home on Thursday. When he walked into his apartment, however, he found his wife in bed with another man. Furious,he picked up his bag and stormed out. He met his mother-in-law on the street, told her what had happened and announced that he was filing for divorce in the morning. "Give my daughter a chance to explain before you take any action," the older woman pleaded. Reluctantly, he agreed. An hour later his mother-in-law phoned the husband at his club. "I knew my daughter would have an explanation," she said, a note of triumph in her voice. "She didn't receive your telegram!" %% The hypnotist is fascinating Mary in her modest gown, Meantime mentally debating: Is she blonde the whole way down? %% The hypothesis: Amid a wash of paper, a small number of documents become the critical pivots around which every project's management revolves. These are the manager's chief personal tools. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month %% The iceman wins again. -- Riker about Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% The icing, now visible, says "ENLARGE". %% The icing, now visible, says "EVAPORATE". %% The icing, now visible, says "EXPLODE". %% The idea is for a woman to make her life as big, as challenging as she can, and know that during that life there will be men who will love her for what she is trying to be, just as there have always been men who loved her for not trying to be anything at all. -- Lee Grant %% The idea is to die young as late as possible. -- Ashley Montagu %% The idea of daylight-savings is like trying to be taller by cutting off your head and standing on it. %% The idea of male and female are universal constants. -- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8 %% The idea of man leaving this earth and flying to another celestial body and landing there and stepping out and walking over that body has a fascination and a driving force that can get the country to a level of energy, ambition, and will that I do not see in any other undertaking. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we needed that impetus extremely strongly. I sincerely believe that the space program, with its manned landing on the moon, if wisely executed, will become the spearhead for a broad front of courageous and energetic activities in all the fields of endeavour of the human mind - activities which could not be carried out except in a mental climate of ambition and confidence which such a spearhead can give. -- Dr. Martin Schwarzschild, 1962, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" %% The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanently destroyed, consumers would then be free to go out and buy new devices, rather than have to fritter away years of their lives trying to have the old ones repaired at so-called "factory service centers," which in fact consist of two men named Lester poking at the insides of broken electronic devices with cheap cigars and going, "Lookit all them WIRES in there!" -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" %% The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink. -- Edward Abbey %% The ideal reasoner, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only the chain of events which led up to it but also the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilize all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavored in my case to do. -- Sherlock Holmes %% The ideal resume will turn up one day after the position is filled. %% The ideal situation is to have real computing power close at hand - right at home. Something that dims streetlights and shrinks the picture on the neighbors TV when you crank it up. %% The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others. -- Edward Abbey %% The ideal voice for radio may be defined as showing no substance, no sex, no owner, and a message of importance for every housewife. -- Harry V. Wade %% The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. -- John Maynard Keyes %% The identical is equal to itself, since it is different. -- Franco Spisani %% The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest. %% The idle mind knows not what it is it wants. -- Quintus Ennius %% The ignorance of the working-class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions -- are superstitions fostered by intellectual mercenaries, by universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege. -- George D. Herron (1862-1925) %% The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand. -- Cesare Lombroso, "The Man of Genius" %% The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer. -- Henry Kissinger %% The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages. -- Horace Greeley (1811-1872), "The American Conflict", 1864-1866 %% The image of the fields in front of you vanishes abruptly. %% The implementers are dead; therefore, they do not respond. %% The implied convertibility between a unit of real money produced by labor and an article of wealth created by human labor for the market must be assured. Therefore, the value of the monetary unit should have a real objective regulator. -- Lewis E. Lehrman %% The importance of the man and his job, in that relative order, rises in direct proportion to the distance separating his audience from his home office. %% The important thing to remember about walking on eggs is not to hop. %% The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set; this is a a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a *smaller* subset common to all those in use. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% The inability to benefit from feedback appears to be the primary cause of pseudoscience. Pseudoscientists retain their beliefs and ignore or distort contradictory evidence rather than modify or reject a flawed theory. Because of their strong biases, they seem to lack the self-correcting mechanisms scientists must employ in their work. -- Thomas L. Creed, "The Skeptical Inquirer," Summer 1987 %% The incidence of anything worthwhile is either 15-25 percent or 80-90 percent. %% The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr. -- Will Rogers %% The income tax has make more liars out of the American people than golf has. -- Will Rogers %% The indirect cause of this accident was a little guy in a small car with a big mouth. %% The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly important thing to people. -- Donald N. Smith, president of Burger King %% The industrial corporation is the natural enemy of nature. -- Edward Abbey %% The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses. -- Edward Abbey %% The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communication between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding. -- Thomas L. Martin %% The inferior man works through power. The superior man does not act thus. To continue is dangerous. A goat butts against a hedge And gets its horns entangled. %% The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% The influence shows itself in the back of the neck. No remorse. %% The influence shows itself in the big toe. %% The influence shows itself in the calves of the legs. Misfortune. Tarrying brings good fortune. %% The influence shows itself in the jaws, cheeks and tongue. %% The influence shows itself in the thighs. Holds to that which follows it. To continue is humiliating. %% The information in this cookie is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by Digital Equipment Corporation. %% The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay! %% The information you have is not what you need. %% The information you need is not what you can obtain. %% The inhabitants of Paris are Parisites. %% The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. -- Mohammed %% The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be; because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him; and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim. -- Chesterfield %% The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% The instruments of science do not in themselves discover truth. And there are searchings that are not concluded by the coincidence of a pointer and a mark. -- Fred Saberhagen, "The Berserker Wars" %% The integral of the gravitational potential taken around any loop trail you choose to hike always comes out positive. -- Milt Barber %% The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it. -- Hare %% The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants. -- Adam Walinsky %% The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man almost nothing. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% The intensity of anxiety when you tell a lie is nothing compared to the relief when you find out it is believed. -- John Francis Putnam (1964) %% The intensity of movie publicity is in inverse ratio to the quality of the movie. -- Gene Shalit %% The interest of the people [lies] in being able to join organizations, advocate causes, and make political "mistakes" without being subjected to government penalties. -- Justice Hugo Black (1886-1971) %% The interesting thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself. -- Woodrow Wilson %% The interesting thing about a waltzing bear is not how well it dances. %% The intergenerational poverty that troubles us so much today is predominantly a poverty of values. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% The interview with Gordon Liddy, back in D.C., was most pleasurable. He is a man of the same stamp as Sir Thomas More and Solzhenytsin, among others. The motto of such people is, "Do your worst, I do not coerce!" The human race is honored by such. -- Jeff Cooper %% The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves. We injure our own cause in the opinion of the world when we too passionately defend it. -- Charles Caleb Colton %% The island of Atuan is close to you, just to the northwest. A large island can be seen in a northwestern direction. %% The island of Ilite is situated just north of your current position. Islands can be seen in the distance to the northwest and southwest. %% The island of Kaltuel is to your west. Though the map shows several other large islands nearby, you can see only water where they should be. %% The island of Ontuego lies to the west here. Beyond it, and to the north, you can see another island. %% The island of Pelimer is situated to the north. No other islands can be seen. %% The island of Rogm lies nearby to the northwest. %% The island of Venway is to the south of your current position. %% The isle of Jessage is just to the southeast here. Land can be seen clearly to the northwest. %% The isle of Norst is now immediately to the north. Ebosskil can be seen to the east of southeast. %% The item you want is out of stock. But it's on back order. %% The job of a Dean is to provide parking for the faculty, football for the alumni, and sex for the students. %% The job of a Dean is to raise as much money as he can, then spend it as fast as he can. %% The job of satire is to frighten and enlighten. -- Richard Condon %% The job's not over until the paperwork's done. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% The joy is in the doing. -- Elizabeth Braidwood The joy is in the dancing. -- Justin du Coeur The joy is in the dancer. -- Justin's lady The joy is in Dancer, and Prancer, and Vixen... -- Kris Kringle The Joy is in the kitchen next to the sink. -- Vergil William de Comyn %% The joys of love made her human and the agonies of love destroyed her. -- Spock, "Requiem for Methuselah," stardate 5842.8 %% The judge asked, "What do you plead?" I said, "Insanity, your honour, who in their right mind would park in the passing lane?" -- Steven Wright %% The judge increased his fine by $10. He thought that was extra fine. %% The keen spirit Seized the prompt occasion -- makes the thought Start into instant action, and at once Plans and performs, resolves and executes. -- Hannah Moore %% The kegger lasted far into the night, and the next morning, Dave stuck his foot into a shoe full of cranky, hung-over, stimulus-response scorpions. %% The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh %% The key is made from intricately carved gold stock. It is affixed to a handle cut from an unknown red gemstone. It looks very valuable. %% The key to Christ's success was that He always did the Father's will. %% The key to being an expert is to complicate the simple. %% The key won't turn, because the lock is too rusty. %% The keyring consists of a tight loop of dull grey metal, on which are strung a group of 12 brightly colored keys. Each key bears a number embossed in gold. Keys 1-3 are red, keys 4-6 are green, keys 7-9 are yellow, and keys 10-12 are blue. The keys are quite delicate with intracate wards. %% The kids scream 'Oh yuck, we just hit a mosquito on the windshield - look at its blood.' In fact, it isn't the mosquito's blood, but blood the insect has just recently sucked from a red-blooded animal. Insect blood is colorless. Male mosquitos suck plant juices; females suck blood. %% The kind of danger people most enjoy is the kind they can watch from a safe place. %% The king arranged a regal marriage for his daughter--a bond that would unite two great kingdoms. Yet, because the young couple seemed so formal to each other, he posted a spy outside the royal wedding chamber and demanded a full account of the wedding night's progress. "It's hard to tell," said the spy the next morning. "When the prince entered the chamber, I heard the princess say, quite formally, 'I offer you my honor.' Then the prince said, with equal courtliness, 'I honor your offer.' And that's the way it went all night long--honor, offer, honor, offer. %% The king offers him Mount Ch'i. Good fortune. No blame. %% The king uses him to march forth and chastise. Then it is best to kill the leaders And take captive the followers. No blame. %% The king's servant is beset by obstruction upon obstruction, But it is not his own fault. %% The kings of Peru were the Incas, Who were known far and wide as great drincas. They worshiped the sun And had lots of fun, But the peasants all thought they were stincas. %% The knife is carved from a single piece of hard red stone. The double-edged blade is about 6 inches long, with a needle- sharp point. The handle is tubular, as long as the blade, and terminates in a small round ball. %% The knights are dust, And their good swords are rust, Their souls are with the saints, we trust. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% The knob that fires the mighty missile May make World War Three begin, Write our fate in fires of fissile-- Hey! You fool! You've knocked it in! %% The knock reverberates along the hall. For a time it seems there will be no answer. Then you hear someone unlatching the small wooden panel. Through the bars of the great door, the wrinkled face of an old man appears. He gazes down at you and intones as follows: "I am the Master of the Dungeon, whose task it is to insure that none but the most scholarly and masterful adventurers are admitted into the secret realms of the Dungeon. To ascertain whether you meet the stringent requirements laid down by the Great Implementers, I will ask three questions which should be easy for one of your reputed excellence to answer. You have undoubtedly discovered the answers during your travels through the Dungeon. Should you answer each of these questions correctly within five attempts, then I am obliged to acknowledge your skill and daring and admit you to these regions. "All answers should be in the form 'ANSWER, '." %% The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable. -- Irving Howe %% The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of in illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% The kzinti who had dared that vastness [of the Great Ocean] had not been cowards, and those who returned had not been fools. -- "The Ringworld Engineers" %% The label "NEW" or "IMPROVED" means the price went up and the quality went down. %% The label on the pouch reads "Merlin's triple-action magic dust, good for 3 (three) kinds of spell-casting: rune-reading, levitating, and conjuring." %% The laboring people found the prisons always open to receive them, but the courts of justice were practically closed to them. -- John Peter Altgeld (1847-1902) %% The ladies all had to agree That Mort's penis was too small to see. A whore named Louise Sniffed, "Who will THAT please?" Mort proudly submitted, "Just me!" %% The ladies looked one another over with microscopic carelessness. %% 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 (1893-1967) %% The lagging activity in a project will invariably be found in the area where the highest overtime rates lie waiting. -- Charles P. Boyle %% The lake has risen up to heaven: The image of Break-through. Thus the superior man Dispenses riches downward And refrains from resting on his virtue. %% The lake rises above the trees: The image of Preponderance of the Great. Thus the superior man, when he stands alone, Is unconcerned, And if he has to renounce the world, He is undaunted. %% The lamp appears to be getting dimmer. %% The lamp has smashed into the floor, and the light has gone out. %% The lamp is dying. %% The lamp is nearly dead. What a shame . . . %% The lamp is now completely used up. %% The lamp's glow is dying. You probably should think about getting out of here . . . %% The land of the free! This is the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free? Why I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch him the moment he shows he is not one of them. -- D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) %% The language provides a programmer with a set of conceptual tools; if these are inadequate for the task, they will simply be ignored. For example, seriously restricting the concept of a pointer simply forces the programmer to use a vector plus integer arithmetic to implement structures, pointer, etc. Good design and the absence of errors cannot be guaranteed by mere language features. -- Bjarne Stroustrup, "The C++ Programming Language" %% The larger the project or job, the less time there is to do it. -- George A. Daher %% The largest gay community in the U.S. (as a percentage of total population) is not in San Francisco, but in Iowa Falls, Minnesota (pop. 763), a small town in which virtually everyone is gay. In 1976, a group of about 100 gays fleeing persecution in the South settled in the town, and soon won a majority on the town council. Ordinances prohibiting heterosexual acts soon followed. "After all," said mayor Harry Whalen, "If the Supreme Court has refused to strike down laws prohibiting homosexual acts, then our anti-straight laws are equally valid." Rigorous enforcement of those laws has resulted in a community that is now almost 100% gay. Said one long-time resident: "I've lived here 35 years and didn't want to leave, but I didn't want to give up sex either. Then my neighbor Ed came over one night, and said how about I do it with him, and my wife Millie could do it with his wife. Well, I found it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was gonna be. Fact is, I rather like it." %% The largest room in the world is the room for improvement. %% The larva from its dusty cranny Danny took, and laid on cloth To watch it hatch ... Too bad for Danny! He thought the pupa held a moth. %% The last person that quit or was fired will be the held responsible for everything that goes wrong -until the next person quits or is fired. %% The last person who said that (God rest his soul) lived to regret it. %% The last rush-hour express bus to your neighborhood leaves five minutes before you get off work. -- John Corcoran %% The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first. -- Blaise Pascal %% The last thing one knows is what to put first. -- Pascal %% The last time somebody said, `I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, `They used to say the same thing about drugs.' -- Roy Blount, Jr. %% The last two words of the Star-Spangled Banner are not "Play Ball!" -- Solomon Short %% The last verse of Hell In a Bucket -- the one that Bobby never sings in public: "And while you were saying your mantra, I was humping your very best friend Comparing myself to Sinatra, 'Cause I did it my way in her end!" %% The last vestiges of the old Republic have been swept away. -- Governor Tarkin %% The last, best fruit which comes to perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is, tenderness toward the hard, forbearance toward the unforbearing, warmth of heart toward the cold, philanthropy toward the misanthropic. -- Richter %% The late Brigham Young was no neuter -- No faggot, no fairy, no fruiter. Where ten thousand virgins Succumbed to his urgin's There now stands the great State of Utah. %% The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in 13 states in the course of 11 years, is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in letter to James Madison, 20 December 1787 %% The latest issue of "Better Gnomes and Gardens" lies at your feet. %% The latest reports from Good Hope State that apes there have pricks thick as rope, And fuck high, wide, and free, From the top of one tree To the top of the next -- what a scope! %% The law of gravity was just revoked again. I hate when that happens. %% The law of privacy includes underwear. %% The law of the letter: The best way to inspire fresh thoughts is to seal the letter. %% The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. -- Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911) [Sole dissent, Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)] %% The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% The laws of New York City state that any person who fails to step on an insect using a public thoroughfare is liable to a $50 fine. %% The lawyers are going to LOVE this one -- NEWSDAY %% The leader who can enlist cooperation and respect, without having to pull rank, has power of the most positive kind. %% The leadership of the privileged has passed away; but it has not been succeeded by the leadership of the eminent. We have entered the region of mass effects. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% The leak has submerged the depressed area in a pool of sewage. %% The least experienced fisherman always catches the biggest fish. %% The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow human beings. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830), Works, Vol.X %% The leaves burn and the neighbors start to complain. %% The ledge collapses, giving you a narrow escape. %% The ledge collapses, leaving you with no place to land. %% The ledge collapses, probably as a result of the explosion. A large chunk of it, which is attached to the hook, drags you down to the ground. Fatally. %% The ledge has collapsed and cannot be landed on. %% The leg of the bed is split. Those who persevere are destroyed. Misfortune. %% The legibility of a copy is inversely proportional to its importance. %% The legs of the \fIting\fR are broken. The prince's meal is spilled And his person is soiled. Misfortune. %% The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. -- Alfred Hitchcock %% The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present. -- Eileen Shanahan %% The length of any meeting is inversely proportional to the length of the agenda for that meeting. -- G. Robert McLaughlin %% The length of debate varies inversely with the complexity of the issue. -- Robert Knowles %% The less America looks abroad, the grander its promise. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The less a thing can be proved, the angrier we get when we argue about it. %% The less important you are on the table of organization, the more you'll be missed if you don't show up for work. %% The less some people know the more eager they are to tell you about it. %% The less there is between you and the environment, the more you appreciate the environment. %% The less time planning, the more time programming. %% The less you bother me, the sooner you get results %% The less you enjoy serving on committees, the more likely you are to be pressed to do so. (Explanation: If you do not like committees, you keep quiet, nod your head, and look wise while thinking of something else and thereby acquire the reputation of being a judicious and cooperative colleague; if you enjoy committees, you talk a lot, make many suggestions and are regarded by the other members as a nuisance. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% The less your hope, the hotter your love. %% The letters appear larger but are still too small to read. %% The liberal of any species is always more dangerous -- because he always seems so much more rational. -- Solomon Short %% The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. -- Samuel Adams %% The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils. -- Leo XIII (1810-1903) %% The lid closes. %% The lid opens. %% The life expectancy of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of exposure on the medium. %% The life of a cigarette is proportional to the intensity of the protests from the non-smokers. -- Raj K. Dhawan %% The life of a pious minister is visible rhetoric. -- Hooker %% The life of a repo man is always intense. %% The life which is unexamined is not worth living. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% The light at the end of the tunnel is probably your house burning down. %% The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train. %% The light has sunk into the earth: The image of Darkening of the Light. Thus does the superior man live with the great mass: He veils his light, yet still shines. %% The light here seems better now. %% The light of a hundred stars does not equal the light of the moon. %% The light that burns twice as brightly burns half as long. You have a long life ahead of you. %% The lights are most likely to come back on at the precise moment you find the flashlight. -- Solomon Short %% The lights within the room come on. %% The likelihood of anything happening is in direct proportion to the amount of trouble it will cause if it does happen. -- Sam W. Warren %% The limerick is furtive and mean; You must keep her in close quarantine, Or she sneaks to the slums And promptly becomes Disorderly, drunk, and obscene. -- Morris Bishop %% The limerick's an art form complex Whose contents run mostly to sex. Two sexes of virgins, Their mutual mergin's, And vulgar erotic side effects. %% The limerick, a verse form iniquitous Has nonetheless been ubiquitous Once Congress in session declared its suppression But people got around that by writing the last line with no rhyme or meter. %% The limits of my language means the limits of my world. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein %% The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep. -- Woody Allen %% The little bird attacks the green dragon, and in an astounding flurry gets burnt to a cinder. The ashes blow away. %% The little bird attacks the green snake, and in an astounding flurry drives the snake away. %% The little bird is now dead. Its body disappears. %% The little boy pointed to two dogs in the park and asked his father what they were doing. "They're making puppies, son," replied the father. That night, the boy wandered into his parents' room while they were making love. Asked what they were doing, the father replied, "Making you a baby brother." "Gee, Dad," the boy pleaded, "turn her over--I'd rather have a puppy." %% The little engineer that could %% The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it - and that's all. It is thus that we should love. -- DeGourmont %% The little mind who loves itself, will write and think with the vulgar; but the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road, from universal benevolence. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% The little old lady rushed into the taxidermist and unwrapped a package containing two recently deceased monkeys. Her instructions to the proprietor were delivered in a welter of tears. "Favorite pets... (blubber,sob)... caught cold... (moan)... Don't see how I'll live without them... (weep,sob)... want to have them stuffed... (blubber,blubber)!" "Of course, madam," said the proprietor in an understanding voice, "and would you care to have them mounted?" "Oh, no," she sobbed, "shaking hands. They were just close friends." %% The little pieces of my life I give to you, with love, to make a quilt to keep away the cold. %% The little sweet doth kill much bitterness. %% The little trouble in the world that is not due to love is due to friendship. -- Ed Howe %% The local banker really likes the Swiss slogan: every little bit Alphs. %% The local density of mosquitos is inversely proportional to your remaining repellant. -- Milt Barber %% The local minister noticed a little girl standing outside of his parish with a basket of kittens. "Hello little girl what do you have there?" "These are my democratic kittens," she replied. Two weeks later the same minister noticed the same little girl with the same basket of kittens. "My, I see you still have your democratic kittens" "I beg your pardon, these are Republican kittens," she replied. "Two weeks ago they were democratic kittens," he said. "Two weeks ago they had their eyes closed," she replied. %% The lock doesn't need oiling. %% The lock isn't on this side of the door. %% The lonely and the hunted explode into rock and roll bands. %% The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. -- Sir Thomas Browne %% The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself. -- Henry Kissinger %% The longer ahead you plan a special event, and the more special it is, the more likely it is to go wrong. -- David and Jane Evelyn %% The longer the title, the less important the job. -- Robert Shrum %% The longer the wand the better. %% The longest part of the journey is said to be the passing of the gate. -- Marcus Terentius Varro %% The longest pole in the tent is holding everything up. %% The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole. -- John Peter Zenger %% The loss of life will be irreplaceable. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, after the San Francisco earthquake %% The love of meat prevents any real change. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% The love of money is the root of all evil; which while some coveted after they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. -- I Timothy VI, 10 %% The low doth punish man or woman That steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose, That steals the common from the goose. -- Anon. (1764) %% The luck that is ordained for you will be coveted by others. %% The lustre of diamonds is invigorated by the interposition of darker bodies; the lights of a picture are created by the shades; the highest pleasure which nature has indulged to sensitive perception is that of rest after fatigue. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% The machine -- not only does it relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labor; but by the miraculous enhancing of our senses, through its powers of enlargement, penetration and exact measurement, it constantly increases the scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living creatures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness with a minimum of effort! Having embarked upon so profitable a path, how can Mankind fail to pursue it? -- Teilhard de Chardin %% The machine comes to life (figuratively) with a dazzling display of colored lights and bizarre noises. After a few moments, the excitement fades. %% The machine doesn't seem to want to do anything. %% The mad scientist was once only a creature of gothic romance; now he is everywhere, busy torturing atoms and animals in his laboratory. -- Edward Abbey %% The magic dust carries you safely downward. %% The magic mushroom gives you vivid hallucinations, and an upset stomach. %% The magician is seated in his high chair and looks upon the world with favor. He is at the height of his powers. If he closes his eyes, he causes the world to disappear. If he opens his eyes, he causes the world to come back. If there is harmony within him, the world is harmonious. If rage shatters his inner harmony, the unity of the world is shattered. If desire arises within him, he utters the magic syllables that causes the desired object to appear. His wishes, his thoughts, his gestures, his noises command the universe. -- Selma Fraiberg, "The Magic Years", pg. 107 %% The main beneficiaries of federal aid are those states that most oppose the principle. -- Bob Smith %% The main impact of the computer has been the provision of unlimited jobs for clerks. %% The main thing is the play itself. I swear that greed for money has nothing to do with it, although heaven knows I am sorely in need of money. -- Feodor Dostoyevsky %% The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% The major cause of poverty is the birth of children to unwed mothers. -- Pat Robertson %% The majority is never right. %% The majority of us are for free speech only when it deals with those subjects concerning which we have no intense convictions. -- Edmund B. Chafee %% The majority, compose them how you will, are a herd, and not a nice one. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% The makers may make and the users may use, but the fixers must fix with but minimal clues %% The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their poems, or of parents for their children ... and hence they are very bad company, for they talk of nothing but the praises of wealth. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% The man is rolling a rolled map across the draftsman's table located in the center of the room. He sees you enter and comments mockingly, "Some choad went to the trouble to map out the first couple of miles of the mine really well. Unfortunately most of it is not worth knowing and there is not enough paper in the place to do the whole thing. Come on, we are getting close to the interesting part of this dump." The man steps out the passage to the northeast. There is a door to the west. %% The man is sitting on an artificial wood grain desk and holding some yellowed papers. He says, "This is supposed to be the owner's office where all the important records are kept. There's nothing in here worth the trouble to go through. Even that music box is busted. I don't even know how long it has been since this place was used for its original purpose. Enough of this shooting the bull here - there are much better things to see. Follow me." He hops off the desk and out the door to the east. Another door faces northwest. %% The man kicks a pile of empty cans into the corner and says, "The only thing worse than eating canned food for 12 years is not being able to read the cans to tell what it is before you open it." He leads you towards a door to the west and leaves. Another door is to the north and there is a passage to the south. %% The man on top walks a lonely street; the "chain" of command is often a noose. -- McCoy, "The Conscience of the King," stardate 2818.9 %% The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be.... The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. -- Adam Smith (1723-1790) %% The man seems lost in thought as you enter but he snaps to and gestures to the two ore carts and associated cables which occupy the majority of the room. He says, "Those carts are the only way to move around in the mine without getting yourself wasted. And, speaking of wasted, stay out of that place, he jabs a thumb to the west, that is none of your business, or mine any more. The cables here move them but you have to carry your own air. The tanks against the wall give you an hour of air at a shot but it doesn't take near that much to get all the stuff we could need. You gotta watch the pedals though, the cart can be a real E ticket ride until you get the hang of it. Enough of this though we will come back to get the treasure later. Let me finish what little tour I have to give." The man leaves through a passage to the north. Another passage exits to the southwest. A heavy door to the west stands directly opposite the entrance to the mine proper which is sealed by the carts and a air lock. %% The man shoves you onto the bed and says "Now just stay put!" and leaves the room through the southeast door. %% The man told the ghost to go away, "You don't have a haunting license." %% The man waves to the two doors northwest and northeast and says "Those only go off to the crew quarters. Not much in mine and even less in yours." At this point he walks into the northwest room saying "Lets just get you the few things you will need here......". There is also a door to the southwest and east. %% The man who builds a factory builds a temple; the man who works there, worships there. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% The man who builds and wants wherewith to pay Provides a home from which to run away. -- Young %% The man who can laugh when he isn't amused is always popular. %% The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% 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 man who has ceased to learn ought not to be allowed to wander around loose in these dangerous days. -- M. M. Coady %% The man who has never been flogged has never been taught. -- Menander %% The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors, is like a potato--the only thing belonging to him is underground. -- Sir Thomas Overbury %% The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. -- Henri-Frederic Amiel %% The man who invented velvet made a nice pile %% The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it. -- Woodrow Wilson %% The man who laughs has not yet been told the terrible news. -- Bertolt Brecht %% The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902), "The Fair Haven", 1873 %% The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. %% The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas. -- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), "Time After Time" %% The man who rows the boat seldom has time to rock it. -- Bill Copeland %% The man who runs may fight again. -- Menander %% The man who said "A bird in the hand's worth two in the bush" has been putting his bird in the *WRONG* bushes. %% The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance. %% The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The man who sees the consistency in things is a wit, the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% The man who sees, on New Year's day, Mount Fuji, a hawk, and an eggplant is forever blessed. -- Old Japanese proverb %% The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out. -- Chinese proverb %% The man who understands one woman is qualified to understand pretty well everything. -- William Butler Yeats %% The man who will live above his present circumstances is in great danger of living in a little time much beneath them. -- Addison %% The man whom I call Dr. A. Is past master at love and at play. At hugging and kissing-- (The remainder is missing For I won't give my secrets away.) %% The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary. She is simply a woman who has done her best to snare a man and has failed. -- Norton %% The management question, therefore, is not WHETHER to build a pilot system and throw it away. You WILL do that. The question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., 'The Mythical Man-Month' %% The manager asks you not to use the merchandise. %% The manner of giving, shows the character of the giver, more than the gift itself. -- Lavater %% The map is extremely old and dates from ancient egypt. It shows a route popular at the time for sailing to the shores of the sahara desert. %% The map is tightly rolled and seems quite large. %% The map shows a long canyon shaped mine. The main shaft runs east-west into the mountain. Off the main shaft lie many short narrow side-trails. Other scribbles indicate that some of the side-trails were the sites of excavation. %% The march of the human mind is slow. -- Edmund Burke %% The margin is very marginal. %% The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to die humbly for one. -- Wilhelm Stekel %% The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. -- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul %% The marriage of Marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism. -- Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism" %% The marrying maiden as a concubine. A lame man who is able to tread. Undertakings bring good fortune. %% The marrying maiden as a slave. She marries as a concubine. %% The marrying maiden draws out the allotted time. A late marriage comes in due course. %% The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a soda can, when discarded will last forever ... and a $7,000 car which when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years. %% The mass media is supported and sustained by commercial entities. And corn flakes and Shakespeare are simply not kissing cousins. Leonard Bernstein and living bras are incompatible. And you cannot sustain adult, probing, meaningful drama when the proceedings are interrupted every twelve minutes by a dozen dancing rabbits with toilet paper. -- Rod Serling %% The master class has always brought a war and the subject class has always fought the battle. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, and the subject class has had all to lose and nothing to gain. -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) %% The master programmer moves form program to program without fear. No change in management can harm him. He will not be fired, even if the project is cancelled. Why is this? He is filled with Tao. %% The master's eye makes the horse fat. %% The match has gone out. %% The match is out. %% The mate for beauty should be a man and not a money chest. -- Bulwer %% The materials of action are variable, but the use we make of them should be constant. -- Epictetus %% The mature bohemian is one whose woman works full time. %% The maxim that "Honesty is the best policy" is one which, perhaps, no one is ever habitually guided by in practice. An honest man is always before it, and a knave is generally behind it. -- Whately %% The meaning of a word is what is explained by the explanation of the meaning. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Philosophical Investigations" %% The means-and-ends moralists, or non-doers, always end up on their ends without any means. -- Saul Alinsky %% The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) %% The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has chosen. -- Lamb %% The measure of man is what he does with power. -- Pittacus %% The mechanistic world view, taking the play of physical particles as ultimate reality, found its expression in a civilization which glorifies physical technology that has led eventually to the catastrophes of our time. Possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human history. -- Ludwig von Bertalanffy %% The meek are contesting the will. %% The meek can inherit the earth -- the rest of us have other plans. %% The meek don't want it. %% The meek inherit the earth -- usually in small sections ... about 6 by 3. %% The meek shall inherit the Earth after we're done with it. %% The meek shall inherit the Earth. In three foot by six foot plots. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% The meek shall inherit the earth -- they are too weak to refuse. %% The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights. -- J. Paul Getty %% The meek shall inherit the earth, if that's OK with you %% The meek shall inherit the earth, one meter wide and two meters long. %% The meek shall inherit the earth. Are you ready? %% The meek shall inherit the earth; the rest of us, the Universe. %% The meek shall inherit the earth; but by that time there won't be anything left worth inheriting. %% The meek will inherit the Earth..... The rest of us will go to the stars. %% The meek will inherit the earth ... in pine boxes six feet long by ... %% The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. -- Carl Jung %% The melting glacier seems to have carried the torch away, leaving you in the dark. %% The members of my generation who served in Vietnam made a sacrifice for their country that was far, far greater than mine. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% The men and women are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize. %% The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves. -- Herbert N. Casson %% The mere act of hearing or reading wise statements and sound advice does little for anyone. In the process of learning, the learner's dynamic cooperation is required. %% The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% The message of David Duke, is this, basically: Big government, anti-big government, get out of my pocketbook, cut my taxes, put welfare people back to work. That's a very popular message. The problem is the messenger. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation. -- Lew Mammel, Jr. %% The meter now registers 'no flow'. %% The military is developing artificial intelligence because that way they can have the perfect fighting man - smart enough to understand what he's been told to do, but stupid enough that he never questions why. %% The mind is an iceberg -- it floats with only one-seventh of its bulk over water. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? here at least We shall be free; the almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence; Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. -- Satan, from John Milton (1608-1674) "Paradise Lost" bk. i, 253 %% The mind is like a parachute - it works only when open. %% The mind is no match with the heart in persuasion; constitutionality is no match with compassion. -- Everett M. Dirksen %% The mind of man is vastly like a hive; His thoughts are busy ever -- all alive; But here the simile will go no further; For bees are making honey, one and all; Man's thoughts are busy in producing gall, Committing, as it were, self-murther. -- Dr. Wolcott %% The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract. -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% The mind ought sometimes to be amused, that it may the better return to thought, and to itself. -- Phaedrus %% The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking. -- Phaedrus %% The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned. -- Seneca %% The minority is always in the right. -- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) %% The minute a man is convinced that he is interesting, he isn't. %% The minute you sign a client is the minute you start to lose him. -- James M. Blankenship %% The minute you start to analyze why sex feels so good, it stops feeling good and starts feeling silly. -- Solomon Short %% The mirror breaks, revealing a panel behind it. %% The mirror has already been broken. %% The mirror is broken into little pieces. %% The mirror is closed. %% The mirror is mounted on a panel which has been opened outward. %% The mirror is mounted on a wooden panel which moves slightly inward as you push and back out as you let go. The mirror feels rather fragile. %% The mirror is unyielding but seems rather fragile. %% The mirror quietly swings shut. %% The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions. -- Marquis D. A. F. de Sade %% The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came. -- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) %% The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power. -- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking." %% The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages--as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already. -- Edward Abbey %% The mistake you make is in trying to figure it out. -- Tenessee Williams %% The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% The modern child will answer you back before you've said anything. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% The modern conqueror cannot "take" any spoils. -- Sir Norman Angell (1872-1967) %% The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me. -- Nicol Williamson %% The moment a woman marries, some terrible revolution happens in her system; all her good qualities vanish, presto, like eggs out of a conjurers box. 'Tis true that they appear on the other side of the box, but for the husband, they are gone forever. -- Bulwer %% The moment in which you confront your own death is the moment in which you are most totally alive. -- Solomon Short %% The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish -- all duties even. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The moment you forecast, you know you're going to be wrong, you just don't know when and in which direction. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it. It probably isn't right. -- Edmund C. Berkeley %% The moment you're born you're done for. -- Arnold Bennett %% The monarch oak, the patriarch of the trees, Shoots rising up, and spreads by slow degrees; Three centuries he grows, and three he stays Supreme in state; and in three more decays. -- Dryden %% The monster grabs you on the wrist, squeezes, and you drop your # in pain. %% The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader. %% The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood %% The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away. %% The moon nearly at the full. The team horse goes astray. No blame. %% The moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last. -- James A. Froude (1818-1894) %% The moral majority is neither. %% The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux. -- Sir James G. Frazer %% The more I know men the more I like my horse. %% The more I learn about men, the more I love my dog. %% The more I learn about women, the more I love my cat. %% The more I look, the more I like it. I do think it's good. I wish you were here to see it. %% The more I see of man, the more I like dogs. -- Mme. de Stael %% The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" %% The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast powers in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The more a recruit knew about a given subject, the better chance he had of receiving an assignment involving some other subject. -- Dr. R. F. Gumperson %% The more campaigning, the better. -- Larry O'Brien %% The more complex the idea or technology, the more simpleminded is the opposition. %% The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play. -- Kirk, "Shore Leave," stardate 3025.8 %% The more control, the more that requires control. %% The more cordial the buyers secretary, the greater the odds that the competition already has the order. %% The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws. -- Edward Abbey %% The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. -- Cornelius Tacitus, 56-120 A.D. %% The more crap you put up with, the more crap you are going to get. %% The more enthusiastic, unruly, and large the candidate's crowds in the week before the election, the less likely he is to carry the area. -- Frank Mankiewicz %% The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents. -- Edward Abbey %% The more heavily a man is supposed to be taxed, the more power he has to escape being taxed. -- Diogenes %% The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint. The affectation of sanctity is a blotch on the face of piety. -- Lavater %% The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence. -- Susan Jacoby %% The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be. -- Lao Tsu %% The more noise a motor or a man makes the less power is available. -- W. R. McGeary %% The more often a person feels, and fails to act, the less he will be able to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. -- C. S. Lewis %% The more people I meet, the more I like my dog. -- David Paranka %% The more qualified candidates who are available, the more likely the compromise will be on the candidate whose main qualification is a non-threatening incompetence. -- Mark B. Cohen %% The more right one is, the more careful he should be to express his opinion tactfully. The other fellow never likes to be proved wrong. -- John Luther %% The more the change, the more it is the same thing. -- Alphonse Karr %% The more the merrier. -- John Heywood %% The more things change, the more they remain the same. -- Alphonse Karr, "Les Guepes", January 1849 %% The more things change, the more they stay insane. %% The more things change, the more they'll never be the same again. %% The more unworkable the urban plan, the greater the probability of implementation. -- Robert Wood %% The more waist, the less speed. %% The more we condemn unadulterated Marxian Socialism, the stouter should be our insistence on thorough-going social reforms. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right. %% The more we learn about the 386, the less we want to know ... -- cgd %% The more we love, the nearer we are to hate. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% The more wit the less courage. -- Thomas Fuller %% The more you know the less the better. -- Billy Connolly %% The more you run over a dead skunk, the flatter it gets. %% The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit. -- Felelon %% The more you speak of yourself, the more you are likely to lie. -- Zimmerman %% The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. %% The more, the better. %% The mosquito exists to keep the mighty humble. %% The mosquito is nature's example of the male/female difference ... The male lives off plants. The female lives off the blood of others. Now shall we talk about the Black Widow Spider? %% The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey. -- Andy Warhol %% The moss on the tree does not fear the talons of the hawk. %% The most advantageous, pre-eminent thing thou canst do is not to exhibit nor display thyself within the limits of our galaxy, but rather depart instantaneously whence thou even now standest and flee to yet another rotten planet in the universe, if thou canst have the good fortune to find one. -- Carlyle %% The most agreeable of all companions is a simple, frank man, without any high pretensions to an oppressive greatness; one who loves life, and understands the use of it; obliging, alike at all hours; above all, of a golden temper, and steadfast as an anchor. For such a one we gladly change the great genius, the most brilliant wit, the profoundest thinker. -- Lessing %% The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea ... this pollution is for the most part irrecoverable. -- Rachel Carson %% The most certain sign of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. -- Lord Acton (1834-1902) %% The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% The most common form of marriage proposal: "YOU'RE WHAT!?" %% The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws. -- Edward Abbey %% The most cooperative man in this world is a dead man. -- Bela Oxmyx, "A Piece of the Action," stardate unknown %% The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The most dangerous person in the world is an ideologue with a machine gun. %% The most delicate component will be the one to drop. %% The most destructive criticism is indifference. %% The most difficult light bulb to replace burns out first and most frequently. -- Joe Anderson %% The most difficult thing about Time is doing it. %% The most difficult thing about surviving AIDS is trying to convince your parents that you're Haitian. %% The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself. -- Thales %% The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting. -- T. H. White %% The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right. -- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World Revisited", 1956 %% The most egotistical person we've ever heard of is the one who remarked that he had only been wrong once in his life and that was when he thought he was wrong but wasn't. %% 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 most extreme and dangerous form of vadding is `elevator rodeo', a.k.a. `elevator surfing', a sport played by wrasslin' down a thousand-pound elevator car with a 3-foot piece of string, and then exploiting this mastery in various stimulating ways (such as elevator hopping, shaft exploration, rat-racing, and the ever-popular drop experiments). Kids, don't try this at home! See also {hobbit} (sense 2). %% The most happy marriage I can picture would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise. -- Preem Palver, First Speaker %% The most important early product on the way to developing a good product is an imperfect version. %% The most important invention in the history of the human race is the written contract. It makes it possible for individual parties to list all the different ways they distrust each other. -- Solomon Short %% The most important office ... that of a private citizen. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) %% The most important reason for the drug laws in this country is to encourage a healthy distrust for the law. %% The most important service rendered by the press is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust. %% The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it. -- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), quoted in "Contemporary Architects", 1980 %% The most important things to do in this world are to get something to eat, somthing to drink and somebody to love you. -- Brendan Behan, in "Weekend", 1968 %% The most important things, each person must do for himself. %% The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), "Life", 1950 %% The most merciful thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. -- H. P. Lovecraft %% The most popular kids show in France is Beauxault le Clown. -- Steve Connelly %% The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners--and the crude vulgarity of their way of life. -- Edward Abbey %% The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or at nine at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a Billiard table, or hears your voice at a Tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% The most undesirable things are the most certain (e. g., death and taxes). -- Martin S. Kottmeyer %% The most unsatisfactory men are those who pride themselves on their virility and regard sex as if it were some form of athletics at which you win cups. It is a woman's spirit and mood which a man has to stimulate in order to make sex interesting. The real lover is the man who can thrill you by just touching your head or smiling into your eyes - or just by staring into space. -- Marilyn Monroe %% The most utterly lost of all days, is that in which you have not once laughed. -- Chamfort %% The most vital dimension on any plan or drawing stands the greatest chance of being omitted. %% The mountain rests upon the earth: The image of Splitting Apart. Thus those above can insure their position Only by giving generously to those below. %% The movement of heaven is full of power. Thus the superior man makes himself strong and untiring. %% The movement of the structure alerts the Guardians. %% The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on. %% The moving finger having writ... gestures. %% The moving finger writhes and, having writhed, moves on. %% The mud is alive! -- Bing Crosby %% The mulch sinks into the ground at the base of the tree. %% The museum boasted owning the original version of Beethoven's unfinished basement. -- Steve Connelly %% The music box is made from ornately carved ivory, with an interlocking hinge and no visible latch. %% The mysterious monster totally digests you. %% The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt. -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost" %% The narrower the mind the broader the statement. -- Ted Cook %% The nation had the lion's heart. I had the luck to give the roar. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe. -- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy %% The nation that once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production is now told that it is achieved by squalor ... You can't have your cake and let your neighbor eat it, too. -- Francisco d'Anconia %% The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety. -- Norman Mailer %% The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. %% The nearer to the church, the further from God. -- John Heywood %% The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one/the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. -- [on yin-yang] %% The neighbor in the east who slaughters an ox Does not attain as much real happiness As the neighbor in the west With his small offering. %% The neighborhood stores are all out of broccoli, Loccoli. %% The nervous young bride became irritated by her husband's lusty advances on their wedding night and reprimanded him severely. "I demand proper manners in bed," she declared, "just as I do at the dinner table." Amused by his wife's formality, the groom smoothed his rumpled hair and climbed quietly between the sheets. "Is that better?" he asked, with a hint of a smile. "Yes," replied the girl, "much better." "Very good, darling," the husband whispered. "Now would you be so kind as to please pass the pussy?" %% The nest of golden eggs has vanished! %% The net of law is spread so wide, No sinner from its sweep may hide. Its meshes are so fine and strong, They take in every child of wrong. O wondrous web of mystery! Big fish alone escape from thee! -- James Jeffrey Roche (1847-1908) %% The net weight of your boots is proportional to the cube of the number of hours you have been on the trail. -- Milt Barber %% The new Congressmen say they're going to turn the government around. I hope I don't get run over again. %% The new cinematic emporium Is not just a super-sensorium, But a highly effectual Heterosexual Mutual masturbatorium. %% The new electronic independence recreates the world in the image of a global village. %% The new employee walks into the Boss' office and nervously tells the Boss, "I have some good news and bad news, Sir." The Boss looks up and asks, "What's the good news, Tom?" "I promise such a thing will never happen again." %% The new ensign was standing his first night watch on the bridge of a destroyer. Far out on the horizon the USS New Jersey was conducting a night gunnery exercise. The ensign, seeing the flashes of light from the battleship, ran excitedly up to the signal bridge and pointed out the "Morse code" coming from the other ship. Ensign: "What are they saying? What are they saying?" Signalman: "Boom. Boom." %% The new local cinematorium Is not only a super sensorium, But a highly effectual Heterosexual Mutual masturbatorium. %% The new rooster caused a great stir in the barnyard. From resplendent comb to defiant spurs, he was the picture of young bantamhood. Almost immediately upon arrival, he was greeted by and elderly rooster who took him behind the barn and whispered in his ear: "Young fellow, I'm long past my prime. All I want now is peace and solitude. So you take over right now as ruler of the roost with my blessings." The newcomer did just that. He went about his squirely duties as only a young rooster could. After several days, however, the elder rooster again took the young champion behind the barn. "Kid," he said, "the hens are after me for giving up my position so readily. So why don't we have a race, say, ten laps around the farmhouse? The winner becomes undisputed keeper of the henhouse and the hens will stop nagging me. The young rooster, with only contempt for his elder, agreed. Surprisingly, the older one jumped off to an early lead. His counterpart, weakened by the activities of the previous week, was never quite able to overtake him. As they rounded the barn for the fourth time, the elder rooster maintained a formidable lead. Suddenly, a shotgun blast rang out. The young rooster fell in the dust, his plumage riddled with buckshot. "Dammit, Emmy," said the farmer. "That's the last rooster we buy from Ferguson. Four of 'em this month, and every one's been queer." %% The newest books are those that never grow old. -- Holbrook Jackson %% The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap - and they know it. -- Fred Friendly, 1980 %% The news of the day, no matter how trivial or unimportant, always takes up more time than a married man has. -- Ray O'Neil %% The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit. -- Bovee %% The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% The next big scandal headline... "Neil Bush Admits Serving on Iraq's board of directors" %% The next class is always three buildings away on a rainy day. -- M. M. Johnston %% The next dreadful thing to a battle lost is a battle won. %% The next person to mention spaghetti stacks to me is going to have his head knocked off. -- Bill Conrad %% The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false. %% The next thing I say to you will be true. The last thing I said was false. %% The next time you are contemplating a decision in which you are debating whether or not to go for the gusto, ask yourself this important question: "How long am I going to be dead?" With that perspective, you can now make a free, fearless choice to do just about any goddamned sneaky thing your devious little mind can think up. Go ahead. Have your fun. You're welcome. Go on. See you in Hell. %% The nice thing about dying is that once you've gotten it over with, you can stop being afraid of it. -- Solomon Short %% The nice thing about self-love is that it's hardly ever unrequited. -- Solomon Short %% The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum %% The nicest thing about the Alto is that it doesn't run faster at night. %% The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while. -- Edward Abbey %% The night belongs to Michelob - they bought up all the rights... %% The night is wild, but I'm in control. You gotta brush your teeth with rock and roll! -- J. Geils %% The night passes quickly when you're asleep But I'm out shufflin' for something to eat ... Breakfast at the Egg House, Like the waffle on the griddle, I'm burnt around the edges, But I'm tender in the middle. -- Adrian Belew %% The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe. %% The nipples of Sarah Sarong When excited are twelve inches long This embarrassed her lover Who was pained to discover She expected no less of his dong %% The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation. -- Lt Col Jean V. Dubois %% The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted to the love of glory. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% The normal process for the acceptance of a scientific idea: 1. "This is worthless nonsense"; 2. "This is an interesting but perverse point of view"; 3. "This is true, but quite unimportant"; 4. "I always said so..." %% The north wall is solid rock. %% The nose knows Neo-Synepherin. Do you, you little snot? %% The notion of a "record" is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card. -- Dennis M. Ritchie %% The notion of ideas as infectious diseases is one to which most authoritarian religions and governments subscribe, and they hold massive "hygienic" burnings of the "viral DNA" behind the ideas. Promulgators of these "diseased" ideas are called "carriers of spiritual impurity" (to use one phrase now popular in China) and attempts are made to prevent the spread of these diseases. This is a naive and dangerous view of how ideas work and it is disturbing to see it rationalized into Western pop psychology. -- Tim Maroney, tim@toad.com %% The notion of the Trinity of Gods has enfeebled the belief in one God. A multiplication of beliefs acts as a division of belief; and in proportion as anything is divided it is weakened. %% The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once--and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.... -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), 1930 %% The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion ... In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state. -- Alan Barth %% The notorious Duchess of Peels Saw a fisherman fishing for eels. Said she, "Would you mind? -- Shove one up my behind. I am anxious to know how it feels." %% The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war. -- Edward Abbey %% The number of adjectives and verbs that are added to the description of a menu item is in inverse proportion to the quality of the resulting dish. -- John Calkins %% The number of arguments is unimportant unless some of them are correct. -- Ralph Hartley %% The number of computer scientists in a room is inversely proportional to the number of bugs in their code. %% The number of different hypotheses erected to explain a given biological phenomenon is inversely proportional to the available knowledge. %% The number of errors in any piece of writing rises in proportion to the writer's reliance on secondary sources. -- Harold Faber %% The number of errors make is equal to the sum of the "squares" involved. %% The number of letters written to the editor is inversely proportional to the importance of the article. -- Robert L. Marcus %% The number of licorice gumballs you get out of a gumball machine increases in direct proportion to how much you hate licorice. %% The number of people who agree or disagree with you has absolutely no bearing on whether you're RIGHT. The universe has a way of deciding that for itself. %% The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite. %% The number of stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail. -- Milt Barber %% The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please multiply by i and dial again. %% The number you have reached is not in service at this time. Please be sure you are dialing the right number, and are dialing correctly. This is a recording. %% The number you have reached, 653-1800, has been changed. The new number is 653-1800. %% The nutritional content of most promises is nearly zero. %% The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins %% The objective of all dedicated employees should be to thoroughly analyze all situations, anticipate all problems prior to their occurrence, have answers for these problems, and move swiftly to solve these problems when called upon. However, When you are up to your ass in alligators it is difficult to remind yourself your initial objective was to drain the swamp. %% The ocean lies amidst a series of rocky shoals here. What looks like a reef can vaguely be seen in the waters to the North. To the south, a rickety shack is poised flush against the face of a rock cliff. %% The odds are 6:5 that if one has late classes, one's roommate will have the earliest possible classes. %% The odds are a million to one against your being one in a million. %% The offer that is "too good to be true" is also too good to be legal. %% The office brown-noser named Bunky Would claim he was nobody's flunky. But when the chips were all down, His proboscis was brown, And there hung many strands which were gunky. THE FARTING CONTEST %% The office space and salaries of college administrators are in inverse proportion to those of the instructors. -- M. M. Johnston %% The oil can is mightier than the sword. -- Everett Dirksen %% The oil has freed up the hinges so that the door will now move, although it requires some effort. %% The oil soaks into the rusty lock. The lock soon is almost as good as new. %% 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. %% The older I get, the smarter my parents were. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), Prejudices, Third Series", 1922 %% The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath. -- Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart %% The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy. %% The older we get, the later old age starts. %% The oldest of all philosophies, that of Evolution, was bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness during the millennium of theological scholasticism. But Darwin poured new lifeblood into the ancient frame; the bonds burst, and the revivified thought of ancient Greece has proved itself to be a more adequate expression of the universal order of things than any of the schemes which have been accepted by the credulity and welcomed by the superstition of 70 later generations of men. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) %% The once was a man from Bombay Who modeled his cunts out of clay So hot was his prick That he turned them to brick And rubbed all his foreskin away. %% The one L lama, he's a priest The two L llama, he's a beast And I will bet my silk pyjama There isn't any three L lllama. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) [to which a fire chief replied that occasionally his department responded to something like a "three L lllama."] %% The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe. %% The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them? -- Edward Abbey %% The one item you want is never the one on sale. %% The one piece that the plant forgot to ship is the one that supports 75% of the balance of the shipment. Corollary: Not only did the plant forget to ship it, 50% of the time they haven't even made it. %% The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions. -- Bishop Mandell Creighton %% The one sure way to make a lazy man look respectable is to put a fishing rod in his hand. %% The one thing worse than a knee-pad Tory is a chickenshit liberal. The type that can not say "shit" even when his mouth is full of it. -- Edward Abbey %% The one who dies with the most toys wins. %% The one who does the least work will get the most credit. %% The one who writes the advertisements for the bank is surely not the same person who approves the loans. %% The one with the little thing that spins around on top. %% The only accident [at Three Mile Island] is that this thing leaked out. You could have avoided this whole thing by not saying anything. -- Craig Faust (control-room operator at TMI), 1979, quoted from "Loose Talk" %% The only beast in the Plaza de Toros is the crowd. -- Vicente Blasco Ibanez (1867-1928) %% The only certain thing in life is death. %% The only certainties in life are death and taxes. %% The only complaint of this 74 year old woman is that the wind keeps blowing her off her motorcycle and she suffers aches and pains because of this. %% The only constant is change. %% The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next. -- Mignon McLaughlin %% The only culture you have is between your toes %% The only cure for a real hangover is death. -- Robert Benchley %% The only difference between a fool and a criminal who attacks a system is that the fool attacks unpredictably and on a broader front. -- Tom Gibb %% The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions. %% The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The only difference between your girlfriend and a barracuda is the nailpolish. %% The only difference in the game of love over the last few thousand years is that they've changed trumps from clubs to diamonds. -- The Indianapolis Star %% The only flaw in the Hinckley trial is that it left a lot of people with the impression that psychiatrists are just a bunch of bearded voodoo doctors who espouse confusing and wildly contradictory theories that have nothing to do with common sense. This is totally unfair. Many psychiatrists are clean- shaven. -- Dave Barry, Psychiatrist For Rent, "Bad Habits" %% The only fool bigger that the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him %% The only good husbands stay bachelors: They're too considerate to get married. -- Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) %% The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% The only idea that ever came to me while shaving was to grow a beard. -- Jim Fiebig %% The only imperfect thing in nature is the human race. %% The only important result of a meeting is agreement about next steps. -- Charles Wolf, Jr. %% The only insect able to produce something as strong as steel wire of the same thickness is the spider and its web. Before WWII, black widow silk was used for the cross-sections in the telescopic sights in rifles. %% The only insect that can beat its wing over 130,000 times a minute is the midge - a mosquito look-alike. %% The only insect that can lift 50 times its own weight is the ant. %% The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have not legitimacy. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% The only measure of a man's usefulness is the extent to which he exercises his talent, according to the laws of his own growth, for the common good. -- Stanley Kunitz %% The only one of your children who does not grow up and move away is your husband. %% The only people for me are the mad ones--the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles. -- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road" %% The only people with a right to complain about what I do for a living are vegetarian nudists. -- Ken Bates, fur trapper %% The only perfect science is hind-sight. %% The only person who ever got all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe. %% 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 only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane. -- Phaedrus %% The only problem with the 'Star Wars' system is that it will cause the Russians to create an `Empire Strikes Back' system. -- Neil Larrimore %% The only programs a grown-up can possibly stand are those that cater to those pre-adolescent fantasies that most have never abandoned. -- Richard Schickel %% The only psychologically damaging thing about masturbation is that there's nobody else to blame later for persuading you to do it. %% The only really decent thing to do behind a person's back is pat it. %% The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again. -- Erma Bombeck %% The only reward of virtue is virtue. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The only rose without thorns is friendship. %% The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change -- and we all instinctively avoid it. -- E. B. White %% The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless. %% The only solution is...a balance of power. We arm our side with exactly that much more. A balance of power -- the trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all. But the only one that preserves both sides. -- Kirk, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8 %% The only thing better than love is milk. %% The only thing better than time well spent is time well wasted. %% The only thing cheaper than hardware is talk. %% The only thing houseflies fear more than the Venus fly trap is the hanging plant. -- Rod Schmidt %% The only thing more reliable than Magik is one's friends. -- Macbeth, King of Scotland %% The only thing nature abhors more than a vacuum is a Pink Panther with a vacuum. %% The only thing that endures is change. %% The only thing that hurts more than paying an income tax is not having to pay an income tax. %% The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless. -- Nicolas Chamfort %% The only thing that will shame an attorney is poverty. %% The only thing that's more discouraging than waiting two months for a dental appointment is getting one the next day. %% The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), 1st Inaugural Address, 1933 %% The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn. -- Earl Warren %% The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. -- Georg Wihelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) I know guys can't learn from yesterday ... Hegel must be taking the long view. -- John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar" %% The only thing worse than a sorcerer is a sorcerer's apprentice. -- Mickey Mouse %% The only thing worse than an expert is someone who thinks he's an expert. %% The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why. -- Jean Rostand %% The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance. %% The only time I refused a drink I didn't understand the question. %% The only time a dog gets complimented is when he doesn't do anything. -- C. Schultz %% The only time he'll pick up a check is if it's made out to him. -- Joey Adams %% The only time we doctors should accept death is when it comes as a result of our own incompetence. -- Dr. Hfuhruhurr %% The only tool diplomacy has is language. -- Hodin of Gideon, "The Mark of Gideon," stardate 5423.4 %% The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) %% The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down. -- Frank Kent, Baltimore Sun %% The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor. -- William Temple %% The only way round is through. -- Robert Frost %% The only way to amuse some people is to slip and fall on an icy pavement. -- Ed Howe %% The only way to be good at everything you do is to only do the things you are good at. %% The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% The only way to conquer fear is to keep doing the thing you fear to do. %% The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them to the impossible. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.... I can resist everything but temptation. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The only way to have a friend is to be one. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. In other fields, such as business, it's different. For example, almost every advertisement you see is obviously designed, in some way or another, to fool the customer: the print that they don't want you to read is small; the statements are written in an obscure way. It is obvious to anybody that the product is not being presented in a scientific and balanced way. Therefore, in the selling business, there's a lack of integrity. -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% The only way to keep you health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. -- Brian Kernighan %% The only way to stop war once and for all is to keep it from being so much fun. -- Solomon Short %% The only way you'll ever hear from me is if you're living in the same hell. -- Roy Harper %% The only winner in the war of 1812 was Tchaikovsky. -- Solomon Short %% The only writing visible is a capital E. The rest is too small to be clearly visible. %% The onset and the waning of love make themselves felt in the uneasiness experienced at being alone together. -- Jean de La Bruyere %% The opera isn't over until the fat lady sings. %% The opossum is a very sophisticated animal. It doesn't even get up until 5 or 6 p.m. %% The opportunity for graft equals the plethora of legal requirements multiplied by the number of architects, engineers, and builders. %% 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 (1885-1962) %% The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Bohr (1885-1962) %% The opposite of love isn't hate - it's apathy. -- Leo Buscaglia %% The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. -- Fran Lebowitz %% The opposite wall is solid rock. %% The opposition is largely composed of "short-haired women and long-haired men." -- Marsdon Manson %% The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true. -- James Branch Cabell, "The Silver Stallion", 1926 %% The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it. -- J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" 1951 %% The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine %% The opulence of the front office decor varies inversely with the fundamental solvency of the firm. %% The orange button depresses with a faint click. %% The orb floats out of your hands. %% The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. %% The orders come down and they march us away. There's a battle outside and we join in the fray. God, it's hell when you know this could be your last day, But it's better than working for Xerox. -- Frank Hayes, "Don't Ask" %% The organization of any bureaucracy is very much like a septic tank -- the really big chunks always rise to the top. -- Professor John Imhoff %% The organization of any program reflects the organization of the people who develop it. -- Bill Gray %% The origin of the Frisbee is said to have originated at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut just after WWII when students started throwing empty pie plates from the nearby Frisbie Bakery. A shout of 'Frisbee' was often heard if someone got in the way of the spinning pie plate. In the 1950's, the Wham-O Manufacturing Company marketed a plastic version - called the Pluto Platter and the game took off in popularity. Frisbees have been clocked at over 75 m.p.h. %% The original Mickey Mouse cartoon was in Mouse, with English subtitles. -- Steve Connelly %% The original Star Trek crew is getting a little old. Capt. Kirk just flew the Enterprise 2 million light years with the left turn signal on. -- Jay Leno %% The original title of 'Catch-22' written by Joseph Heller was Catch-18. Can you think of being in a catch-18 situation? I can't either. %% The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intentions. %% The other day I saw a headline from a couple of years back: "Bush Wants a 'Revolution' in Schools." So *that's* where the guns are coming from! %% The other day I was playing guitar for my air band. I broke a string. %% The other day I...uh, no, that wasn't me. %% The other day [the President] said, I know you've had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. (He paused, then said) Would you like a puppy? -- Vice President Dan Quayle (LA Times 5/21/89) %% The other day when I was walking through the woods, I saw a rabbit standing in front of a candle making shadows of people on a tree. -- Steven Wright %% The other day, I was walking my dog around my building... on the ledge. Some people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths. -- Steven Wright %% The other line always moves faster. %% The other line moves faster. This applies to all lines -- bank, supermarket, tollbooth, customs, and so on. And don't try to change lines. The Other Line -- the one you were in originally -- will then move faster. -- Barbara Ettorre %% The other night I came home late, and tried to unlock my house with my car keys. I started the house up. So, I drove it around for a while. I was speeding, and a cop pulled me over. He asked where I lived. I said, "right here, officer". Later, I parked it on the freeway, got out, and yelled at all the cars, "Get out of my driveway!" -- Steven Wright %% The other night I was having sex, but the girl hung up on me. %% The other night, George Bush, when talking about prosperity in America said: "In the US, the sun is always peeking over the horizon ..." Does this mean by the end of his next term, America will be known as the "Land of the Rising Sun"? %% The other occupant (he of the large bag), finding nothing of value, left disgusted. %% The other occupant just left carrying his large bag. You may not have noticed that he robbed you blind first. %% The outraged husband discovered his wife in bed with another man. "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded. "Who is this fellow?" "That seems like a fair question," said the wife, rolling over. "What IS your name?" %% The owner of a large furniture store in the mid-west arrived in France on a buying trip. As he was checking into a hotel he struck up an acquaintance with a beautiful young lady. However, she only spoke French and he only spoke English, so each couldn't understand a word the other spoke. He took out a pencil and a notebook and drew a picture of a taxi. She smiled, nodded her head and they went for a ride in the park. Later, he drew a picture of a table in a restaurant with a question mark and she nodded, so they went to dinner. After dinner he sketched two dancers and she was delighted. They went to several nightclubs, drank champagne, danced and had a glorious evening. It had gotten quite late when she motioned for the pencil and drew a picture of a four-poster bed. He was dumbfounded, and has never be able to understand how she knew he was in the furniture business. %% The oyster creaks open, revealing nothing but oyster inside. It promptly snaps shut again. %% The oyster. %% The painting is of a rather beautiful women shown in a mixture of blue and green hues. The technique marks the work as done by Cezanne. The skillful blending and matching of shades make this a splendid work of art. %% The painting is of a rolling countryside with rolling hills and a small stream. The impressionist technique of using a multitude of tiny dots combined with a genius for detail indicate the artist was none other than Claude Monet. The painting is essentially priceless. %% The panel has been opened outward. %% The panel is closed. %% The panel is not that easily destroyed. %% The panel is unyielding. %% The panther is like a leopard, Except it hasn't been peppered. Should you behold a panther crouch, Prepare to say Ouch. Better yet, if called by a panther, Don't anther. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The paper burns, but the words fly free. -- ben Joseph Akiba (c. 50-132) (Last words, at the stake, when the Torah was also burned.) %% The paperwork has GOT to be right -- Anon. %% The park bench smelled of flower petals and bird shit. %% The part of the world that people find most puzzling is the part called "Me". %% The partition of Vavasour Scowles Was a sickener: they came on his bowels In a firkin; his brain Was found clogging a drain, And his toes were inside of some towels. -- Edward Gorey %% The party adjourned to a hot tub, yes. Fully clothed, I might add. -- IBM employee [testifying in California State Supreme Court] %% The passage here is blocked by a recent cave-in. %% The passage is too narrow to accommodate coffins. %% The passionate young thing was having a difficult time getting across what she wanted from her rather dense boyfriend. Finally she asked, "Would you like to see where I was operated on for appendicitis?" "Gosh, no!" he replied. "I hate hospitals." %% The passions and desires, like the two twists of a rope, mutually mix one with the other, and twine inextricably round the heart; producing good if moderately indulged; but certain destruction, if suffered to become inordinate. -- Burton %% The passions are the only orators that always persuade. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% The passions often engender their contraries. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% The passions, like heavy bodies down steep hills, once in motion, move themselves, and know no ground but the bottom. -- Fuller %% The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here. -- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley) (1867-1936) %% The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet. -- Cyril Connolly, "Journal and Memoir" 1983 %% The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the party chooses to make it. Six means eighteen, two plus two equals five, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984" %% The path forks here. The left fork leads northeast. A dull rumbling seems to get louder in that direction. The right fork leads southeast down a gentle slope. The main corridor enters from the west. %% The paths of glory at least lead to the grave, but the paths of duty may not get you any where. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% The paths of glory lead but to the grave. -- Grey's Elegy %% The patient can oftener do without the doctor, than the doctor without the patient. -- Zimmerman %% The patient had a deformity of the chest, the name of which I can never remember at the proper time. %% The patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch. %% The patient is here with a rash which I sent over to Dr. Blank. %% The patient said she was too sick to be in the hospital and would return when she felt better. %% The patient was evaluated by an orthopedist, but impression of his consultation is unknown, as I cannot read his writing. %% The patient was placed under the microscope. %% The patient was taken to delivery where she gave birth to a male-female infant. Oops! There isn't any such thing, is there? %% The patient went to his doctor for a checkup, and the doctor wrote out a prescription for him in his usual illegible writing. The patient put it in his pocket, but he forgot to have it filled. Every morning for two years he showed it to the conductor as a railroad pass. Twice it got him into the movies, once into the baseball park and once into the symphony. He got a raise at work by showing it as a note from the boss. One day he mislaid it. His daughter picked it up, played it on the piano and won a scholarship to a conservatory of music. %% The patient went to the bathroom shortly after the sigmoidoscopy and produced a prolapse, which she brought back to the office. %% The patient's taken a turn for the nurse. %% The patient, be he dead or alive, needs a doctor's order to be released. %% The pedestrian had no idea where to go, so I ran over him. %% The pedestrian works where I work. She is a standards coordinator. Funny she should be the one I hit. %% The pen is mightier than the sword; and easier to write with. %% The penalty for bigamy is having two mothers-in-law. %% The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The pendulum has gone full circle. %% The penis mightier than the sword. %% The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.... This and no other is the root from which tyranny springs. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% The people always want to hear when the mighty stag is brought to the ground by a pack of common dogs. -- Babbaluche the cobbler %% The people here [in Nicaragua] are amazingly friendly, when you figure we're here to overthrow their government. -- Richard Melton, US Ambassador to Nicaragua %% The people most preoccupied with titles and status are usually the least deserving of them. %% The people of Gideon have always believed that life is sacred. That the love of life is the greatest gift .. we are incapable of destroying or interfering with the creation of that which we love so deeply -- life in every form from fetus to developed being. -- Hodin of Gideon, "The Mark of Gideon," stardate 5423.4 %% The people of Rome have always destroyed their greatest sons. -- Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) %% The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible enough to give none. %% The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% The people who are rising in the world take over. The people who are sinking are taken over. -- Sepp von Plum %% The people who make art their business are mostly imposters. -- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) %% The people's revolutionary committee has decided that the name "e" is retrogressive, unmulticious and reactionary, and has been flushed. %% The perfect friend sees the best in you -- sees it constantly -- not just when you occasionally are that way, but also when you waver, when you forget yourself, act like less than you are. In time, you become more like his vision of you -- which is the person you have always wanted to be. -- Nancy Friday %% The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with [you] and possess that quality of joy. -- Erica Jong %% The perils of progress, continued: Metallurgical analysis seems to show that modern harpsichord strings are tinnier-sounding than their 18th-century counterparts. The reason? Today's steel is stronger and has fewer impurities; the old-time strings sounded better because they were stretched close to the material's breaking point. One more proof that progress doesn't necessarily apply to the arts! %% The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom. -- John Stuart Mill %% The person next to you has a face only a mother could love. %% The person next to you might be able to help you. %% The person next to you needs a hug. %% The person next to you needs a smile. %% The person next to you smells, but you should be polite and ignore it. %% The person who buys the most raffle tickets has the least chance of winning. -- Dr. R. F. Gumperson %% The person who considers five or six possible solutions to a problem is more apt to find the right answer than the person who only considers one or two. %% The person who walks alone is soon trailed by the FBI. -- Wright Morris %% The person whose clothes are extremely fine I am too apt to consider as not being possessed of any superiority of fortune, but resembling those Indians who are found to wear all the gold they have in the world in a bob at the nose. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% The person you rejected yesterday could make you happy, if you say yes. %% The persons hardest to convince they're at the retirement age are children at bedtime. -- Shannon Fife %% The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly person. -- John Ruskin (1819-1900) %% The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent. -- Archibald MacLeash (b. 1892) %% The perversity of the Universe is nothing compared to my girlfriend. %% The phase of the moon is bad, causing a fatal disk crash. %% The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein %% The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the thing, however, is to change it. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% The phone number of Frederick's of Hollywood is 769-2014. %% The phone will not ring until you leave your desk and walk to the other end of the building. -- Linda A. Lawyer %% The phrase "we(I)(you) simply MUST ... " designates something that need not be done. "That goes without saying" is a red warning. "Of course" means you had best check it yourself. These small-change cliches and others like them, when read correctly, are reliable channel markers. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% The piano is a spinnet upright and sits flush to the wall of the room. It has been painted exactly the same shade of red as that of the walls. The keyboard is protected by the conventional cover, which has a small keyhole in it. %% The piano sounds like a carnival. The microphone smells like a beer. They sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say "Man, what are you doing here?" -- Billy Joel %% The pigeons in B. F. Skinner's Laboratories are Political - Prisoners. Release them at once or further action will follow. Ezra Pound, For The Dreaded Neurological Army (DNA) %% The pine door opens into the field of view of the Guardians. %% The pine wall closes quietly. %% The pine wall swings open. %% The pirate's treasure chest is here! %% The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects. %% 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 place of justice is a hallowed place. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% The place where I come from is a small town. They think so small, they use small words. But not me, I'm smarter than that. I worked it out. I've been stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out... -- Peter Gabriel, "Big Time" %% The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum. -- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), "The Dance of Life", 1923 %% The planets in their distant courses Exert a baleful influence. They stack the cards, they slow down horses-- My God, their power must be immense! %% The plant grows explosively, almost filling the bottom of the pit. %% The plant has exceptionally deep roots and cannot be pulled free. %% The plant indignantly shakes the oil off its leaves and asks, "Water?" %% The plant spurts into furious growth for a few seconds. %% The plaque is somewhat tarnished, but is still quite legible. The inscription reads as follows: -------------------------------------------------------- | The Lesser Castle of Ebosskil | | | | In ancient times the island of Ebosskil was an | | uninhabitable wasteland of rock. However, in the | | time of the mage-warrior Ghelderode's rule, his | | power was such that he created two castles on this | | barren isle, raising them up out of the bedrock | | itself. For many years Ghelderode then ruled the | | central isles and most of the west reach from the | | great castle of Ebosskil. This fantastic feat of | | magic proved to be the mage's undoing, for it had | | awakened some force deep within this island. One | | terrible night the great castle was demolished, | | and Ghelderode perished within. All the people of | | Ebosskil who were still alive fled in terror. When | | some adventurers returned years later, they found | | that only the great castle had been destroyed, and | | for some reason this, the lesser castle, was still | | intact. Fearing a similar occurrence no one has | | dared to actually live in the lesser castle since | | that time. Yet it remains a mystery why the lesser | | castle has remained untouched, and why the island | | has not reverted to its natural forbidding state. | | | | -- Placed by the Historical society of Havnor | -------------------------------------------------------- %% The pleasure is momentary, The position ridiculous, The expense damnable. -- Chesterfield [on sex] %% The pleasure is transitory, the cost prohibitive, and the position ridiculous. -- Benjamin Disraeli [on sex] %% The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose. -- David Lardner %% The plow has probably done more harm--in the long run--than the sword. -- Edward Abbey %% The plural of spouse is spice. %% The poison doesn't seem to affect you. %% The pole cannot be raised further. %% The pole is already resting on the floor. %% The pole is lowered into the channel. %% The pole is lowered into the stone hole. %% The pole is now slightly above the floor. %% The pole now rests on the stone floor. %% The police were investigating the mysterious death of a prominent businessman who had jumped from a window of his 11th story office. His voluptuous private secretary could offer no explanation for the action but said that her boss had been acting peculiarly ever since she started working for him a month ago. "After my very first week on the job," she said, "I received a twenty-dollar raise. At the end of the second week he called me into his private office, gave me a lovely black nightie, five pairs of nylon stockings and said, 'These are for a beautiful, efficient secretary.' At the end of the third week he gave me a gorgeous mink stole. Then, this afternoon, he called me into his private office again, presented me with this fabulous diamond bracelet and asked me if I would consider making love to him and what it would cost. I told him I would, and because he had been so nice to me, he could have it for five dollars, although I was charging all the other boys in the office ten dollars. That's when he jumped out the window." %% The polish national zoo had to close. The duck escaped. %% The polite thing to do has always been to address people as they wish to be addressed, to treat them in a way they think dignified. But it is equally important to accept and tolerate different standards of courtesy, not expecting everyone else to adapt to one's own preferences. Only then can we hope to restore the insult to its proper social function of expressing true distaste. -- Judith Martin, "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior" %% The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog. -- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) %% The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With the grand opportunities all around for a man with political pull, there's no excuse for stealin' a cent. -- George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924) %% The politicians's passion is to be mistaken for a statesman. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% The polls show 8 out of 5 schizophrenics agree! %% The pollution's at that awkward stage. Too thick to navigate and too thin to cultivate. -- Doug Sneyd %% The pool of water evaporates, revealing a tin of rare spices. %% The poor little doe Crawled out of the woods, Tired, bedraggled and blue. "Look," she said, "What I did for a buck, I should have asked for two!" %% The porcupine with the sharpest quills gets stuck on a tree more often. %% The postage rate is really only 2 cents, the rest is for storage. %% The postman always rings twice. %% The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation. -- Ray L. Wilbur %% The pouch of dust carries you upward. %% The powder is finely ground, pure white in color, and has a faintly sour smell. It doesn't look particularly good for you to eat. %% The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement which may be put into a mighty poor watch. I suppose it is about as common as the power of moving ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare endowment. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% The power of the Heart is rare. %% The power of the Heart is strong. But luckily the power of my mind is stronger. %% The power to destroy a planet is insignificant when compared to the power of the Force. -- Darth Vader %% The power you now possess earns you the unique title of Unmaker. %% The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. -- James A. Froude (1818-1894) %% The prayer is inscribed in an ancient script which is hardly remembered these days, much less understood. What little of it can be made out seems to be a diatribe against small insects, absent- mindedness, and the picking up and dropping of small objects. The final verse seems to consign trespassers to the land of the dead. All evidence indicates that the beliefs of the ancient Zorkers were obscure indeed. %% The prefixes pro and con have opposite meanings... like PROgress and CONgress. %% The present turn made by the White House toward the cold war and economic blackmail against the Soviet Union and the socialist community creates a serious threat to Western Europe and Japan for convenient external energy sources. -- TASS, 1980 %% The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921 %% The prettier the flower the farther from the path. -- Into the Woods %% The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish. -- Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) %% The price of greatness is responsibility. %% The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. -- Eldridge Cleaver, "Soul on Ice", 1968 %% The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us. -- Mario Cuomo %% The price of success in philosophy is triviality. -- C. Glymour %% The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. -- James Baldwin %% The prick of the engineer, Scott, Fell off from Saturnian rot. He went to the basement And made a replacement Of tungsten and plastic and snot. %% The priest at Sunday mass noticed that Michael took a ten-dollar bill and two one-dollar bills from the collection plate, instead of putting something in. He thought to himself, I'd better watch out for Michael. The next week he noticed the same thing. So he waited outside church when mass was over, and as Michael came out, he accosted his and said, "Michael, tell me - why did you take out a ten-dollar bill and two singles two weeks in a row, instead of putting money into the collection?" Michael replied, "Father, I'm embarrassed, but I did it because I needed a blow job." The priest looked surprised but said to Michael, "Listen, don't do that anymore. I'll be watching you from now on." When he got back to the rectory, the priest was still perplexed. Finally he decided to call Mother Agatha at the convent. He said, "Mother, you've been such a great friend of mine, I have a question for you. What is a blow job?" Mother Agatha replied, "Oh, about twelve dollars." %% The primary aim of all government regulation of economic life of the community should be, not to supplant the system of private economic enterprise, but to make it work. -- Carl Becker %% The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped marker. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman. %% The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure. -- Sydney J. Harris %% 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 primary requisite for any new tax law is for it to exempt enough voters to win the next election. %% The primary theme of SoupCon is communication. The acronym "LEO" represents the secondary theme: Law Enforcement Officials The overall theme of SoupCon shall be: Avoiding Communication with Law Enforcement Officials %% The prince shoots at a hawk on a high wall. He kills it. Everything serves to further. %% The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. %% The prisoners will not be harmed...until they are found guilty. -- Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only. -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) %% The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and receptive young woman increases by pyramidical progression when he is already in the company of (1) a date, (2) his wife, (3) a better looking and richer male friend. -- Ronald H. Beifeld %% The probability of an event's occurring varies directly with the perversity of the inanimate object involved and inversely with product of its desirability and the effort expended to produce it. -- Walter Mule %% The probability of anything happening is in inverse ratio to its desirability. -- John W. Hazard, "Changing Times" 1957 %% The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action. -- A. Kindsvater %% The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with. Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" %% The problem is not whether business will survive in competition with business, but whether business will survive at all in the face of social change. -- Laurence Joseph McGinley %% The problem is that in life you end up with only one of two things: a) RESULTS, or b) THE REASONS YOU DID'T GET THEM. -- Carl Frederick "est: Playing the Game the New Way" %% The problem of civil society is twofold: how to identify and select wise rulers, and how to assure that their wisdom will be used for the benefit of the ruled--or of the common good as distinct from their private good. -- Harry V. Jaffa %% The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. -- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) %% The problem that we face is a collective responsibility in order to balance on the one hand the competitive enterprise system from which innovation, entrepreneurship and new products and new processes come and, on the other hand, a sensible series of restraints. To try to wish away one or the other, to say that government can produce the products and services, or that the enterprise system can take care of the public good, I think, is misreading the times. -- J. Herbert Hollomon %% The problem with a kitten is that Eventually it becomes a cat. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it. -- Glaser and Way %% The problem with being best man at a wedding is that you never get a chance to prove it. %% The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get results. The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results. The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy problems in order to get results. %% The problem with most conspiracy theories is that they seem to believe that for a group of people to behave in a way detrimental to the common good requires intent. %% The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues. -- Elizabeth Taylor %% The problem with political jokes is that they get elected. %% The problem with the Nazis wasn't simply that their leaders were the evil, psychotic men they were. But the main problem, I think was the leader principle. A man who holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can resist the urge to play God. -- Kirk and McCoy, "Patterns of Force," stardate 2534.7 %% The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. %% The problem-solving process will always break down at the point at which it is possible to determine who caused the problem. %% The problems of business administration in general, and database management in particular are much to difficult for people that think in IBMese, compounded with sloppy english. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% The problems with "Medflies" may have hurt Jerry Brown's chances to become a Senator. After all, if they won't allow California fruit out of the state, how is Brown going to get to Washington? %% The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination. -- H. P. Lovecraft %% The process of turning steam back into water again is called conversation. %% The product of an arithmetical computation is the answer to an equation; it is not the solution to a problem. -- G. O. Ashley %% The product that will not sell without advertising will not sell profitable with advertising. -- Albert Lasker %% The professional quality of the faculty tends to be inversely proportional to the importance it attaches to space and equipment. -- Thomas L. Martin %% The profoundly wise do not declaim against superficial knowledge in others, as much as the profoundly ignorant. -- Colton %% The program is absolutely right; therefore the computer must be wrong. %% The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought- stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month %% The programmers of old were mysterious and profound. We cannot fathom their thoughts, so all we do is describe their appearance. Aware, like a fox crossing the water. Alert, like a general on the battlefield. Kind, like a hostess greeting her guests. Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood. Opaque, like black pools in darkened caves. Who can tell the secrets of their hearts and minds? The answer exists only in the Tao. %% The programmers' cheer: Shift to the Left, Shift to the Right, Pop Up, Push Down, Byte! Byte! Byte! %% The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; {{Commonwealth Hackish}} has its own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace `#'; thus Britishers sometimes call `#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a `#' suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% The proof is beyond the scope of this text. Obviously this is a plot. The reader will never find any text with the proof in it. The Proof doesn't exist. The theorem just turned out to be useful to the author. %% The proof is left up to the reader. ...sure let us do all the work. Does the author think that we have nothing better to do than sit around with THEIR textbook, and do the work that THEY should have done? %% The proof of the pudding is in the eating. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Prejudice" %% The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead. -- Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) %% The public is not made up of people who get their names in the papers. -- Woodrow Wilson %% The punctual Cynthia Rolen Missed a period, (or it was stolen) She looked up her ass With a tube made of glass, But found only her own semi-colon; %% The purely agitational attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject. -- Jawaharlal Nehru %% The purple latch won't move at all any more. %% The purple panel is tightly secured. %% The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient. -- Edward Abbey %% The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. -- R. W. Hamming, "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers", 1973 %% The purpose of freedom is to create it for others. -- Bernard Malamud %% The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused. -- Edward Abbey %% The purpose of satire is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth. And our business, as I see it, is to put it back again. -- Michael Flanders %% The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% The qotc (quote of the con) was Liz's: "My brain is paged out to my liver" %% The quality goes in before the name goes on. %% The quality of a blow-job is determined by the length of sheet you have to pull out of your ass. %% The quality of a department is inversely proportional to the number of courses it lists in its catalogue. -- Professor Joel Hildebrand %% The quality of legislation passed to deal with a problem is inversely proportional to the volume of media clamor that brought it on. -- G. Ray Funkhouser %% The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. %% The quality of your work will be affected as much by your attitude as by your skill. %% The quantity of rhetoric has been directly proportional to the lack of action. -- Arthur Herzog %% The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste? -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics" %% The question, "Who ought to be boss?" is like asking, "Who ought to be tenor in the quartet?" Obviously the man who can sing tenor. -- Henry Ford %% The questions remain the same. The answers are eternally variable. %% The quickest way for a parent to get a child's attention is to sit down and look comfortable. %% The quickness of your thrust knocks the # back, staggered. %% The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong - but thats the way to bet. -- Damon Runyon %% The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -- Ecclesiastes 9:11 %% The races of the Galaxy look towards mankind as the essential lunatic element. %% The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The radical novelty in modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart. -- Walter Lippmann %% The rain comes, there is rest. This is due to the lasting affect of character. Perseverance brings the woman into danger. The moon is nearly full. If the superior man persists, Misfortune comes. %% The rain has such a friendly sound to one who's six feet underground. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay %% The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella, But chiefly on the just, because The unjust steals the just's umbrella. %% The rainbow seems to have become somewhat run of the mill. %% The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep, poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight, supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow shit, cheat grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies--and then leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he loves the West. -- Edward Abbey %% The rangers had a homecoming in Harlem late last night. %% The rank of King is now yours. %% The rat strolls into town, rolls up his pants, together they take a stab at romance, and disappear down Flamingo lane. %% The rate of hospital admissions responds to bed availability. Or, if we insist on installing more beds, they will tend to get filled. -- Dr. Milton Roemer %% The ratio of the time involved in work to time available for work is usually about 0.6. %% The reader this message encounters not failing to understand is cursed. %% The readiest and surest way to get rid of censure, is to correct ourselves. -- Demosthenes %% The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations. -- Edward Abbey %% The real character of a man is found out by his amusements. -- Joshua Reynolds %% The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will being to think like computers. %% The real fight today is against inhuman, relentless exercise of capitalistic power ... The present struggle in which we are engaged is for social and industrial justice. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) %% The real head of the household is the one who has custody of the remote control. %% The real man's Bloody Mary: Ingredients: vodka, tomato juice, Tobasco, Worcestershire sauce, A-1 steak sauce, ice, salt, pepper, celery. Fill a large tumbler with vodka. Throw all the other ingredients away. %% The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. -- Adam Smith (1723-1790) %% The real problem with fucking a sheep is that you have to walk around in front every time you want to kiss her. %% The real question for 1988 is whether we're going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the -- to the back! -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% The real reason psychology is hard is that psychologists are trying to do the impossible. %% The real secret is turning a disadvantage into an advantage. -- Riva the Mediator, "Loud as a Whisper", stardate 42477.2 %% The real thing doesn't advertise. %% The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk, but to the majority, that does not want to listen. -- Zechariah Chaffe, Jr. (1885-1957) %% The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. -- Marcel Proust %% The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information. -- Edward Abbey %% The reason Congressmen try so hard to get reelected is that they would hate to have to make a living under laws they've passed. %% 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 replicatable 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 reason I know my youth is all spent? My get up and go got up and went. -- Len Ingebrigston %% The reason Roman Catholics are allowed to use the rhythm method of birth control is that it doesn't work. %% The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much. %% The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy. -- Sam Levenson %% The reason it's called "Grape Nuts" is that it contains "dextrose", which is also sometimes called "grape sugar", and also because "Grape Nuts" is catchier, in terms of marketing, than "A Cross Between Gerbil Food and Gravel", which is what it tastes like. -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's" %% The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it is cheaper to do this than to institutionalize all those people. %% The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves. -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665 %% The reason that sex is so popular is that it's centrally located. %% The reason the way of the transgressor is hard is because it's so crowded. -- Kin Hubbard %% The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces. -- Maureen Murphy %% The reason they're called wisdom teeth is that the experience makes you wise. %% The reason we need the MX missile system is that the missiles we currently have in the ground are the Minuteman model, which is very old. The Defense Department can't even remember where half of them are. Insects have built nests in them. People have built houses directly over the silos. What this means, of course, is that if we ever needed them to help obliterate all human life on the planet, they could be a real embarrassment. I mean, maybe YOU'RE comfortable with the prospect of missiles that are supposed to represent you barging over the North Pole trailing shreds of polyester carpeting from some recreation room in South Dakota, but your strategic defense planners are not. -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against Political Fallout" %% The reason why people who mind their own business succeed is because they have so little competition. %% The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who write know anything. -- Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) %% The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work. -- Robert Frost %% 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 (1856-1950), "Reason" %% The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice. -- Edward Abbey %% The receptacle is already occupied. %% The red flower is a delicate tulip-like blossom with an unearthly fragrance. The petals are rather flimsy, but the stamen is quite thick and sturdy, holding an anther covered with pollen. %% The red stone is a flawless star ruby, weighing in at about 10 carats. This is a unique specimen, which has been brilliantly polished in facetless cavochon cut to reveal all the glory of the star within. %% The red table consists of a single slab of shiny red material supported by four sturdy legs. The slab is about two inches thick and is made of some sort of plastic. The legs are molded directly into the slab and into the floor. Even if the table was not fastened down so securely, it would be far too heavy to move. %% The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% The refreshing waters give you eternal youth and vigor! %% The relative importance of files depends on their cost in terms of the human effort needed to regenerate them. -- T. A. Dolotta %% The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The release of emotion is what keeps us healthy. Emotionally healthy. That may be, Doctor. However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently unhealthy for those closest to you. -- McCoy and Spock, "Plato's Stepchildren," stardate 5784.3 %% The religion that is afraid of science dishoners God and commits suicide. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The remaining distance to your chosen campsite remains constant as twilight approaches. -- Milt Barber %% The remaining information in this section is provided for completeness only. %% The remedy in the United States is not less liberty but real liberty -- an end to the brutal intolerance of churchly hooligans and flag-waving corporations and all the rest of the small but bloody despots who have made the word Americanism a synonym for coercion and legal crime. -- Archibald MacLeash (b. 1892) %% The removal of a threat is not a payment, the negation of a negative is not a reward, the withdrawal of your armed hoodlums is not an incentive, the offer not to murder me is not a value. -- John Galt %% The repairman will never have seen a model quite like yours before. %% The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper's harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying. -- George F. Will, Washing Post Writers Group %% The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The reputation of a man is like his shadow: It sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him, it is sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size. %% The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from "bad" to "very bad." (Is there another gamut?) -- Edward Abbey %% The rest is history, although it is difficult to remember any of it. -- Gordon Fitch %% The resulting ruckus has awakened the dwarves. There are now several threatening little dwarves in the room with you! Most of them throw knives at you! All of them get you! %% The reverence of a man's self is, next to religion, the chiefest bridle of all vices. -- Lord Bacon %% The revolution will not be televised. %% The reward for working hard is more hard work. %% The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The reward of energy, enterprise, and thrift -- is taxes. %% The rhino is a homely beast, For human eyes he's not a feast. Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros, I'll stare at something less prepoceros. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich. -- Edward Abbey %% The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness. -- Edward Abbey %% The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. The haves get more, the have-nots die. %% The rich get richer; the poor get babies. %% The rich man uses vaseline, The poor man uses lard; The worker uses axle grease But gets it twice as hard. %% The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it, it would have been much better. -- Karl Marx's Mother %% The rider likes best the horse which needs most breaking in. -- Edward Garrett %% The ridgepole is braced. Good fortune. If there are ulterior motives, it is humiliating. %% The ridgepole sags to the breaking point. Misfortune. %% The rifle and handgun are "equalizers"--the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship. -- Edward Abbey %% The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This means that only left handed people are in their right mind. %% The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. -- Hubert M. Humphrey, 1965 %% The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. -- Justice Douglas %% The right to revolt has sources deep in our history. -- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) %% The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by our labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of property interests of the country, and upon the successful management of which so much remains. -- George F. Baer [railroad industrialist] %% The rights we have today we may consider natural rights, but they were won by blood, sweat, sacrifice, and death. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower %% The rights you have are the rights given you by this Committee [the House Un-American Activities Committee]. We will determine what rights you have and what rights you have not got. -- J. Parnell Thomas %% The ring is a simple unadorned circlet of pure 18-carat white gold. The are no visible markings of any kind. %% The ripest fruit falls first. -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II" %% The rising People, hot and out of breath, Roared round the palace: "Liberty or death!" "If death will do," the King said, "let me reign; You'll have, I'm sure, no reason to complain." %% The river descends here into a valley. There is a narrow beach on the east below the cliffs, and there is some shore on the west which may be suitable. In the distance a faint rumbling can be heard. %% The river is moving; the blackbird must be flying. %% The river is running faster here, and the sound ahead appears to be that of rushing water. On the west shore is a sandy beach. A small area of beach can also be seen below the cliffs. %% The river turns a corner here making it impossible to see the dam. The white cliffs loom on the east bank, and large rocks prevent landing on the west. %% The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% The road to Hades is easy to travel. -- Bion %% The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) (In which case, the road to Heaven must be paved with bad ones.) %% The road to hell is paved with NAND gates. -- J. Gooding %% The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And littered with sloppy analysis! %% The road to ruin is always in good repair, and the travellers pay the expense of it. -- Josh Billings %% The road to success is always under construction. %% The robber revives, briefly feigning continued unconsciousness, and when he sees his moment, scrambles away from you. %% The robber wanted to go upstairs, he wanted to be tried in a higher court. %% The robber, somewhat surprised by this turn of events, nimbly recovers his stiletto. %% The robot gladly takes the # and nods his headlike appendage in thanks. %% The robot is injured (being of shoddy construction) and falls to the floor in a pile of garbage, which disintegrates before your eyes. %% The robot who teaches the course in Humanities. "I am an android, not a robot." I beg your pardon. -- Q and Data, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% The robotic geneticist squirms When asked what eugenics affirms, And will not orate On man's future fate In sacred or secular terms. -- C. M. and G. A. Maxson %% The romantic young man sat on the park bench with a first date. He was certain his charming words and manner would win her as they had many others. "Some moon out tonight,"he cooed. "There certainly is," she agreed. "Some really bright stars in the sky." She nodded. "Some dew on the grass." "Some do," she said indignantly, "but I'm not that sort." %% The room about you bursts into flames. %% The room around was once used as the palace kitchen. It is quite a contrast to the usual splendor of the palace, as no attempt was ever made to hide its crude functionality. The floor is nothing more than compressed earth since any flagstones that once were present have been ripped out. The walls are mottled with stains from the countless meals prepared within these chambers. Three exits are present, one to the north, one to the south and one to the west. %% The room around you seems to be getting smaller. %% The room around you was once used as a conference room for the nobility of Enlad. It was probably a splendid sight at one time, but only a map set into the north wall remains to remind one of its former glory. %% The room is flooded with blue light. %% The room is full of water and cannot be entered. %% The room is lit. %% The room lights up around you. %% The room seems to have become too small to hold you. It seems that the walls are not as compressible as your body, which is more or less demolished. %% The room trembles and 50,000 pounds of rock fall on you, turning you into a pancake. %% The room which surrounds you appears to have no walls or ceiling. Intense green light floods the entire scene, The floor is entirely featureless, and is also colored bright green. %% The room you are in was intended as a guest bedroom, but was never actually used as such. It was never furnished, so there is no bed or other furniture present. Doorways exit to the north and east. %% The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% The rope drops gently to the floor below. %% The rope drops over the side and comes within ten feet of the floor. %% The rope is already attached. %% The rope is tied to the railing. %% The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together. -- Saadi %% The rose of yore is but a name, mere names are left to us. %% The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide -- as, I think, he will. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out. -- Francisco d'Anconia, in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" %% The rug is extremely heavy and cannot be carried. %% The rug is too heavy to lift, but in trying to raise it you notice an irregularity beneath it. %% The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. -- Lewis Carroll %% The rule on staying alive as a forcaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once. -- Jane Bryant Quinn %% The rulers of the State are the only ones who should have the privilege of lying, whether at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the State. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% The rules: 1: Thou shalt not worship other computer systems. 2: Thou shalt not impersonate Liberace or eat watermelon while sitting at the console keyboard. 3: Thou shalt not slap users on the face, nor staple their silly little card decks together. 4: Thou shalt not get physically involved with the computer system, especially if you're already married. 5: Thou shalt not use magnetic tapes as frisbees, nor use a disk pack as a stool to reach another disk pack. 6: Thou shalt not stare at the blinking lights for more than one 8 hour shift. 7: Thou shalt not tell users that you accidentally destroyed their files/backup just to see the look on their little faces. 8: Thou shalt not enjoy cancelling a job. 9: Thou shalt not display firearms in the computer room. 10: Thou shalt not push buttons "just to see what happens". %% The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% The runes are magic, and require a spell. %% The saddest moment in a person's life comes but once. %% The sail is ripped. You must patch it before proceeding. %% The sailboat is a sturdy craft about 15 feet long. Every part of the boat shows signs of heavy use over a long period of time. There is no name painted on the boat, but the semblance of two eyes have been carefully painted on either side of the hull. There is no sail or mast, but there is a small hole in the bottom of the boat where a mast ought to be. %% The sale of bathtubs is prohibited in Pennsylvania. %% The same trek, some days later, in snowstorm on open plain; I'm asking the Explorer orienteering if he knows where we're supposed to go: - I guess I do... I've been watching this bubble in my compass and it's pointing that way...! - Why not just go with the wind then ? [again, we did - and found our way...] %% The sand disappears before it hits the ground. %% The sand is much too fine for you to pick up. %% The sand momentarily blinds the goblin. He can't see you . . . %% The savage in man is never quite eradicated. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Journal", 26 September 1859 %% The savior becomes the victim. %% The scalded cat fears even cold water. -- Thomas Fuller %% The scholar without good-breeding is a pedant, the philosopher a cynic, the soldier a brute, and every man disagreeable. -- Chesterfield %% The schools ain't what they used to be and never was. -- Will Rogers %% The scientist is at the moving edge of what's happening. -- Dr. Gerald M. Edelman %% The scientists most esteemed by their colleagues are those who are both very original and committed to the abstract ideal of truth in the midst of clamoring demands of ego and ideology. They pass the acid test of promoting new knowledge even at the expense of losing credit for it. -- Edward O. Wilson, "Biophilia" %% The scientists split the atom; now the atom is splitting us. -- Quentin Reynolds, in "Quote & Unquote", 1970 %% The score didn't really reflect the outcome. %% The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways, like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays. %% The scriptures are a databank, a reservoir of human experience. -- Neal A. Maxwell %% The scroll catches fire and you burn your hands. %% The scroll erupts in a tower of flame! %% The scroll turns into an elevator. %% The scroll turns to dust as you pick it up. %% The scum also rises. -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson %% The seal of truth is on thy gallant form, for none but cowards lie. -- Murphy %% The second best policy is dishonesty. %% The second law of thermodynamics implies that the expression "good news" is an oxymoron. %% The second myth of management is that success equals skill. %% The secret of education is respecting the pupil. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The secret of happiness is total disregard of everybody. %% The secret of life is that we grow old without growing wise. -- John LeCarre %% The secret of marriage is self-mastery. -- David A. Christensen %% The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made. -- Jean Giraudoux %% The secret of wands of Nothing Happens: try again! %% The secret police have discovered a man who looks exactly like Stalin. This is obviously dangerous: he could impersonate the Leader, and who knows what harm may result. Beria, the secret police chief, is reporting to Stalin, and asking for instructions. "Why, shoot him." says Stalin. "Certainly, comrade Stalin; a great idea, comrade Stalin." says Beria," but... well, I will see that this is done promptly!" "BUT?" says Stalin "But what?! Speak out your mind! You know I am always open to suggestions." "Well, I thought, if we just shaved off his moustache... he might be no problem... " says Beria. "A valuable suggestion, comrade Beria!" says Stalin. "We'll implement it. Shave him, *then* shoot him! %% The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The secret to Hewlett-Packard's success is that we've simply got more bonfires burning at one time. -- Bill Hewlett %% The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% The secret to winning the support of large groups of people is positive thinking. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% The seductive Dolores could lay so Well, she earned many a peso From men who walked miles To climax, with smiles. (Her ads in the papers all say so.) %% The seeds of our own punishment are sown at the same time we commit sin. -- Hesiod %% The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by plain. -- Colton %% The semi-conscious mind is a tricky thing. A man never knows just how much is real or how much is imagination. -- McCoy, "Obsession," stardate 3620.7 %% The sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow. %% The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them. -- Edward Abbey %% The sepulchral voice entones, "The cave is now closed." as the echoes fade, there is a blinding flash of light (and a small puff of orange smoke). . . . as your eyes refocus, you look around and find... %% The sergeant walked into the shower and caught me giving myself a dishonorable discharge. Without missing a beat, I said, "It's my dick and I can wash it as fast as I want!" %% The service hallway ends here at its southern extreme. A group of doors are visible to the north lining both walls. %% The set of all sets which are not members of any other set divided by the set of all sets which are members of every other set is negative entropy. %% The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone, shadows of the evening fall around us, and the world seems but a dim reflection itself--a broader shadow. We look forward into the coming lonely night; the soul withdraws itself. Then stars arise, and the night is wholly. -- Longfellow %% The seven deadly sins... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach. %% The sex act is the funniest thing on the face of this earth. -- Diana Rigg %% The sex life of spiders is very interesting. He fucks her. She bites his head off. -- From a Women's Lib Poster %% The sexual desires of the camel are greater than anyone thinks. Why once in a moment of passion one tried to deflower the sphinx Now the sphinx's posterior orifice is clogged with the sands of the nile Which accounts for the hump on the camel's back and the sphinx's inscrutable smile %% The sexual revolution is here and I'm out of ammunition. -- Jim Backus %% The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid. -- Edward Abbey %% The shadowy figure seems to be trying to attract your attention. %% The shattered pieces of a mirror cover the floor. %% The sheep died in the wool. %% The sheep that fly over your head are soon to land. %% The shell is very strong and is impervious to attack. %% The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% The shields are currently activated. %% The shields were protecting the ship! A photon torpedo soon destroys the ship and you with it. %% The shifts of Fortune test the reliability of friends. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% The shopkeeper calms down. %% The shopkeeper comes and takes all your possessions. %% The shopkeeper comes and takes the zorkmids you owed him. %% The shopkeeper gets angry. %% The shopkeeper is as angry as ever. %% The short pole prevents the structure from rotating. %% The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to remount first principles, and to take nobody's word about them. -- Bolingbroke %% The shortest answer is doing the thing. %% The shortest distance between two people is laughter. %% The shortest distance between two points is rarely found in speeches. %% The shortest distance between two points is under construction. -- Noelie Altito %% The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line %% The shortest measurable interval of time is the time between the moment I put a little extra aside for a sudden emergency and the arrival of that emergency. %% The shoulders of a borrower are always a little straighter than those of a beggar. -- Morris Leopold Ernst %% The show's not over 'til the fat lady sings. %% The shy young man had been married for three months when he reported to his doctor that his marriage was still in name only. The doctor, after hearing the sad tale, told him that waiting until bedtime to make advances was causing psychological pressure and advised him to take advantage of the next time he felt in the mood. A week later, the doctor happened to meet the man again, and noticed a new spring in his step. "My advice worked, I take it?" he inquired. The young man grinned. "Perfectly. The other night, we were having supper, and as I reached for the salt -- so did she! Our hands touched... It was as if an electric current ran through us. I leaped to my feet, swept the dishes from the table and then and there consummated our marriage! There's just one problem, however. We can't go back to The Four Seasons again..." %% The sight of death frightens them [Earthers]. -- Kras the Klingon, "Friday's Child," stardate 3497.2 %% The sight of his guests filled Lord Cray At breakfast with horrid dismay, So he launched off the spoons The pits from his prunes At their heads as they neared the buffet. -- Edward Gorey %% The sight of someone carrying a pile of burning leaves so offends the neighbors that they come over and put you out. %% The sign said "eight items or less". So I changed my name to Les. -- Rod Schmidt %% The silent snow fell relentlessly, unceasingly, mercilessly from the sordid, sullied surreality of the sky as if some enormous, ethereal diner were shaking grated parmesan on the great, soggy meatball that was earth. -- 1988 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest, runner up %% The silver lining is easier to find in someone else's cloud. %% The simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately, following an argument, detecting an ambiguity or a false inference, testing guesses bu summoning up contrary instances, organizing one's time and one's thought for study--all these arts ... cannot be taught in the air but only through the difficulties of a defined subject; they cannot be taught in one course on one year, but must be acquired gradually in dozens of connections. -- Jacques Barzun %% The simple explanation always follows the complex solution. %% The simple life is your key. It will make you miserable. %% The simple realization that there are other points of view is the beginning of wisdom. Understanding what they are is a great step. The final test is understanding why they are held. -- Charles M. Campbell %% The singing sword slides easily out of the rock. %% The sink is old and battered. It seems to have used primarily for outdoor work, as there are stains of dirt and grass all over it. There is no way to plug the sink, and there is only a single cold water tap. %% The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech, wisdom, needlework, and chastity. -- Theodore Roosevelt (1907) %% The six steps in a project: 1) Unbounded enthusiasm 2) Total disillusionment 3) PANIC!! 4) Frantic search for the guilty 5) Punishment of the innocent 6) Promotion of the uninvolved. %% The sixth shiek's sixth sheep's sick. -- [just say that five times...] %% The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick. %% The size of a dollar depends entirely on how many more you have. %% The size of each of the stones in you boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail. -- Milt Barber %% The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than to a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf" %% The skater, Barbara Ann Scott Is so fuckingly "winsome" a snot, That when posed on her toes She elaborately shows Teeth, fat ass, titties and twat. %% The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. -- William Gibson, "Neuromancer" %% The sky already fell. Now what? -- Rod Schmidt %% The slag turns out to be rather insubstantial and crumbles into dust at your touch. It must not have been very valuable. %% The sleep is still in my eyes, The dream is still in my head. I heave a sigh and sadly smile, And lie awhile in bed. I wish that it might come to pass, Not fade like all my dreams. Just think of what my life might be, In a world like I have seen. I don't think I can carry on, Carry on this cold and empty life. My spirits are low in the depths of despair. My life blood ... spills over. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% The sluice gates close, and water starts to collect behind the dam. %% The sluice gates on the dam are closed. Behind the dam, there can be seen a wide lake. A small stream is formed by the runoff from the lake. %% The sluice gates open, and water pours through the dam. %% The slum is the measure of civilization. -- Jacob Riis (1849-1914) %% The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it. -- Christian Nestell Bovee %% The smallest worm will turn being trodden on. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI" %% The smiling Spring comes in rejoicing, And surly Winter grimly flies. Now crystal clear are the falling waters, And bonnie blue are the sunny skies. Fresh o'er the mountains breaks forth the morning, The ev'ning gilds the oceans's swell: All creatures joy in the sun's returning, And I rejoice in my bonnie Bell. The flowery Spring leads sunny Summer, The yellow Autumn presses near; Then in his turn come gloomy Winter, Till smiling Spring again appear. Thus seasons dancing, life advancing, Old Time and Nature their changes tell; But never ranging, still unchanging, I adore my bonnie Bell. -- Robert Burns, "My Bonnie Bell" %% The snake has now devoured your bird. %% The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward. -- Edward Abbey %% The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an "airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference -- one can see only a very few things at once. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. %% The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors. -- Max Lerner %% The social problems raised by science must be faced and solved by the humanities. -- Harold Dodd %% The socialist or anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilization itself rests... One who studies this subject will soon be brought face to face with the conclusion that upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends -- the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the saving bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions. -- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) %% 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. -- John W. Gardner %% The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort of voluntary thinking. -- William James %% The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader. %% The solution to a problem changes the problem. -- John Peers %% The song bird is not here, but it is probably nearby. %% The sooner all the animals are dead, the sooner we'll find their money. -- Ed Bluestone, "The National Lampoon" %% The sooner and in more detail you announce the bad news, the better. %% The sooner our happiness together begins, the longer it will last. -- Miramanee, "The Paradise Syndrome," stardate 4842.6 %% The sooner you make your first 5000 mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them. -- Nicolaides %% The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% The sorcerer's handwriting is completely illegible, and besides he wrote In dwarvish. %% The soul of this man is in his clothes. -- William Shakespeare %% The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears. %% The sound of laughter has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the universe. -- Peter Ustinov %% The sound of rushing water is nearly unbearable here. On the west shore is a large landing area. %% The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it. -- Ed Howe %% The soup is delicious, worthy of a dragon's dinner. %% The source codes and formal descriptions [for DES] were publically available in USSR long before that posting. I've first seen it being a student and hacking some Unix sources about 1982. Isn't it stupid to continue insisting on export restrictions of the well-known technology? -- Vadim Antonov (avg@hq.demos.su) %% The source of enthusiasm. He achieves great things. Doubt not. You gather friends around you As a hair clasp gathers the hair. %% The source of nourishment. Awareness of danger brings good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. %% The southest corner of the lesser castle is about three feet away from you. The walls are composed of pale gray stone, and they meet to form a precise square corner. There is a narrow winding path that roughly paralles the south side of the castle to the west. The ground is rocky and cannot be crossed to the south. %% The sovereign I gave his daughter in marriage. The embroidered garments of the princess Were not as gorgeous As those of the servingmaid. The moon that is nearly full Brings good fortune. %% The sovereign I Gives his daughter in marriage. This brings blessing And supreme good fortune. %% The spaceship with its human cargo Speeds from star to blazing star. The captain, humming Handel's Largo, Wonders where the hell they are. %% The speaking of any language other than English is prohibited in any public place of Sweet Home, Oregon. %% The specialist learns more and more about less and less until, finally, he knows everything about nothing; whereas the generalist learns less and less about more and more until, finally, he knows nothing about everything. %% The spectacle of astrology in the White House -- the governing center of the world's greatest scientific and military power -- is so appalling that it defies understanding and provides grounds for great fright. The easiest response is to laugh it off, and to indulge in wisecracks about Civil Service ratings for horoscope makers and palm readers and whether Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev for his sign. A contagious good cheer is the hallmark of this presidency, even when the most dismal matters are concerned. But this time, it isn't funny. It's plain scary. -- Daniel S. Greenberg, Editor, "Science and Government Report", writing in "Newsday", May 5, 1988 %% The speed at which the legislative process seems to work is in inverse proportion to your enthusiasm for the bill. If you want a bill to move quickly, committee hearings, the rules committee, and legislative procedures appear to be roadblocks to democracy. If you do not want the bill to pass, such procedures are essential to furthering representative government, etc., etc. -- Pierre S. du Pont %% The speed of Ed's seed is unclocked Whenever a lady's unfrocked. Tho' his spirit is willin, When a pussy needs fillin', He's a man who goes off half-cocked. %% The speed of anything depends on the flow of everything. %% The speed of exit of a civil servant is directly proportional to the quality of his service. -- Ralph Nader, "The Spoiled System" %% The spiders have created a web in some trees to the east. %% The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" %% The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is always right. -- Judge Learned Hand %% The spirit of public service will rise, and the bureaucracy will multiply itself much faster, in time of grave national concern. -- Taylor Branch %% The splendor of an editor's speech and the splendor of his newspaper are inversely related to the distance between the city in which he makes his speech and the city in which he publishes his paper. -- Ben Bragdikian %% The spokes burst out of the wagon wheel. Man and wife roll their eyes. %% The spokesperson told me that one of the hot toys for boys this year, once again, is the G.I. Joe action figure and "accessories," which is the toy industry code word for guns, as in: "Don't nobody move! I got an accessory!" -- Dave Barry %% The sports page records people's accomplishments; The front page nothing but their failures. -- Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren %% The spouse of a pretty young thing Came home from the wars in the spring. He was lame but he came With his dame like a flame -- A discharge is a wonderful thing. %% The spring is a time for political activists. Leaflets are everywhere; just look at the trees. %% The sprung doors parted and I staggered out into the lobby's teak and flicker. Uniformed men stood by impassively like sentries in their trench. I slapped my key on the desk and nodded gravely. I was loaded enough to be unable to tell whether they could tell I was loaded. Would they mind? I was certainly too loaded to care. I moved to the door with boxy, schlep-shouldered strides. -- Martin Amis, "Money" %% The squeaky hinge gets the oil. -- Gene Franklin %% The squeaky wheel doesn't always get greased; sometimes it gets replaced. %% The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but the yapping dog gets kicked. %% The squire on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the other two squires. %% The staff appears to have been carved long ago from a single oaken timber. Most of the surface you can see is covered with intricate carvings. The staff is quite heavy and extremely strong. %% The staircase is a tight spiral, with rather tall steps. It ascends through a hole in the ceiling above. The stairs appear to be molded of a smooth red material, with no seams, bolts, grooves, or other signs of fasteners anywhere. The base of the staircase blends smoothly into the floor. The whole structure is extremely rigid. %% The stairs are too steep for carrying the coffin. %% The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization. When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying. The "mass mind" has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap. -- Elie Faure (1875-1937) %% The standard German word for committee is 'Ausschuss' which, perhaps by more than coincidence, also means 'rubbish'. -- R. V. Jones %% The standard is changing. Perseverance brings good fortune. To go out of the door in company Produces deeds. %% The standstill comes to an end. First standstill, then good fortune. %% The star of riches is shining upon you. %% The star of riches is shining upon you. Unfortunately the roof of your house is blocking its rays. %% The star of that X-rated hit Plays a nurse with a throat full of clit. This serves as a palace For each turgid phallus-- Some say that the plot is pure shit. %% The stars have no control over you. %% The startling truth finally became apparent, and it was this: Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single statement took the scientific world by storm. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure, and the science of mathematics was put back by years. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% The state law of Pennsylvania prohibits singing in the bathtub. %% The statues are impassive. %% The stature of a science is commonly measured by the degree to which it makes use of mathematics. -- S. S. Stevens %% The steady state of disks is full. -- Ken Thompson %% The sterile radical is basically ... conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted. -- Eric Hoffer %% The stiletto flashes faster than you can follow, and blood wells from your leg. %% The stiletto severs your jugular. It looks like the end. %% The stiletto touches your forehead, and the welling blood obscures your vision. %% The stock actor is a stage calamity. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The stone walls shudder horribly while you feel the earth move under your feet. %% The stool creaks under your weight as you sit down. %% The store manager has a sword of his own. He parries, thrusts, and pierces you from front to back. %% The store manager is an expert at hand-to-hand combat. He manages to hit a particularly vital spot, killing you instantly. %% The store manager is dead, just take anything you want. %% The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within that system of necessary restraints. -- Justice Abe Fortas %% The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. %% The stream flows out through a pair of 1 foot diameter sewer pipes. It would be advisable to use the exit. %% The street preacher looked so baffled When I asked him why he dressed With forty pounds of headlines Stapled to his chest. But he cursed me when I proved to him I said, "Not even you can hide. You see, you're just like me. I hope you're satisfied." -- Bob Dylan %% The streets are alive as secret debts are paid, contracts made they vanish unseen. %% The streets are safe in Philadelphia, it's only the people who make them unsafe. -- Mayor Frank Rizzo %% The strong give up and move away, while the weak give up and stay. %% The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. -- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), "An Enemy of the People", 1882 %% The structural integrity of the rainbow seems to have declined precipitously, leaving you about 450 feet in the air, supported by water vapor. %% The structure blocks your way. %% The structure has reached the end of the stone channel and won't budge. %% The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% The structure of the joke is ... the juxtaposition of the trivial and the mundane ... We have to reconcile the paradox of it all. The joke mirrors the paradox. -- Woody Allen %% The structure rocks back and forth slightly but doesn't move. %% The structure rotates clockwise. %% The structure shakes slightly but doesn't move. %% The structure slides # and stops over another compass rose. %% The structure wobbles as it moves, alerting the Guardians. %% The structure won't budge. %% The struggling for knowledge has a pleasure in it like that of wrestling with a fine woman. -- Lord Halifax %% The student in question is performing minimally for his peer group and is an emerging underachiever. %% The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant biology. %% The stylus is more potent than the claymore. %% The success of any venture will be helped by prayer, even in the wrong denomination. -- Charles P. Boyle %% The successful business man sometimes makes his money by ability and experience; but he generally makes it by mistake. -- Gilbert K. Chesterson (1874-1936) %% The successful people are the ones who can think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at. -- Don Marquis (1878-1937) %% The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% The sudden change in temperature has delicately shattered the vase. %% The sudden sight of me causes panic in the streets. They have yet to learn - only the savage fears what he does not understand. -- The Silver Surfer %% The sufficiency of my merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient. -- St. Augustine %% The sum of the Universe is zero. %% The summer day has clos'd -- the sun is set; Well have they done their office, those bright hours, The latest of whose train goes swiftly out In the red west. -- Bryant %% The sumptuousness of a company's annual report is in inverse proportion to its profitability that year. -- Irving Hale %% The sun goes down just when you need it the most. -- Jon Kirkup %% The sun has set, and twilight covers the world. %% The sun never sets on the British Empire. But it rises every morning. The sky must get awfully crowded. -- Rod Schmidt %% The sun never sets on those who ride into it. -- RKO %% The sun rises over the earth: The image of Progress. Thus the superior man himself Brightens his bright virtue %% The sun was shining brightly The breeze was blowing briskly, And I could hardly wait, It made the flowers sway, To ponder at my window The garden was enchanting And gaze at my estate. On this inspiring day. My eyes fell on a little bird, I smiled at him cheerfully With a beautiful yellow bill, And gave him a crust of bread, I beckoned him to come and light And then I closed the window Upon my window sill. And smashed his fucking head. -- Debbie Smith, "Good Morning" %% The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright -- And this was very odd, because it was The middle of the night. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" %% The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands. -- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), "The Dance of Life", 1923 %% The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. -- Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Dispossessed" %% The superfluous is very necessary. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% The superior man changes like a panther. The inferior man molts in the face. Starting brings misfortune. To remain persevering brings good fortune. And makes the seasons clear. %% The superior man rises by lifting others. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell. -- Confucius (551-479 B.C.) %% The superiority of some men is mere local. They are great because their associates are little. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, forsight and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, even two blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room. -- Henry Kissinger %% The surest sign that a man is in love is when he divorces his wife. %% The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% The surest way to encourage violence is to give in to it. %% The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. -- Robert Benchley %% The surest way to remain a winner is to win once, and then not play any more. %% The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love; The taint of earth, the odor of the skies is in it. -- Bailey %% The sword appears to be of very fine craftsmanship. In spite of its age it is extremely sharp, and looks as if it will stay that way. %% The sword is firmly embedded in the stone, and you aren't strong enough to pull it out. %% The sword is not affected by the river water. %% The sword is singing quietly to itself. %% The system is a sacred tin god: never break it or dent it when you can get what you want by bending it. %% The system is not quite as rickety as I have been telling you. -- Ralph Gorin %% The system was down for backups from 5am to 10am last Saturday. %% The system will be down for 10 days for preventative maintenance. %% The system will be down for about a week next month while we install a new manager. %% The table is a tilting draftsman's table used to make the mine's engineering drawings and maps. %% The tallest human in the world was Robert Wadlow. He was 8 feet 11 1/2 inches. %% The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune. -- William Penn %% The tar pit of software engineering will continue to be sticky for a long time to come. One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems, our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal doses of common sense, and ... humility to recognize our fallibility and limitations. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month %% The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes. -- William Shakespeare %% The tasks to do immediately are the minor ones; otherwise you'll for get them. The major ones are often better to defer. They usually need more time for reflection. Besides, if you forget them, they'll remind you. -- Charles Wolf, Jr. %% The teaching of BASIC in schools, should be considered a criminal act. -- Dijkstra %% The tears of penitents are the wine of angels. -- St. Bernard %% The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out. -- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities" %% The telephone company and the post office have decided to merge. Their new motto: Reach out and lick someone. %% The telephone pole was approaching fast, I was attempting to swerve out of its path when it struck my front end. %% The telephone will ring when you are outside the door, fumbling for your keys. %% The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye -- Prof. Brian O'Blivion %% The television writer's guild went on strike again today. This time to demand larger crayons. %% The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that ... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (_H/_E)^4 = 50, where _E is the absolute temperature of the earth (-300K), gives _H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C. -- From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972 %% The temperature of the aqueous content of an unremittingly ogled culinary vessel will not achieve 100 degrees on the Celsius scale. %% The temple of our purest thoughts is -- silence! -- Mrs. Hale %% The tendencies of democracies are, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal. -- James Fenimore Cooper %% The tendency of all strong Governments has always been to suppress liberty, partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in innovation. -- J. A. Hobson (1858-1940) %% The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is ... the source of all religious fanaticism. %% The tengu was the most troublesome creature of Japanese legend. Part bird and part man, with red beak for a nose and flashing eyes, the tengu was notorious for stirring up feuds and prolonging enmity between families. Indeed, the belligerent tengus were supposed to have been man's first instructors in the use of arms. -- From: Mythical Beasts by Deirdre Headon (The Leprechaun Library). %% The tenure of an employee who is right all of the time will be rather short. %% The territory behind rhetoric is too often mined with equivocation. %% The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) %% The test of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Aldo Leopold %% The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children. -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer %% The the secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach. -- Lin Yutang %% The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883), "The Communist Manifesto" %% The theory of evolution was greatly objected to because it made man think. %% The thief amuses himself by searching your pockets. %% The thief attacks, and you fall back desperately. %% The thief bows formally, raises his stiletto, and with a wry grin ends the battle and your life. %% The thief comes in from the side, feints, and slips the blade between your ribs. %% The thief entertains himself by rifling your pack. %% The thief gestures mysteriously, and the treasures in the room suddenly vanish. %% The thief is taken aback by your unexpected generosity but accepts the # and stops to admire its beauty. %% The thief knocks you out. %% The thief neatly flips your # out of your hands, and it drops to the floor. %% The thief places the # in his bag and thanks you politely. %% The thief rams the haft of his blade into your stomach, leaving you out of breath. %% The thief seems rather offended by your offer. Do you think he's as stupid as you are? %% The thief slowly approaches, strikes like a snake, and leaves you wounded. %% The thief stabs a deep cut in your upper arm. %% The thief stabs nonchalantly with his stiletto and misses. %% The thief strikes at your wrist, and suddenly your grip is slippery with blood. %% The thief strikes like a snake! The resulting wound is serious. %% The thief tries to sneak past your guard, but you twist away. %% The thief, a man of good breeding, refrains from attacking a helpless opponent. %% The thief, being temporarily incapacitated, is unable to acknowledge your greeting with his usual graciousness. %% The thief, forgetting his essentially genteel upbringing, cuts your throat. %% The thief, noticing you beginning to stir, reluctantly finishes you off. %% The thief, who is essentially a pragmatist, dispatches you as a threat to his livelihood. %% The thing in the world I am most of afraid of is fear, and with good reason, that passion alone in the trouble of it exceeding other accidents. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% The thing that drives a real pro is simply inner satisfaction. that's all. -- Merlin Olsen %% The thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the greatest amount of trouble is sex. %% The things in this file don't have to be in bad taste, they just have to leave a bad taste. -- Dick Munroe %% The things taught in school are not an education but the means of an education. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The things that interest people most are usually none of their business. %% The things that matter most must not be at the mercy of the things that matter least. %% The things which belong to others please us more, and that which is ours is more pleasing to other. -- Syrus %% The thinner the ice, the more anxious is everyone to see whether it will bear. -- Josh Billings %% The thought of 2000 thousand people munching celery at the same time horrifies me. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think that I would want the job. -- Ronald W. Reagan (in 1973) %% The thousand injuries of fortune I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. %% The three faithful things in life are money, a dog, and an old woman. %% The three great elements of modern civilization, Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% The three indispensables of genius are understanding, feeling, and perseverance. The three things that enrich genius, are contentment of mind, the cherishing of good thoughts, and exercising the memory. -- Southey %% The three laws of physics: F = MA; Things fall down; You can't push a rope. %% The three most important parts of a stove: lifter, leg, and poker. %% The three most puzzling questions are: 1. Why are we born? 2. Why do we die? 3. Why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches? %% The thrill is gone, the thrill is gone baby %% The thrill of victory, the stink of defeet. %% The thrush in my back yard sings down his nose in liquid runs of melody, over and over again, and I have the strongest impression that he does this for his own pleasure. It is a meditative, questioning kind of music, and I cannot believe that he is simply saying 'thrush here.' -- Lewis Thomas %% The tide comes in and the tide goes out, and what have you got? %% The timber is about six feet long, quite thin, and has intricate carvings along its surface. %% The time has come for kicking ass and taking names. %% The time is past. There is no room for gods. -- Apollo, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% The time is right to make new friends. %% The time is right to pursue your endeavors. %% The time of departure will be delayed by the square of the number of people involved. Simply stated, if I wish to leave the city at 5 PM, I will most likely depart at 5:01. If I am to meet a friend, the time of departure becomes 5:04. If we were to meet another couple, we won't be on out way before 5:16, and so on. -- Paul D. Plotnick %% The time spent on any item of the agenda [of a finance committee] will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved. -- C. N. Parkinson %% The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. %% The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end. -- Adlai Stevenson, 9 September 1952 %% The time was the 19th of May, 1780. The place was Hartford, Connecticut. The day has gone down in New England history as a terrible foretaste of Judgement Day. For at noon the skies turned from blue to grey and by mid-afternoon had blackened over so densely that, in that religious age, men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came. The Connecticut House of Representatives was in session. And as some of the men fell down and others clamored for an immediate adjournment, the Speaker of the House, one Col. Davenport, came to his feet. He silenced them and said these words: "The day of judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought." -- Alistair Cooke %% The time-tested truism: Actions speak louder than words. %% The tire is only flat on the bottom. -- John L. Shelton %% The title of Archmage of Roke has been bestowed upon you. %% The title of the work is "Study by candlelight", a self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh. The unusual color scheme of yellows blended with orange and red appear to bear the taint of madness. The painting is worth a king's ransom. %% The titles of bills -- like those of Marx Brothers movies -- often have little to do with the substance of the legislation. Particularly deceptive are bills containing title buzz words such as emergency, reform, service, relief, or special. Often the emergency is of the writer's imagination; the reform, a protection of a vested interest; the service, self-serving; the relief, an additional burden on the taxpayer; and the special, something that otherwise shouldn't be passed. -- Pierre S. du Pont %% The tongue is the ambassador of the heart. -- Lyly %% The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% The top of a 12-foot-tall beanstalk is poking out of the west pit. %% The torch hits the glacier and explodes into a great ball of flame, devouring the glacier. The water from the melting glacier rushes downstream, carrying the torch with it. In place of the glacier, there is a passageway leading west. %% The torch is made from a section of roughly carved hardwood. The flammable material appears to be a tightly tied bundle of some sort of leaves. This bundle has been stuffed into the hollow end of the torch. It does not appear to be removable. The entire thing is rather crude, actually. %% The torch is now completely burnt out. %% The torch is starting to flicker. There's not much you can do . . . %% The torch's light is not as bright as it used to be. You'd better do something . . . %% The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The torture never stops. %% The tortured love is a burning flame, It burns so bright and consumes all pain %% The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% The total amount of evil in any system remains constant. Hence, any diminution in one direction -- for instance a reduction in poverty or unemployment -- is accompanied by an increase in another, e.g., crime or air pollution. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% The totality is present even in the broken pieces -- Aldous Huxley %% The tough part of a Data Processing Manager's job is that users don't really know what they want, but they know for certain what they don't want. %% The toughest decision a purchasing agent faces is when he is about to buy the machine designed to replace him. %% The town of Brawley, California, passed a resolution forbidding snow within the city limits. %% The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. -- Edward Abbey %% The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others. -- Edward Abbey %% The trail's got to be 'round here somewhere! -- D. Boone %% The tranquil heart may yet outrun the rocket and the car. %% The tree in which the sap is stagnant remains fruitless. -- Hosea Ballou %% The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% The tree soon grows a banana. %% The tree soon sprouts new leaves. %% The trees of the forest are large hardwood oak and maple, with an occasional grove of pine or spruce. There is quite a bit of undergrowth, largely birch and ash saplings plus nondescript bushes of various sorts. This time of year visibility is quite restricted by all the leaves, but travel is quite easy if you detour around the spruce and berry bushes. %% The trigger has been pulled. We've got to get there before the hammer falls. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3198.4 %% The troll catches you off guard. You are seriously wounded. %% The troll catches your treasure and scurries away out of sight. %% The troll charges, and his axe slashes you on your # arm. %% The troll deftly catches the axe, examines it carefully, and tosses it back, declaring, "Good workmanship, but it's not valuable enough." %% The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture. %% The troll hesitates, fingering his axe. %% The troll hits you with a glancing blow, and you are momentarily stunned. %% The troll is nowhere to be seen. %% The troll lands a killing blow. You are dead. %% The troll laughs at your puny gesture. %% The troll neatly removes your head. %% The troll refuses to let you cross. %% The troll scratches his head ruminatively. Might you be magically protected, he wonders? %% The troll seems afraid to approach your crumpled form. %% The troll sees a hole in your defense, and a lightning stroke opens a deep wound in your left side. %% The troll spits in your face, saying "Better luck next time". %% The troll steps out from beneath the bridge and blocks your way. %% The troll stirs, quickly resuming a fighting stance. %% The troll strikes at your unconscious form but misses in his rage. %% The troll swings his axe, and it nicks your arm as you dodge. %% The troll swings his axe, but it misses. %% The troll swings. The blade turns on your armor but crashes broadside into your head. %% The troll swings. You parry, but the force of his blow disarms you. %% The troll's axe barely misses your ear. %% The troll's axe bashes in your skull. %% The troll's axe cleaves you from the nave to the chops. %% The troll's axe swings down, gashing your shoulder. %% The troll's mightly blow drops you to your knees. %% The troll's swing almost knocks you over as you barely parry in time. %% The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls. %% The troll, now worried about this encounter, recovers his bloody axe. %% The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift %% The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the # %% The trophy case is securely fastened to the wall (perhaps to foil any attempt by robbers to remove it). %% The trouble is, there is an endless supply of White Men, but there has always been a limited number of Human Beings. -- Little Big Man %% The trouble with America is that so many political jokes get elected. %% The trouble with a kitten is that When it grows up, it's always a cat -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The trouble with being a breadwinner nowadays is that the Government is in for such a big slice. %% The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. %% The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it. -- Franklin P. Jones %% The trouble with being punctual is that people think you have nothing more important to do. %% The trouble with born-again Christians is that they're an even bigger pain the second time around. -- Herb Caen %% The trouble with computers is that they do what you tell them, not what you want. -- D. Cohen %% The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was. -- Walt West %% The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again. -- George Miller %% The trouble with giving advice is that people want to repay you. -- James Dent %% The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to deal with: sudden death. -- Michael Phelps, M.D. %% The trouble with money is it costs too much! %% The trouble with nude dancing is that not everything stops when the music stops. -- Sir Robert Helpmann (b. 1909) %% The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work. -- Herbert V. Prochnow %% The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the *time* it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong until he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure! -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% The trouble with resisting temptation is that you may not get another chance. %% The trouble with some of us is that we have been inoculated with small doses of Christianity which keep us from catching the real thing. -- Leslie Dixon Weatherhead %% The trouble with some self-made men is that they worship their creator. %% The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing -- and then marry him. -- Cher %% The trouble with superheros is what to do between phone booths. -- Ken Kesey %% The trouble with the Ten Commandments is that there are too many "Thou Shalt Not"s and not enough "Thou Shalt"s. -- Solomon Short %% The trouble with the average family budget is that at the end of the money there's too much month left. %% The trouble with the average family today is that it's hard to support it and the government on one income. %% The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. -- Lily Tomlin %% The trouble with you Is the trouble with me. Got two good eyes But we still don't see. -- Robert Hunter, "Workingman's Dead" %% The troublesome little man child. Are you prepared for the kind of death you've earned little man? -- Lore to Wesley, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4 %% The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The true civilization is where every man gives to every other man every right that he claims for himself. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) %% The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts. -- Edmund Burke %% The true function of art is to edit nature and so to make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God. %% The true source of cheerfulness is benevolence. -- P. Godwin %% The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks. -- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), 1967 %% The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon. -- Franz Kafka %% The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. -- Michelangelo %% The true, strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe--fear and awe of the State. -- Edward Abbey %% The truest wild beasts live in the most populous places. -- Baltasar Gracian, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" 1647 %% The truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labour and the fact that honor lies in honest toil. -- Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) %% The truly brave are soft of heart and eyes, And feel for what their duty bids them do. -- Byron %% The truly generous is the truly wise, and he who loves not others, lives unblest. -- Henry Home %% The truly valiant dare everything but doing an anybody an injury. -- Sir Philip Sidney %% The trustees of the Madrid Zoo read that there were only thirty-four whooping cranes left in the U.S. and determined that they must have one before the breed became extinct. Never mind what Spanish wiles they had to exercise to fulfill their ambition; suffice it to say that a whooping crane was dispatched via air freight to the Madrid Zoo. Alas, when the fool bird arrived at the Madrid Airport, he flatly refused to debark, and the brokenhearted trustees had to return empty-handed to their zoo. The moral of the story of course is that cranes in Spain stick mainly to the plane. %% The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides. -- Andre Malraux %% The truth about a woman often lasts longer than the woman is true. %% The truth is more important than the facts. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth. -- Alfred Adler (1870-1937) %% The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it. -- Emile Zola (1840-1902), "J'Accuse!" %% The truth is stranger than fiction. %% The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The truth is the one thing nobody will believe. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie. -- Lenny Bruce %% The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa. %% The truth of an argument has nothing to do with it's credibility. %% The truth shall rape you over. %% The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy. -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% The truth you speak has no past and no future. It is, and that's all it needs to be. %% The tube refuses to accept anything. %% The turnpike road to people's hearts I find Lies through their mouths, or I mistake mankind. -- Dr. Wolcot %% The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks Which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% The tusk of a gelded boar. Good fortune. %% The twilight had washed off the details of the buildings. They rose in thin shafts of a soft, porcelain blue, a color not of real things, but of evening and distance. They rose in bare outlines, like empty molds waiting to be filled. The distance had flattened the city. The single shafts stood immeasurably tall, out of scale to the rest of the earth. They were of their own world, and they held up to the sky the statement of what men had conceived and made possible. They were empty molds. But man had come so far; he could go farther. The city on the edge of the sky held a question -- and a promise. %% The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn, ... tired of common sense and civilization. -- F. L. Lucas %% The two best ways to my heart are sex, and the descending aorta. -- Anmar Mirza %% The two bits of protoplasm could remember when they were cell-mates. %% The two couples were enjoying their vacation together at a resort hotel. They were in the middle of a game of Scrabble in the lobby when a thunderstorm cut off the hotel's electricity, leaving little to do but retire to their rooms. Bill was a rather devout man, so before getting into bed with his companion, he said his prayers. As he got under the covers, the lightning suddenly flashed through the window and he discovered that he was in the wrong room. He instantly jumped up and started to dash for the hallway. "It's too late, called the girl from the bed, "my guy doesn't pray." %% The two men feigned friendship but secretly hated each other's guts and took great pleasure in giving one another the needle on any and all occasions. This particular evening they met, quite by accident, at a popular bar. The conversation started innocently enough; then one, with sudden inspiration, ran his hand over the other's bald head and exclaimed, "By God, Fred, that feels just like my wife's ass!" The other ran his own hand over his head and nonchalantly retorted, "Well, I'll be damned, Jim, so it does, so it does!" %% The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new. -- Johnson %% The two oldest professions in the world have been ruined by amateurs. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The two things that can get you into trouble quicker than anything else are fast women and slow horses. %% The two things that have not evolved throughout time are sharks and bugs. %% The type syntax for C is essentially unparsable. -- Rob Pike %% The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% The typical page layout program is nothing more than an electronic light table for cutting and pasting documents. %% The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. -- Montesquieu %% The ukulele is a four-stringed instrument brought to Hawaii by Portuguese sailors in the 18th century. Ukulele means 'jumping flea'. %% The ultimate game show will be the one where somebody gets killed at the end. -- Chuck Barris %% The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education. -- John W. Gardner %% The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Strength to Love", 1963 %% The ultimate test of whether you posses a sense of humor is your reaction when someone tells you you don't. -- Frank Tyger %% The unconscious # cannot defend himself: he dies. %% The underbrush is of such abundance That the small stars can be seen at noon. He breaks his right arm. No blame. %% The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude %% The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance. -- Lewis Thomas %% The unique operations of the (human) brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture. They have suspended us between the two antipodal ideals of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and the artifactual, relentlessly seeking, in the words of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, an equilibrium not of this world. -- Edward O. Wilson, "Biophilia" %% The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The universe does not give first warnings. Or second chances. -- Solomon Short %% The universe does not have laws -- it has habits, and habits can be broken. %% The universe has its own cure for stupidity. Unfortunately, it doesn't always apply it. -- Solomon Short %% The universe is against me. . . . The universe makes no provision for a two-hundred-year-old man. -- Louis Wu "Ringworld" %% The universe is all a spin-off of the Big Bang. %% The universe is an island, surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds universes. %% The universe is but one vast Symbol of God. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. -- Eden Phillpots %% The universe is full of surprises -- most of them nasty. -- Solomon Short %% The universe is intractably squiggly. -- Charles Suhor %% The universe is laughing behind your back. %% The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the combination is locked up in the safe. -- Peter DeVries %% The universe is not indifferent to intelligence, it is actively hostile to it. %% The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose. -- J. B. S. Haldane %% The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. -- J. B. S. Haldane %% The universe is one of God's thoughts. -- Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) %% The universe is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering. -- Chinese proverb %% The universe is their oyster, and they like it raw. -- Matt Howarth, referring to Those Annoying Post Brothers. %% The universe may be as great as they say But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist. %% The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. -- Sagan %% The universe will go down tomorrow at 6:00. Please plan accordingly. %% The unnatural, that too is natural. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% The unrestricted use of a GOTO statement is considered to be harmful because it hampers program understandability. Consequently, a programmer should justify every use of a GOTO statement. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% The urgent leaves no time for the important. %% The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra (1982) %% The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% The usefulness of any meeting is inversely proportional to the attendance. -- Lane Kirkland %% The user will forget mathematics in proportion to the complexity of the calculator. -- John L. Shelton %% The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% The vain beauty cares most for the conquest which employed the whole artillery of her charms. -- Edward Garrett %% The value of a program is proportional to weight of its output. %% The value of compassion cannot be over-emphasized. Anyone can criticize. It takes a true believer to be compassionate. No greater burden can be borne by an individual than to know no one cares or understands. -- Arthur H. Stainback %% The value of knowledge lies not in its accumulation, but in its utilization. %% The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592), 1580 %% The value of money has an objective regulator only when it it linked to a real commodity, like gold, itself requiring the cost of human labor to be produced. By comparison, the value of inconvertible paper money has no objective regulator, its marginal cost of production being nearly zero. -- Lewis E. Lehrman %% The value of passion, like fire, is judged finally by the amount of warmth and light it creates. Fanatics, like forest fires, burn bright but destroy all in their path that is tender and green. To be useful, fire must be confined. To live passionately, we must develop discipline; to love powerfully, we must forge bonds of commitment. Passion is inseparable from compassion. -- Sam Keen %% The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. -- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) %% The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body, only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% The vase is made of a light blue glass, with a narrow mouth and a short stub of a handle. Although attractive, it does not seem to be particulary valuable. %% The vase is now resting, delicately, on a velvet pillow. %% The vehicle in front of you is traveling slower than you are. %% The veil which covers the face of futurity is woven by the hand of mercy. -- Bulwer %% The venom clamors of a jealous woman poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth. -- William Shakespeare %% The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf" %% The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic. -- Edward Abbey %% The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. -- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil" %% The very proper spinster didn't go out very often, but she had some important shopping to do that morning and so decided to have her lunch in what appeared to be a nice quiet respectable restaurant. With the noontime crowd, many customers shared their tables with strangers; the spinster selected a seat next to an attractive, young office girl. The girl finished her sandwich and coffee, then settled back and lit up a cigarette. The older woman controlled herself for a few moments and then snapped, "I'd rather commit adultery than smoke in public." "So would I," said the girl, "but I only have half an hour for lunch." %% The very remembrance of my former misfortune proves a new one to me. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. -- William Shakespeare %% The very technology that makes our living simpler makes society more complex. The more efficient we get, the more specialized we become and the more dependent. -- Thomas Griffith %% The vial explodes into splinters and disintegrates, releasing an oily liquid which rapidly sublimes into a large mushroom-shaped cloud of pale blue vapor smelling like sequoia sap and ozone. %% The vice squad picked up a peddler for selling pornographic photos. 'But these aren't dirty.' the salesman complained. The officer pointed to one photo showing several naked men and women entangled. The guy said, 'What's the matter, ain't you ever seen six people in love before?' %% The vicious drop in temperature has delicately shattered the goblet. %% The victor belongs to the spoils. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) %% The victor will never be asked if he told the truth. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% The victors invariably write the history to their own advantage. -- Picard, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% The viewscreen shows a lovely planet on one side, and a raging space battle on the other. %% The viewscreen shows an endless expanse of stars, as far as the eye (or any other sensor device) can see. %% The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while. Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth-while. -- Alfred North Whitehead, 1963, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" %% The vile are only vain; the great are proud. -- Byron %% The vine Jane! No the vine! aaiiieeeee... %% The virtues of hard work are extolled most loudly by people without calluses. %% The vitality of a new movement in art or letters can be pretty accurately gauged by the fury it arouses. -- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) %% The voice of the guardian of the dungeon booms out from the darkness, "Your disrespect has cost you your life!" and places your head on a pole. %% The voluptuous blond was chatting with her handsome escort in a posh restaurant when their waiter, stumbling as he brought their drinks, dumped a martini on the rocks down the back of the blonde's dress. She sprang to her feet with a wild rebel yell, dashed wildly around the table, then galloped wriggling from the room followed by her distraught boyfriend. A man seated on the other side of the room with a date of his own beckoned to the waiter and said, "We'll have two of whatever she was drinking." %% The wage earner relies upon the ventures of confident and contented capital. This failing him, his condition is without alleviation, for he can neither prey on the misfortune of others nor hoard his labor. -- Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) %% The wages of sin are high -- unless you know someone who does it for nothing. %% The wages of sin are high but you get your money's worth. %% The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead. -- Lucretius %% The wall collapses, smothering you. %% The wall falls back into the moat. Use no army now. Make your commands known within your own town. Perseverance brings humiliation. %% The wall is solid rock. %% The walls are quite warm here. From the north can be heard a steady roar, so loud that the entire cave seems to be trembling. Another passage leads south, and a low crawl goes east. %% The walls cannot be climbed. %% The walls have ears. %% The walls of our apartment are so thin that when I asked my wife a question I got four different answers. %% The wanderer comes to and inn. He has his property with him. He wins the steadfastness of a young servant. %% The wanderer rests in a shelter. He obtains his property and an ax. My heart is not glad. %% The wanderer's inn burns down. He loses the steadfastness of his young servant. Danger. %% The warden of the De Luxington preparatory school for boys was holding a hearing. The lad before his desk, a very popular young fellow, was angrily accusing one of his schoolmates of having assaulted him sexually. "I must warn you, m'boy, this is a very serious charge, the warden said. "I don't care. I tell you it is true. He raped me, warden." The youth pointed to another, somewhat larger boy smirking in the corner. "That's him, sir, the one who forced me to do all those crimes against nature. The bully!" "Now tell me, son, as closely as you can, when this happened." "Sir, two weeks ago on Wednesday at 4:00, then at 7:00 that same evening, on Friday, twice on Saturday, two times on Monday, once on Wednesday, and then he met that bitch Roy and he hasn't touched me since." %% The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood. -- Alexander Haig %% The water is a murky black. It appears to be extremely unhealthy. As you approach the bank you are all but overcome by the repellent odor of the water. %% The water leaks out of the # and evaporates immediately. %% The water level is now high in your lungs. %% The water level is now over your head. %% The water level is now up to your neck. %% The water slips through your fingers. %% The water soaks into the ground. %% The water spills to the floor and evaporates immediately. %% The water splashes on the walls and evaporates immediately. %% The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whiskey. By diligent effort, I learned to like it. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% The way is blocked by debris from an explosion. %% The way is too narrow. %% The way north is barred by a massive, rusty, iron door. %% The way north leads through a massive, rusty, iron door. %% The way through the gate is barred by evil spirits, who jeer at your attempts to pass. %% The way to a man's heart is below his stomach. -- Ron Randall %% The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. -- Fanny Fern, "Willis Parton" %% The way to a man's heart is through the left ventricle. %% The way to a man's stomach is through his esophagus. %% The way to avoid the imputation of impudence is not to be ashamed of what we do, but never to do what we ought to be ashamed of. -- Tully %% The way to conquer men is by their passions; Catch but the ruling foibles of their hearts, And all their boasted virtues shrink before you. -- Tolson %% The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run! -- John Barrymore %% The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. %% The way to make a small fortune in the commodities market is to start with a large fortune. %% The way to the south is blocked by rubble. %% The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% The way we treat eachother is the foundation of the gospel of Christ. -- Marvin J. Ashton %% The weak have to be decent, while the strong can choose to be decent. -- Sepp von Plum %% The weather for catching fish is that weather, and no other, in which fish are caught. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful. My thoughts aren't too clear, but don't run away. My girlfriend's a bore; my job is too dutiful. Hell nobody's perfect, would you like to play? I feel together today! -- Jimmy Buffet, "Coconut Telegraph" %% The weather is here. Wish you were beautiful. %% The weather's turning very funny -- Hailstones crashing from the sky, Snow and sleet ... It's even money Whether we'll survive July! %% The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm wind if it ... did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind. -- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) %% The weed of crime bears bitter fruit... but the leaves are good to smoke! -- Stanley Kugell %% The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows! %% The weight of your pack increases in direct proportion to the amount of food you consume from it. If you run out of food, the pack weight goes on increasing anyway. -- Milt Barber %% The well is being lined. No blame. %% The well is cleaned, but no one drinks from it. This is my heart's sorrow, For one might draw from it. If the king were clear-minded, Good fortune might be enjoyed in common. %% The well-tended front lawn is the modern moat that keeps the barbarians-- other people--at bay. %% The wheel of fortune turns incessantly round, and who can say within himself, I shall today be uppermost. -- Confucius %% The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the first to be replaced. %% The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease. -- Josh Billings, "The Kicker" %% The wheels of nature are not made to roll backward; everything presses on toward Eternity; from the birth of Time an impetuous current has set in, which bears all the sons of men toward that interminable ocean. Meanwhile Heaven is attracting to itself whatever is congenial to its nature, is enriching itself by the spoils of earth, and collecting within its capacious bosom, whatever is pure, permanent and divine. -- Robert Hall %% The whirring decreases in intensity slightly. %% The white cliffs prevent you from landing here. %% The white race is the cancer of history. -- Susan Sontag %% The white sail vanishes into thin air as quickly as it came. %% The white zone is for the loading and unloading of passengers only. No Parking. %% The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist. -- William James %% The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak. -- Wavy Gravy %% The whole is the sum of its parts, plus one or more bugs. %% The whole of life is futile unless you consider it as a sporting proposition. %% The whole thing about matrimony is this: We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character. -- Peter DeVries %% The whole world is a tuxedo and you are a pair of brown shoes. -- George Gobel %% The whole world is about three drinks behind. -- Humphrey Bogart %% The wicked at heart probably know something. %% The wicked have a solid interest that the good never seem to possess. the good are grand for one great rally. Then they go home and work at their business. The cohesive power of public plunder remains on the job. -- Nicolas Murray Butler (1862-1947) %% The wife of young Richard of Limerick Complained to her husband, "My quim, Rick, Still grows in diameter Each time that you ram at her; How can your poor tool stay so slim, Rick?" %% The wild goose gradually draws near the cliff. Eating and drinking in peace and concord. Good fortune. %% The wild goose gradually draws near the cloud heights. Its feathers can be used for the sacred dance. Good fortune. %% The wild goose gradually draws near the plateau. The man goes forth and does not return. The woman carries a child but does not bring it forth. Misfortune. It furthers one to fight off robbers. %% The wild goose gradually draws near the shore. The young son is in danger. There is talk. No blame. %% The wild goose gradually draws near the summit. For three years the woman has no child. In the end nothing can hinder her. Good fortune. %% The wild goose gradually draws near the tree. Perhaps it will find a flat branch. No blame. %% The wildest colts make the best horses. -- Plutarch %% The will to win is important, but it isn't worth a damn unless you also have the will to prepare. %% The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character. -- Sir Walter Scott %% The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. -- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) %% The wind blows low on the mountain: The image of Decay. Thus the superior man stirs up the people And strengthens their spirit. %% The wind blows over the earth: The image of Contemplation. Thus the kings of old visited the regions of the world, Contemplated the people, And gave them instruction. %% The wind doth taste so bitter sweet, Like Jaspar wine and sugar, It must have blown through someone's feet, Like those of Caspar Weinberger. -- P. Opus, "Bloom County" %% The wind drives across heaven: The image of The Taming Power of the Small. Thus the superior man Refines the outward aspect of his nature. %% The wind drives over the water: The image of Dispersion. Thus the kings of old sacrificed to the Lord And built temples. %% The window closes (more easily than it opened). %% The window is made of the best bullet-proof glass that the sorcerer could obtain. It is impervious to anything less than a 10-megaton bomb. %% The windows are all barred. %% The wire falls off the hook. %% The wire rapidly burns into nothing. %% The wire starts to burn. %% The wise man seeks everything in himself; the ignorant man tries to get everything from somebody else. %% The wise prince must foment some emnity so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness. -- Italo Bombolini %% The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at is. If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao. The highest sounds are hardest to hear. Going forward is a way to retreat. Great talent shows itself late in life. Even a perfect program still has bugs. %% The wise shepherd never trusts his flock to a smiling wolf. %% The wisest have the most authority. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: "Nine out of ten people improve on acquaintance"; and I have found his words true. -- Frank Swinnerton %% The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so. -- Boileau %% The witty man merely says what you would have said if you had thought of it. %% The woman holds the basket, but there are no fruits in it. The man stabs the sheep, but no blood flows. Nothing that acts to further. %% The woman loses the curtain of her carriage. Do not run after it; On the seventh day you will get it. %% The woman who lives on the moon Is still cherishing the balloon Of an earthling who'd come And given her some, But had dribbled away all too soon. %% The woman who tells her age is either too young to have anything to lose or too old to have anything to gain. %% The woman you buy -- and she is the least expensive -- takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself takes all your time. -- Balzac %% The wonderful thing about a dancing bear is not how well he dances, but that he dances at all. %% The wonders of the ages assembled for your edification, education, and enjoyment -- for a price. -- P. T. Barnum %% The wooden door closes. %% The wooden door has a barred panel in it at about head height. The panel is #, and the door is #. %% The wooden door opens. %% The wooden panel moves slightly inward as you push and back out when you let go. %% The woodpecker knocked twice. %% The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep. -- Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", 1923 %% The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep. -- Frost, "The Road not Taken" %% The word "politics" is derived from the word "poly", meaning "many", and the word "ticks", meaning "blood sucking parasite %% The word "spine" is, of course, an anagram of "penis". This is true in almost fifty percent of the languages of the Galaxy, and many people have attempted to explain why. Usually these explanations get bogged down in silly puns about "standing erect". -- Donald Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% The word 'We' is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black is lost in the gray of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. -- Equality 7-2521 %% The word 'crack' (or 'krack') is found nowhere in a real pirate's name... unless he really knows how to. %% The word GOOD has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man. %% The word of the day is LEGS Help spread the word %% The word that's on the tip of your tongue? You'll never remember it. %% The words of the profits were written on the studio walls -- Rush %% The words of the prophets were written on the subway walls -- Simon & Garfunkel %% The work of Mess Sergeant Potgieter Is not merely reading a meter. By orders of Kirk A part of his work Is dosing the food with saltpeter. %% The work of an unknown good man is like a vein of water flowing hidden in the underground, secretly making the ground greener. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him. -- Claude Levi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques", 1955 %% The world cannot always understand a person's profession of faith, but it can understand service. -- Ian Maclaren %% The world does not spin around my every move! The world will not stop when I die. So while I'm here I'll make it a little better for you and I. %% The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream That this watch exists and has no watchmaker. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% The world ended yesterday-this is only a dream! %% The world ended yesterday-why are you sitting there hitting me with your fingers? %% The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill! -- Edward Abbey %% The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands. -- John Irving, "The World According to Garp" %% The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress. -- Charles F. Kettering %% The world is a madhouse, so it's only right it's patrolled by armed idiots. -- Brendan Behan %% The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% The world is all the richer for having the devil in it, so long as we keep our foot on his neck. %% The world is an 8000 mile in diameter spherical pile of shit. %% The world is an enormous injustice. -- Jules Romains %% The world is an old woman, that mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; thereby being often cheated, she will henceforth trust nothing but the common copper. -- Carlyle %% The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was before you came in. -- James Baldwin %% The world is but a canvas to our imagination. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% The world is coming to an end! Repent and return those library books! %% The world is coming to an end--save your buffers! %% The world is divided into two groups. There are those who know, and those who don't know. Those who know, they're no problem. Those who don't know are also in two groups. One is those who don't know, and know they don't know. Well, they can learn! But then, there are those who don't know, and don't know they don't know. And they become managers! %% The world is doomed to fiery destruction in not many _falans._ Only Louis Wu can save us. -- Kyeref "The Ringworld Engineers" %% The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must. -- Edward Abbey %% The world is full of cactus, but we don't have to sit on it. -- Will Foley %% The world is full of kings and queens who'll blind your eyes and steal your dreams. %% The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind. -- E. B. White %% The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. -- Robertson Davies, "A Voice from the Attic", 1960 %% The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them. -- Robert Frost %% The world is going through a great big menopause. %% The world is governed more by appearances than by realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. -- Daniel Webster %% The world is more complicated than most of our theories make it out to be. -- Edmund C. Berkeley %% The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it. -- E. Hubbard %% The world is my country, all mankind are my brethern, and to do good is my religion. -- Thomas Paine %% The world is no nursery. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) %% The world is not a prison-house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks. -- Edwin Arlington Robinson %% The world is not octal despite DEC. %% The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion. %% The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow. -- Edward Abbey %% The world is really just a big ball of dirt. %% The world is so big and so global now. %% The world is too critical. The world is too cynical. We lose our innocence and we lose our very soul. %% The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning. -- Edward Abbey %% The world is wide and beautiful. But almost everywhere, everywhere, the children are dying. -- Edward Abbey %% The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages. -- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul %% The world is your oyster, everything is getting better, and you will live happily ever after. %% The world is your oyster, so EAT IT!! %% The world just ended. Log off and go home. %% The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls. -- Father Robert F. Capon %% The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox hunters. -- Shenstone %% The world needs more people like us and fewer like them. %% The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both. -- Edward Abbey %% The world really isn't any worse. It's just that the news coverage is so much better. %% The world spins and goes dark. %% The world spins and you slap against the floor. %% The world that never mankind hath possessed. -- Dante "Inferno," XXVI %% The world wants to be deceived. -- Sebastian Brant %% The world will end at NOON tomorrow (12:30 in Newfoundland) %% The world will end neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with the strident cries of little men devoted to cost-benefit ratios. -- Norman Cousins %% The world's as ugly as sin, And almost as delightful -- Frederick Locker-Lampson %% The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% The worlds most effective lockpick is dynamite followed by a sledgehammer. -- The Terrorists Handbook %% The worst cliques are those which consist of one man. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The worst day's fishing is better than the best day's w %% The worst feature of a new baby is its mother's singing. -- Kin Hubbard %% The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. -- Aristotle %% The worst is enemy of the bad. %% The worst is not so long as we can say "This is the worst." -- King Lear %% The worst men often give the best advice. -- Bailey %% The worst part of valor is indiscretion. %% The worst provincialism of which America can be guilty is the provincialism of prejudice, racial prejudice, prejudice against new and challenging ideas. -- Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) %% The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship. %% The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized - and never knowing. -- David Viscott %% The worst wheel of the cart makes the most noise. -- Poor Richard %% The worth of the State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it, and a State which postpones the interest of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business... will find that with small men no great thing can be accomplished. -- John Stuart Mill, 'On Liberty', 1859 %% The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist. -- Edward Abbey %% The writer is the engineer of the human soul. -- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) %% The writer speaks not *to* his audience (who wants to listen to lectures?) but *for* them, expressing their thoughts and emotions through the imaginative power of his art. -- Edward Abbey %% The writing of more than 75 poems in any fiscal year should be punishable by a fine of $500. -- Ed Sanders %% The yankees, son, are up north. The damnyankees are down here. %% 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. %% The yellow flower is similar to a Chrysanthemum, but has far more fragrance than would be expected. The stem is quite sturdy, but the bloom itself looks very fragile. %% The yellow stone is a radiant opal of extreme brilliance and hardness. This opal is highly unusual in that a faceted cut has been used on a soft stone. The magnificent beauty of the stone attest to the shrewdness of the cutter's choice. %% The yoo-hoo you yoo-hoo into the forest is the yoo-hoo you get back. -- Merle Miller %% The young Georgia miss came to the hospital for a checkup. "Have you been X-rayed?" asked the doctor. "Nope," she said, "but ah've been ultraviolated." %% The young girl was having a heart-to-heart talk with her mother on her first visit home since starting college. "Mom, I have to tell you," the girl confessed. "I lost my virginity last weekend." "I'm not surprised," said her mother. "It was bound to happen sooner or later. I just hope it was a romantic and pleasurable experience." "Well, yes and no," the pretty student remarked. "The first eight guys felt great, but after them my pussy got real sore." %% The young lady had an unusual list, Linked in part to a structural weakness. She set no preconditions. %% The young man stopped his car on a secluded road with his date. 'If I try to make love to you, will you yell for help?' She slyly said, 'Only if you really need it.' %% The young man-about-town enjoyed luxury but didn't always have the means to buy it, and so he huffily walked out of the Miami Beach hotel when he found out the charges for room, meals and golf privileges were $100 a day. He registered across the street at an equally elegant hotel, where the rates were only $70. The following morning he went down to the hotel's golf course and asked Scotty, the pro, to sell him a couple of golf balls. "Sure," said Scotty. "That'll be $15 apiece." "What?" screamed the bachelor. "In the hotel across the street they only charge $1 a ball!" "Naturally," replied the pro. "Over there they get you by the rooms." %% The younger, the better. %% The youth of today and of those to come after them would assess the work of the revolution in accordance with values of their own ... a thousand years from now, all of them, even Marx, Engels, and Lenin, would possibly appear rather ridiculous. -- Mao Tse-tung %% The yuppie helped his date into his car, which was parked on a New York city street. He then went around to the driver side and got in. Just as he was reaching to close the door, a cab came by and neatly removed the door from the car AND the yuppie's hand from his arm. After a stunned silence, the yuppie began to wail, "My God, my God -- my BMW!" His date stared at him and screamed, "Are you nuts? What about your hand?" At which the yuppie looked down at his wrist and wailed, "My God, my God -- my Rolex!" %% The zebra is chiefly used to illustrate the letter Z. %% The zombie won't let you go that way. %% The zoo is not an exhibition I view with much enjoyment, when I notice beasts in a position To learn the weaknesses of men. -- John Brunner %% The, uh, snowy mountains are like really cold, eh? And the, um, plains stretch out like my moms girdle, eh? There's lotsa beers and doughnuts for everyone, eh? So the last one to be peaceful and everything is a big idiot, Eh? So shut yer face up and dry yer mucklucks by the fire, eh? And dream about girls with their high beams on, eh? They may be cold, but that's okay! Beer's better that way! Eh? -- A, like, Tribute to the Great White North, eh? Beauty! %% Thee are creatures in the universe who would consider you the ultimate achievement, android. No feelings, no emotions, no pain. And yet you cover those qualities of humanity. Believe me, you are missing nothing. But if it means anything to you, you are a better human than I. -- Q to Data, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Theft from a single author is plagiarism. Theft from three or more is research. %% Their [the Klingon's] empire is made up of conquered worlds. They take what they want by arms and force. -- Kirk, "Friday's Child," stardate 3497.2 %% Their idea of an offer you can't refuse is an offer... and you'd better not refuse. %% Them as has, gets. %% Them that has, gets. %% Them what has -- gets. -- Dexter B. Wakefield %% Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it. -- Achilles in Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" %% Then Nicholl, using his own calculations, demonstrated that it was absolutely impossible to give any object at all the velocity of 12,000 yards per second. And, algebra in hand, he maintained that even if such a velocity could be attained, such a heavy projectile could never be lifted beyond the limits of the Earth's atmosphere! It would never reach even an altitude of twenty miles. And furthermore! Even if such a speed could be attained, even if it would suffice, the shell could not withstand the pressure of the gases produced by igniting 1,600,000 pounds of powder. And even if it could resist the pressure, it could not withstand the temperature, it would melt as it left the Columbiad, and a red-hot rain would fall on the heads of the foolish spectators. Barbicane did not even wince at these attacks; he simply got on with his work. -- Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (1865) %% Then a man said: Speak to us of Expectations. He then said: If a man does not see or hear the waters of the Jordan, then he should not taste the pomegranate or ply his wares in an open market. If a man would not labour in the salt and rock quarries then he should not accept of the Earth that which he refuses to give of himself. Such a man would expect a pear of a peach tree. Such a man would expect a stone to lay an egg. Such a man would expect Sears to assemble a lawnmower. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% Then a scream rang through the courtroom, and a woman staggered in. She scarcely weighed three hundred pounds, she was so pale and thin. "The prisoner is my boy!" she cried, "The only one I had. His brothers were always good, but he was always bad. Long before he was born, he was my pride and joy. I don't know what he's here, for, Judge, But for heaven's sake, hang my boy!" %% Then condemn what they do not understand. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% Then do the pelvic thrust. %% Then happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. -- William Shakespeare %% Then here's to the City of Boston the town of the cries and the groans. Where the Cabots can't see the Kabotschniks, And the Lowells won't speak to the Cohns. -- Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.) (1881-1960) %% Then of course, there's the way Keillor used to close his broadcast stories: "That's the news from Lake Woebegon, where all the men are smart, the women are good looking, and all the children are above average." %% Then rested he by the tumtum tree, and stood awhile in thought. And as in uffish thought he stood. . . %% Then somebody spoke, and I went into a dream.... %% Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic" %% Then there was Benjamin Bright, A contestant on "What's My Delight?" They guessed at his habits With little white rabbits, But were stumped by his mouse and his kite. %% Then there was the Formosan bartender named Taiwan-On. %% Then there was the Millet guy who was so dumb that he couldn't tell you which way an elevator was going if you gave him three guesses. %% Then there was the angry man who flung himself from the room, flung himself from the house, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions. -- Stephen Leacock %% Then there was the girl who was engaged to a gymnast -- 'til he broke it off. %% Then there was the girl whose boyfriend didn't smoke, drink or swear, and never, ever made a pass at her. He also made his own dresses. %% Then there was the guy that got badly messed up fighting for his girl's honor. It seems she wanted to keep it. %% Then there was the middle-aged businessman who took his spouse to Paris. After traipsing with her from one mansion du couture to another, be begged for a day off to rest and got it. With the wife gone shopping again, he went to the Ritz Bar and picked up a luscious parisienne. They got on well until the question of money came up. She wanted a hundred American dollars; he offered fifty. They couldn't get together on the price; so they didn't get together. That evening he escorted his wife to of the nicer restaurants on the Rue de Rivoli, and there he spotted his gorgeous babe of the afternoon seated at a table near the door. "See, monsieur?" she said as they passed her. "Look what you got for your lousy ten bucks." %% Then there was the woman who bought herself a Lamborghini, and though she wasn't particularly religious, she had worked hard for the car and wanted it blessed. She asked the rabbi next door to bless it for her, but he said, "A sports car is really a bit out of my domain. You should ask the priest." So she asked the priest at St. Christopher's, but he said, "I really wouldn't know how to bless a sports car. We're really pretty traditional. Why don't you ask the Unitarian minister?" So, somewhat exasperated, she hunts down the Unitarian minister, and says, "You must be the only person in this town who can give me a blessing for my new Lamborghini!" The minister replied, "A Lamborghini? That's a fine car! Have to be careful with the suspension though - it can be rough on turns. Now, what did you want? A blessing? What's that?" %% Then there's the story of the man who avoided reality for 70 years with drugs, sex, alcohol, fantasy, TV, movies, records, a hobby, lots of sleep... And on his 80th birthday died without ever having faced any of his real problems. The man's younger brother, who had been facing reality and all his problems for 50 years with psychiatrists, nervous breakdowns, tics, tension, headaches, worry, anxiety and ulcers, was so angry at his brother for having gotten away scott free that he had a paralyzing stroke. The moral to this story is that there ain't no justice that we can stand to live with. -- R. Geis %% Then there's the woman who goes to the dentist. As he leans over to begin working on her, she grabs his balls. The dentist says "Madam, I believe you've got ahold of my privates." The woman replies, "Yes. We're going to be careful not to hurt each other, aren't we." %% Then we have every guy's favorite fraternity: I Eta Theta And their sister sorority: I Eta Beta %% Then what is it worth, this mining industry? And why should it be kept alive, if it is only our poverty that keeps it alive? ... Is it we that must be kept poor so that others may stay rich? -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948 %% Then, gently touching my face, she hesitated for a moment as her incredible eyes poured forth into mine love, joy, pain, tragedy, acceptance, and peace. "'Bye for now," she said warmly. -- Thea Alexander (2150 A.D.) %% Theodore Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. %% Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% Theorem: All odd numbers are prime. Proofs: Mathematician: One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, therefore all odd numbers are prime. Physicist: One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is experimental error, eleven is prime, thirteen is prime, therefore all odd numbers are prime. Engineer: One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is prime, eleven is prime, thirteen is prime, therefore all odd numbers are prime. Computer Scientist: Zero is not odd, one is odd and prime, therefore all odd numbers are prime. Computer Scientist: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 7 is a prime, .... %% Theorem: All programs are dull. Proof: Assume the contrary; i.e., the set of interesting programs is nonempty. Arrange them (or it) in order of interest (note that all sets can be well ordered, so do it properly). The minimal element is the "least interesting program", the obvious dullness of which provides the contradictory denouement we so devoutly seek. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" %% Theorem: Every horse has an infinite number of legs 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. The only number that is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore, horses have an infinite number of legs. -- From "On the Nature of Mathematical Proofs", Joel Cohen %% Theorum I - The universe is a figment of its own imagination. - proof From Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." The very fact that I am doing this proves I am thinking, and consequently, I exist. Let us consider the theory of uncertainty that some Greek guy came up with some eons ago: "I cannot be sure the outside world exists. I am only sure of my sensations thereof." (The old "is the chair really there?" trick.) Therefore, in effect, the external universe is a figment of MY imagination. Now since I exist, I must be a part of the universe. It then follows that the universe is a figment of its own imagination. %% Theorum II - If and when we nuke ourselves, it will be a completely natural event. - proof Consider that Darwin was correct in his hypothesis that Man (as a species) actually evolved from lower animals. Thus, we are animals. (wow. how deep.) But if a cat kills a mouse, then we say it is a natural instinct. If fact we say similar things about all animals. Thus, anything "Man-made" or anything that Man does must be a natural result of evolution. The result follows. %% Theory is gray, but the golden tree of life is green. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Theory of Selective Supervision: The one time in the day that you lean back and relax is the one time the boss walks through the office. %% Theory: A hunch with a college education. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% There *__is* intelligent life on Earth, but I leave for Texas on Monday. %% There a young man from the Coast Who had an affair with a ghost. At the height of orgasm Said the pallid phantasm, "I think I can feel it -- almost!" %% There ain't any news in being good. You might write the doings of all the convents of the world on the back of a postage stamp, and have room to spare. %% There ain't no cure for the summertime blues. %% There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% There appears a flight of dragons without heads. Good fortune. %% There appears before you a threatening figure clad all over in heavy black armor. His legs seem like the massive trunk of the oak tree. His broad shoulders and helmeted head loom high over your own puny frame and you realize that his powerful arms could easily crush the very life from your body. There hangs from his belt a veritable arsenal of deadly weapons: sword, mace, ball and chain, dagger, lance, and trident. He speaks with a commanding voice: "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" As he grabs you by the neck all grows dim about you. %% There appears to be irrefutable evidence that the mere fact of overcrowding induces violence. -- Harvey Wheeler %% There are 2 ways to handle women and I know neither. %% There are 32 points to the compass, meaning that there are 32 directions in which a spoon can squirt grapefruit; yet, the juice almost invariably flies straight into the human eye. -- Louis Sattler %% There are 350 varieties of shark, not counting loan and pool. -- L. M. Boyd %% There are 8 threatening little dwarves in the room with you. all of them throw knives at you!. All of them get you! %% There are Jews in the world, there are Buddhists, Every sperm is sacred, there are Hindus and Mormons and then Every sperm is great, there are those that follow Mohammed ...But... If a sperm is wasted, I've never been one of them. God gets quite irate. I am a Roman Catholic Every sperm is wanted, And have been since before I was born, Every sperm is good. And the one thing they say about Catholics is Every sperm is needed, They'll take you as soon as you're warm. In your neighborhood. You don't have to be a six-footer. Let the heathens spill theirs, You don't have to have a great brain. On the dusty ground. You don't have to have any clothes on, God shall make them pay for You're a Catholic the moment Dad came Each sperm that can't be found. ...Because... Hindu, Taoist, Mormon, Every sperm is useful, spill theirs just anywhere Every sperm is fine. but God loves those who treat their God needs everybodies, semen with more care. Mine, and mine, and mine. -- Monty Python, "Every Sperm is Sacred" %% There are a couple of things about her I greatly admire. %% There are a few recent issues of "Spelunker Today" magazine here. %% There are a few things that never go out of style, and a feminine woman is one of them. -- Ralston %% There are a finite number of jokes in the universe. %% There are a lot of drunk people about to drive home, so drive as fast as you can. It's harder for drunk people to hit you. %% There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back. -- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, "Peopleware", 1987 %% There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at its root. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% There are actually five billion types of people in the world, but aside from the fact that cataloging them would be more exhausting than exhaustive, this does not allow us to generalize, and is therefore useless. %% There are also a lot of nice buildings in Haiphong. What their contributions are to the war effort I don't know, but the desire to bomb a virgin building is terrific. -- Commander Henry Urban Jr. %% There are always alternatives. -- Spock, "The Galileo Seven," stardate 2822.3 %% There are always options. -- Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% There are as many Communists in the freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. %% There are bars of silver here! %% There are better information sources than fortune cookies. %% There are bugs and then there are bugs. And then there are bugs. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% There are but three classes of men: the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive. -- Lavater %% There are certain absolutes, and one of them is the right of humanoids to a free and unchained environment -- the right to have conditions which permit growth. Another is their right to choose that system which seems to work best for them. -- McCoy and Spock, "The Apple," stardate 3715.6 %% There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke. -- Herman Melville (1819-1891), "Moby Dick" %% There are certain things men must do to remain men. -- Kirk, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4929.4 %% There are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. This device [the universal translator] instantaneously compares the frequency of brain wave patterns, selects those ideas and concepts it recognizes, and then provides the necessary grammar. Then it simply translates its findings into English. -- Kirk and Spock, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8 %% There are charms made only for distant admiration. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution. -- Edward Abbey %% There are coexisting elements in frustrating phenomena which separate expected results from achieved results. %% There are diamonds here! %% There are eight million stories in the naked city- the following is NOT one of them: %% There are faint rustling noises from the darkness behind you. As you turn toward them, the beam of your lamp falls across a bearded pirate. He is carrying a large chest. "Shiver me timbers!" he cries, "I've been spotted! I'd best hie meself off to the maze to hide me chest!" with that, he vanishes into the gloom. %% There are faint rustling noises from the darkness behind you. Out from the shadows behind you pounces a bearded pirate! "Har, har," he chortles, "I'll just take all this booty and hide it away with me chest deep in the maze!" He snatches your treasure and vanishes into the gloom. %% There are few creative forces in the Law, because it is, by nature, rooted in the past. -- William O. Douglas %% There are few people more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be thought so. %% There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. -- Christian Nestell Bovee %% There are five things that women should never ask men, according to the April issue of Sassy magazine: What are you thinking? Do you love me? Do I look fat? Do you think she's prettier than me? What would you do if I died? The last is apparently the worst. %% There are four great cyphers in the world; he that is lame among dancers, dumb among lawyers, dull among scholars, and rude amongst courtiers. -- Bishop Earle %% There are four heads here, mounted securely on poles. %% There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy ... -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% There are four kinds of people that live in Great Britain. First are the Scots, Who hold onto their children and anything else they can get their hands on. Next are the Welsh, Who pray on their knees and on their neighbors. Then there are the Irish, Who don't know what they want, but they'll fight anyone for it. and last are the English, Who consider themselves self made men, which relieves the Almighty of any responsibility! %% There are four kinds of people: those who sit quietly and do nothing, those who talk about sitting quietly and doing nothing, those who do things, and those who talk about doing things. %% There are four pedals on the floor and two switches on the dash. None of the directions seem to be readable. However the cart seems to get heavy use so someone must understand how to use it. %% There are fresh batteries here. %% There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves. -- Arthur P. Stanley %% There are in business three things necessary -- knowledge, temper and time. -- Feltham %% There are in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two has the following record: The Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second is 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 is going to tell the other how to run the telephone business? I can hardly wait for the results. %% There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% There are lots of good women who, when they get to heaven, will watch to see if the Lord goes out nights. -- Ed Howe %% There are many aspects of human irrationality I do not yet comprehend. Obsession, for one. The persistent single-minded fixation on one idea. -- Spock, "Obsession," stardate 3619.6 %% There are many coins here! %% There are many inside dopes in politics and government. -- Mark B. Cohen %% There are many intelligent species in the universe. They all own cats. %% There are many occasions to weep In this trip to the ultimate leap. My tears are untrussed For I see that I've just Wiped a file I intended to keep. %% There are many people today who literally do not have a close personal friend. %% There are many people today who literally do not have a close personal friend. They may know something that we don't. They are probably avoiding a great deal of pain. %% There are many shards of broken glass here. %% There are many shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion; it is this, indeed, that gives a value to all the rest, which sets them to work in their proper times and places, and turns them to the advantage of the person who is possessed of them. Without it, learning is pedantry, and wit impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own principle. -- Addison %% There are many things I could say... %% There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home. %% There are many ways to say "I love you", but fucking is the fastest. %% There are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created. It is almost a biological rebellion. A profound revulsion against the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres. They hunger for an Eden, where spring comes. We all do. The cave is deep in our memories. -- Spock and Kirk, "The Way to Eden," stardate 5832.3 %% There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labour. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% There are monsters of softening penetration. %% There are monsters of striking charity. %% There are more horses' backsides in the military service of the United States than there are horses. -- Robert J. Clark %% There are more old drunkards than old doctors. %% There are more things in heaven and earth than any place else. %% There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of ... in either. %% There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. -- Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5, Line 166) %% There are more ways of killing a cat than buttering her with parsnips. %% There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream. %% There are never any bugs you haven't found yet. %% There are new messages. %% There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe. -- Baba Ram Dass %% There are no answers, only cross-references. -- Weiner %% There are no atheists in the foxholes of Bataan. -- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) %% There are no atheists in the foxholes. -- William Thomas Cummings, 1942 %% There are no bugs, only unrecognized features. %% There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis are chosen correctly. %% There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% There are no games on this system, and they are not located in NGC434:[JUNK.BLACKHOLES] %% There are no games on this system. %% There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet. -- Admiral William Halsey %% There are no greater wretches in the world than namy of those whom people in general take to be happy. -- Seneca %% There are no more fingers to fill. %% There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. -- Richard Davisson %% There are no refunds. %% There are no rules for March. March is spring, sort of, usually, March means maybe, but don't bet on it. %% There are no rules of architecture for castles in the sky. %% There are no saints, only unrecognized villains. %% There are no straight lines in space. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) There are no straight lines in space. -- Woody Allen %% There are no strangers here -- only friends we have not met. %% There are no tall guys named Phil. %% There are no ugly loves, nor handsome prisons. -- Poor Richard %% There are no winners in life, only survivors. %% There are none more abusive to others than they that lie most open to it themselves; but the humor goes round, and he that laughs at me today will have somebody to laugh at him tomorrow. -- Seneca %% There are not enough storage registers to solve the problem. -- John L. Shelton %% There are old engravings on the walls here. %% There are only 2 enterprises that refer to their customers as users, and one is illegal -- Michael Hammer %% There are only 2000 real people in the world; the rest are bad special effects %% There are only two families in the world, the Haves and the Have-nots. -- de Cervantes (1547-1616) %% There are only two kinds of books--good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time. -- Edward Abbey %% There are only two kinds of tequila. Good and better. %% There are only two things a child will share willingly -- communicable diseases and his mother's age. -- Benjamin Spock %% There are people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying. -- Josh Billings %% There are people who find it odd to eat four or five Chinese meals in a row; In China, I often remind them, there are a billion or so people who find nothing odd about it. -- Calvin Trillin %% There are perhaps only three certain ways to make money betting: as a bookmaker, as a tipster or with certain superior information. The first needs no explanation, and the smart tipster has only satisfied customers -- he returns his fee when his tip is proved wrong. -- Computer Bulletin, Sept. 1980 %% There are places I'll remember All my life though some have changed. Some forever not for better Some have gone and some remain. All these places had their moments With lovers and friends I still recall. Some are dead and some are living, In my life I've loved them all. But of all these friends and lovers, There is no one compared with you, All these memories lose their meaning When I think of love as something new. Though I know I'll never lose affection For people and things that went before, I know I'll often stop and think about them In my life I'll love you more. -- Lennon/McCartney, "In My Life", 1965 %% There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What the country really needs is a good five-cent nickel. -- Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.) (1881-1960) %% There are pretty flowers growing here. %% There are rare spices here! %% There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone. -- Gloria Steinem %% There are revolutions that are sweeping the world and we in America have been in a position of trying to stop them. With all the wealth of America, with all of the military strength of America, those revolutions are revolutions against a form of political and economic organization in the countries of Asia and the Middle East that are oppressive. They are revolutions against feudalism. (1952) -- Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) %% There are running jobs. Why don't you go chase them? %% There are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject. %% There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% There are so many bonds that hold us together. Your government bonds, your savings bonds, your Liberty bonds. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% There are so many earthquakes and tornados that we don't even recognize them as signs. -- Mark E. Petersen %% There are some batteries for sale here. %% There are some discarded worn-out batteries here. %% There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Bramhs Requiem. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% There are some fresh extra batteries here. %% There are some glittering bangles lying here. %% There are some keys on the ground here. %% There are some micro-organisms that exhibit characteristics of both plants and animals. When exposed to light they undergo photosynthesis; and when the lights go out, they turn into animals. But then again, don't we all? %% There are some moldy old bones here. %% There are some nails here. %% There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell em. -- Yogi Berra %% There are some things about you that I like; I just can't put my fingers on them. %% There are some things that it is impossible to know, but, of course, it is impossible to know these things. %% There are some things we mustn't expose, So we hide them away in our clothes. Oh, it's shocking to stare At what's certainly there-- But why this is so, heaven knows. %% There are some things worth dying for. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3201.7 %% There are souls which fall from heaven like flowers, but ere they bloom are crushed under the foul tread of some brutal hoof. -- Richter %% There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee. -- Robert W. Service %% There are ten or twenty basic truths, and life is the process of discovering them over and over and over. -- David Nichols %% There are these two country farmers. One is milking this cow, the other is bulling the shoot. While the one farmer is milking, a fly zooms into the cows ear. The cow starts jumping around, shaking its head and mooing. Jed tries to steady the cow, but suddenly, it settles down. Jed looks down, and behold, the fly is in the milk pail. Jed asks Jethro "Golly, how'd that fly get down there so fast?" Jethro replies.... "IN ONE EAR AND OUT THE UDDER!" %% There are things on heaven and earth, Horatio, Man was not meant to know. -- Hamlet %% There are those that are born to be on top and those that are born to be on bottom. Like officers and soldiers. -- Sergeant Traub %% There are those who argue that everything breaks even... I suppose that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. -- Bat Masterson %% There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it swells and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in concentrated pools here and there, almost disappearing from other spots, leaving them parched for wonder. There are also those who believe that if you stick your fingers up your nose and blow, it will increase your intelligence. -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII %% There are those who think that life is nothing left to chance. A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance. A planet of playthings we dance on the strings Of powers we cannot perceive. The stars aren't aligned, or the gods are malign, Blame is better to give than receive. You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will. There are those who think that they were dealt a losing hand. The cards were stacked against them. They weren't born in Lotus land. All was preordained, a prisoner in chains, A victim of venomous fate. Kicked in the face, you can pray for a place In heaven's unearthly estate. Each of us, a cell of awareness imperfect and incomplete. Genetic blends with uncertain ends on a fortune hunt that's far too fleet. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% There are three faithful friends -- old Bert, old Ham, and Ronald Reagan. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% There are three great questions which in life we have over and over again to answer: Is it right or wrong? Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our education ought ot help us to answer these questions. -- John Lubbock %% There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: (1) - to tell him you have read one of his books; (2) - to tell him you have read all of his books; (3) - to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart. %% There are three kinds of friends: best friends, guest friends, and pest friends. %% There are three kinds of liars: 1. Plain liars 2. Damn liars 3. Statisticians %% There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% There are three kinds of people in the world -- those who can count, and those who can't. %% There are three kinds of people you will have to deal with in life, fools, damn fools, and sons of lady dogs. -- N. G. Herreschoff (Designer of six America's Cup defenders) %% There are three kinds of people: men, women, and unix. %% There are three parts in truth: first, the inquiry, which is the wooing of it; secondly, the knowledge of it, which is the presence of it; and thirdly, the belief, which is the enjoyment of it. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; or someone loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor. %% There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted. -- Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior %% There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering. %% There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory, decreased short term memory, and I forget the third. -- Timothy Leary %% There are three sides to every story -- yours, mine, and all that lie between. -- Jody Kern %% There are three things I always forget. Names, faces -- the third I can't remember. -- Italo Svevo %% There are three things I have always loved and never understood - art, music, and women. %% There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. -- Stephen Stills %% There are three ways of knowing you're getting really old: One is memory loss . . . . and I've forgotten the other two. %% There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it. -- Monta Crane %% There are three women on the fast track in a particular company. The president realizes it's time to promote one of them, but they're all so competent that he's not sure which one to choose. So he devises a little test. One day while they're all at lunch, he places $500 on each of their desks. #1 returns it to him immediately. #2 pockets it. #3 invests in the market and returns $1,500 to him in the morning. Who gets the promotion? The one with the big tits! %% There are times when even the best manager is like the little boy with the big dog waiting to see where the dog wants to go so he can take him there. -- Lee Iacocca %% There are times when truth is stranger than fiction and lunch time is one of them. %% There are times, Sir, when men of good conscience cannot blindly follow orders. You acknowledge their sentience, but you ignore their personal liberties...and freedom. Order a man to hand his child over to the state. Not while I'm his Captain. -- Picard to Admiral Haftel, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% There are trivial truths and the great truth. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true. -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) %% There are twenty-five people left in the world, and twenty-seven of them are hamburgers. -- Ed Sanders %% There are two candles here. %% There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring: impatience and laziness. -- Franz Kafka %% There are two distinct sorts of what we call bashfulness; this, the awkwardness of a booby, which a few steps into the world will convert into the pertness of a cox comb; that, a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove. -- Mackenzie %% There are two kinds are art: (1) decorative, nonobjective, wallpaper art; and (2) art with a moral purpose. -- Edward Abbey %% There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us %% There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did but never thought. %% There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, therefore it is superior." The other says, "This is new, therefore it is better." %% There are two kinds of lawyers, those who know the law and those who know the judge. %% There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group. -- Edward Abbey %% There are two kinds of people in the world: Those we love, and those we don't understand. %% There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who can only see half of the picture. %% There are two kinds of people: those who'll argue over anything and those who'll argue over nothing. %% There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect the sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the sunlight that hits your neighbors' homes, too. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" %% There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. -- Jeremy S. Anderson %% There are two reasons for doing things -- a very good reason and the real reason. -- Anon. %% There are two sides to every divorce: yours and the shithead's. %% There are two things in life for which we are never fully prepared, and that is -- twins. -- Josh Billings %% There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% 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. %% There are two types of people in this world - Those who want to control and those who want to be controlled. %% There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more. -- Woody Allen %% There are two was to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. -- Alfred Korzybski %% There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. -- Charles Anthony Richard Hoare %% There are two ways of disliking art. One is to dislike it. The other is to like it rationally. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% There are two ways of teaching people: You can teach them how to think, or you can teach them what to think. Socrates taught people how to think, Jesus taught people what to think.... and look what happened to them. %% There are two ways to improve on human factors in computing: Make the programmers less stupid and/or make the users less stupid. Both are necessary, neither are likely. -- Digital Teddy Bear (dlarson@blake.acs.washington.edu) %% There are two ways we can meet a difficulty: either we can alter the difficulty or we can alter ourselves to meet it. %% There are very few original thinkers in the world; the greatest part of those who are called philosophers have adopted the opinions of some who went before them. -- Dugald Stewert %% There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives. %% There are very few problems which can't be solved by ripping a hole in reality. %% There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% There are visible walls to the north and south. %% There are walls faintly visible to the north and south. An opening is visible in the south wall. %% There are walls on every side but the south. Dead end. %% There are walls to the east, west, and south. Dead end. %% There are walls to the north and east. A small opening is visible in the north wall. %% There are walls visible to the west and south. %% There aren't enough days in the weekend. -- Rod Schmidt %% There but for the grace of God, goes God. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill, speaking of Sir Stafford Cripps %% There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions. When has justice been as simple as a rulebook. -- Picard and Riker, "Justice", stardate 41255.6 %% There can be no regulation in the Minds nor in the Hearts of Women, unless their temperament is in unison with it. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% There can be no twisted thought without a twisted molecule. -- R. W. Gerard %% There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. -- Henry Kissinger %% There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice. -- Edward Abbey %% There comes a time in a man's life when he must rise above principle. %% There comes a time in the affairs of a man when he has to take the bull by the tail and face the situation. -- W. C. Fields %% There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last. -- Edward Abbey %% There comes a time to stop being angry. -- A Small Circle of Friends %% There comes a time when one must stop suggesting and evaluating new solutions, and get on with the job of analyzing and implementing one pretty good solution. -- Robert Machol %% There comes to all races an ultimate crisis which you have yet to face .... One day our minds became so powerful we dared think of ourselves as gods. -- Sargon, "Return to Tomorrow," stardate 4768.3 %% There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. -- Charles F. Kettering %% There exist tasks which cannot be done by more than 10 men or fewer than 100. -- Steele's Law %% There has been a little distress selling on the stock exchange. -- Thomas W. Lamont (29 Oct 1929) %% There has been a long history of optimizing the wrong things, using elaborate mechanisms to produce beautiful code in cases that hardly ever arise in practice, while doing nothing about frequently occurring situations. -- Donald Knuth %% There has been a severe error in this game. Please report this error to someone. In the meantime, you are stuck unless you can walk through stone walls. We condone suicide at this point. %% There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about. %% There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword. -- Benjamin Dana %% There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so fucked up by chance alone. -- Edward Abbey %% There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love. -- Edward Abbey %% There has never been an "original" sin: each is quite banal. -- Edward Abbey %% There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal. -- Edward Abbey %% There hasn't been a good-looking American car in 20 years. %% There have always been disposable creatures. -- Guinan, "The Measure of a Man", stardate 42523.7 %% There have been cases where people's shoes got stuck on their feet and could never be removed. %% There have been people like you in here; their ghosts seek revenge on you. %% There he was at the office Christmas party, grazing at the goodie table. %% There is _never_ no hope left. Remember. -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% There is a 1-pound box of alta-dena butter here. %% There is a 12-foot-tall beanstalk stretching up out of the pit, bellowing "Water!! Water!!" %% There is a 20% chance of tomorrow. %% There is a 20-pound bag of k-mart special banana tree mulch here. %% There is a 4-meter saguaro cactus stretching high above your head. %% There is a 5 kilogram sack of morton's salt here. %% There is a Catholic church in a resort town on Lake Michigan whose priest HATED parishioners who came late to Mass. My uncle and his wife attended this church regularly during the summer, and were unlucky enough to be late one Sunday. When they strolled in, the priest stopped talking and the church was silent until they sat down (a wait of about a minute). The priest finally said "You should make more of an effort to get to church ON TIME." Without blinking an eye, my uncle said "Why? Did we miss collection?" %% There is a Gnome of Zurich here. %% There is a Massachusetts law requiring all dogs to have their hind legs tied during the month of April. %% There is a New America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not. -- Adlai E. Stevenson %% There is a Persian rug spread out on the floor! %% There is a Stradivarius here. %% There is a VIP-lounge on this level. Only first-class travellers admitted. %% There is a balloon here, broken into pieces. %% There is a beautiful brass bauble here. %% There is a beautiful crystal sphere here. %% There is a beautiful rug on the floor here. %% There is a beautiful statue here. %% There is a bloody axe here. %% There is a blue book here. %% There is a blue label here. %% There is a boat rolling gently in the waters here. %% There is a book in the bookcase. %% There is a book of matches here. %% There is a bottle of oil here. %% There is a bottle of water here. %% There is a bowl of fruit salad here. %% There is a brass lantern (battery-powered) here. %% There is a bright amethyst here. %% There is a bright red ticket here. %% There is a broken brass lantern here. %% There is a bundle of sheet music here. %% There is a burned out ivory torch here. %% There is a burned-out lantern here. %% There is a calling under the breath, a cry that goes on long as a vein. It is the last senseless moment of the organism, the instant of death that cries back through the narrows of air from the ferrous edge. -- Schiavoni and Malamocco, Voorish Rituals %% There is a can of 3-in-1 oil here. %% There is a canvas picture of 12 magic trees here. %% There is a card with writing on it here. %% There is a cauldron full of creamed rutabaga soup here. %% There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place. -- Washington Irving %% There is a chasm too wide to jump across. %% There is a chocolate-covered cherry here. %% There is a clap of thunder and the east door opens. %% There is a clap of thunder, and a voice echoes through the cavern: "Begone, chomper!" Apparently, the voice thinks you are an evil spirit and dismisses you from the land of the living. %% There is a clap of thunder, and a voice echoes through the cavern: "Begone, fiends!" The spirits, sensing the presense of a greater power, flee through the walls. %% There is a claw hammer here. %% There is a clove of garlic here. %% There is a coconut here. %% There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for. -- Fred Hoyle %% There is a coil of thin shiny wire here. %% There is a contented-looking bear wandering about nearby. %% There is a control panel here. There is a large metal bolt on the panel. Above the bolt is a small green plastic bubble. %% There is a curtain of light there. %% There is a darkness, a darkness in her pretty face from which no man can keep Candy safe. %% There is a dead herring here. %% There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure. -- Edward Abbey %% There is a definite parallel between shots of tequila and a woman's breasts. One is not enough and three are too many. %% There is a delicate, precious, Ming vase here! %% There is a dented steel box here. %% There is a difference between "celibate" and simply "not getting any". It's like the difference between "fast" and "starve". After all of Esther's posts, I still can't figure out exactly which category she fits into. Let's see if I can make this plain. Esther: If Mel Gibson offered you a doughnut, would you eat it? -- Ajay Jain %% There is a feeling among sailors that borders on fatalism. It is born of the belief that a ship can never get lost. When you run out of water, you always run into land. It may not be the right land; but then, if it were, America would still be undiscovered. -- Robert E. Mirvish %% There is a fence in the way. %% There is a ferocious cave bear eying you from the far end of the room! %% There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks. -- Edward Abbey %% There is a fine crystal goblet here. %% There is a firm, ripe rutabaga here. %% There is a fish in the tank. No blame. Does not further guests. %% There is a flashlight for sale here. %% There is a flashlight here. %% There is a flathead commemorative stamp here. %% There is a fly on your Dimension! %% There is a fly on your nose. %% There is a folded pile of plastic here which has a small valve attached. %% There is a four-word formula for success that applies equally well to organizations or individuals -- make yourself more useful. %% There is a fragile rickety wooden bridge here, spanning the canyon. %% There is a game in progress under your name. %% There is a gentle cave bear sitting placidly in one corner. %% There is a giant spark, and you are fried to a crisp. %% There is a gigantic beanstalk stretching all the way up to the hole. %% There is a gigantic pile of line-printer output here. Although the paper once contained useful information, almost nothing can be distinguished now. %% There is a girl in our town, Silk and satin is her gown, Silk and satin, gold and velvet, Can you guess her name? Three times I've telled it. "Ann" %% There is a golden chain locked to the wall! %% There is a golden chain lying in a heap on the floor! %% There is a golden clockwork canary here. %% There is a golden clockwork canary nestled in the egg. It seems to have recently had a bad experience. The mountings for its jewel-like eyes are empty, and its silver beak is crumpled. Through a cracked crystal window below its left wing you can see the remains of intricate machinery. It is not clear what result winding it would have, as the mainspring appears sprung. %% There is a golden clockwork canary nestled in the egg. It has ruby eyes and a silver beak. Through a crystal window below its left wing you can see intricate machinery inside. It appears to have wound down. %% There is a grating securely fastened into the ground. %% There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature: that of paying literary men by the quantity they do NOT write. %% There is a green book here. %% There is a green lizard on your left leg. %% There is a green piece of paper here. %% There is a green, multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder. %% There is a happy red herring here. %% There is a hard hat lying here. %% There is a hideous disgusting spider hanging in the trees nearby! %% There is a high-quality knife manufactured from tempered steel here. %% There is a hissing sound and the boat deflates. %% There is a huge beanstalk growing out of the west pit up to the hole. %% There is a huge block of ice here. %% There is a huge poisonous spider hanging in the trees nearby! %% There is a hunk of bat guano here. %% There is a jewel-encrusted egg here. %% There is a jewel-encrusted trident here! %% There is a juicy red apple here. %% There is a juicy ripe mango here. %% There is a keel for a small boat here. %% There is a kind of greatness which does not depend upon fortune; it is a certain manner that distinguishes us, and which seems to destine us for great things; it is the value we insensibly set upon ourselves; it is by this quality, that we gain the deference of other men, and it is this which commonly raises us more above them, than birth, rank, or even merit itself. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% There is a kind of poetry in simple fact. -- Edward Abbey %% There is a lace pillow here with frills all around it. %% There is a lady driving down a one way street going the wrong way, and a policeman hails her over to the curb and says, "Hey, lady! Didn't you see the arrows?" To which the lady replies, "Sorry, officer. I didn't even see the indians!" The same lady is driving down another one way street going the wrong way, and ANOTHER policemen waves her down and says, "Hey lady! This is one way!" To which the lady replies, "But officer, I'm only going one way!" The lady is driving down ANOTHER one way street going the wrong way, and another policeman pulls her over and says, "Hey, lady! Where do ya think yer goin?" To which she says, (she's getting good at this by now) "I don't know officer. But I must be late. They're all coming back!" %% There is a lamp shining nearby. %% There is a large black book here. %% There is a large broken mirror blocking your way. %% There is a large case here, containing objects which you used to possess. %% There is a large clump of spinach here. %% There is a large coil of rope here. %% There is a large emerald here. %% There is a large fruit still uneaten. The superior man receives a carriage. The house of the inferior man is split apart. %% There is a large gorilla here. %% There is a large nest here, full of golden eggs! %% There is a large passageway leading westward. %% There is a large piece of canvas for sale. %% There is a large pile of empty coke bottles here, evidently produced by the implementers during their long struggle to win totally. %% There is a large platinum bar here. %% There is a large shovel here. %% There is a large sparkling nugget of gold here! %% There is a large wooden picture frame here. %% There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. -- Edmund Burke %% There is a lit brass lamp here. %% There is a lit torch here, dangerously close to your feet. %% There is a little axe here. %% There is a little axe lying beside the bear. %% There is a little baby cactus growing in the sand here. %% There is a little bird in the cage. %% There is a little labeled pouch filled with magic dust here. %% There is a long rope lying here. %% There is a long stout timber that seems to be supporting the ceiling of the cave. It is wedged in between two circlets of rock on the floor and roof. %% There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the dwarves in the rubble. You march through the hole and find yourself in the main office, where a cheering band of friendly elves carry the conquering adventurer off into the sunset. %% There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the snakes in the rubble. A river of molten lava pours in through the hole, destroying everything in its path, including you! %% There is a loud explosion, and you are suddenly splashed across the walls of the room. %% There is a lovely blood-red ruby here. %% There is a lovely opal here. %% There is a lovely treasure chest here. %% There is a mangled cage here. %% There is a map here. %% There is a massive vending machine here. The instructions on it read: "Drop coins here to receive fresh batteries." %% There is a matchbook whose cover says, "VISIT BEAUTIFUL FCD #3", here. %% There is a message scrawled in the dust in a flowery script, reading: "This is not the maze where the pirate leaves his treasure chest." %% There is a mill with seven corners, In each corner stand seven bags, Upon each bag sit seven cats, each cat has seven kittens, Then the miller and his wife come into the mill. How many feet are now in the mill? 4 (cat's have paws) %% There is a moby ruby lying here. %% There is a move in the Texas legislature to put the words "The Lone Star State" in our plain looking car plates. One representative unsuccessfully tried to amend it to "The Savings and Lone Star State." %% There is a multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder. -- Spock, "A Taste of Armageddon," stardate 3193.9 %% There is a nasty-looking knife lying here. %% There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% There is a natural hootchy-kootchy to a goldfish. -- Walt Disney %% There is a nervous volcano gnome here. %% There is a new anti-communist organization that advocates the use of wooden toilet seats... It's called the Birch John Society. %% There is a non-functional canary here. %% There is a note here reading "Good for any 2 items at the general store." %% There is a pearl necklace here with hundreds of large pearls. %% There is a piece of cake where with the words "EAT ME" on it. %% There is a piece of cake with blue (ecch) icing here. %% There is a piece of cake with red icing here. %% There is a pile of leaves on the ground. %% There is a pile of plastic here with a large hole in it. %% There is a pile of wooden timbers here. %% There is a pinecone here. %% There is a place for a decisive gamble where you know your enemy and can calculate the risks at least roughly; but to move at all against an unknown enemy is boldness in itself. -- Bel Riose %% There is a platinum pyramid here, 8 inches on a side! %% There is a pleasure in being mad, Which none but madmen know. -- Dryden %% There is a pot of gold here. %% There is a pretty jade necklace here. %% There is a purple book here. %% There is a quantity of white powder here. %% There is a recipe lying on the ground. %% There is a red buoy here (probably a warning). %% There is a ripe grape here. %% There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% There is a robot here. %% There is a room with 3 computers on a table: an Apple, an HP, and an IBM. Suddenly there is an earthquake (obviously a California story). What happens to the computers? All 3 fall. The Apple hits the floor and breaks. The HP hits the floor and keeps on working. And a Customer Service Engineer bursts into the room to catch the IBM before it can reach the floor. %% There is a rope here, tied to the bottom rung of the ladder. %% There is a rug lying next to an open trap door. %% There is a rumble from deep within the earth, and the room shakes. %% There is a rumbling sound and a stream of water appears to burst from the east wall of the room (apparently, a leak has occurred in a pipe). %% There is a rusty anchor in the trash can. %% There is a rusty knife here. %% There is a sapphire-encrusted bracelet here. %% There is a saying among trial lawyers: "Never ask a question unless you are already SURE of the answer." For Dungeon Masters/Game Masters that should be Never roll the dice unless you're sure the outcome is acceptable." For computer scientists, it reads: "Unless you know what to do with a error condition, never test for it." -- Eric Holtman, info-unix mail %% There is a screwdriver here. %% There is a set of skeleton keys here. %% There is a sharp broken stick here. %% There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. %% There is a silver chalice, intricately engraved, here. %% There is a single wall visible to the north. %% There is a single west wall here. %% There is a small birds nest here. %% There is a small brass bell here. %% There is a small clump of spinach here. %% There is a small door to the south. %% There is a small heap of coal here. %% There is a small hook attached to the rock here. %% There is a small leaflet here. %% There is a small mailbox here. %% There is a small piece of vitreous slag here. %% There is a small pouch of spices here. %% There is a small pump here. %% There is a small ship with a patched sail anchored off shore. %% There is a small wicker cage discarded nearby. %% There is a small wooden box here. %% There is a solid gold coffin, used for the burial of Ramses II, here. %% There is a solution to every problem; the only difficulty is finding it. %% There is a somewhat ruined egg here. %% There is a spaceship here on the beach. %% There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In it there are an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters. Whenever a monkey walks across a typewriter it types, purely by chance, one of Shakespeare's sonnets. %% There is a special feel in an Oldsmobile (442) %% There is a square brick here which feels like clay. %% There is a stack of computer paper here. %% There is a state law prohibiting the blindfolding of cows on Arkansas public highways. %% There is a statistical correlation between the number of initials in an Englishman's name and his social class (the upper class having significantly more than three names, while members of the lower class average 2.6). %% There is a sterling silver buckle here. %% There is a story about a software contractor who was hired to write code to calculate range tables for the US Navy. They used feet for altitude and statute miles for range. "No! We're the Navy. Use NAUTICAL miles!" the Navy said. So the contractor changed the code to use nautical miles for the range. And negative fathoms for the altitude. -- Peter Bain %% There is a sudden flash of blinding white light about you. %% There is a sunkist orange here. %% There is a suspicious-looking individual lying unconscious on the ground. His bag and stiletto seem to have vanished. %% There is a suspicious-looking individual, holding a bag, leaning against one wall. He is armed with a vicious-looking stiletto. %% There is a sword here with its blade plunged deep into the block of stone. %% There is a sword lying here, jauntily singing the theme from camelot. %% There is a tan label here. %% There is a tendency for the person in the most powerful position in an organization to spend all his time serving on committees and signing letters. %% There is a theory that states: "If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bazaarly inexplicable." There is another theory that states: "This has already happened ...." -- Donald Adams, "Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" %% There is a threatening little dwarf in the room with you! %% There is a three-legged stool on the ground here. %% There is a tide in the affairs of men which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. -- William Shakespeare %% There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries: On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. -- William Shakespeare %% There is a time in the tides of men, Which, taken at its flood, leads on to success. On the other hand, don't count on it. -- T. K. Lawson %% There is a tin of rare spices here. %% There is a tiny little plant in the pit, murmuring "water, water, ..." %% There is a tour guidebook here. %% There is a trap on this level! %% There is a trophy case here. %% There is a tunnel leaving the room to the north. %% There is a vast difference between putting your nose in other people's business and putting your heart in other people's problems. %% There is a very large and extremely heavy wicker basket with a cloth bag here. Inside the basket is a metal receptacle of some kind. Attached to the basket on the outside is a piece of wire. %% There is a very valuable sapphire here. %% There is a vicious-looking stiletto here. %% There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, which is translated through into action. And because there is only one You in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and the world will have lost it. -- Martha Graham %% There is a wall there. %% There is a way on high, conspicuous in the clear heavens, called the Milky Way, brilliant with its own brightness. By it the gods go to the dwelling of the great Thunderer and his royal abode ... Here the famous and mighty inhabitants of heaven have their homes. this is the region which I might make bold to call the Palatine [Way] of the Great Sky. -- Ovid %% There is a way to explore that region without having to worry about falling into a pit. None of the objects available is immediately useful in discovering the secret. %% There is a western exit, a passageway south, and a steep pathway climbing up along the edge of a cliff. %% There is a white book here. %% There is a wide difference between general acquaintance and companionship. You may salute a man and exchange compliments with him daily, yet know nothing of his character, his inmost tastes and feelings. -- William Matthews %% There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino. -- Edward Abbey %% There is a wooden bowl at your feet. %% There is a wooden bucket here, three feet in diameter and three feet high. %% There is a wooden wall blocking your way. %% There is a wrench here. %% There is a young faggot named Mose Who insists that you fuck his long nose. And you'll double the joy Of this lecherous boy If you'll tickle his balls with your toes. %% There is a young woman from Riga With morals depressingly meager, She's seduced twice a week By a lecherous Greek If "seduced" is the word when she's eager. %% There is always a party going on somewhere. %% There is always a way, and it usually doesn't work. %% There is always an easy answer to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% There is always more hell that needs raising. -- Lauren Leveut %% There is always one more bug. %% There is always someone worse off than yourself. %% There is always something new out of Africa. -- Gaius Plinius Secundus %% There is always something on television. %% There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations. -- Ihara Saikaku %% There is an Italian a Frenchman and a Greek. Having been captured by a group of savage cannibals, they are given one last wish before being thrown into the kettle and then having their skin peeled off and used as the covering for a canoe. So the savages ask the French guy what his is: "I would like a gun." So he takes the gun and says: "I will die by my own hand!" And he blows his brains out. The greek guy says :" I would like a knife, please," and he stabs himself and says "I will not be killed by a group of savage cannibals" The Italian dude says : "I would like a fork." He stabs his chest repeatedly with the fork and says : "You're not making a canoe out of me!" %% There is an acorn here. %% There is an ancient egyptian amulet here. %% There is an elvish sword here. %% There is an emerald here the size of a plover's egg! %% There is an empty bottle here. %% There is an enchanted ring here. %% There is an engraved Zorkmid coin here. %% There is an enormous diamond (perfectly cut) here. %% There is an enormous oyster here with its shell tightly closed. %% There is an enormous saguaro cactus reaching up into the sky here. %% There is an enormous stack of line-printer paper here. It is barely readable and totally unintelligible. %% There is an eternal principle that states that service is essential to salvation. -- Bruce R. McConkie %% There is an exception to every rule, except this one. %% There is an explosion nearby. %% There is an exquisite jade figurine here. %% There is an extremely nasty spider hanging in the trees nearby! %% There is an extremely valuable (perhaps original) grail here. %% There is an imaginary universe just around the corner from reality and next door to the twilight zone. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to explore the landscape and gather up treasures. %% There is an important subgenre of humorous ASCII art that takes advantage of the names of the various characters to tell a pun-based joke. +--------------------------------------------------------+ | ^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | +--------------------------------------------------------+ " A Bee in the Carrot Patch " -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% There is an infinite number of describable functions, which are not effectively computable. -- N. Jones, "Computability Theory" Note: This contradicts the oft stated maxim "If a function can be defined, it can be programmed". %% There is an inflated boat here. %% There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has not yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% There is an inverse relationship between the uniqueness of an observation and the number of investigators who report it simultaneously. -- A. B. Pardee %% There is an iron "scold's bridle" in Walton Church. They used these things in ancient days for curbing women's tongues. They have given up the attempt now. I suppose iron was getting scarce, and nothing else would be strong enough. -- Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat" %% There is an issue of US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT dated 10-SEP-78 here. %% There is an ivory torch here. %% There is an object which looks like a tube of toothpaste here. %% There is an odd saying here that a man must do three things during life: Plant trees, write books and have sons. I wish they would plant more trees and write more books. -- Luis Munoz Marin %% There is an old cauldron here. %% There is an old charmed key here. %% There is an old custom among my people. When a woman saves a man's life, he is grateful. -- Nona, the Kanuto which woman, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8 %% There is an old key in the lock. %% There is an old time toast which is golden for its beauty. "When you ascend the hill of prosperity may you not meet a friend." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% There is an old trunk here, bulging with assorted jewels. %% There is an open grating descending into darkness. %% There is an order of things in this universe. -- Apollo, "Who Mourns for Adonais?," stardate 3468.1 %% There is an steel cage in the middle of the room. %% There is an ugly person staring at you. %% There is an unpleasant grinding noise from inside the canary. %% There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between counsel of a friend and a flatterer. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% There is but one element of government, and that is THE PEOPLE. From this element spring all governments. "For a nation to be free, it is only necessary that she wills it." For a nation to be slave, it is only necessary that she wills it. -- John Adams (1735-1826) %% There is drinking of wine In genuine confidence. No blame. But if one wets his head, He loses it, in truth. %% There is fast forming in this country an aristocracy of wealth, the worst form of aristocracy that can curse the prosperity of a nation. -- Peter Cooper (1791-1883) %% There is food here. %% There is food in the \fIting\fR. My comrades are envious, But they cannot harm me. Good fortune. %% There is game in the field. It furthers one to catch it. Without blame. Let the eldest lead the army. The younger transports corpses; Then perseverance brings misfortune. %% There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. -- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) %% There is growing evidence that smoking has pharamacological ... effects that are of real value to smokers. -- Joseph F. Cullman III (Pres. of Phillip Morris) Annual Report to Stockholders, 1962 %% There is hardly a thing in the world that some man can not make a little worse and sell a little cheaper. %% There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world with surprise and horror. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% There is in certain living souls A quality of loneliness unspeakable, So great it must be shared As company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this That in immensity There is one lonelier than you. %% There is intelligent life on Earth, but I'm just visiting. %% There is just one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you said in Opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible. -- John Galsworthy (1867-1933) %% There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program: Your tax dollar will go farther. %% There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror. -- William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) %% There is many a good man to be found under a shabby hat. %% There is more at stake here than our lives. -- Col. Travis (Alamo Pep Talk) %% There is more magic in this cave than meets the eye. %% There is more to life than increasing its speed. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) %% There is more to life than meets the mind. %% There is more to life than work. Do not let time pass you by. %% There is much Obi-Wan did not tell you. -- Darth Vader %% There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% There is much to admire in the work of D. H. Lawrence--excepting his queer, soft, gooey, and epicene prose. -- Edward Abbey %% There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but there is always enough time to do it over. %% There is no God! He just thinks he's there! %% There is no TRUTH. There is no REALITY. There is no CONSISTENCY. There are no ABSOLUTE STATEMENTS I'm very probably wrong. %% There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. -- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) %% There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if only you begin to inculate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% There is no answer. %% There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver, the mind cannot use its wings--the clearest proof that it is out of its element. -- Hare %% There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law. No artist ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth. -- Jean Giraudoux %% There is no bigotry like that of "free thought" run to seed. -- Horace Greeley (1811-1872) %% There is no business like throw business. %% There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice. -- Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) %% There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering. -- Cato %% There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it? -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% There is no conflict between liberty and safety. We will have both or neither. -- Ramsey Clark %% There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires -- if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical ... A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy -- so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients. -- John Galt %% There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness. -- Countess of Blessington %% There is no counter for a spirited woman except a spirited drink. -- R. Butler %% There is no courage, but in innocence, No constancy, but in an honest cause. -- Southern %% There is no cure for birth and death other than to enjoy the interval. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% There is no dark side of the moon. Really. %% There is no difference between man and man, as there is between man and beast or between man and God, that makes one by nature the ruler of another. This does not mean that there are not wide differences among men, or that it is not often to the advantage of some to be ruled by others. -- Harry V. Jaffa %% There is no difference between theory and practice in theory, but there is often a great deal of difference between theory and practice in practice. %% There is no distinction between any AI program and some existent game. %% There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. -- Seneca %% There is no education that is not political. An apolitical education is also political because it is purposely isolating. %% There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% There is no excuse for laziness, but I'm working on it. %% There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking. -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% There is no failure except in no longer trying. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear. %% There is no fool to the old fool. -- John Heywood %% There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed. -- Edward Abbey %% There is no fortress so strong that money cannot take it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% There is no free lunch. -- Barry Commoner %% There is no freedom without the power to defend it. %% There is no friendship which time does not decay and destroy. %% There is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers. -- Seneca %% There is no great genius free from some tincture of madness. -- Seneca, "On Tranquility of the Mind" %% There is no great genius without some touch of madness. -- Seneca, "On Tranquility of the Mind" %% There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country. -- Joseph Addison %% There is no greater sorrow than to recall a time of happiness in misery. %% There is no grief which time does not lessen and soften. %% There is no grue here, but I'm sure there is at least one lurking in the darkness nearby. I wouldn't let my light go out if I were you! %% There is no harm in praising a large dog. %% There is no hope -- the future will but turn the old sand in the falling glass of time. -- R. H. Stoddard %% There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter. -- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) %% There is no knowledge that is not power. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist. -- A. Trevor Hodge %% There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity. -- Gene Wolfe %% There is no limit to the amount of good that people can accomplish, if they don't care who gets the credit. -- Anonymous %% There is no longer any way across the chasm. %% There is no love sincerer than the love of food. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler than he is by nature. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% There is no market for gloom. You cannot sell it. What the world wants, needs, and will buy is cheer. %% There is no more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. -- William James %% There is no music in space. %% There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% There is no obvious way to open the egg. %% There is no one else like you. %% There is no one orthodoxy which is the enemy of democracy. All of them are. -- James Higgins %% There is no ox so dumb as the orthodox. -- George Francis Gillette %% There is no pardon FOR Murphy's Law. %% There is no pardon FROM Murphy's Law. %% There is no personal charm so great as the charm of a cheerful temperament. -- Henry van Dyke %% There is no point in waiting. The train stopped running years ago. All the schedules, the brochures, The bright-colored posters full of lies, Promise rides to a distant country That no longer exists. %% There is no possible line of conduct which has not at some time and place been condemned, and which at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty. -- William E. H. Lecky (1838-1903) %% There is no problem which cannot be solved by a suitable application of high explosives. -- William W. Hughes whughes@lonestar.utsa.edu %% There is no proposition, no matter how foolish, for which a dozen Nobel signatures cannot be collected. Furthermore, any such petition is guaranteed page-one treatment in The New York Times. -- Daniel S. Greenberg %% There is no proverb that is not true. -- Cervantes %% There is no rampart that will hold out against malice. -- Jean Baptiste Moliere (1622-1673), "Tartuffe" %% There is no realizable power that man cannot, in time, fashion the tools to attain, nor any power so secure that the naked ape will not abuse it. So it is written in the genetic cards -- only physics and war hold him in check. And also the wife who wants him home by five, of course. -- Encyclopadia Apocryphia, 1990 ed. %% There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. -- Kenneth H. Olson, President of DEC, Convention of the World Future Society, 1977 %% There is no remedy for fun but more fun! %% There is no remedy for sex but more sex. %% There is no reply. %% There is no right way to do something wrong. %% There is no royal road to geometry. -- Euclid %% There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist. %% There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else. -- James Thurber (1894-1961) %% There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity. -- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), 1955 %% There is no sin but ignorance. -- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) %% There is no sin except stupidity. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), "The Critic as Artist", 1891 %% There is no skin on his thighs, And walking comes hard. If a man were to let himself be led like a sheep, Remorse would disappear. But if these words are heard They will not be believed. %% There is no skin on his thighs, And walking comes hard. If one is mindful of the danger, No great mistake is made. %% There is no substitute for cubic inches except cubic dollars. %% There is no substitute for cubic inches. %% There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes. %% There is no substitute for hard work. -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), "Life", 1932 %% There is no substitute for thorough going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. -- Dickens %% There is no such thing as "social gambling." Either you are there to cut the other bloke's heart out and eat it--or you're a sucker. If you don't like this choice--don't gamble. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% There is no such thing as a "dirty capitalist", only a capitalist. -- Bill Gray %% There is no such thing as a "self-made" man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and our thoughts, as well as our success. -- George Matthew Adams %% There is no such thing as a holy war. -- Solomon Short %% There is no such thing as a little country. the greatness of a people is no more determined by their number than the greatness of a man is determined by his height. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. books are well written, or badly written, That is all. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% There is no such thing as a nonracial society in a multiracial country. -- F. W. de Klerk, President of South Africa, quoted in "Time", 11 September 1989 %% There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. %% There is no such thing as a short beer. (As in, "I'm going to stop off at Joe's for a short beer before I meet you.") -- Virginia W. Smith %% There is no such thing as an absolute truth -- that is absolutely true. -- Solomon Short %% There is no such thing as an ugly woman -- there are only the ones who do not know how to make themselves attractive. -- Christian Dior %% There is no such thing as fortune. Try again. %% There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death. -- Fran Lebowitz %% There is no such thing as inner peace; there is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise is a breach of manners. -- Fran Lebowitz %% There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court. -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938), Interview, April 1936 %% There is no such thing as justice. There is only the desire to see the pain spread around equally. -- Solomon Short %% There is no such thing as modern art. There is art -- and there is advertising. -- Albert Steiner %% There is no such thing as overkill. -- Solomon Short %% There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it. %% There is no such thing as water. It is merely melted ice. %% There is no time in space. %% There is no time in space. This is to say - there is no chronology that can be calibrated. %% There is no time like the pleasant. %% There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline. -- Edward Abbey %% There is no tree here suitable for climbing. %% There is no vaccine against stupidity. %% There is no warranty of merchantability nor any warranty of fitness for a particular purpose nor any other warranty, either express or implied, on the accuracy of the enclosed materials or their suitability for any particular purpose. Therefore, Amdahl Corporation and Bell Telephone Laboratories assume no responsibility for their use by the recipient. Further, Amdahl corporation and Bell Laboratories assume no obligation to furnish any help of any kind whatsoever, or to furnish any additional information or documentation. -- man(1), "crypt" %% There is no water in the lake: The image of Exhaustion. Thus the superior man stakes his life On following his will. %% There is no way across the fissure. %% There is no way down. %% There is no way to get past the bear to unlock the chain, which is probably just as well. %% There is no way to go that direction. %% There is no way to peace; peace is the way. %% There is no way up. %% There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith. -- William E. H. Lecky (1838-1903) %% There is no wisdom like frankness. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. -- Lord Acton (1834-1902) %% There is nobody here to receive your payment. %% There is none made so great, but he may both need the help and service, and stand in fear of the power and unkindness, even of the meanest of mortals. -- Seneca %% There is not a fiercer hell than failure in a great object. -- Keats %% There is not a man in the country that can't make a living for himself and his family. But he can't make a living for them AND the government, too, the way his government is living. What the government has got to do is live as cheap as the people. -- Will Rogers %% There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted. -- James Branch Cabell %% There is not enough light to see your compass with. %% There is not enough room to go that way. %% There is not in nature a thing that makes a man so deform'd, so beastly, as doth intemperate anger. -- Webster's Duchess of Malp. %% There is not much to choose between a woman who deceives us for another, and a woman who deceives another for ourselves. -- Augier %% There is not so agonizing a feeling in the whole catalogue of human suffering, as the first conviction that the heart of the being whom we most tenderly love is estranged from us. -- Bulwer %% There is nothing I'm afraid of like scared people. -- Robert Frost %% There is nothing as cheap and weak in debate as assertion that is not backed by facts. %% There is nothing as overrated as a bad lay, or as underrated as a great shit. %% There is nothing as stupid as an educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in. -- Will Rogers %% There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it. -- Owen Meredith %% There is nothing here to attack. %% There is nothing here to climb. Use "up" or "out" to leave the pit. %% There is nothing here to eat. %% There is nothing here to which the chain can be locked. %% There is nothing here with a lock! %% There is nothing here with which to fill the bottle. %% There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% There is nothing interesting there. %% There is nothing it can be tied to. %% There is nothing like a good painstaking survey full of decimal points and guarded generalizations to put a glaze like a Sung vase on your eyeball. -- S. J. Perelman %% There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment--and nothing more corrupting. -- A. J. P. Taylor %% There is nothing more destructive of physical and mental health than the isolation of you from me, of us from them. %% There is nothing more difficult to carry out and more doubtful of success than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who prosper by the old order. -- Italo Bombolini %% There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), "The Prince" %% There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% There is nothing more permanent than a temporary tax. %% There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% There is nothing more silly than a silly laugh. -- Gaius Valerius Catullus %% There is nothing new except what has been forgotten. -- Marie Antoinette %% There is nothing permanent except change. -- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.) %% There is nothing purer and more unsullied, madam, than the desire for revenge, but if you follow the metaphor, I've thrown a pebble into the water perhaps killing two birds with one stone and causing ripples that'll rock the High Council to its foundations. What more could a renegade wish for? -- The Master, THE ULTIMATE FOE %% There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. -- Oliver Goldsmith %% There is nothing so aggravating as a fresh boy who is too old to ignore and too young to kick. -- Kin Hubbard %% There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) %% There is nothing so ridiculous but that some philosopher has said it. %% There is nothing so simple that it cannot be made difficult. -- Merle P. Martin %% There is nothing so unbecoming on the beach as a wet kilt. -- Bill Gray %% There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. -- Peter F. Drucker %% There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense. In other words, a good offense wins. -- J. Danforth Quayle, on "Star Wars", quoted in "Time", 19 September 1988 %% There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% There is nothing to dig into here. %% There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class. -- Leonard Sidney Woolf %% There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine," said a monk, coming into a teahouse where Nasrudin sat. "And yet just a short time ago, I was challenged by a scholar with an unanswerable question," said Nasrudin. "I could have answered it if I had been there." "Very well. He asked, 'Why are you breaking into my house in the middle of the night?' %% There is nothing worse than being peerless in a peer-review system. %% There is nothing wrong with America that a socialist revolution wouldn't cure. %% There is nothing wrong with Captain Picard or with the ship's logs. Therefore, there must be something wrong with your original assumption. "That is not acceptable, Mr. Data." Acceptable or not, sir, it is the truth. -- Data and Remmick, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2 %% There is nothing wrong with abstinence, in moderation. %% There is nothing wrong with screwing everyone in sight. Boring your friends about it is the sin. -- Mama Liz %% There is nothing wrong with writing ... as long as it is done in private and you wash your hands afterward. %% There is now a puddle in the middle of the #. %% There is nowhere to swim here. %% There is one are of which man should be master -- the art of reflection. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% There is one around here somewhere. -- John Croll %% There is one difference between a discussion and a flame. A discussion is about an issue. A flame is about someone involved in a discussion. %% There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist -- the taxidermist leaves the hide. -- Mortimer Caplan %% There is one inflexible rule of television. No show is too bad to be run during the summer. %% There is one right, which man is generally thought to possess, which I am confident he neither does, nor can, possess: a right to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it. Our laws indeed say that he has this right, and bind the society to furnish employment and food to those who cannot get them in the regular market; but in so doing, they attempt to reverse the laws of nature. -- Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) %% There is one single fact which we may oppose to all the wit and argument of infidelity, namely, that no man ever repented of being a christian on his death bed. -- Hannah More %% There is one thing to be said for country clubs; they drain off a lot of people you wouldn't want to associate with anyway. -- Joseph Prescott %% There is only one commandment: Thou Shalt Not Waste. All the others are superfluous. -- Solomon Short %% There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and that is the folly of the people that says with its head that it does not know whether there is a God or not. -- Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) %% There is only one sort of genuine Socialism, the democratic sort, by which I mean the organization of society for the benefit of the whole people. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% There is only one success, to be able to spend your life in your own way. -- Christopher Morley %% There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% There is only one thing worse than dreaming you are at a conference and waking up to find that you are at a conference: and that is the conference where you can't fall asleep. %% There is only one way to console a widow. But remember the risk. %% There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes. -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) %% There is precious jewelry here! %% There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California. -- Edward Abbey %% There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that is behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us. -- Robert Louis Stevenson, "Good and Bad" %% There is some gunk here. %% There is some water here. %% There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness. -- Euripides %% There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% There is something to be said about me: "Wow!!" %% There is something you must understand about the Soviet system. They have the ability to concentrate all their efforts on a given design, and develop all components simultaneously, but sometimes without proper testing. Then they end up with a technological disaster like the Tu-144. In a technology race at the time, that aircraft was two months ahead of the Concorde. Four Tu-144s were built; two have crashed, and two are in museums. The Concorde has been flying safely for over 10 years. -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100 %% There is this difference between happiness and wisdom; he that thinks himself the happiest man really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool. -- Colton %% There is this gay man who has a fondness for a particular doctor. The gay tried of think of someway to get the doctor's attention. One day the gay goes into the doctors office and says "I think there's something stuck in my bum." So the doctor puts on gloves and tips him over. After probing for a while the doctor removed a full-length red rose. The doctor is just astounded. "I think there's more in there doc." says the gay to the doctor probes again. And again the doctor removes another red rose, then another and another until the doctor is sitting there with 12-roses. "I'm really surprised", says the doctor. Then the gay responds, "Well, read the card! Read the card!" %% There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog. -- Edward Abbey %% There is too much magic flowing in it. Find something to insulate your hands from it first. %% There is unrest in the forest, there is trouble with the trees, For the maples want more sunlight and the oaks ignore their pleas. The trouble with the maples, and they're quite convinced they're right, Is that the oaks are just too lofty and they grab up all the light. But the oaks can't help their feelings if they like the way they're made And they wonder why the maples can't be happy in their shade. There is trouble in the forest and the creatures all have fled, For the maples scream "Oppression!" and the oaks just shake their heads. So the maples formed a union and demanded equal rights. "The oaks are just too greedy. We will make them give us light." Now there's no more oak oppression, for they passed a noble law, And the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe and saw. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong. %% There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), 1930 %% There isn't room enough in this dress for both of us! %% There isn't time enough for love, so what does that leave for hate? %% There must be an ideal world, a sort of mathematician's paradise where everything happens as it does in textbooks. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% There must be at least 500,000,000 rats in the United States; of course, I never heard the story before. %% There must be underinvestment in bulls ... just look at the rate of return. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% There never is [profit] in revenge. Let the dead rest, and the past remain the past. -- Picard, "The Battle", stardate 41723.9 %% There never was a devil who didn't advise people to keep out of Hell. %% There never was a good war or a bad peace. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% There never was a good war or a bad revolution. -- Edward Abbey %% There never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority. %% There once was a Duchess of Beever Who slept with her golden retriever. Said the potted old Duke : "Such tricks make me puke! Were it not for her money, I'd leave her." %% There once was a Duchess of Bruges Whose cunt was incredibly huge. Said the king to this dame As he thunderously came: "Mon Dieu! Apres moi, le deluge!" %% There once was a Sailor who looked through a glass And spied a fair mermaid with scales on her... island. Where seagulls flew over their nest. She combed the long hair which hung over her... shoulders. And caused her to tickle and itch. The sailor cried out "There's a beautiful... mermaid. A sittin' out there on the rocks." The crew came a running, all grabbing their... glasses. And crowded four deep to the rail. All eager to share in this fine piece of... news. ... "Throw out a line and we'll lasso her... flippers. And soon we will certainly find If mermaids are better before or be... brave My dear fellows," The captain cried out. And cursing with spleen. This song may be dull, but it's certainly clean. -- Oscar Brandt, "The Clean Song" %% There once was a Scot named McAmeter With a tool of prodigious diameter. It was not the size That cause such surprise; 'Twas his rhythm -- iambic pentameter. %% There once was a Swede in Minneapolis, Discovered his sex life was hapless: The more he would screw The more he'd want to, And he feared he would soon be quite sapless. %% There once was a bishop from Birmingham Who deflowered young girls while confirming 'em. As they knelt on the hassock He lifted his cassock And slipped his episcopal worm in 'em. %% There once was a boy named Carruthers Who was busily fucking his mother "I know it's a sin," He said, shoving it in, "But it's better than blowing my brother." %% There once was a chick named Longet, Who went out to Aspen to play. Along came a Spyder, Who sat down beside her And she blew the poor bastard away. %% There once was a clergyman's daughter Who detested the pony he bought her, Till she found that its dong Was as hard and as long As the prayers her father had taught her. She married a fellow named Tony Who soon found her fucking the pony. Said he, "What's it got, My dear, that I've not?" Sighed she, "Just a yard-long bologna." %% There once was a couple named Kelley, Who lived their life belly to belly. Because in their haste They used Library Paste, Instead of Petroleum Jelly. %% There once was a dentist named Stone Who saw all his patients alone. In a fit of depravity He filled the wrong cavity, And my, how his practice has grown! %% There once was a fag of Khartoom Who spent the night in a Lesbians room. They argued all night, Over who had the right, To do what, and with which, and to whom. %% There once was a fairy named Avers Who encircled his cock with lifesavers. Though buggers all claimed That their asses were maimed, Sixty-niners all cheered the new flavors. %% 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. %% 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." %% There once was a fellow named Cabbot Who made love to his girl as a habit: But he ran to the door When his girl asked for more And yelled, 'I'm a man not a jack rabbit.' %% There once was a fellow named Howard, Whose tool it was nuclear-powered, While grabbing some ass, He reached critical mass, But think of the girl he deflowered! %% There once was a fellow named Jason, Whose horrible death I would hasten. I'd feed him to worms, Just to see how he squirms -- But they'd vomit his crap in a basin. %% There once was a fellow named Moorehead, Who had an affair with a warhead. His wife moved away, The very next day -- She was always kind of a sorehead. -- Thomas S. Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" %% There once was a fellow named Potts Who was prone to having the trots But his humble abode Was without a commode So his carpet was covered with spots. %% There once was a fellow named Rafferty Who went to a gentleman's lafferty, When he saw the sight He said, "Newton was right, This must be the center of grafferty!" %% There once was a fellow named Siegel Who attempted to bugger a beagle, But the mettlesome bitch Turned and said with a twitch, "It's fun, but you know it's illegal." %% 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. %% There once was a fencer named Fisk, Whose speed was incredibly brisk. So fast was his action, The Fitzgerald contraction, Foreshortended his foil to a disk. %% There once was a fiesty young terrier Who liked to bite girls on the derriere. He'd yip and he'd yap, Then leap up and snap; And the fairer the derriere the merrier. %% There once was a floozie named Annie Whose prices were cosy--but cannie: A buck for a fuck, Fifty cents for a suck, And a dime for a feel of her fanny. %% There once was a freshman named Lin, Whose tool was as thin as a pin, A virgin named Joan From a bible belt home, Said "This won't be much of a sin." %% There once was a gangster named Brown - the sneakiest bastard in town. He was caught by G-men Shooting his semen Where the cops would slip and fall down. %% There once was a gaucho named Bruno, Who said, "About sex, well, I do know, Sheep are just fine, Chickens, divine, But iguanas are Numero Uno." %% There once was a gay young Parisian Who screwed an appendix incision, And the girl of his choice Could hardly rejoice At the horrible lack of precision. %% There once was a girl from Cornell Whose teats were shaped like a bell. When you touched them they shrunk, Except when she was drunk, And then they got bigger than hell. %% There once was a girl from Decatur, Who got laid by a big alligator. Now nobody knew The result of that screw, 'Cause after he laid her, he ate her. %% There once was a girl from Madras Who had such a beautiful ass - It was not round and pink ( as you bastards think ) But had two ears, a tail, and ate grass. %% There once was a girl from Spokane, Went to bed with a one-legged man. She said, "I know you-- You've really got two! Why didn't you say so when we began?" %% There once was a girl named Irene Who lived on distilled kerosene But she started absorbin' A new hydrocarbon And since then has never benzene. %% There once was a girl named Louise Who cunt hair hung down to her knees The crabs in her twat Tied the hairs in a knot And constructed a flying trapeze %% There once was a girl named Mcgoffin Who was diddled amazingly often. She was rogered by scores Who'd been turned down by whores, And was finally screwed in her coffin. %% There once was a girl named Priscilla In need of a fellow to fill her. But her hole was so big She could take in a pig Three horses, King Kong and Godzilla. %% 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 once was a girl named Roseann Who covered herself with a fan. The fan came undone, exposing her bun, and the rest of her summertime tan. %% There once was a girl so lovely, Who wanted to make love in the bubbly, She strapped on her tanks, And started her pranks, But the lobsters all thought she was ugly. %% There once was a golfer named Leer, Who got put in the clink for a year, For an action obscene, On the very first green. Where the sign said "Enter course here." %% There once was a gouty old colonel Who grew glum when the weather grew vernal, And he cried in his tiffin For his prick wouldn't stiffen, And the size of the thing was infernal. %% There once was a great philosopher who declared: "I think, therefore I am." One day he was on a plane trip. The flight attendant asked if he would like some coffee. He replied, "I think not," and vanished into thin air. %% There once was a guardsman from Buckingham Who said, "As for girls, I hate fucking 'em. But when I meet boys, God! how I enjoys Just licking their peckers and sucking 'em." %% There once was a hacker named Ken Who inherited truckloads of Yen So he built him some chicks Of silicon chips And hasn't been heard from since then. %% There once was a handsome young seaman Who with ladies was really a demon. In peace or in war, At sea or on shore, He could certainly dish out the semen. %% 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. %% There once was a horse named Lily Whose dingus was really a dilly. It was vaginoid duply, And labial quadruply -- In fact, he was really a filly. %% There once was a husky young Viking Whose sexual prowess was striking. Every time he got hot He would scour the twat Of some girl that might be to his liking. %% There once was a jolly old bloke Who picked up a girl for a poke. He took down her pants, Fucked her into a trance, And then shit into her shoe for a joke. %% There once was a kiddie named Carr Caught a man on top of his mar. As he saw him stick 'er, He said with a snicker, "You do it much faster than par." %% There once was a king who ruled his country long, wisely, and well. The king had a son whom he hoped would someday rule the land. He also wished in his heart that the son ould be wise and compassionate. One day he said to the prince: "If you promised that you would give a certain women anything, even half of your kingdom, and then she demanded the life of your best friend, what would your decision be, my son?" The young prince thought for a moment and then said, "I would tell her that she was my best friend, and cut her head off." The king knew that his son would be a great king. %% There once was a king who ruled his country long, wisely, and well. The king had a son whom he hoped would someday rule the land. He also wished in his heart that the son ould be wise and compassionate. One day he said to the prince: "If you promised that you would give a certain women anything, even half of your kingdom, and then she demanded the life of your best friend, what would your decision be, my son?" The young prince thought for a moment and then said, "I would tell her that the life of my best friend did not lie in the half of the kingdom that I had promised." The king knew that his son would be a great king. %% There once was a lady from Exeter, So pretty that men craned their necks at her. One was even so brave As to take out and wave The distinguishing mark of his sex at her. %% There once was a lady from Kansas Whose cunt was as big as Bonanzas. It was nine inches deep And the sides were quite steep -- It had whiskers like General Carranza's. %% There once was a lady named Carter, Fell in love with a virile young Tartar. She stripped off his pants, At his prick quickly glanced, And cried: "For that I'll be a martyr!" %% There once was a lady named Lizard, Who got lost in a pink candy blizzard, With a fellow named Jim Who wanted to swim Up her legs to visit her gizzard. %% 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 lawyer named Rex With minuscule organs of sex. Arraigned for exposure, He maintained with composure: "De minimis non curat lex." %% There once was a lecherous pianist Of all, the most he-in' and she-inest. To heighten his joy He would only employ Those girls he was told were agreein-est. %% There once was a lifeguard named Lee Who rescued a girl from the sea She asked how to pay, And he said "Try this way, Go down for the third time on me." %% 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 once was a man from Bombay He would do it all night and all day He soon became sore You shoulda' heard him roar When his wife rubbed his balls with Ben-Gay! %% There once was a man from Calcutta Who used to beat off in the gutta The heat of the sun Affected his gun And turned all his cream into butta! %% There once was a man from Dunoon, Who always ate soup with a fork. He said "When I eat Either fish, foul or flesh, I otherwise finish too quick." %% There once was a man from Exameter Who had a prodigious diameter But it wasn't the size That brought forth the cries 'Twas his rhythm, iambic pentameter. %% There once was a man from Nantucket, Who kept all his cash in a bucket. His daughter, named Nan, Ran away with a man, And, as for the bucket, Nan-tucket. %% There once was a man from Nantucket, Who kept all his cash in a bucket. His daughter, named Nan, Ran away with a man, And, as for the bucket, Nan-tucket. Paw followed the pair to Pawtucket, (Nan and the man with his bucket.) He said to the man, You're welcome to Nan, But as for the bucket, Paw-tucket. %% There once was a man from Peru Whose limericks all stopped at line two. There once was a fellow named Dunne... %% There once was a man from Racine, Who invented a screwing machine. Both concave and convex, It could please either sex, But, oh, what a bastard to clean! %% There once was a man from Sandem Who was making his girl on a tandem. At the peak of the make She jammed on the brake And scattered his semen at random. %% There once was a man from Sparta, The ultimate musical farta. He could fart anything, From `God Save the King,' To Beethoven's `Moonlight Sonarta.' He would fart a gavotte for a starta, Then something by Elliot Carta. He would boom from his ass Bach's `B Minor Mass,' And in counterpoint `La Traviarta.' But old age crept up on this marta, Thus making his farting much harta. His cries of "Alas! I've lost all my gas," Are still heard in regions of Sparta. %% There once was a man from Sparter, The ultimate musical farter. He could fart anything From `God Save the King' To Beethoven's `Moonlight Sonarter.' He would fart a gavotte for a starter, Then, something by Elliot Carter. He would boom from his ass Bach's `B Minor Mass' And in counterpoint, `La Traviarter.' As old age crept up on this martyr, His farting became somewhat harter. His cries of "Alas! I've lost all my gas!" Echoed plaintively all over Sparter. But age also made him much smarter, So he settled in Puerto Vallarter, Where bean-filled tostadas And green enchiladas Inspired his finest cantarter. %% There once was a man from Sydney Who could put it up to her kidney. But the man from Quebec Put it up to her neck; He had a big one, now didn't he? %% There once was a man from Yuma, Who told an elephant joke to a puma, Now his body lies, Under the hot desert skies, For the puma had no sense of huma. %% There once was a man named Lodge, who had seatbelts installed in his Dodge. When his date was strapped in, he committed a sin, without ever leaving the garage. %% There once was a man named McGruder, Who canoed with a girl in Bermuder. But the girl thought it crude, To be wooed in the nude, So McGru took an oar and subduder. %% There once was a man named McSweeny Who spilled lots of gin on his weeney So just to be couth He added vermouth And slipped his girl a martini. %% There once was a man named Parridge With peculiar views on marriage. He sucked off his brother, Fucked his own mother, And gobbled his sister's miscarriage. %% There once was a man who said, "Damn! It is borne in upon me I am An engine that moves In predestinate grooves, I'm not even a bus I'm a tram." -- Maurice Evan Hare (1905) %% There once was a man with a hernia Who said to his doctor, "Gol dern ya, When you work on my middle Be sure you don't fiddle With things that do not concern ya." %% There once was a master programmer who wrote unstructured programs. A novice programmer, seeking to imitate him, also began to write unstructured programs. When the novice asked the master to evaluate his progress, the master criticized him for writing unstructured programs, saying "What is appropriate for the master is not appropriate for the novice. You must understand Tao before transcending structure." %% There once was a member of Mensa Who was a most excellent fencer. The sword that he used Was his -- (line is refused, And has now been removed by the censor). %% There once was a miner named Dave, Who kept a dead whore in his cave. She was ugly as shit, And missing one tit, But think of the money he saves. %% There once was a monk of Camyre Who was seized with a carnal desire And the primary cause Was the abbess's drawers Which were hung up to dry by the fire. %% There once was a nearsighted gynie Whose glasses were sparkly and shiny; But they stayed in the drawer While he worked on a whore And tied up the tubes of her hiney. %% There once was a newspaper vendor, A person of dubious gender. He would charge one-and-two For permission to view His remarkable double pudenda. %% There once was a nice little boy named Herbie. Herbie had been blind since birth. One day, Herbie's mother came into his room and said: Herbie, I went and talked to the preacher today, and he said that if you pray really hard tonight, with all your heart and soul, you'll be able to see tomorrow morning when I come in to wake you up! "Oh boy!!!" said Herbie, "My one wish in the whole wide world is coming true!!! Oh thank you, Mother! Thank you, Lord!"... That night, Herbie prayed with all his might: Dear God, thank you so much for letting me see tomorrow. I am so excited, I can hardly wait. All I can think about are all the beautiful things I'll be able to see! Oh, thank you! The next morning, Herbie's mother went into his room. "Herbie," she said, "Are you ready to open your eyes and see the beautiful world?" "Oh, yes, Mother," Herbie replied eagerly. "Alright Herbie, Open your eyes and you can see." And Herbie opened his eyes. "Mom, Mom, I can't see," he cried, "I can't see!" "I know Herbie. APRIL FOOLS!!! HAHAHA!!!" %% There once was a plumber from Leigh Who was plumbing his maid by the sea. Said she, "Please stop plumbing, I think someone's coming!" Said he, "Yes, I know love, it's me." %% There once was a priest of Gibraltar Who write dirty jokes in his psalter An inhibited nun Who had read every one Made a vow to be laid on his altar. %% There once was a queen of Bulgaria Whose bush had grown hairier and hairier, Till a prince from Peru Who came up for a screw Had to hunt for her cunt with a terrier. %% There once was a rabbi from Peru Who was vainly trying to screw His wife said, "Oy, vay If you keep on this way, The messiah will come before you." %% There once was a sailor named Gasted, A swell guy, as long as he lasted, He could jerk himself off In a basket, aloft, Or a breeches-buoy swung from the masthead. %% There once was a sensuous Sioux, Who liked to do nothing but scrioux. She would give no relief To her favorite chief 'Till both of his balls had turned blioux. %% There once was a silly young man, Whose limericks always failed to scan, But not only that, They didn't rhyme, Either. %% There once was a son-of-a-bitch, Neither clever, nor handsome, nor rich, Yet the girls he would dazzle, And fuck to a frazzle, And then ditch them, the son-of-a-bitch! %% There once was a spaceman named Spock Who had a huge Vulcanized cock. A girl from Missouri Whose name was Uhura Just fainted away from the shock. %% There once was a whore from St. Paul, Who took anyone, wide, short, or tall. She said to her clients, "It's not really science -- It's just that one size will fit all!" %% There once was a woman from Arden Who sucked off a man in a garden. He said, "My dear Flo, Where does all that stuff go?" And she said, "[Swallow hard] I beg pardon?" %% There once was a yarn about a girl named Pearl who was so wooly-headed she didn't have anything to nitwit. %% There once was a yokel of Beaconsfield Engaged to look after the deacon's field, But he lurked in the ditches And diddled the bitches Who happened to cross that antique 'un's field. %% There once was a young fellow named Blaine, And he screwed some disgusting old jane. She was ugly and smelly, With an awful pot-belly, But... well, they were caught in the rain. %% There once was a young girl from Natches Who chanced to be born with two snatches She often said, "Shit! I'd give either tit For a guy with equipment that matches." %% There once was a young girl named Alice Who used dynamite as a phallus They found her vagina In North Carolina And bits of her buttocks in Dallas. %% There once was a young girl named Dot. Who lived on pig shit and snot. When she couldn't get these She ate the green cheese That she scraped off the sides of her twat. %% There once was a young man from Bates Who was learning to use his new skates A fall on his cutlass Rendered him nutless And practically useless on dates. %% There once was a young man from Boston Who drove around town in an Austin, There was room for his ass, And a gallon of gas, So he hung out his balls and he lost 'em. %% There once was a young man from France Who waited ten years for his chance; Then he muffed it... %% There once was a young man from Hyatt Whose voice was exceedingly quiet and then one day it just faded away ....... %% There once was a young man from Yuma Who attempted sex with a puma He gave up real quick Minus nose, toes, and prick In obvious pain and ill huma. %% There once was a young man named Breen The likes of which'd never been seen He'd drive fast as light And as he zoomed out of sight He blueshifted red lights to green. %% There once was a young man named Dave Who dug a dead whore from her grave She was moldy as shit And was missing a tit But think of the money he saved. %% There once was a young man named Gene Who invented a screwing machine Concave and convex It served either sex And it played with itself in between. %% There once was a young man named Lancelot Whom the townsfolk would look at askance a lot For when he should pass A desirable lass The front of his pants would advance a lot. %% There once was an Arpanet freak, Who better response-time did seek. He searched coast to coast, For a reliable host, Whose logger took less than a week. %% There once was an old man from Esser, Who's knowledge grew lesser and lesser. It at last grew so small, He knew nothing at all, And now he's a College Professor. %% There once were two brothers named Luntz Who buggered each other at once. When asked to account For this intricate mount, They said, "Ass-holes are tighter than cunts." %% There once were two women from Birmingham. And this is the story concerning 'em. They lifted the frock And fondled the cock Of the bishop as he was confirming 'em. %% There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. -- Edmund Burke %% There really is no substitute for holding the reins. -- Picard to Riker, "The Icarus Factor", stardate 42686.4 %% There seem to be monsters of touching benevolence. %% There seems no plan because it is all plan. -- C. S. Lewis %% There shall be no such thing as a lost ball. The missing ball is on or near the course somewhere and eventually will be found and pocketed by someone else. It thus becomes a stolen ball, and the player should not compound the felony by charging himself with a penalty stroke. -- Donald A. Metz %% There she is!!! %% There sometimes wants only a stroke of fortune to discover numberless latent good or bad qualities, which would otherwise have been eternally concealed: as words written with a certain liquor appear only when applied to the fire. -- Greville %% There still remain three studies suitable for free man. Arithmetic is one of them. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% There was a bluestocking in Florence Wrote anti-sex pamphlets in torrents, Till a Spanish grandee, Got her off with his knee, And she burned all her works with abhorrence. %% There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." -- C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia %% There was a cannibal walking through the jungle and he came upon a restaurant opened by a fellow cannibal. Feeling somewhat hungry he sat down and looked over the menu Broiled Missionary $25.00 Fried Explorer $35.00 Baked Politician $100.00 The customer called the cook over and asked "why such a price difference for the politician?" The cook replied "Have you ever tried to clean one of them?" %% There was a family named Doe, An ideal family to know. As father screwed mother, She said, "You're heavier than brother." And he said, "Yes, Sis told me so!" %% There was a farmer who had a brown cow and a white cow and he wanted to get them bred. So, he borrowed his neighbor's bull and turned it loose in the pasture. He told his son to watch and come in and tell him when the bull was finished. "Yeah daddy, yeah daddy" said the little boy. After a while the boy came into the living where his father was talking with some friends. "Say, Pop", said the boy. "Yes", replied his father. "The bull just fucked the brown cow". There was a sudden lull in the conversation. The father said "Excuse me" and took his son outside. "Son, you mustn't use language like that in front of company. You should say 'The bull *surprised* the brown cow'. Now go and watch and tell me when the bull *surprises* the white cow". The father went back inside the house. After a while the boy came in and said "Hey, Daddy". "Yes, son. Did the bull surprise the white cow?" "He sure did, Pop! He fucked the brown cow again!" %% There was a fat lady of China Who'd a really enormous vagina, And when she was dead They painted it red, And used it for docking a liner. %% There was a fat man from Rangoon Whose prick was much like a balloon. He tried hard to ride her And when finally inside her She thought she was pregnant too soon. %% 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 a gay dog from Ontario Who fancied himself a Lothario. At a wench's glance He'd snatch off his pants And make for her Mons Venerio. %% There was a gay parson of Norton Whose prick, although thick, was a short 'un. To make up for this loss, He had balls like a horse, And never spent less than a quartern. %% There was a gay parson of Tooting Whose roe he was frequently shooting, Till he married a lass With a face like my arse, And a cunt you could put a top-boot in. %% There was a general whisper, toss, and wriggle, But etiquette forbade them all to giggle. -- Byron %% There was a geometry teacher teaching geometry when she noticed that one of her pupils was sleep. Teacher: Jimmy use geometry in a sentence. Jimmy: ZZZZZZ.. Teacher: Jimmy use GEOMETRY in a sentence!!! Jimmy: There once was this little acorn that woke up one day and said G I AM A TREE(Geometry). %% There was a hard-working soothsayer Well-known as an honest truth-prayer. He married a dame And Ruth was her name And now he is called a Ruth-layer. %% There was a lewd fellow named Duff Who loved to dive deep in the muff. With his head in a whirl He said, "Spread it, Pearl; I cunt get enough of the stuff!" %% There was a mad pilot named Lizzy, Whose manners were said to be skizzy. She could loop, she could twirl, She could make your head whirl. She left all her men fucking dizzy." %% There was a man from Madras, Whose *alls were made of brass, In stormy weather, They clanged together, And sparks came out of his a**. %% There was a man from Mich. Who used to wish and wich. That spring would come So he could bum Around and go out fich. %% There was a man who fell in love with a beautiful young lady and asked her to marry him. She says "Be serious, Sam. You're fat, you're ugly and your wardrobe is atrocious." So Sam loses 80 lbs, gets a facelift, and a hair transplant, joins one of those health clubs and gets tanned and fit. Then he buys an all new up-to-date wardrobe. Now he goes back to the girl and says "Now whaddaya think?" She says "What a hunk!" and agrees to a date. He arrives at her door with a limo. She comes out looking radiant, her eyes aglow with the promise of a never-to-be-forgotten evening. Sam has never been happier in his life. As they walk to the limo lightning strikes him. With his dying words he says "Why now, God? Why now, on the happiest day of my life?" God looks down and says "Oh! Sorry Sam, didn't recognize you..." %% There was a particularly musical lawyer who never lost a case. Whenever he questioned the appropriateness of testimony, with a long, drawn out "objectioooooooooo....n" the judge had to admit it was sustained. ... %% There was a phone call for you, I told them you were playing and goofing off. Your boss wants to see you immediately. %% There was a phone call for you. %% There was a pianist named Liszt Who played with one hand while he pissed, But as he grew older His technique grew bolder, And in concert jacked off with his fist. %% There was a plain Christian called Carter, Who spoke what he hadn't oughter, So they sticked him and stoned him, And neatly deboned him, Making him a peanut martyr. (Let's hear it for Plains.......) %% 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 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. %% There was a russian man named rudolph, a high ranking member of the KGB. one evening rudolph and his wife, helga, were walking along, and it begins to snow. "my, my, look at the lovely snow," said helga. "no, that is not snow, that is rain!" replied rudolph. "no, no, no, this is snow," she said. "look, there is a palace guard, we will ask him." rudolph went to the palace guard and said "is it raining or snowing?" the guard was no dummy, so he said "what do YOU think it is doing, rudolph?" rudolph replied, "raining." and the guard said "yes comrade,i was going to say raining, also!" So rudolph and helga went walking off. the guard could just barely hear the KGB official say: "RUDOLPH, THE RED, KNOWS RAIN, DEAR" %% There was a sick man of Tobago Liv'd long on rice-gruel and sago; But at last, to his bliss, The physician said this-- "To a roast leg of mutton you may go." %% There was a strong man of Drumrig Who one day did seven times frig. He buggered three sailors, Four dogs and two tailors, And ended by fucking a pig. %% There was a sweet girl of Decatur Who went to sea on a freighter. She was screwed by the master --An utter disaster-- But the crew all made up for it later. %% There was a technician named Urban, Who had an affair with a turbine. "It's much nicer," he said, "Than a woman in bed, And it's sure as hell cheaper than bourbon!" -- Thomas S. Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" %% There was a teenager named Donna Who never said, "No, I don't wanna." Two days out of three She would shoot LSD, And on weekends she smoked marijuana. %% There was a thing called a V-2, To pilot which you did not need to - You just pushed a button, And it would leave nuttin' But stiffs and big holes and debris, too. -- Thomas S. Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" %% There was a woman from Leeds, Who swallowed a packet of seeds, Out of her a**, Grew blades of grass, Out of her c*** grew weeds. %% There was a writer in 'Life' magazine ... who claimed that rabbits have no memory, which is one of their defensive mechanisms. If they recalled every close shave they had in the course of just an hour life would become insupportable. -- Kurt Vonnegut %% There was a young German named Ringer Who was screwing an opera singer. Said he with a grin, "Well, I've sure got it in!" Said she, "You mean that ain't your finger?" %% There was a young Jew of Far Rockaway Whose screams could be heard for a block away. Perceiving his error, The Rabbi in terror Cried, "God! I have cut his whole cock away!" %% There was a young belle of old Natchez Whose garments were always in patchez. When comment arose On the state of her clothes She, drawled, "When ah itchez, ah scratchez." %% There was a young blade from South Greece Whose bush did so greatly increase That before he could shack He must hunt needle in stack. 'Twas as bad as being obese. %% There was a young bride of Antigua Whose husband said, "Dear me, how big you are!" Said the girl, "What damn'd rot! Why, you've only felt my twot, My legs and my arse and my figua!" %% There was a young bride, a Canuck, Told her husband, "Let's do more than suck. You say that I, maybe, Can have my first baby-- Let's give up this Frenchin' and fuck!" %% There was a young chap in Arabia Who courted a widow named Fabia. "Yes, my tongue is as long As the average man's dong," He said, licking the lips of her labia. %% There was a young coder named Guy. He said to himself with a sigh, "The VAX is to slow, it won't even go. I'll give my abacus a try." %% There was a young cook with the art Of making a delicious tart With a handful of shit, Some snot and some spit, And he'd flavor the whole with a fart. %% There was a young couple from Florida Whose passion grew steadily torrider. They were planning to sin In a room in an inn. Who can wait? So they screwed in the corridor. %% There was a young curate whose brain Was deranged from the use of cocaine; He lured a small child To a copse dark and wild, Where he beat it to death with his cane. -- Edward Gorey %% There was a young damsel named Baker Who was poked in a pew by a Quaker. He yelled, "My God! what Do you call this -- a twat? Why, the entrance is more than an acre!" %% There was a young dolly named Molly Who thought that to frig was a folly. Said she, "Your pee-pee Means nothing to me, But I'll do it just to be jolly." %% There was a young fellow called Clyde Who fell in an outhouse and died. He had a twin brother Who fell in another So now they're interred side by side. %% There was a young fellow from Cal., In bed with a passionate gal. He leapt from the bed, To the toilet he sped; Said the gal, "What about me, old pal?" %% There was a young fellow from Florida Who liked a friend's wife, so he borrowed her. When they got into bed He cried, "God strike me dead! This ain't a cunt -- it's a corridor!" %% There was a young fellow from Juilliard With a penis that measured a full yard. The girls whispered and leered And most of them cheered Whenever he ran through the schoolyard. %% There was a young fellow from Kent Whose cock was so long that it bent To save himself trouble He put it in double And instead of coming, he went. %% There was a young fellow from Leeds Who swallowed a package of seeds. Great tufts of grass Sprouted out of his ass And his balls were all covered with weeds. %% There was a young fellow from Norwich Who liked having sex with his porridge. With sugar and cream And a buttery scream -- (The leftovers went into storage.) %% There was a young fellow from Parma Who was solemnly screwing his charmer. Said the damsel demure, "You'll excuse me, I'm sure, But I must say you fuck like a farmer." %% There was a young fellow from Queens Whose perpetual motion machines Would more forward by jerks For he kept in the works The best Mexican high-jumping beans. %% There was a young fellow from Trinity Who took the square root of infinity But the number of digits Gave him the fidgets He dropped math and took up divinity! -- George Gamow, "One, Two, Three, Infinity" %% There was a young fellow name Tucker Who, instructing a novice cock-sucker, Said, "Don't bow out your lips Like an elephant's hips, The boys like it best when they pucker." %% There was a young fellow named Adam Whose mother had once been a madam. As for Daddy, the score Was at least seven, for On the day of conception, Ma'd had 'em. %% There was a young fellow named Ades Whose favorite fruit was young maids. But sheep, nigger boys, whores, And the knot holes in doors Were by no means exempt from his raids. %% There was a young fellow named Babbitt Who could screw nine times like a rabbit, But a girl from Johore Could do it twice more, Which was just enough extra to crab it. %% There was a young fellow named Bill, Who took an atomic pill, His navel corroded, His asshole exploded, And they found his nuts in Brazil. %% There was a young fellow named Bliss Whose sex life was strangely amiss, For even with Venus His recalcitrant penis Would never do better than t h i s . %% There was a young fellow named Bowen Whose pecker kept growin' and growin'. It grew so tremendous, So long and so pendulous, 'Twas no good for fuckin' -- just showin'. %% There was a young fellow named Brewer Whose girl made her home in a sewer. Thus he, the poor soul, Could get into her hole, And still not be able to screw her! %% There was a young fellow named Case Who entered a cunt-lapping race. He licked his way clean Through Number thirteen, But then slipped and got pissed in the face. %% There was a young fellow named Charteris Put his hand where his young lady's garter is. Said she, "I don't mind, And higher up you'll find The place where my fucker and farter is." %% There was a young fellow named Cribbs Whose cock was so big it had ribs. They were inches apart, And to suck it took art, While to fuck it took forty-two trips. %% There was a young fellow named Crockett, Who had an affair with a rocket. If you saw them out there, You'd be tempted to stare, But if you ain't tried it don't knock it! -- Thomas S. Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" %% 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 fellow named Fisk Whose comings and goings were brisk. He hid things that were stolen Inside his colon, And said, "Hey! It's my own *." (Asterisk) %% There was a young fellow named Fletcher, Was reputed an infamous lecher. When he'd take on a whore She'd need a rebore, And they'd carry him out on a stretcher. %% There was a young fellow named Forrest Whose cornhole was one of the sorest. Said he, "I don't mind A regular grind -- But I do wish my ass were clitorised." %% There was a young fellow named Fyfe Whose marriage was ruined for life, For he had an aversion To every perversion, And only liked fucking his wife. Well, one year the poor woman struck, And she wept, and she cursed at her luck, And said, "Where have you gotten us With your goddamn monotonous Fuck after fuck after fuck? "I once knew a harlot named Lou -- And a versatile girl she was, too. After ten years of whoredom She perished of boredom When she married a jackass like you!" %% There was a young fellow named Gene Who first picked his asshole quite clean. He next picked his toes, And lastly his nose, And he never did wash in between. %% There was a young fellow named Gluck Who found himself shit out of luck. Though he petted and wooed, When he tried to get screwed He found virgins just don't give a fuck. %% There was a young fellow named Goody Who claimed that he wouldn't, but would he? If he found himself nude With a gal in the mood The question's not woody but could he? %% 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 fellow named Grimes Who fucked his girl seventeen times In the course of a week -- And this isn't to speak Of assorted venereal crimes. %% There was a young fellow named Harry, Had a joint that was long, huge and scary. He grabbed him a virgin, Who, without any urgin', Immediately spread like a fairy. %% There was a young fellow named Hatch Who was fond of the music of Bach. He said: "It's not fussy Like Brahms and Debussy; Sit down, and I'll play you a snatch." %% There was a young fellow named Hector, Who was fond of a launcher-erector. But the squishes and pops Of acute pressure drops Wrecked Hector's hydraulic connector. -- Thomas S. Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" %% There was a young fellow named Howard Who was thought to be magically powered His dick was so short It looked like a wart But when it stood up, it just towered. %% There was a young fellow named Jim Who liked to get naked and swim With plastic sex toys Shaped like pubescent boys, 'Cause he'd rather be gay than be grim. %% There was a young fellow named Kimble Whose prick was exceedingly nimble, But fragile and slender, And dainty and tender, So he kept it encased in a thimble. %% There was a young fellow named Meek Who invented a lingual technique. It drove women frantic, And made them romantic, And wore all the hair off his cheek. %% There was a young fellow named Morgan Who possessed an unusual organ: The end of his dong, Which was nine inches long, Was tipped with the head of a gorgon. %% There was a young fellow named Paul Who confessed, "I have only one ball. But the size of my prick Is God's dirtiest trick, For my girls always ask, 'Is that all?'" %% There was a young fellow named Pell Who didn't like cunt very well. He would finger or fuck one, But never would suck one-- He just couldn't get used to the smell. %% There was a young fellow named Pope, Who plugged into an oscilloscope. The cyclical trace Of their carnal embrace Had a damned nearly infinite slope. -- Thomas S. Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" %% There was a young fellow named Price Who dabbled in all sorts of vice. He had virgins and boys And mechanical toys, And on Mondays... he meddled with mice! %% There was a young fellow named Prynne Whose prick was so short and so thin, His wife found she needed A Fuckoscope -- she did -- To see if he'd gotten it in. %% There was a young fellow named Rex With diminutive organs of sex. When charged with exposure He said with composure, "De minimis non curat lex!" %% There was a young fellow named Skinner Who took a young lady to dinner At a quarter to nine, They sat down to dine, At twenty to ten it was in her. The dinner, not Skinner -- Skinner was in her before dinner. There was a young fellow named Tupper Who took a young lady to supper. At a quarter to nine, They sat down to dine, And at twenty to ten it was up her. Not the supper -- not Tupper -- It was some son-of-a-bitch named Skinner! %% There was a young fellow named Ted, Who had a radio put in his head. Long wave or short, He did it for sport -- And to improve his reception in bed. %% There was a young fellow named dick Who had a magnificent prick. It was shaped like a prism And shot so much gism It made every cocksucker sick. %% There was a young fellow of Burma Whose betrothed had good reason to murmur. But now that he's married he's Been using cantharides And the root of their love is much firmer. %% There was a young fellow of Greenwich Whose balls were all covered with spinach. He had such a tool It was wound on a spool, And he reeled it out inich by inich. But this tale has an unhappy finish, For due to the sand in the spinach His ballocks grew rough And wrecked his wife's muff, And scratched up her thatch in the scrimmage. %% There was a young fellow of Harrow Whose john was the size of a marrow. He said to his tart, "How's this for a start? My balls are outside in a barrow." %% There was a young fellow of Mayence Who fucked his own arse in defiance Not only of custom And morals, dad-bust him, But of most of the known laws of science. %% There was a young fellow of Perth Whose balls were the finest on earth. They grew to such size That one won a prize, And goodness knows what they were worth. %% There was a young fellow of Strensall Whose prick was as sharp as a pencil. On the night of his wedding It went through the bedding, And shattered the chamber utensil. %% There was a young fellow of Ur Whose 'wacker was covered with fur. He delighted to stroke it, To pat it and poke it, For the pleasure of hearing it purr. %% There was a young fellow whose dong Was prodigiously massive and long. On each side of his whang Two testes did hang That attracted a curious throng. %% There was a young gaucho named Bruno Who said, "Screwing is one thing I do know. A woman is fine, And a sheep is divine, But a llama is Numero Uno." %% There was a young gaucho named Bruno Who said, "There is one thing I do know, Women are fine And children devine, But the llama is numero uno." %% There was a young girl from Annista Who dated a lecherous mister. He fondled her titty, Got one finger shitty, Then screwed up his courage and kissed 'er. %% There was a young girl from Decatur Who was raped by an alligator. But no one quite knew How she relished that screw, For after he screwed her, he ate her. %% 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 from Hong Kong Whose cervical cap was a gong. She said with a yell, As a shot rang her bell, "I'll give you a ding for a dong!" %% There was a young girl from Medina Who could completely control her vagina. She could twist it around Like the cunts that are found In Japan, Manchukuo and China. %% 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. %% There was a young girl from Peru, Who noticed her lovers were few; So she walked out her door With a fig leaf, no more, And now she's in bed - with the flu. %% There was a young girl from Peru Whose limericks stopped at line two. %% 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 girl from Siam Who said to her boyfriend Priam, "To seduce me, of course, You'll have to use force, And thank goodness you're stronger than I am. %% There was a young girl from St. Cyr Whose reflex reactions were queer. Her escort said, "Mable, Get up off the table; That money's to pay for the beer." %% There was a young girl from St. Paul Who went to a newspaper ball. Her dress caught on fire And burnt her entire Front page and sport section and all. %% There was a young girl from the Bronix Who had a vagina of onyx. She had so much `tsoris' With her clitoris, She traded it in for a Packard. %% There was a young girl from the coast Who, just when she needed it most, Lost her Kotex and bled All over the bed, And the head and the beard of her host. %% There was a young girl in Berlin Who eked out a living through sin. She didn't mind fucking, But much preferred sucking, And she'd wipe off the pricks on her chin. %% There was a young girl in Dakota Had a letter from Ickes; he wrote her: "In addition to gas We are rationing ass, And you've greatly exceeded your quota." %% There was a young girl name McKnight Who got drunk with her boy-friend one night. She came to in bed, With a split maidenhead-- That's the last time she ever was tight. %% There was a young girl named Ann Heuser Who swore that no man could surprise her. But Pabst took a chance, Found a Schlitz in her pants, And now she is sadder Budweiser. %% There was a young girl named Heather Whose twitcher was made out of leather. She made a queer noise, Which attracted the boys, By flapping the edges together. %% There was a young girl named Laraine Whom no one could think of as plain. The fellows pursue her In order to screw her Again and again and again. %% There was a young girl named McCall Whose cunt was exceedingly small, But the size of her anus Was something quite heinous -- It could hold seven pricks and one ball. %% There was a young girl named O'Clare Whose body was covered with hair. It was really quite fun To probe with one's gun, For her quimmy might be anywhere. %% There was a young girl named O'Malley Who wanted to dance in the ballet. She got roars of applause When she kicked off her drawers, But her hair and her bush didn't tally. %% 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 girl of Aberystwyth Who screwed every man that she kissed with. She tickled the balls Of the men in the halls, And pulled on the prongs that they pissed with. %% There was a young girl of Aberystwyth Who took grain to the mill to get grist with. The miller's sun, Jack, Laid her flat on her back, And united the organs they pissed with. %% There was a young girl of Angina Who stretched catgut across her vagina. From the love-making frock (With the proper sized cock) Came Tocata and Fugue in D minor. %% There was a young girl of Asturias With a penchant for practices curious. She loved to bat rocks With her gentlemen's cocks -- A practice both rude and injurious. %% There was a young girl of Batonger who diddled herself with a conger, When asked how it feels To be pleasured by eels She said, "Just like a man, only longer. %% There was a young girl of Cah'lina, Had a very capricious vagina: To the shock of the fucker "Twould suddenly pucker, And whistle the chorus of "Dinah." %% There was a young girl of Cape Cod Who dreamt she'd been buggered by God. But it wasn't Jehovah That turned the girl over, 'Twas Roger the lodger, the dirty old codger, the bugger, the bastard, the sod! %% There was a young girl of Cape Town Who usually fucked with a clown. He taught her the trick Of sucking his prick, And when it went up -- she went down. %% There was a young girl of Coxsaxie Whose skirt was more mini than maxi. She was fucked at the show In the twenty-third row, And once more going home in the taxi. %% There was a young girl of Darjeeling Who could dance with such exquisite feeling There was never a sound For miles around Save of fly-buttons hitting the ceiling. %% There was a young girl of Des Moines Whose cunt could be fitted with coins, Till a guy from Hoboken Went and dropped in a token, And now she rides free on the ferry. %% There was a young girl of Detroit Who at fucking was very adroit: She could squeeze her vagina To a pin-point, or finer, Or open it out like a quoit. And she had a friend named Durand Whose cock could contract or expand. He could diddle a midge Or the arch of a bridge -- Their performance together was grand! %% There was a young girl of Gibraltar Who was raped as she knelt at the altar. It really seems odd That a virtuous God Should answer her prayers and assault her. %% There was a young girl of LLewellyn Whose breasts were as big as a melon. They were big it is true, But her cunt was big too, Like a bifocal, full-color, aerial view Of Cape Horn and the Straits of Magellan. %% There was a young girl of Mobile, Who hymen was made of chilled steel, To give her a thrill, Took a rotary drill, Or a number nine emery wheel. %% There was a young girl of Moline Whose fucking was sweet and obscene. She would work on a prick With every known trick, And finish by winking it clean. %% There was a young girl of Newcastle Whose charms were declared universal. While one man in front Wired into her cunt, Another was engaged at her arsehole. %% There was a young girl of Pawtucket Whose box was as big as a bucket. Her boy-friend said, "Toots, I'll have to wear boots, For I see I must muck it, not fuck it." %% There was a young girl of Penzance Who boarded a bus in a trance. The passengers fucked her, Likewise the conductor, While the driver shot off in his pants. %% There was a young girl of Pitlochry Who was had by a man in a rockery. She said, "Oh! You've come All over my bum; This isn't a fuck -- it's a mockery." %% There was a young girl of Rangoon Who was blocked by the Man in the Moon. "Well, it has been great fun," She remarked when he'd done, "But I'm sorry you came quite so soon." %% 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 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. %% There was a young girl, very sweet, Who thought sailors' meat quite a treat. When she sat on their lap She unbuttoned their flap, And always had plenty to eat. %% There was a young harlot from Kew Who filled her vagina with glue. She said with a grin, "If they pay to get in, They'll pay to get out of it too." %% There was a young harlot named Schwartz Whose cock-pit was studded with warts, And they tickled so nice She drew a high price From the studs at the summer resorts. Her pimp, a young fellow named Biddle, Was seldom hard up for a diddle, For according to rumor His tool had a tumor And a fine row of warts down the middle. %% There was a young hayseed from Tiffan Whose cock would constantly stiffen. The knob out in front Attracted foul cunt Which he greatly delighted in sniffin'. %% There was a young idler named Blood, Made a fortune performing at stud, With a fifteen-inch peter, A double-beat metre, And a load like the Biblical Flood. %% There was a young lad from Siam, Whose sexlife was caught in a jam. He loved them real small, 'Cause they're funner to ball, So he went out and bought him a lamb! %% There was a young lad name of Durcan Who was always jerkin' his gherkin. His father said, "Durcan! Stop jerkin' your gherkin! Your gherkin's for ferkin', not jerkin'. %% There was a young lad named McFee Who was stung in the balls by a bee He made oodles of money By oozing pure honey Every time he attempted to pee. %% 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." %% There was a young lady at sea Who said, "God, how it hurts me to pee." "I see," said the mate, "That accounts for the state Of the captain, the purser, and me." %% There was a young lady called Ciss Who went to the river to piss. A young man in a punt Put his hand on her cunt; No wonder she thought it was bliss. %% There was a young lady from Bangor Who slept while the ship lay at anchor She woke in dismay When she heard the mate say: "Let's lift up the topsheet and spanker!" %% There was a young lady from Bristol Who went to the Palace called Crystal. Said she, "It's all glass, And as round as my ass," And she farted as loud as a pistol. INDUSTRIAL ASSPIONAGE %% There was a young lady from Brussels Who was proud of her vaginal muscles. She could easily plex them And so interflex them As to whistle love songs through her bustles. %% There was a young lady from Drew Who ended her verse at line two. %% There was a young lady from Dumfries Who said to her boyfriend, "It's some freeze! My navel's all bare, So stick it in there, Before both my legs and my bum freeze." MOMENT OF TRUTH With his penis in turgid erection, And aimed at woman's mid-section, Man looks most uncouth In that Moment of Truth, But she sheathes it with loving affection. %% There was a young lady from Hyde Who ate a green apple and died. While her lover lamented The apple fermented And made cider inside her inside. %% There was a young lady from Kent Whose nose was most terribly bent. One day she chose To follow her nose And nobody knows where she went! %% There was a young lady from Maine Who claimed she had men on her brain. But you knew from the view, As her abdomen grew, It was not on her brain that he'd lain. %% 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. %% 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 lady from Prentice Who had an affair with a dentist. To make things easier He used anesthesia, And diddled her, `non compos mentis'. %% 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 lady from Rio Who slept with the Fornier trio. As she dropped her panties She said, "No andanties I want this allegro con brio." %% There was a young lady from Siam Who said to her lover, one Kiam, "You may kiss me of course, But you'll have to use force. Though god knows you're stronger than I am." %% There was a young lady from Spain Who demurely undressed on a train. A helpful young porter Helped more than he orter, And she promptly cried "Help me again" %% There was a young lady from Spain Who got sick as she rode on a train; Not once, but again, And again, and again, And again, and again, and again. %% There was a young lady from Venus, Whose body was shaped like a penis. A fellow named Hunt Was shaped like a cunt, So it all worked out fine, just between us. %% There was a young lady from Venus. Whose body was shaped like a - -- Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% 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. %% 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. %% 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. %% There was a young lady in Reno, Who lost all her dough playing Keno. But she lay on her back, And opened her crack, So now she owns the Casino! %% 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. %% There was a young lady named Astor Who never let any get past her. She finally got plenty By stopping twenty, Which certainly ought to last her. %% There was a young lady named Bates Who amused every one of her dates By keeping one breast In total arrest While the other described figure eights. %% There was a young lady named Blount Who had a rectangular cunt. She learned for diversion Posterior perversion, Since no one could fit here in front. %% There was a young lady named Bower Who dwelt in an Ivory Tower. But a poet from Perth Laid her flat on the earth, And proceeded with penis to plough her. %% There was a young lady named Bright, Whose speed was far faster than light; She set out one day In a relative way, And returned home the previous night. -- Prof. Arthur Buller, "Punch", 19 Dec. 1923 %% There was a young lady named Brook Who never could learn how to cook. But on a divan She could please any man- She knew every darn trick in the book! %% 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. %% There was a young lady named Ciss Who said, "I think skating's a bliss " But she'll never restate, For a wheel off her skate .siht ekil gnihtemos pu hsinif reh edaM %% There was a young lady named Clair Who possessed a magnificent pair; At least so I thought Till I saw one get caught On a thorn, and begin losing air. %% There was a young lady named Dot Whose cunt was so terribly hot That ten bishops of Rome And the Pope's private gnome Failed to quench her Vesuvial twat. SECRETS OF THE CONFESSIONAL A responsive young girl from the East In bed was an able artiste. She had learned two positions From family physicians, And ten more from the old parish priest. %% There was a young lady named Duff With a lovely, luxuriant muff. In his haste to get in her One eager beginner Lost both of his balls in the rough. %% There was a young lady named Etta Who was constantly seen in a swetta. Three reasons she had: To keep warm wasn't bad, But the other two reasons were betta. %% There was a young lady named Fleager Who was terribly, terribly eager To be all the rage On the tragedy stage, Though her talents were pitifully meagre. -- Edward Gorey %% There was a young lady named Flo Whose lover had pulled out too slow. So they tried it all night, Till he got it just right... Well, practice makes pregnant, you know. %% There was a young lady named Flynn Who thought fornication a sin, But when she was tight It seemed quite all right, So everyone filled her with gin. %% There was a young lady named Gilda Who went on a date with a builder. He said that he would, And he could and he should, And he did and it damn well near killed her. %% There was a young lady named Gloria, Whose boyfriend said, "May I explore ya?" She replied to the chap, "I'll draw you a map, Of where others have been to before ya." %% There was a young lady named Gloria Who was had by Sir Gerald Du Maurier, And then by six men, Sir Gerald again, And the band at the Waldorf-Astoria. %% There was a young lady named Grace Who would not take a prick in her "place." Though she'd kiss it and suck it, She never would fuck it-- She just couldn't relax face-to-face. %% There was a young lady named Hall, Wore a newspaper dress to a ball. The dress caught on fire And burned her entire Front page, sporting section, and all. %% There was a young lady named Hatch Who would always come through in a scratch. If a guy wouldn't neck her, She'd grab up his pecker And shove the damn thing up her snatch. %% There was a young lady named Hunt Who performed the unusual stunt Of screwing by mail When she was in jail For she had a detachable cunt. %% There was a young lady named Mable Who liked to sprawl out on the table, Then cry to her man, "Stuff in all you can -- Get your ballocks in, too, if you're able." %% There was a young lady named Mandel Who caused quite a neighborhood scandal By coming out bare On the main village square And frigging herself with a candle. %% There was a young lady named Maud, A terrible society fraud: In company, I'm told, She was distant and cold, But if you got her alone, Oh God! %% There was a young lady named May Who strolled in a park by the way, And she met a young man Who fucked her and ran -- Now she goes to the park every day. %% There was a young lady named Nance Who learned about fucking in France, And when you'd insert it She'd squeeze till she hurt it, And shoved it right back in your pants. %% There was a young lady named Nancy, Who liked having sex, plain or fancy, With lightning and thunder, And a profound sense of wonder, But not with a partner -- much too chancy. %% 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 was a young lady named Ransom Who was raped three times in a hansom When she cried out for more Said a voice from the floor, "My name, ma'am, is Simpson, not Samson %% There was a young lady named Riddle Who had an untouchable middle. She had many friends Because of her ends, Since it isn't the middle you diddle. %% There was a young lady named Rose Who fainted whenever she chose; She did so one day While playing croquet, But was quickly revived with a hose. -- Edward Gorey %% There was a young lady named Rose With erogenous zones in her toes. She remained onanistic Till a foot-fetishistic Young man became one of her beaux. %% There was a young lady named Schneider Who often kept trysts with a spider. She found a strange bliss, In the hiss of her piss, As it strained through the cobwebs inside her. %% There was a young lady named Smith Whose virtue was largely a myth. She said, "Try as I can I can't find a man Who it's fun to be virtuous with." %% There was a young lady named Susie, Who everyone thought was a floozy. She liked boy scout troops And Shriners, in groups; "What the hell?" She replied, "I'm not choosy." %% There was a young lady named Twiss Who said she thought fucking a bliss, For it tickled her bum And caused her to come .siht ekil gniyl ylbatrofmoc elihW %% 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. %% There was a young lady of Arden, The tool of whose swain wouldn't harden. Said she with a frown, "I've been sadly let down By the tool of a fool in a garden." %% There was a young lady of Bicester Who was nicer by far than her sister: The sister would giggle And wiggle and jiggle, But this one would come if you kissed her. %% There was a young lady of Brabant Who slept with an impotent savant. She admitted, "We shouldn't, But it turned out he couldn't- So you can't say we have when we haven't." %% There was a young lady of Bude Who walked down the street in the nude. A bobby said, "Whattum Magnificent bottom!" And slapped it as hard as he could. %% There was a young lady of Carmia Whose housekeeping ways would alarm ya. At every cold snap She would climb in your lab, So her little base burner could warm ya. %% There was a young lady of Dee Who went down to the river to pee. A man in a punt Put his hand on her cunt, And God! how I wish it were me. %% There was a young lady of Dee Whose hymen was split into three. And when she was diddled The middle string fiddled : "Nearer My God To Thee." %% There was a young lady of Dexter Whose husband exceedingly vexed her, For whenever they'd start He'd unfailingly fart With a blast that damn nearly unsexed her. %% There was a young lady of Dover Whose passion was such that it drove her To cry, when you came, "Oh dear! What a shame! Well, now we shall have to start over." %% There was a young lady of Ealing And her lover before her was kneeling. Said she, "Dearest Jim, Take your hands off my quim; I much prefer fucking to feeling." %% There was a young lady of Fez Who was known to the public as "Jez." Jezebel was her name, Sucking cocks was the game She excelled at (so everyone says). %% 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. %% There was a young lady of Gloucester, Met a passionate fellow who tossed her. She wasn't much hurt, But he dirtied her skirt, So think of the anguish it cost her. %% There was a young lady of Gloucester Whose friends they thought they had lost her Till they found on the grass The marks of her arse, And the knees of the man who had crossed her. %% There was a young lady of Kent, Who admitted she knew what it meant When men asked her to dine, And plied her with wine, She knew, oh she knew - but she went! %% There was a young lady of Lee Who scrambled up into a tree, When she got there Her arsehole was bare, And so was her C U N T. %% There was a young lady of Lincoln Who said that her cunt was a pink'un, So she had a prick lent her Which turned it magenta, This artful old lady of Lincoln. %% There was a young lady of Natchez Who chanced to be born with two snatches, And she often said, "Shit! Why, I'd give either tit For a man with equipment that matches." There was a young fellow named Locke Who was born with a two-headed cock. When he'd fondle the thing It would rise up and sing An antiphonal chorus by Bach. But whether these two ever met Has not been recorded as yet, Still, it would be diverting To see him inserting His whang while it sang a duet. %% There was a young lady of Norway Who hung by her toes in a doorway. She said to her beau "Just look at me Joe I think I've discovered one more way." %% There was a young lady of Rhyll In an omnibus was taken ill, So she called the conductor, Who got in and fucked her, Which did more good than a pill. %% There was a young lady of Spain Who was fucked by a monk in a drain. They did it again And again and again, And again and again and again. %% There was a young lady of Twickenham Who thought men had not enough prick in 'em. On her knees every day To God she would pray To lengthen and strengthen and thicken 'em. %% There was a young lady of Yap With pimples all over her map. But in her interstices There lurked a far worse disease That is commonly known as the clap. %% There was a young lady of York Who plugged herself up with a cork. She explained, "It's more svelte Than a chastity belt, And is quickly removed with a fork." %% There was a young lady of fashion Who had oodles and oodles of passion. To her lover she said, As they climbed into bed, "Here's one thing the bastards can't ration!" %% There was a young lady quite tearful. Of sucking a cock, she was fearful. In a moment of dread, She just turned her head. And, boy! Did she get an earful! %% There was a young lady who said, As her bridegroom got into the bed, "I'm tired of this stunt, That they do with one's cunt, You can get up my bottom instead." %% There was a young lady whose cunt Could accommodate a small punt. Her mother said, "Annie, It matches your fanny, Which never was that of a runt." %% There was a young lady whose thighs, When spread showed a slit of such size, And so deep and so wide, You could play cards inside, Much to her bridegroom's surprise. %% 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 laundress named Wrangle Whose tits tilted up at an angle. "They may tickle my chin," She said with a grin, "But at least they keep out of the mangle." %% There was a young maiden from Osset Whose quim was nine inches across it. Said a young man named Tong, With tool nine inches long, "I'll put bugger-in if I loss it." %% There was a young maiden named Hoople Whose bosom was triple, not duple She had one removed But it grew back improved At present Miss Hoople is quadruple! %% There was a young man from Bear Ridge Who had strange ideas about marriage. He fucked his wife's mother And sucked off her brother And ate up her sister's miscarriage. %% 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. %% 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. %% There was a young man from Biloxi Whose bowels responded to Moxie. Drinking glass after glass, He would tune up his ass, Till he played like the band at the Roxy. %% There was a young man from Boston Who rode around in an Austin. There was room for his ass And a gallon of gas, But his balls hung out and he lost 'em. %% There was a young man from Brazil, And a lady who'd not take the pill, They lay on the sofa, And a <$H12{ot]{ok]{ob{o[]{oR{oK{oDpo~po~pot~poe~{ o!po~po~poq~ n~po_~{o[po ~poz~pok~po\~{o 8]{o/pomF~po^~{opoh~poY~{opoc~poT~{op~po^~poO~{o[~poY~ poJ~{oF~poT~poE~{o1~ %% There was a young man from Calcutta Who was heard in his beard to mutter, "If her Bartholin glands Don't respond to my hands, I'm afraid I shall have to use butter." %% There was a young man from Dallas Who had an exceptional phallus. He couldn't find room In any girl's womb Without rubbing it first with Vitalis. %% There was a young man from Dundee Who buggered an ape in a tree. The results were quite horrid: All ass and no forehead, Three balls and a purple goatee. %% There was a young man from East Wubley Whose cock was bifurcated doubly. Each quadruplicate shaft Had two balls hanging aft, And the general effect was quite lovely. %% There was a young man from Glengozzle Who found a remarkable fossil. He knew by the bend And the wart on the end, 'Twas the peter of Paul the Apostle. %% There was a young man from Hong Kong Who had a trifurcated prong: A small one for sucking, A large one for fucking, And a `boney' for beating a gong. %% There was a young man from Jodhpur Who found he could easily cure His dread diabetes By eating a foetus Served up in a sauce of manure. %% There was a young man from LeDoux, Whose limericks stopped at line two. There was a young man from Verdunne. %% There was a young man from Lyme Who couldn't get his limericks to sound right, When asked why not, It was said that he thought, They were probably too long and badly structured and not very funny. %% There was a young man from Lynn Whose cock was the size of a pin. Said his girl with a laugh As she felt his staff, "This won't be much of a sin." %% There was a young man from Maine Whose prick was as strong as a crane; It was almost as long, So he strolled with his dong Extended in sunshine and rain. %% There was a young man from Nantucket Whose cock was so long he could suck it. He said with a grin, While wiping his chin, "If my ear was a cunt, I could fuck it." %% There was a young man from New Haven Who had an affair with a raven. He said with a grin As he wiped off his chin, "Nevermore!" %% There was a young man from Perth Who was born on the day of his birth He married they say On his wife's wedding day And died the day he left the earth. %% There was a young man from Peru, Who took a long trip by canoe. While staring at Venus, And rubbing his penis, He wound up with a handful of goo. %% There was a young man from Poughkeepsie Who, whenever he got slightly tipsy, Would whip out his tool And attack, like a fool, Any girl who was breasty and hipsy. %% There was a young man from Purdue Who was only just learning to screw, But he hadn't the knack, And he got too far back -- In the right church, but in the wrong pew. %% 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. %% There was a young man from Salinas Who had an extremely long penis: Believe it or not, When he lay on his cot It reached from Marin to Martinez. %% There was a young man from Seattle Whose testicles tended to rattle. He said as he fuck-ed Some stones in a bucket, "If Stravinsky won't deafen you -- that'll." %% There was a young man from Siam Who said, "I go in with a wham, But I soon lose my starch Like the mad month of March, And the lion comes out like a lamb." %% There was a young man from St. Helens Afflicted with shrinkin's and swellin's. His dick was so small It was not there at all, But his balls looked like honeydew melons. %% There was a young man from St. Loo, Who gave his dear sister a screw. Said he, with aplomb, "You're better than Mom." Said she, "That's what Dad told me too!" %% There was a young man from St. Lutz, Who had a remarkable putz. It would sniff, it would hunt, For it only liked cunt. Absolutely no lips, hands, or butts. %% There was a young man from St. Paul's Who read "Harper's Bazaar" and "McCall's" Till he grew such a passion For feminine fashion That he knitted a snood for his balls. %% There was a young man from Stamboul Who boasted so torrid a tool That each female crater Explored by this satyr Seemed almost unpleasantly cool. %% There was a young man from Tibet- And this is the strangest one yet- Whose tool was so long, So pointed and strong, He could bugger six Greeks "en brochette". %% There was a young man in Havana, - Banged his girl on a player-piana. At the height of their fever Her ass hit the lever - And: yes, he has no banana. %% There was a young man in Madrid Who got fifty-five fucks for a quid. When they said, "Are you faint?" He replied, "No I ain't, But I don't feel as good as I did. %% There was a young man in Norway, Tried to jerk himself off in a sleigh, But the air was so frigid It froze his cock rigid, And all he could come was frappe. %% There was a young man in the choir Whose penis rose higher and higher, Till it reached such a height It was quite out of sight -- But of course you know I'm a liar. %% There was a young man named Crockett Whose balls got caught in a socket. His wife was a bitch, And she threw the switch, As Crockett went off like a rocket. %% There was a young man named Hughes Who swore off all kinds of booze. He said, "When I'm muddled My senses get fuddled, And I pass up too many screws." %% 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. %% 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 Levine Who said to his lady, inclined, "Thanks for the spasm, It felt like orgasm; As a matter of fact, 'twas divine." %% There was a young man named McGuire, Who was fond of the pitch amplifier. But a number of shorts Left him covered with warts, And set half the bedroom on fire. -- Thomas S. Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" %% There was a young man named McNamiter With a tool of prodigious diameter. But it wasn't the size Gave the girls a surprise, But his rhythm -- iambic pentameter. %% There was a young man named O'Quinn With inordinate interest in skin. His singular goal When he found a hole Was to do what he could to get in. %% There was a young man named O'Rourke, Heard babies were brought by the stork, So he went to the zoo And attempted to screw One old bird - end result : didn't work. %% There was a young man named Rex Who really was small for his sex. When tried for exposure The judge's disclosure Was "de minimus non curat lex." %% There was a young man named Sam Stover Who prayed for a girl to Jehovah. She appeared on his lap And gave him the clap Now that sort of prayer is all over. %% There was a young man named Zerubbabel Who had only one real, and one rubber ball. When they asked if his pleasure Was only half measure, He replied, "That is highly improbable." %% There was a young man named Zerubbabub Who belonged to the Block, Fuck & Bugger Club But the pride of his life Were the tits of his wife -- One real, and one India-rubber bub. %% There was a young man of Arras Who stretched himself out on the grass, And with no little trouble, He bent himself double, And stuck his prick well up his ass. %% There was a young man of Australia Who went on a wild bacchanalia. He buggered a frog, Two mice and a dog, And a bishop in fullest regalia. %% There was a young man of Belgrade Who planned to seduce a fair maid. And as it befell He succeeded quite well So the maid, like the plan, was deep-laid. %% There was a young man of Belgrade Who remarked, "I'm a queer piece of trade. I will suck, without charge, Any cock, if it's large. If it's small, I expect to be paid." %% There was a young man of Belgrade Who slept with a girl in the trade. She said to him, "Jack, Try the hole in the back; The front one is badly decayed." %% There was a young man of Bengal Who swore he had only one ball, But two little bitches Unbuttoned his britches, And found he had no balls at all. %% 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 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 Cape Horn Who wished he had never been born, And he wouldn't have been If his father had seen That the end of the rubber was torn. %% There was a young man of Coblenz Whose ballocks were simply immense: It took forty-four draymen, A priest and three laymen To carry them thither and thence. %% There was a young man of Darjeeling Whose cock reached up to the ceiling. In the electric light socket, He'd put it and rock it-- Oh God! What a wonderful feeling! %% 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. %% There was a young man of Devizes Whose balls were of different sizes. His tool when at ease, Hung down to his knees, Oh, what must it be when it rises! %% There was a young man of Dumfries Who said to his girl, "If you please, It would give me great bliss If, while playing with this, You would pay some attention to these!" %% There was a young man of Greenwich Whose balls were all covered with spinach. So long was his tool That it wound round a spool, And he let it out inach by inach. %% There was a young man of Japan Whose limericks never would scan. When someone asked why He replied with a sigh, ``It's because I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can.'' %% There was a young man of Khartoum, The strength of whose balls was his doom. So strong was his shootin', The third law of Newton Propelled the poor chap to the Moon. %% There was a young man of Khartoum Who lured a poor girl to her doom. He not only fucked her, But buggered and sucked her-- And left her to pay for the room. %% There was a young man of Kildare Who was fucking a girl on the stair. The bannister broke, But he doubled his stroke And finished her off in mid-air. %% There was a young man of Kutki Who could blink himself off with one eye. For a while though, he pined, When his organ declined To function, because of a stye. %% There was a young man of Lahore Whose prick was one inch and no more. It was all right for key-holes And little girl's pee-holes, But not worth a damn with a whore. %% 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. %% There was a young man of Madras Whose balls were constructed of brass. When jangled together They played "Stormy Weather", And lightning shot out of his ass. %% There was a young man of Missouri Who fucked with a terrible fury. Till hauled into court For his beastial sport, And condemned by a poorly-hung jury. %% There was a young man of Natal Who was fucking a Hottentot gal. Said she, "You're a sluggard!" Said he, "You be buggered! I like to fuck slow and I shall." %% There was a young man of Ostend Whose wife caught him fucking her friend. "It's no use, my duck, Interrupting our fuck, For I'm damned if I draw till I spend." %% There was a young man of Rostov Who found it a risk to make love. He had grown very fond Of a statuesque blonde And was hurt when he slipped and fell off. %% There was a young man of Seattle Who bested a bull in a battle. With fire and gumption He assumed the bull's function, And deflowered a whole herd of cattle. %% There was a young man of St. John's Who wanted to bugger the swans. But the loyal hall porter Said, "Pray take my daughter! Those birds are reserved for the dons." %% There was a young man of Tibet -- And this is the strangest one yet -- His prick was so long, And so pointed and strong, He could bugger six sheep en brochette. %% There was a young man of Toulouse Who had a deficient prepuce, But the foreskin he lacked He made up in his sac; The result was, his balls were too loose. %% There was a young man of high station Who was found by a pious relation Making love in a ditch To -- I won't say a bitch -- But a woman of no reputation. %% There was a young man who appeared To his friends with a full growth of beard; They at once said, "Although We can't say why it's so, The effect is uncommonly weird." -- Edward Gorey %% 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." "Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd, For I'm always about in the Quad; And that's why the tree, Continues to be," Signed "Yours faithfully, God." %% There was a young man with a fiddle Who asked of his girl, "Do you diddle?" She replied, "Yes, I do, But prefer to with two -- It's twice as much fun in the middle." %% There was a young man with a prick Which into his wife he would stick Every morning and night If it stood up all right -- Not a very remarkable trick. %% There was a young man with a prick Which into his wife he would stick Every morning and night If it stood up all right -- Not a very remarkable trick. His wife had a nice little cunt: It was hairy, and soft, and in front, And with this she would fuck him, Though sometimes she'd suck him -- A charming, if commonplace, stunt. %% There was a young man with one foot Who had a very long root. If he used this peg As an extra leg Is a question exceedingly moot. %% There was a young man, name of Fred, Who spent every Thursday in bed; He lay with his feet Outside of the sheet, And the pillows on top of his head. -- Edward Gorey %% There was a young man, name of Saul, Who was able to bounce either ball, He could stretch them and snap them, And juggle and clap them, Which earned him the plaudits of all. %% There was a young miss from Johore Who'd lie on a mat on the floor; In a manner uncanny She'd wobble her fanny, And drain your nuts dry to the core. %% There was a young monk from Siberia Whose life got drearia' and drearia' Till he did to a nun What shouldn't be done And made her a mother superia'. %% There was a young monk from Siberia Whose morals were very inferior. He did to a nun What he shouldn't have done And now she's a Mother Superior. %% 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." %% There was a young monk of Kilkyre, Was smitten with carnal desire. The immediate cause Was the abbess' drawers, Which were hung up to dry by the fire. %% There was a young of Warwick Who had reason for feeling euphoric, For he could by election Have triune erection: Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric. %% There was a young parson of Harwich, Tried to grind his betrothed in a carriage. She said, "No, you young goose, Just try self-abuse. And the other we'll try after marriage." %% There was a young peasant named Gorse Who fell madly in love with his horse. Said his wife, "You rapscallion, That horse is a stallion-- This constitutes grounds for divorce." %% There was a young person of Kent Who was famous wherever he went. All the way through a fuck, He would quack like a duck, And he crowed like a cock when he spent. %% There was a young plumber named Lee Who was plumbing his girl by the sea. She said, "Stop your plumbing, There's somebody coming" Said the plumber, still plumbing, "It's me." %% There was a young poet named Dan, Whose poetry never would scan. When told this was so, He said, "Yes, I know, It's because I try to put every possible syllable into that Last line that I can." %% There was a young poet named Dan, Whose poetry never would scan. When told this was so, He said, "Yes, I know. %% 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 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 young sailor from Rome Who found the girls over the foam All acted the same In the sexual game So he might just as well have stayed home. %% There was a young sapphic named Anna Who stuffed her friend's cunt with banana, Which she sucked, bit by bit, From her partner's warm slit, In the most approved lesbian manner. %% There was a young soldier from Munich Whose penis hung down past his tunic, And their chops girls would lick When they thought of his prick, But alas! he was only a eunuch. %% There was a young sportsman named Peel Who went for a trip on his wheel; He pedaled for days Through crepuscular haze, And returned feeling somewhat unreal. -- Edward Gorey %% There was a young squaw of Wohunt Who possessed a collapsible cunt. It had many odd uses, Produced no papooses, And fitted both giant and runt. %% There was a young student from Yale Who was getting his first piece of tail. He shoved in his pole, But in the wrong hole, And a voice from beneath yelled: "No sale!" %% There was a young trollop at Yale, Who had verses tattooed on her tail, And on her behind, For the sake of the blind, A duplicate version in Braille. %% There was a young tutor most wise Who loved to feel cocks, just for size. At every school dance, He'd unzip the boys' pants; They nicknamed him _Lord of the Flies_. %% There was a young woman from Bude, Who went for a swim in the nude, But a man in a punt, Grabbed at her elbow, And said "Hey, lady, you can't swim here, it's private property." %% There was a young woman in Dee Who stayed with each man she did see. When it came to a test She wished to be best, And practice makes perfect, you see. %% There was a young woman named Alice Who peed in a Catholic chalice. She said, "I do this From a great need to piss, And not from sectarian malice." %% There was a young woman named Brent With a cunt of enormous extent, And so deep and so wide, The acoustics inside Were so good you could hear when you spent. %% There was a young woman named Clare Within genitals lacking in hair. What caused this affliction Was sexual friction Which left them the worse for the wear. %% There was a young woman named Ells Who was subject to curious spells When got up very oddly, She'd cry out things ungodly by the palms in expensive hotels. -- Edward Gorey %% There was a young woman named Florence Who for fucking professed an abhorrence, But they found her in bed With her cunt flaming red, And her poodle-dog spending in torrents. %% There was a young woman named Golda Whose lovers grew colder and colder For during love making She'd sing the earth-shaking Love theme from Tristan und Isolde. %% There was a young woman named Maud Who found herself now and then floored --Or bedded, or chaired, Or top of the staired-- Oh, well, it's the life of a bawd. %% There was a young woman named Melanie Who was asked by a man, "Do you sell any?" She replied, "No, siree, I give it for free To sell it, dear sir, is a felony." %% There was a young woman named Plunnery Who rejoiced in the practice of gunnery. Till one day unobservant, She blew up a servant, And was forced to retire to a nunnery. -- Edward Gorey %% There was a young woman named Susan Who found it completely amusin' To make love to three men Although who did what when Was frequently rather confusin'. %% There was a young woman named Sutton Who said, as she carved up the mutton, "My father preferred The last sheep in the herd -- This is one of his children I'm cuttin'." %% There was a young woman named Vicki Who said, "I don't want to be picky. If, in ten minutes or so As you say, you must go, At least we'll have time for a quickie." %% 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 young woman of Condover Whose husband had ceased to be fond of 'er. Her pussy was juicy, Her arse soft and goosey, But peroxide had now made a blonde of 'er. %% There was a young woman of Croft Who played with herself in a loft, Having reasoned that candles Could never cause scandals, Besides which they did not go soft. Said another young woman of Croft, Amusing herself in the loft, "A salami or wurst Is what I'd choose first -- With bologna you know you've been boffed." %% There was a young woman of Sydney Who could take it clear up to the kidney. But the thrust of Alphonse Barely reached to her mons So he left her unsatisfied, didney? %% There was a young woman whose stammer Was atrocious, and so was her grammar; But they were not improved When her husband was moved To knock out her teeth with a hammer. -- Edward Gorey %% 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 an Old Man of the Mountain Who frigged himself into a fountain Fifteen times had he spent, Still he wasn't content, He simply got tired of the counting. %% There was an interesting development in the CBS-Westmoreland trial: both sides agreed that after the trial, Andy Rooney would be allowed to talk to the jury for three minutes about little things that annoyed him during the trial. -- David Letterman %% There was an old Indian belief that by making love on the hide of their favorite animal, one could guarantee the health and prosperity of the offspring conceived thereupon. And so it goes that one Indian couple made love on a buffalo hide. Nine months later, they were blessed with a healthy baby son. Yet another couple huddled together on the hide of a deer and they too were blessed with a very healthy baby son. But a third couple, whose favorite animal was a hippopotamus, were blessed with not one, but TWO very healthy baby sons at the conclusion of the nine month interval. All of which proves the old theorem that: The sons of the squaw of the hippopotamus are equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides. %% There was an old Scotsman of Fife Who had left, in the course of his life, Scores of well-rounded ends Of the wives of his friends And likewise of the friends of his wife. %% There was an old abbess quite shocked To find nuns where the candles were locked. Said the abbess, "You nuns Should behave more like guns, And never go off till you're cocked." %% There was an old bastard named Gene, Impotent, selfish, and mean. His dick was so shamed By what the man claimed, It pretended that it was a spleen. %% There was an old bishop from Buckingham Who fell in love with some oysters while shucking 'em. His wife with distain Could scarcely restrain That sprightly old bishop from * * *. %% There was an old count of Swoboda Who would not pay a whore what he owed her. So, with great savoir-faire, She stood on a chair And pissed in his whiskey-and-soda. %% There was an old curate of Hestion Who'd erect at the slightest suggestion. But so small was his tool He could scarce screw a spool, And a cunt was quite out of the question. %% There was an old fellow named Art Who awoke with a horrible start, For down by his rump Was a generous lump Of what should have been just a fart. %% There was an old fellow named Skinner Whose prick, his wife said, had grown thinner. But still, by and large, It would always discharge Once he could just get it in her. %% There was an old feminine blighter Who trained a Chow dog to delight her. She would cream her own pool While she sucked off his tool -- How his cock in her cunt would excite her! %% There was an old gent from Kentuck Who boasted a filigreed schmuck, But he put it away For fear that one day He might put it in and get stuck. %% There was an old girl of Kilkenny Whose usual charge was a penny. For half of that sum You could finger her bum-- A source of amusement to many. %% There was an old harlot from Dijon Who in her old age got religion. "When I'm dead & gone," Said she, "I'll take on The Father, the Son, and the Pigeon." %% There was an old hermit named Dave Who kept a dead whore in his cave. He said "I'll admit I'm a bit of a shit, But look at the money I save." %% There was an old lady from Austin With a cunt big enough to get lost in In one night she had 14 men and 10 lads And a 15-foot trailer she forced in. %% There was an old lady of Bingly Who wailed, "I do hate to sleep singly. I thought I had got A bloke for my twat, But he seems rather queenly than kingly." %% There was an old lady of Glascow, Whose party proved quite a fiasco. At nine-thirty, about, The lights all went out, Through a lapse on the part of the Gas Co. %% There was an old lady of Kewry Whose cunt was a `lusus naturae': The `introitus vaginae', Was unnaturally tiny, And the thought of it filled her with fury. %% There was an old lady who lay With her legs wide apart in the hay, Then, calling the ploughman, She said, "Do it now, man! Don't wait till your hair has turned gray." %% There was an old lady who lived in a Shoe she had so many children she didn't know what to do so she sold them all and moved into a split level sandal. %% There was an old maid from Cape Cod Who thought all good things came from god. But it wasn't the almighty Who lifted her nighty, It was Roger, the lodger, by god. %% There was an old maid of Peru Who swore that she never would screw Except under stress Of forceful duress Like, "I'm ready, dear, how about you?" %% 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 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 an old man from Fort Drum Whose son was incredibly dumb. When he urged him ahead, He went down instead, For he thought to succeed meant succumb. %% There was an old man from the Nile Whose sexual habits were vile. Yet whenever he'd score The women all swore That he sure made perversion worthwhile. %% There was an old man of Alsace Who played the trombone with his ass. He put in a trap To take out the crap, But the vapors corroded the brass. %% There was an old man of Belfast Whose active sex life was so vast He was glad he'd worked through To a spry ninety-two When his lust was declining at last. %% There was an old man of Brienz The length of whose cock was immense: With one swerve he could plug A boy's bottom in Zug, And a kitchen-maid's cunt in Coblenz. %% There was an old man of Cajon Who never could get a good bone. With the aid of a gland It grew simply grand; Now his wife cannot leave it alone. %% There was an old man of Calcutta Who spied through a chink in the shutter. But all he could see Was his wife's bare knee, And the back of the bloke who was up her. %% 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 an old man of Duddee Who came home as drunk as could be. He wound up the clock With the end of his cock, And buggered his wife with the key. %% 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. %% There was an old man of St. Bees, Who was stung in the arm by a wasp. When asked, "Does it hurt?" He relied, "No, it doesn't. I'm so glad that it wasn't a hornet." -- William S. Gilbert (1836-1911) %% There was an old man of Tagore Whose tool was a yard long or more, So he wore the damn thing In a surgical sling To keep it from wiping the floor. %% There was an old man of the port 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 an old man who averred He had learned how to fly like a bird. Cheered by thousands of people He leapt from the steeple -- This tomb states the date it occurred. %% There was an old man who said, "Tush! My balls always hang in the brush, And I fumble about, Half in and half out, With a pecker as limber as mush." %% There was an old man with a beard Who said, "It is just what I feared! Two owls and a hen, Four larks and a wren Have all built their nests in my beard!" %% There was an old person of Ware Who had an affair with a bear. He explained, "I don't mind, For it's gentle and kind, But I wish it had slightly less hair." %% 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 an old prune name of Ginty Who only ate muffics and thin tea. Thinking of sex Gave her the blecchs, And left her all dried-up and squinty. %% There was an old satyr named Mack Whose prick had a left handed tack. If the ladies he loves Don't spin when he shoves, Their cervixes frequently crack. %% There was an old voyeur named Zeke, Who liked to hide in the closet and peek, Then jump out with loud cries of "Aha!" and "Surprise!" And point out your flaws in technique. %% There was an old whore from Silesia Who'd croke: "If my box doesn't please ya, For a slight extra sum You can go up my bum But watchout or my tapeworm'll seize ya." %% There was an old whore in the Azores Whose body was covered with festers & sores. Why the dogs in the street Wouldn't eat the green meat That hung in festoons from her drawers. %% There was an old witch, name of Jessie Whose crotch was all smelly and messie. She enjoyed a good squirm With an alien worm -- And got stains all over her dressie. %% There was an old woman of Ghent Who swore that her cunt had no scent. She got fucked so often At last she got rotten, And didn't she stink when she spent. %% There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems. -- "Ringworld" %% There was never anything where I've got to work really hard to get there. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% There was no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency ... Inflation engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction. and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. -- John Maynard Keynes %% There was once a family in Philadelphia that went through four generations without fingerprints at all: they were born without prints, the only known case in history. "This could present quite a problem for law enforcement," said one public official. "No way," replied another. "If the police ever find a murder weapon in Philly with no prints on it, we'll know immediately that one of them did it." -- Tom Robbins "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" %% There was once a mechanic named Bench Whose best tool was a sturdy gut-wrench. With this vibrant device He could reach, in a trice, The innermost parts of a wench. %% There was once a newly-married couple. Now these two lovers were, well, rather uptight about using expressions such as "having sex", "getting it on", or "boffing the brains out". So, they decided to use the euphemism, "doing the laundry" whenever the topic of sex came up. One evening, hubby said, "Well, honey, feel like doing some laundry tonite?", and she consented. The next evening, hubby again asked, "Sweetie, feel like doing some laundry tonite?" Well, wifey wasn't really in the mood, but complied. On the third night, when hubby approached her, asking her to participate in doing still MORE laundry, she replied, "Oh, Hon, I'm really not in the mood for doing any laundry tonite." Well, hubby, being a bit disappointed, locked himself in the bathroom and engaged in a spot of self-abuse instead. Upon returning to the living room, wifey said, "Well, Poopsie, I've changed my mind -- how about doing some laundry?" To which he replied, "Oh, no, that's okay, I just did a small load!" %% There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?" "An operating system," replied the programmer. The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said. "Not so," said the programmer, "when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design." The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?" %% There was once a sad Maitre d'hotel Who said, "They can all go to hell! What they do to my wife-- Why it ruins my life; And the worst is, they all do it well. %% There was something about her I liked, but I couldn't put my finger on it. %% There was these 3 guys in the desert. An Arab, an American, and a Dork . Each was carrying 1 item. Now, these bandits came from the east and stopped this merry caravan. They were ready to kill them, when the leader said "We will spare your life if you can give a reasonable explanation of why you are carrying all the items you have. First Was the Arab. "What do you have, and why!" "I have water, so I can drink when thirsty under the hot sun" "Very Well. You, American! Explain!" "I have food, since we have such a long journey, I can eat when I get hungry". "Very Well. Explain Yourself, Dork!" "I carry a Car Door." "Why Do you carry such an Item! There is no good explanation!" "Well, When It get hot, I can roll down the window, and let the fresh air blow in." %% There was this New Yorker that had a lifelong ambition to be an Texan. Fortunately, he had an Texan friend and went to him for advice. "Mike, you know I've always wanted to be a Texan. You're a *real* Texan, what should I do?" "Well," answered Mike, "The first thing you've got to do is look like a Texan. That means you have to dress right. The second thing you've got to do is speak in a southern drawl." "Thanks, Mike, I'll give it a try," replied the New Yorker. A few weeks passed and the New Yorker saunters into a store dressed in a ten-gallon hat, cowboy boots, Levi jeans and a bandanna. "Hey, there, pardner, I'd like some beef, not too rare, and some of them fresh biscuits," he tells the counterman. The guy behind the counter takes a long look at him and then says, "You must be from New York." The New Yorker blushes, and says, "Well, yes, I am. How did you know?" "Because this is a hardware store." %% There was this beautiful woman with three brothers. They were practical jokers. she sent them a telegram of her her planned marriage. Like all good brothers they found out where the honeymoon would be. They would make this a very memorable honeymoon for her and her groom. They drew straws to see what order they would set the room up in. The brother who was a carpenter went first. He went in and came back out in five minutes. the other brothers asked, "What did you do?". He answered, "I messed the couch up". The next brother who was a plumber went in. He banged a bit and was back out in fifteen minutes. He said that he fixed the shower. The third brother was a bit more professional. He was a dentist and had the worst case being a practical joker. He went in the hotel room and came back out in less than a minute. The other two brothers looked in amazement and asked if he had done anything. He said that they would have to wait to find out. A week later they receive another telegram from their sister. It read: Thank you for the surprises. I like the couch falling apart when we sat on it. I liked the shower scalding us in the middle of it. But whoever put the novicane in the petroleum jelly, I will kill... %% There was this city doctor who started a practice in the countryside. He once had to go to a farm to attend to a sick farmer who lived there. After a few housecalls he stopped coming to the farm. The puzzled farmer finally phoned him to ask whats the matter, didn't he like him or somethin'. The doctor said, "No, its your ducks at the entrance...every time I enter the farm, they insult me!" %% There was this girl who was such an airhead that she thought 'nirvana' was where Wheel of Fortune contestants stand.... (Groan!) %% There was this hijacker so dumb that he demanded four hostages and a gun. %% There was this little boy who got up very early one morning to go to Sunday school. He got dressed and right before he was getting ready to leave he asked his mom to give him some money to put in the offering. Well his mom gave him ten cents and, off he was on his way to church. On the way to church he stopped by the little store on the corner to purchase some snacks in case he got hungry. He bought a nickle pack of cookies and put them in his back pocket. When he got to church it was offering time. He walked up to the table and put his nickle in the offering pan and got a dirty look form the preacher. After the offering the minister got up to give his sermon and he said these words. "GOD IS HERE, GOD IS EVERYWHERE." Well now, this frightened little Billy so he jump up right in the middle of the sermon and replied. "I hope god ain't in my back pocket eating up my cookies." %% There was this man who was about to go on a trip to England. The day before he left he asked his next-door neighbour, Mrs. Dunn, if she wanted anything from England. 'Yes', she said. 'Could you please find my son Neely. He's been gone 10 years and has not written or phoned me. Ever! I write to him but he never replies. I try to phone him but he never seems to be in. Anyways, here's his address.' And on a back of a handy envelope she scribbled: Neely Dunn WC1 London, England. The next day, the man embarked on his journey. The plane landed at Heathrow. He got off the plane and was walking down the corridor when he saw a sign saying 'WC'. He entered the room, and saw that it was a washroom. He proceeded to the first toilet stall, knocked on the door and said: - 'Are you Neely Dunn?' - 'Yes, but I ran out of paper', came the reply. - 'Well, that's no excuse not to write your mother!!' %% There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which, in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term that the old hands used for this rite -- West invented the term, not the practice -- was `signing up.' By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends -- if you had any of these left (and you might not, if you had signed up too many times before). -- Tracy Kidder, "The Soul of a New Machine" %% There wasn't any shoot-to-kill order. That was a fabrication. %% There were once three Indian squaws. One sat on a leopard skin. One sat on a doe skin. The third sat on a hippopotamus skin. The squaw on the leopard skin had one son. The squaw on the doe skin had two sons. This, of course, proves that the squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two hides. %% There were the Scots Who kept the Sabbath And everything else they could lay their hands on. Then there were the Welsh Who prayed on their knees and their neighbors. Thirdly there were the Irish Who never knew what they wanted But were willing to fight for it anyway. Lastly there were the English Who considered themselves a self-made nation Thus relieving the Almighty of a dreadful responsibility. %% There were three famous people named Stein There was Gert, there was Ep, there was Ein Gerts writing was bunk Eps carving was junk and no-one could understand Ein %% There were three ladies of Huxham, And whenever we meets 'em we fucks 'em, And when that game grows stale We sits on a rail, And pulls out our pricks and they sucks 'em. %% There were three men working in a stone quarry. When each was asked what he was doing, they each responded differently. The first said, "I'm cutting rocks." The second replied, "I'm earning some money." The third man said, "I'm building a palace." %% There where 2 novice nuns and a mother superior riding a three person bicycle. they were riding along when they hit a bump. As they hit the 2 novices giggled. The mother superior just gave them a dirty look. They rode a little farther and they hit another bump and the novices giggled again. The mother superior gave them another dirty look. They rode a bit further until they came to another bump and the two novices giggled again and the mother stopped the bike and looked at the novices and said, "If you don't stop that I'm going to put the seat back on!" %% There where 3 nuns on a train and they had been talking for some time when they decided to pass the time they decided to tell each other what their greatest sins where. The first nun got up and said, "My greatest sin is sex. Every year I go out for a week and become a prostitute. Of course I put all the money I earn in the poor box but that is my greatest sin." The second nun got up and said, "My greatest sin is drinking. Every year I the money out of the poor box and drink for one consecutive week." The third nun was sitting there being very quite. The other nuns say "come now we told you our worst sins, what is yours." The third nun got up and said, "My greatest sin is that I am a gossip and I can't wait to get off this train." %% There will always be beer cans rolling on the floor of your car when the boss asks for a lift home from the office. %% There will always be mimes and ventriloquists to make us miserable. %% There will always be prayer in school as long as there are final exams. %% There will always be some delightful mysteries in your life. %% There will always be survivors. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% There will be big changes for you and you will be happy. Don't expect it to last long. %% There will be big changes for you but you will be happy. %% There will be no last bus tonight. %% There will be no mutant enemy we shall certify. %% There will not be a murky ending. -- President George Bush, prior to invading Iraq %% There you go man, Keep as cool as you can. It riles them to believe that you perceive the web they weave. Keep on being free! %% There'll be good rockin' at midnight tonight. %% There's a bug somewhere in your code. %% There's a certain inefficiency in constantly questioning me on things you've already made up your mind about. -- Spock, "The Corbomite Maneuver," stardate 1514.0 %% There's a charming young girl in Tobruk Who refers to her quiff as a nook. It's deep and it's wide, -- You can curl up inside With a nice easy chair and a book. %% There's a charming young lady named Beaulieu Who's often been screwed by yours truly, But now--it's appallin'-- My balls always fall in! I fear that I've fucked her unduly. %% There's a corporate giant named EXXON That it seems maybe God put a hex on. Its tankers all leak And we won't even speak Of the pipeline that nobody checks on. %% There's a couple of million dollars worth of baseball talent on the loose, ready for the big leagues, yet unsigned by any major league. There are pitchers who would win 20 games a season ... and outfielders [who] could hit .350, infielders who could win recognition as stars, and there's at least one catcher who at this writing is probably superior to Bill Dickey, Josh Gibson. Only one thing is keeping them out of the big leagues, the pigmentation of their skin. They happen to be colored. -- Shirley Povich (1941) %% There's a dance in the old girl yet %% There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker. -- Charles M. Schulz %% There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me. -- John Erskine %% There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will. -- William Shakespeare %% There's a dowager near Sweden Landing Whose manners are odd and demanding. It's one of her jests To suck off her guests -- She hates to keep gentlemen standing. %% There's a fine line between courage and foolishness. Too bad that it's not a fence. %% There's a flaw in the ointment. %% There's a fundamental rule of automation that says Everything automatically done _for_ you simultaneously does something unpredicted and usually unpleasant _to_ you. %% There's a ghost in this machine. %% There's a great power in words, it you don't hitch too many of them together. -- Josh Billings %% There's a hot place with pitchforks waiting. %% There's a little picture of ED MCMAHON doing BAD THINGS to JOAN RIVERS in a $200,000 MALIBU BEACH HOUSE!! %% There's a long hard road and a full, hard drive And a sector there where I feel alive Every bit of every byte Is written down once on the night Networking, I'm user friendly..." -- Warren Zevon, Networking, Transverse City %% There's a lot than can be said about procrastination, but this isn't the time to talk about it. -- Kevin Barkes %% There's a lot to be said for being noveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all. -- Gore Vidal, in "The Observer", 1981 %% There's a lot to be said for not saying a lot. %% There's a lovely young lady named Shittlecock Who loves to play diddle and fiddle-cock, But her cunt's got a pucker That's best not to fuck, or When least you expect it to, it'll lock. %% There's a man deeply in debt, see, and he takes the money he has left and goes to Monte Carlo to try to recoup at the roulette tables. Won a little, lost a lot, and was down to his last franc. Prayed for help. A voice whispered in his ear: "Le rouge..." Man looked around; nobody there. What the hell - he puts his last franc on the red, and it won. The voice immediately said, "Encore le rouge..." Played red again, and it won again. The voice said, "Impair..." Played odd, and it won. Voice said, "Quinze..." so he put all the money on 15, and it won. This went on for hours, the voice telling him what to bet, and the man putting all his money on what the voice said, and winning. Finally when the voice spoke, the man protested that he'd won millions of dollars and wanted to quit. The voice was inexorable: "Douze..." The man put the money on 12, and 11 came up - he had lost everything - the voice murmured "Merde!!" %% There's a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good. -- Burton Hillis %% There's a new outfit in New York City called New York Pride, which is attempting to get New Yorkers to at least pretend that they don't hate everybody. This program resulted from a survey in which researchers asked tourists how come they didn't want to come back to New York, and the tourists said it was because there was so much mean-spiritedness. So the researchers spat on them. -- Dave Barry %% There's a penguin on the telly. %% There's a pizza place near where I live that sells only slices... in the back you can see a guy tossing a triangle in the air... -- Stephen Wright %% There's a rather odd couple in Herts Who are cousins (or so each asserts); Their sex is in doubt For they're never without Their moustaches and long, trailing skirts. -- Edward Gorey %% There's a reason why Barton is queer. When you meet him, the reason is clear. A goddess named Venus Gave him a penis, But Mother Nature filled up his brassiere. %% There's a small town on Poland with two families and a mule. Everyone was married. %% There's a sports-minded coed named Sue, Who's been coxing the varsity crew. In the shell Sue is great, But her boyfriend's irate, When she calls out the stroke as they screw. %% There's a sucker born every minute. -- Phineas T. Barnam %% There's a sucker reborn every minute. -- Old Buddhist saying %% There's a tavern in London that's staffed, By a barmaid who's tops at her craft: In her striving to please, She serves ale on her knees, So the patrons get head with their draft. %% There's a thrill in store for all for we're about to toast The corporation that we represent. We're here to cheer each pioneer and also proudly boast, Of that man of men our sterling president The name of T. J. Watson means A courage none can stem And we feel honored to be here to toast the IBM. -- Ever Onward [from the 1940 IBM Songbook] %% There's a time to fight, and a time to hide out! -- B. Cassidy %% There's a time when you have to explain to your children why they're born, and it's a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then. %% There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over--and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along--quite gracefully. -- Ellen Goodman %% There's a vas deferens between children and no children. %% There's a vas deferens between men and women. %% There's a very hot babe at the Aggies Who's to men what to bulls a red rag is. The seniors go round Hanging down to the ground, And one extra-large Soph has to drag his. %% There's a vicar who's classed as nefarious, Since his shocking perversions are various... He will bugger some lad With a dildo (the cad!) While exulting, "My pleasure's vicarious!" %% There's a way of transferring funds that is even faster than electronic banking. It's called marriage. -- James Holt McGavran %% There's a way out of any cage. -- Captain Christopher Pike, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown. %% There's a whole WORLD in a mud puddle! -- Doug Clifford %% There's a wonderful family called Stein, There's Gert and there's Epp and there's Ein; Gert's poems are bunk, Epp's statues are junk, And no one can understand Ein. %% There's a young Yiddish slut with two cunts, Whose pleasure in life is to pruntz. When one pireg is shot, There's that alternate twat, But the ausgefuckt male merely grunts. %% There's always free cheese in a mousetrap. %% There's always someone willing to disagree with me; but I'm the one who's called controversial. -- Solomon Short %% There's an ancient amber scarab here. %% There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to. %% 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. %% There's an unbroken babe from Toronto, Exceedingly hard to get onto, But when you get there, And have parted the hair, You can fuck her as much as you want to. %% There's another Shuttle going up...but this time they'll be a substitute teacher. %% There's another way to survive. Mutual trust -- and help. -- Kirk, "Day of the Dove," stardate unknown %% There's at least one fool in every married couple. %% There's been no top authority saying what marijuana does to you. I really don't know that much about it. I tried it once but it didn't do anything to me. -- John Wayne %% There's enough money here to buy 5000 cans of Noodle-Roni! %% There's going to be some changes around here! %% There's good rocking at midnight. %% There's got to be more to life than compile-and-go. %% There's just something I don't like about Virginia; the state. %% 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 (1893-1967) %% There's many a slurp t'wixt the tip and the zip. %% There's more than one way to skin a cat: Way #15 -- Krazy Glue and a toothbrush. Way #27 -- Use an electric sander. Way #32 -- Wrap it around a lonely frat man's pecker. Way #33 -- A bicycle pump. %% There's more than one way to skin a cat: Way number 15 -- Krazy Glue and a toothbrush. %% There's more than one way to skin a cat: Way number 27 -- Use an electric sander. %% There's more than one way to skin a cat: Way number 32 -- Wrap it around a lonely frat man's pecker. %% There's more to living than not dying. %% There's mulch in the bag. %% There's never time to do it right but always time to do it over. -- John K. Meskimen %% There's never time to do the job right, so we must find time to do it again. %% There's no accounting for taste! -- Colonel Sanders %% There's no bug in this program. It's the C optimizer!! %% There's no bug in this program. It's the operating system!! %% There's no easy quick way out, we're gonna have to live through our whole lives, win, lose, or draw. -- Walt Kelly %% There's no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs. %% There's no future in time travel %% There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending. -- Abraham Lincoln, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.5 %% There's no justice in this world. -- Frank Costello [On the prosecution of "Lucky" Luciano by New York district attorney Thomas Dewey after Luciano had saved Dewey from assassination by Dutch Schultz (by ordering the assassination of Schultz instead)] %% There's no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit. %% There's no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I'll have it in the face of death, or it's useless. -- Hober Mallow %% There's no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger. -- William Shakespeare %% There's no place here for a man who says what he means. %% There's no place like home. %% There's no place like home. There's no place like home. %% There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish--sometimes. -- Dr. Tom Baker, ROBOT %% There's no point in suspending a demonstration game. %% There's no real need to do housework -- after four years it doesn't get any worse. %% There's no replacement, for displacement -- Steve D'Amelio, damelio@progress.com %% There's no room in the drug world for amateurs. -- Raoul Duke %% There's no saint like a reformed sinner. %% There's no such thing as a dangerous weapon, only dangerous men. %% There's no such thing as a well adjusted slave. %% There's no such thing as an original sin... -- Elvis Costello %% There's no surefool way of proceeding. %% There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. -- Will Rogers %% There's no use being precise about something when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann %% There's no use in having a dog and doing your own barking. %% There's none so blind as they that won't see. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% There's not much chance for kids to work their way though college these days. One father said that his son took odd jobs all summer "and worked his way through his registration fee." -- Armand Cirilli %% There's not much point in wandering around out here, and you can't explore the cave without a lamp. So let's just call it a day. %% There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough. -- Wiliam Zinsser %% There's not one wise man among twenty will praise himself. -- William Shakespeare %% There's not so much danger in a known foe and a suspected friend. -- Nabb %% There's nothing as dull as yesterday's headlines. %% There's nothing better than good sex. But bad sex? A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is better than bad sex. -- Billy Joel %% There's nothing disgusting about it [the Companion]. It's just another life form, that's all. You get used to those things. -- McCoy, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8 %% There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. -- William Shakespeare %% There's nothing here it wants to eat (except perhaps you). %% There's nothing like a girl with a plunging neckline to keep a man on his toes. %% There's nothing like good food, good wine, and a bad girl. %% There's nothing like the face of a kid eating a Hershey bar. %% There's nothing more restful than taking orders from fools. %% There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas. -- Edward Abbey %% There's nothing very mysterious about you, except that nobody really knows your origin, purpose, or destination. %% There's nothing worse for your business than extra Santa Clauses smoking in the men's room. -- W. Bossert %% There's nothing wrong with America that a good erection wouldn't cure. -- David Mairowitz %% There's nothing wrong with sex on television... so long as you don't fall off. %% There's nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won't aggravate. %% There's nothing wrong with using four-letter words in explaining the facts of life to children--words like love, kiss, help, care, give, ... -- Sam Levenson %% There's one fool at least in every married couple. %% There's one in every car... You'll see. %% There's one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience. %% There's one thing worse than being alone: wishing you were. -- Bob Steele %% There's one thing worse than change, and that's the status quo. %% There's only one everything. %% There's only one kind of woman.... Or man, for that matter. You either believe in yourself or you don't. -- Kirk and Harry Mudd, "Mudd's Women," stardate 1330.1 %% There's only one me and I'm stuck with him. -- R. L. Stanfield %% There's only one thing that I can do better than anyone else - read my own handwriting. %% There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again. -- Clint Eastwood %% There's safety in numbers/When you learn to divide. %% There's salt in the sack. %% There's six of us baby so... %% There's small choice in rotten apples. -- William Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew" %% There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic. -- Lily Tomlin %% There's so much to say but your eyes keep interrupting me. %% There's something about winning at poker that restores my faith in the innate goodness of my fellowman. -- Edward Abbey %% There's something else I dislike just as much as creeping socialism, and that's galloping reaction. -- Adlai Stevenson %% There's something to be said for relatives... It has to be said because it's unprintable! -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% There's something wrong if you're always right. -- Arnold Glasow %% There's still much to do, still so much to learn. -- Picard, "The Neutral Zone", stardate 41986.0 %% There's such a thing as too much point on a pencil. -- Avery %% There's this cowboy, who is riding along on his horse, and he sees this Indian laying down with his head to the ground. "What's going on?" sez the cowboy. The Indian replys: "Wagon... two horses... Man... Woman... boy... dog..." "Wow!", sez the cowboy, "You can tell all that by listening to the ground?" The Indian replys: "Ran over me five minutes ago." %% There's times peoples just be tired of peoples. %% There's too much apathy in this world...but who cares? %% There's too much beauty upon this earth for lonely men to bear. -- Richard Le Gallienne %% Theres a kid in the livingroom playing with his train set and his mother is in the kitchen. The kid has the train pull up to the station and says: "Okay, all you assholes who want to get off, get off! And all you assholes that want to stay on, stay on!" Well, the mother is appalled at her childs language, so she tells him: "Go to your room young man and think about what youve said. And don't come out till you're finished!!" So the kid goes to his room and about an hour later he comes out. He goes back to his train set and says: "Okay, all you nice people who want to get off, please do so. And all of you nice people who want to stay on, please do so. And if there are any complaints about the delay, you can talk to the asshole in the Kitchen!!!!!" %% Thermal paper will run out before the calculation is complete. -- John L. Shelton %% Thermonuclear detonation in 1 second ... BOOM! %% These Frenchman are talking about the true meaning of "savoir faire." The first one says, "If a man should come home unexpectedly and find his wife in bed with her lover, and he should tiptoe away without disturbing them, that man has savoir faire." "Mais non, mon ami! If a man should <... find his wife etc.>, and he says to them, "Pardonnez-moi, please continue, -that- man has savoir faire." The last guy says, "Not quite, mes amies: if a man should <...> and he says to them "Pardonnez-moi, please continue" - now if her lover CAN continue, THAT man has savoir faire!" %% These PRESERVES should be FORCE-FED to PENTAGON OFFICIALS!! %% These activities have their own rules and methods of concealment which seek to mislead and obscure. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1960) %% These are the effects of doting age: vain doubts, and idle cares, and over caution. -- John Dryden (1631-1700) %% These aren't my COLORS! -- Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% These blokes need to be taught to respect their superiors. -- Gen. Cornwallis %% These days the necessities of life cost you about three times what they used to, and half the time they aren't even fit to drink. %% These definitions were taken from "Whut Makes You Thank Teksuns Tawk Funny" a dictionary of the Texas language by Ken Rigsbee The Grayte State uh Teksus defines: Aukerd- clumsy, inept, embarrassing. "Ah shore felt aukerd when thuh outhouse wall fayul down."- awkward Cawdja-past tense of "cawya". "Herd Joe cawdja last night."-Called you Code-opposite of hot. "Ah gotta code."- cold Cuz-normally comes before reason. "Ah didunt go ovur tuh town cuz Ah habumt got no money."- because Everwonsinawhahl-periodically, but frequently. "Ah git tuh drahv mah Pappa's pickem'up truk evurwonsinawhahl."- ever once in a while Frayed- an affirmative or negative response. "Ahm frayed so." or "Ahm frayed not."- afraid Guf- a large body of water for which a previously named large and independent oil company was named ( since bought out). "Thuh closest thang waygot tuh un oshun iz thuh Guf uh Messyco"- gulf %% These ideas and others like them can be had for $0.02 each from any reputable idealist. %% These mysterious lines were seen on Arnold's visual display: LDA $FF STA $20 TYX TAY LDX #$1B PHA It becomes curiouser and curiouser when one notes the clearly bitmapped, smooth scrolling characters. A theory: 2 68000's control the display, while the 6502 is his brain. AHA! you say -- How could he ride a motorcycle like that with only 64K of addressable RAM? Answer: Bank switching. %% These poems have come out of my forehead. The subjects are all fairly torrid -- Except for the few That will make you say, "Pugh!" And those are the ones that are horrid. %% These screamingly hilarious gogs ensure owners of X Ray Gogs to be the life of any party. -- X-Ray Gogs Instructions %% These shells in which we have encased ourselves -- they have such heightened senses. To feel, to hear, to smell. How do humans manage to exist in these fragile cases? -- Rojan the Kelvan, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4657.5 %% These three women are discussing their boyfriends and how they perform in bed. First woman: "My boyfriend is a wrestler and he's very aggressive! I like that!" Second woman:"My boyfriend is an artist and he's so gentle when we make love" Third woman: "(sigh) Well, my boyfriend sells computers for IBM and we never actually make love.He just sits on the edge of the bed and tells me how good it's going to be when I finally get it." %% These tricorder readings are most unusual, Captain. %% These tricorder readings are unique. %% These two were driving home across the desert.. and they were in need of some fuel. They pass a sign that says, "Free sex with fill-up" "Hey man" says one , "I've heard of that. Let's try it." So they stop... "Can I help you?" "Yeah, fill 'er up" (a few minutes later) "That'll be $18.50 please" "Hey, wait a minute, your sign says free sex with fill-up" "Oh, why yes it does, but it is conditional.. I am thinking of a number between one and twenty, what is it?" "Five" "Eight" "No, I am sorry gentlemen, it was two, well, better luck next time" The two s leave and are a bit perturbed... "Aw man, we were ripped off!" "Nah, I don't think so, last week my wife went in there twice and won both times!!" %% These two girls from back east were vacationing in California and went to the beach to catch some rays. Well, they sat out too long and got burned raw. Since they never got to go to the beach back home, they sat out at the beach the next day. And the next. Until their two weeks vacation was finished. They went back home and were just red beyond recognition. A month later, they both got sick and went to a doctor. (Dr. Demento, I think.) He took one look at them and proclaimed, "The cancer my friends, is growing in the skin, the cancer is growing in the skin." %% These two guys, George and Harry, set out in a Hot Air balloon to cross the Atlantic Ocean. After 37 hours in the air, George says "Harry, we better lose some altitude so we can see where we are". Harry lets out some of the hot air in the balloon, and the balloon descends to below the cloud cover. George says, "I still can't tell where we are, lets ask that guy on the ground". So Harry yells down to the man "Hey, could you tell us where we are?". And the man on the ground yells back "You're in a balloon, 100 feet up in the air". George turns to Harry and says "That man must be a lawyer". And Harry says "How can you tell?". George says "Because the advice he gave us is 100% accurate, and totally useless". That's the end of the Joke, but for you people who are still worried about George and Harry: They end up in the drink, and make the front page of the New York Times: "Balloonists Soaked by Lawyer". %% These two project managers were walking through a residential area one day, when they saw a dog (also male) sitting on a lawn, licking its cock. (Why do dogs do that? Because they can). Anyway, the first manager nudged the second and said, "Hey, look at that! That really looks like fun -- I wish I could do that!" Whereupon the second manager replied, "Well, I don't know... I tried it once, and the damn dog bit me!" %% These types are not "abstract"; they are as real as int and float. -- Doug McIlroy %% These walls that still surround me, Still contain the same old me. Just one more who's searching for The world that ought to be. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% They [District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity: (1) Go down and raid all the lockers in the local high school and confiscate 53 marijuana cigarettes and put them in a pile and hold a press conference where you announce that they have a street value of $850 million. These raids never fail, because ALL high schools, including brand-new, never-used ones, have at least 53 marijuana cigarettes in the lockers. As far as anyone can tell, the locker factory puts them there. (2) Raid an "adult book store" and hold a press conference where you announce you are charging the owner with 850 counts of being a piece of human sleaze. This also never fails, because you always get a conviction. A juror at a pornography trial is not about to state for the record that he finds nothing obscene about a movie where actors engage in sexual activities with live snakes and a fire extinguisher. He is going to convict the bookstore owner, and vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong impression. -- Dave Barry, "Pornography" %% They [preachers] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% They also serve who only stand and wait. -- John Milton (1608-1674) %% They also surf who only stand on waves. %% They are able because they think they are able. -- Virgil %% They are all fickle but one, sir. -- A West Point Cadet's answer to, "How are they all?" (Suggestions as to what this could have meant are appreciated). %% They are blueprints for building a small ship! You will need hammer, nails, lumber, anchor, keel, and something for a sail. %% They are called computers simply because computation is the only significant job that has so far been given to them. -- Louis Ridenour %% They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% They are relatively good but absolutely terrible. -- Alan Kay [commenting on Apollos] %% They bear and endure; This means good fortune for inferior people. The standstill serves to help the great man attain success. %% They bear shame. %% They begin with making falsehood appear like truth, and end with making truth itself appear like falsehood. -- Shensione %% They called him Frost. %% They can't stop us... we're on a mission from God! -- The Blues Brothers %% They collapsed....like nuns in the street....they had no teen appeal! %% They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist... -- Civil War General John Sedgwick [his last words, Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, 1864] %% They don't give a damn if it takes one-tenth the RAM, It ain't what *they* call "structured code"... -- from "The Sultans of Software" %% They don't make nostalgia like they used to. %% They don't say Hanes until I say they say Hanes! %% They don't suffer. They can't even speak English. -- George F. Baer [answering a reporter's question about the suffering of starving miners] %% They face off against each other in the street down in jungleland. %% They finally had to stop Millet's pie-eating contest this year, when a guy was killed in it. The cow sat on him. %% They gave her back to me, Scotty. I doubt if it was *that* easy with Nogura, sir! -- Kirk and Scotty, "ST: The Motion Picture," stardate 7411.4 %% They had come in the fugue to the stretto When a dark, bearded man from a ghetto Slipped forward and grabbed Her tresses and stabbed Her to death with a rusty stiletto. -- Edward Gorey %% They have a right to censure that have a heart to help. -- William Penn %% They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost" %% They just buzzed and buzzed.....buzzed. %% They killed his mother. They burned his forest. He's back. And he's pissed. -- BAMBO! %% They make love at the drop of a hat. Any hat. -- Geordi and Yar about the Edo, "Justice", stardate 41255.6 %% They never let you live it down. One little mistake! -- Nero %% They only did it 'cause of fame, who - EMI. %% They pass best over the world who trip over it quickly; for it is but a bog-- if we stop we sink. -- Queen Elizabeth %% They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor, and the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance' -- his food, his clothes, his shelter -- with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it -- from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world. Created -- by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as 'an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.' Supplied -- by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being -- but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind -- and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce -- on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand -- of whom? Blank-out. -- John Galt %% They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring -- one's answer to the first blades of grass, the first buds on tree branches, the first blue of the sky -- the singing answer, not to grass, trees and sky, but to the great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an achievement that nothing will stop. Not from leaves and flowers, but from wooden scaffoldings, from steam shovels, from blocks of stone and sheets of glass rising out of the earth they received the sense of youth, motion, purpose, fulfillment. %% They say a reasonable amount o' fleas is good for a dog -- keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog mebbe. -- Edward Noyes Westcott %% They say an elephant never forgets, but what's he got to remember? %% They say it's the responsibility of the media to look at government -- especially the president -- with a microscope. I don't argue with that, but when they use a proctoscope, it's going too far. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% They say that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. That's not as bad as it sounds, considering that the other 50% end in death. %% They say that a dagger hits. %% They say that a dog avoids traps. %% They say that a dog can be trained to fetch objects. %% They say that a dog never steps on a cursed object. %% They say that a spear will hit a Dragon. %% They say that a spear will hit a neo-otyugh. (Do YOU know what that is?) %% They say that a two-handed sword misses. %% They say that a unicorn might bring you luck. %% They say that an elven cloak may be worn over your armor. %% They say that cavemen seldom find tins in the dungeon. %% They say that dead lizards protect against a cockatrice. %% They say that killing a shopkeeper brings bad luck. %% They say that marriages are made in heaven - but so are thunder and lightning. %% They say that monsters never step on a scare monster scroll. %% They say that shopkeepers often have a large amount of money in their purse. %% They say that the owner of the dungeon might change it slightly. %% They say that the use of dynamite is dangerous. %% They say that there is a big treasure hidden in the zoo! %% They say that there is a message concealed in each fortune cookie. %% They say that there is a trap on this level! %% They say that throwing food at a wild dog might tame him. %% They say that you can meet old friends in the caves. %% They say that you need a key in order to open locked doors. %% They say there are two types of people who fly exclusively on Boeing planes: 1) Boeing engineers. 2) McDonnell Douglas engineers. %% They say there is strangeness, too dangerous, in our theatres and bookstore shelves. Those who know what's best for us, must rise and save us from ourselves. Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand; ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand. -- Rush %% They say we're 98% water. We're that close to drowning... (picks up his glass of water from the stool)... I like to live on the edge... -- Steve Wright %% They say you don't really know a person until you've camped out with him. Car-pooling serves the same purpose. %% They say, if you travel far enough, you will eventually meet yourself. Having experienced that, Number One, its not something I would care to repeat. -- Picard to Riker, "Time Squared", stardate 42679.2 %% They scream your name at night in the street, your graduation gown lies down at your feet. %% They seek him here, they seek him there; They seek that scoundrel everywhere! Is he in space, or travelling time? That damned Napoleon of Crime! -- Moi %% They should stop calling Reagan and Gorbachev the two most powerful men in the world. Between the two of them, they couldn't bench press a hundred pounds. -- Al Ordover %% They sicken of the calm that know the storm. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% They simply have no sense of humor. A character flaw with which you can personally identify. "I say we hand him over to them." Oh, well, I take it back. You do have a sense of humor, a dreadful one at that. -- Q and Riker, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% They spell it "da Vinci" and pronounce it "da Vinchy". Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% They take the paper and they read the headlines, So they've heard of unemployment and they've heard of breadlines, And they philanthropically cure them all By getting up a costume charity ball. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% They talk most who have the least to say. -- Matthew Prior %% They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. The dignity is in leisure. -- Herman Melville (1819-1891) %% They that govern most make the least noise. You see, when they row in a barge, they do that drudgery work, slash and puff, and sweat, but he that governs sits quietly at the stern, and is scarce seen to stir. -- Selden %% They that govern the most make the least noise. -- John Seldon, 1689 %% They that know no evil will suspect none. -- Ben Johnson %% They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them! %% They told me you had proven it When they discovered our results About a month before. Their hair began to curl The proof was valid, more or less Instead of understanding it But rather less than more. We'd run the thing through PRL. He sent them word that we would try Don't tell a soul about all this To pass where they had failed For it must ever be And after we were done, to them A secret, kept from all the rest The new proof would be mailed. Between yourself and me. My notion was to start again Ignoring all they'd done We quickly turned it into code To see if it would run. %% They took some of the Van Goghs, most of the jewels, and all of the Chivas! %% They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum. -- Tallulah Bankhead %% They used to say, if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did fly; he discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That's like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut, like your great, great, great-grandfather used to do ... Dr. McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities -- the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk -- risk is our business. -- Kirk, "Return to Tomorrow," stardate 4768.3 %% They want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of the sanction -- but, Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. -- Hank Rearden %% They weighed anchor, and it hadn't gained an ounce. %% They went rushing down that freeway, Messed around and got lost. They didn't care...they were just dying to get off, And it was life in the fast lane. -- Eagles, "Life in the Fast Lane" %% They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes. %% They were puppets! Huge and dark and sentient, the Puppet Master twitched their arms and their legs and moved them about to an unseen script. And Louis Wu knew the Puppet Master's name. _The luck of Teela Brown._ -- "Ringworld" %% They were sketches of buildings such as had never stood on the face of the earth. They were as the first houses built by the first man born, who had never heard of others building before him. There was nothing to be said of them, except that each structure was inevitably what it had to be. It was not as if the draftsman had sat over them, pondering laboriously, piecing together doors, windows, and columns, as his whim dictated and as the books prescribed. It was as if the buildings had sprung from the earth and from some living force, complete, unalterably right. The hand that had made the sharp pencil lines still had much to learn. But not a line seemed superfluous, not a needed plane was missing. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved that simplicity. No laws had dictated a single detail. The buildings were not Classical, they were not Gothic, they were not Renaissance. They were only Howard Roark. %% They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and the principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. -- Josef Conrad, "An Outpost of Progress" %% They who provide much wealth for their children, but neglect to improve them in virtue, do like those who feed their horses high, but never train them to the manage. -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.) %% They wouldn't listen to the fact that I was a genius, The man said "We got all that we can use", So I've got those steadily-depressin', low-down, mind-messin', Working-at-the-car-wash blues. -- Jim Croce %% They'll shoot you dead, make you a man. %% They'll take away my sword when they pry my cold dead fingers off the hilt. %% They're [androids are] perfect. Flawless, mentally and physically. No weaknesses, perfectly disciplined. No vices, no fears, no faults. Just a sense of purpose. -- McCoy, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% They're enormous! -- President George Bush, on the previous eight years' deficits, Day 12 of the Bush presidency. He didn't understand the deficit until after the election. -- An aide to President George Bush, Day 13 of the Bush presidency %% They're holding us by our love of it, and we'll go on paying so long as there's one chance left to keep one single wheel alive and moving in token of human intelligence. We'll go on holding it afloat, like our drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we'll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism. I know what we're paying, but -- price is no object any longer. -- Dagny Taggart %% They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men and a virgin in the whole organization. -- Mayor Vincent J. `Buddy' Cianci [on the ACLU's suit to have a city nativity scene removed] %% They're not both for sale. %% They're offering you a chance for combat. They consider it more pleasurable than love. -- McCoy, "Friday's Child," stardate 3497.2 %% They're only trying to make me LOOK paranoid! %% They're unfriendly, which is fortunate, really. They'd be difficult to like. -- Avon %% They've found something that does the work of 5 men...1 woman. %% They, I mean the Daleks, tell me they've always been defeated by human beings. . . Possibly because of some factor possessed by human beings that is absent in the Daleks. Perhaps they want to find out what it is and transplant it into their own race. -- Theodore Maxtible, THE EVIL OF THE DALEKS %% The 1-tick-per-second clock of UNIX is good only until January 18, 2038, assuming word lengths don't increase by then. See also {wall time}. %% Thievery is a matter of stealth, not hearty greetings. -- Richard Mace, THE VISITATION %% Thimk! %% Things always get worse under pressure. %% Things are always at their best in the beginning. -- Pascal %% Things are better in their beginnings. -- Blaise Pascal %% Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. -- Dwight D Eisenhower %% Things are more like they used to be than they are now. %% Things are not always as they seem. -- Mandrake the Magician %% Things are not always what they seem. -- Phaedrus %% Things are not as simple as they seems at first. -- Edward Thorp %% Things are seldom what they seem, Skim milk masquerading as cream. -- H.M.S. Pinafore, Act II %% Things are so bad now that the Poles are telling economist jokes. %% Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man's habits change quickly enough? -- Isaac Asimov %% Things do not change; we change. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. %% Things get hazy if you stare at them. %% Things look good, but you may have a halting problem. %% Things move so fast today that we sometimes get the feeling our solutions may be obsolete before we can get them worked out. %% Things past redress and now with me past care. -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II" %% Things sweet to the taste, prove in digestion sour. -- William Shakespeare %% Things will be bright this evening. A cop will shine a light in your face. %% Things will get better despite our efforts to improve them. -- Will Rogers %% Things will get worse before they get better. Who said things would get better? -- John Ehrman %% Things work better when assembled correctly. %% Things worth having are worth cheating for. %% Think "HONK" if you're a telepath %% Think -- maybe the Joneses are trying to keep up with you! %% Think before you act; it's not your money. %% Think big. Pollute the Mississippi. %% Think dirty! %% Think even harder. %% Think globally; act locally. %% Think harder. %% Think it's time I'm leavin' / Nothin' here to make me stay. -- Led Zeppelin %% Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought. -- Henri Bergson %% Think lucky. If you fall in a pond, check your pockets for fish. -- Darrell Royal %% Think more. %% Think of it as evolution in action. %% Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.! %% Think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him -- Gandhi's epitaph %% Think of what others ought to be like, then start being like that yourself. %% Think of your family tonight. Try to crawl home after the computer crashes. %% Think sideways! -- Ed De Bono %% Think that day lost whose low descending sun Views from thy hand no noble action done. -- Jacob Bobart %% Think that you are exceptional and entitled to special privileges. %% Think that you can control your autonomic nervous system by sheer willpower. %% Think twice before saying nothing. %% Think twice before speaking, but don't say "think think click click". %% Think twice before you speak to a friend in need. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Think you are indispensable to your job, your community, your friends. %% Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's Wife, he would have written Sonnets all his life? -- Byron %% Think! -- IBM slogan %% Thinking about what you can't control only wastes energy and creates its own enemy. -- Worf, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2 %% Thinking of Maud you forget everything else. %% Thinks't thou existence doth depend on time? It doth; but actions are our epochs; mine Have made my days and nights imperishable, Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore, Innumerable atoms; and one desert, Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break, But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks, Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness. %% Third Law of Advice: Simple advice is the best advice. %% Third Law of Hacking: the last blow counts most. %% Thirteen at a table is unlucky only when the hostess has only twelve chops. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Thirteen times this year I die Endless is the course I ply, Who or what am I? The moon %% Thirty days hath November, April, June, and September, February hath twenty-eight alone, And all the rest have thirty-one. -- Richard Grafton, 1562 %% Thirty days hath Septober, April, June, and no wonder. all the rest have peanut butter except my father who wears red suspenders. %% Thirty seconds on the evening news is worth a front page headline in every newspaper in the world. -- Edwin Guthman %% This "family values" concept seems to be burgeoning amongst the counterculture. Just recently in Phoenix a professional burglar went about his business accompanied by his wife and children. (Was he perhaps thinking of the statement, "The family that preys together, stays together"?) In any case, when he was shot dead by one of his victims in broad daylight, his wife, who was driving the getaway car, and his children, who were interested observers, were much upset. One observer opined in the newspaper that you should not shoot people for stealing stuff. It gives one to wonder. Obviously, the constituted minions of the law are doing little about people who steal stuff. Perhaps it is indeed time for "the militia" to take over. Remember that according to the Founding Fathers the militia is constituted of all the people, except for a few public servants. -- Jeff Cooper %% This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876 %% This ASEXUAL PIG really BOILS my BLOOD...He's so..so.....URGENT!! %% This Englishman walks in the saloon of a small town somewhere in the Wild West, and orders a drink. Suddenly, a gangster appears, shooting left and right and screaming, "All you scum bags, get out of here." The bar becomes empty in a second, save the Englishman, who calmly carries on to finish his drink. The gangster looks in the Englishman's direction; "Well?" he says. "Well", the Briton replies, "There were certainly quite a lot of them". %% This Fortue Examined By INSPECTOR NO. 2-14 %% This Fortune inspected by NO. 13 %% This Garment Examined By INSPECTOR NO. 2-14 %% This IBM service rep, hardware engineer, and software engineer were driving down the road one day and they had a flat. The service rep wanted to replace the car. The hardware engineer thought they could work around it. The software engineer said, 'Maybe if we ignore it, it'll go away.' %% This MUST be a good party -- My RIB CAGE is being painfully pressed up against someone's MARTINI!! %% This PIZZA symbolizes my COMPLETE EMOTIONAL RECOVERY!! %% This PORCUPINE knows his ZIPCODE ... And he has "VISA"!! %% This Purdue Engineering graduate went into this bar and started to chat with this lovely woman. He offers her a drink, she accepts and they chat some more. When he offers her another drink, the lady says, "Before this goes on any further, I have to tell you that I'm a lesbian." The guy, being from Purdue, says, "really?! What's a lesbian?" The lady was surprised that he didn't know, but explained it to him by saying, "See that gorgeous woman over there, I would love to take her home and ravish her body." The guy than says, "HOT DAMN!! That must mean I'm a lesbian too!" %% This TOPS OFF my partygoing experience! Someone I DON'T LIKE is talking to me about a HEART-WARMING European film ... %% This above all: to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day thou cans't not then be false to any man. -- William Shakespeare %% This ain't no party! This ain't no disco! %% This boat will not inflate since some cretin put a hole in it. %% This book is written in a tongue with which I am unfamiliar. %% This button boldly goes where no button has gone before %% This button is right side up--the person wearing it has flipped %% This cannot be tied, so it cannot be untied! %% This cavern has many long narrow stalactites and stalagmites. when the wind blows through, they produce delicate music, which echoes off the walls. Passages lead south and west, with a tunnel to the east. %% This cavern has smooth walls and a soft floor. it looks like the lair of some huge beast, but there's no animal in sight. there is a short tunnel leading out through the north wall, and another exit to the south. %% This cavern is rather cool and clammy. A newly-cut tunnel leads west, and you see another exit to the south. %% This cavern looks like any other standard assembly-line cavern. %% This chamber sits atop the tower. The only apparent exit from this room is an opening out onto a balcony to the west. A heavy stone sarcophagus sits on an even more massive catafalque against the north wall. %% This child is about to wipe out every living thing on Earth. Now what do you suggest we do? Spank it? -- McCoy, "The Motion Picture," stardate 7411.4 %% This child will probably be shorter than he wants to be, but he should have picked different parents. %% This compter is subject to breakdowns during periods of critical need. %% This computer hardware has the following ratings: 20 Mhs - (20 Million Hurts / Second) 50 DIPS - (50 Dozen Instructions Per Second) 400 MBOPS - (Million Botched Operations Per Second) %% This computer is: a) not smart enough to be artificially intelligent; and b) not stupid enough to be a dumb terminal. %% This computer will self-destruct in five minutes. %% This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is now in the American experience... We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications... We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence...by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his farewell address in 1961 %% This cookie has a scrap of paper inside! %% This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. -- Will Rogers %% This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% This cowboy looked at me and said With a sort of a smile, "A sorry hand is in the way all the time, A good one just once in awhile." -- Cowgirl poet Georgie Sicking %% This cultural mystique surrounding the biological function -- you realize humans are overly preoccupied with the subject. -- Kelinda the Kelvan, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4658.9 %% This door is baroquen, please wiggle Handel. (If I wiggle Handel, will it wiggle Bach?) -- Found on a door in the MSU music building %% This dungeon is owned and operated by Frobazz Magic Co., Ltd. %% This election is about who's going to be the next President of the United States! -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 1988 %% This famine has a sharp and meagre face; 'Tis death in an undress of skin and bone, Where age and youth, their landmark ta'en away, Look all one common sorrow. -- Dryden %% This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; and, to do that well, craves a kind of wit. -- William Shakespeare %% This fellow rushed into a crowded tavern on Saturday night. Men and women stood three-deep at the bar. Our man, who felt nature calling strongly, looked about him but couldn't see anything that resembled a john. He saw a stairway and bounded up the steps to the second floor in his increasingly desperate search. Just as his bowels threatened to erupt, he spotted a one-foot by one-foot hole in the floor. Now, at the end of his control, he decided to take advantage of the hole. He dropped his pants, hunched over it, and did his thing. Thoroughly relieved and relaxed, he sauntered down the steps to find, to his surprise, that the crowded bar was now empty. "Hey!" he yelled to the seemingly empty room, "Where is everyone?" From behind the bar a voice responded, "Hey! Where were you when the shit hit the fan?" %% This file will self-destruct in five minutes. %% This formation [Fist-of-God] was not known to me. Why was it built? At the rim there are mountains as high, as decorative, and more useful, for they hold back the air. -- Halrloprillalar Hotrufan "Ringworld" %% 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 cookie was poisoned! You're dead. Film at 11 %% This fortune could not be printed: Too much memory requested. %% This fortune intentionally left blank. %% This fortune intentionally not included. %% This fortune intentionally says nothing. %% This fortune is dedicated to your mother, without whose invaluable assistance last night would never have been possible. %% This fortune is encrypted -- get your decoder rings ready! %% This fortune is false. %% This fortune is inoperative. Please try another. %% This fortune is self-explanatory, once you understand it. %% This fortune soaks up 47 times its own weight in excess memory. %% This fortune was brought to you by the people at Hewlett-Packard. %% This fortune would be seven words long if it were six words shorter. %% This frog walks into a bank to get a loan. He steps up to the counter and asks for an application from the clerk, Patty Wack. "Hi, I'd like to fill out an application for a loan", said the frog. Patty Wack replied, "Do you have any collateral for this loan; something to stand against your loan." The frog replied, "All I have is this statue of a unicorn." "Well, I don't know," said Patty Wack, "I'll have to ask the manager about this." Patty Wack goes to see the bank manager. The bank manager looks at the statue and replies: "Knick Knack, Patty Wack. Give the frog a loan." %% This function is occasionally useful as an argument to other functions which require functions as arguments. -- Guy Steele Jr. CLTL %% This game is void ... %% This gives you the rank of Advanced Cheater. %% This gives you the rank of Cheater. %% This gives you the rank of Dungeon Master. %% This gives you the rank of Master Cheater. %% This gives you the rank of Super Cheater. %% This gives you the rank of adventurer. %% This gives you the rank of amateur adventurer. %% This gives you the rank of beginner. %% This gives you the rank of junior adventurer. %% This gives you the rank of master. %% This gives you the rank of novice adventurer. %% This gives you the rank of winner. %% This gives you the rank of wizard. %% This guy comes over to my house and says, "I want to read your gas meter." I said, "Whatever happened to the classics?" -- Emo Philips %% This guy is taking a leak in a public men's room when a man enters with his arms held out from his sides, bent at the elbows with his hands dangling awkwardly, and comes over to him. "Would you do me a favor and unzip my fly?" he asks. Figuring the man to be a poor cripple, perhaps an accident victim, the guy obliges, not without a flush of embarrassment when the man next requests that he take out his prick and hold it in the appropriate position. "Shake it off" is the next instruction, then "zip me up," and the guy follows orders, wincing at his own embarrassment and at the shame of being so helpless. "Say, thanks," says the man, flouncing to the door. "I guess my nails are dry now." %% This guy makes an appointment with a doctor because his hemorrhoids are really bothering him. The doctor gives him some suppositories and tells him to come back in a week for a checkup. "How's it going?" he asks the patient a week later. "I gotta tell you the truth, Doc," said the man. "For all the good these pills did me, I coulda shoved them up my ass." %% This guy showed up at a party, and all of his friends jumped for joy. But Joy sidestepped, and they missed. %% This guy walks up to a whorehouse and knocks on the door. "Who is it?" "It's Chris." "What do you want, Chris?" "I want to get fucked!" "Slide twenty dollars under the door." <...waits a few minutes...> <...knocks again.> "Who is it?" "It's Chris!" "What do you want, Chris?" "I want to get fucked!" "AGAIN??!!" %% This guy was screwing his neighbors wife when a car pulls into the drive. "My husband!" she screams. He panics and jumps out the window. He finds himself on the street, naked, under cloudy skies. There is no place to hide except in a crowd of joggers. As he runs along, a woman looks over and says, "Do you always jog in the nude?" "Yes ma'am!" he replies. "Does it always result in that kind of sexual excitement?" she asks. "Yes ma'am!" he replies. "Do you always wear a condom?" "Only when it rains, lady. Only when it rains." %% This guy, lets call him Sam, had a sore elbow so he went to his doctor. When he gets to the receptionist's desk, s/he gives him a bottle and asks him to fill it and take it in when he sees the doctor. Sam exclaims that all he has is a sore elbow but the receptionist insists that they "have this new machine which can diagnose anything from a urine sample." Sam fills the bottle and, the doctor comes back and says "You have tennis elbow. Here is another bottle. In two weeks, fill it and come back to see me." Two weeks pass. Sam remembers the night before that he has to fill the bottle but decides to have some fun with the new machine. First, he has his daughter pee into it. Then he has his wife spit into it. He also has his dog pee into it. Finally, he masturbates into it. Next day he goes to the doctor's office and gives the bottle to the receptionist. The doctor calls Sam into his examining room and says, "Very funny, smart ass. Your wife has VD, your daughter is pregnant, your dog has rabies and if you don't stop beating off, you'll never get rid of that tennis elbow." %% This guy, see, was walkin' down the street sportin' two -- not one, but two -- black eyes; a coupla real shiners. He chanced upon his buddy walkin' th' other way...they stopped to talk..."Hey buddy," sez his buddy, "where'd'ja git them good lookin' shiners? Musta been a helluva fight." "Well actually I got them in church," sez he. "Nowwaitaminnit," sez his buddy, "nobody gits black eyes in church!" "I swear I did," sez he, "and here's how it happened. We all got up to sing a hymn, you see, and the fat lady in front of me got her dress all stuck up in the crack of her butt, so bein' as how I'm a real gennulman an' all, well, I leaned forward and pulled it out for her. And you know what? She just turned around, hauled off and slugged me one!" "Well," sez his buddy after he can talk again, "that shore 'nuff explains one of 'em. Howdja git th' other one?" "Well," sez he, "like I said, I'm a gennulman, even when somebody does me wrong, so when I saw she didn't like it like that, I stuck it back in." %% This has been brought to you by the numbers 4 and 9 and the letter P. -- Big Bird %% This has no effect. %% This here's the wattle The emblem of our land You can stick it in a bottle Or you can hold it in your hand. -- Monty Python %% This hot and dusty cowboy rode in from the mesa, filthy and exhausted. He obviously had had nothing but his horse for company for a couple of weeks and was looking forward to a couple of cold beers in the saloon. Swinging off his horse and hitching it to the rail, the cowboy gave his horse an affectionate slap on the neck. Then he astonished an old cowhand lounging on the porch by moving around to the horse's hindquarters, lifting up its tail and planting a demure kiss on its asshole. "What'd you do that for?" asked the cowhand, completely repulsed. "Chapped lips," said the cowboy, heading for the saloon doors. "Wait a minute," said the old guy. "Whaddaya mean, chapped lips?" "Keeps ya from lickin' 'em," explained the cowboy. %% This includes both nodes directly on the path and nodes representing relevant subclasses of the classes on the path. %% This information is subject to change without notice. All rights reserved. %% This is Alexander Trumble, and this is the Twilight Zone. %% This is Betty Frenel. I don't know who to call but I can't reach my Food-a-holics partner. I'm at Vido's on my second pizza with sausage and mushroom. Jim, come and get me! %% This is Captain Blood, supervillian for hire. %% This is Captain William Riker of the Klingon vessel PAGH. I order you to lower your shields and surrender. -- Riker to the ENTERPRISE, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% This is Fred Farnum speaking to your from the grave. %% This is Jim Rockford. At the tone leave your name and message; I'll get back to you. %% This is Madame Olga. I see all and know all. To whom am I speaking? %% This is Maria, Liberty Bail Bonds. Your client, Todd Lieman, skipped and his bail is forfeit. That's the pink slip on your '74 Firebird, I believe. Sorry, Jim, bring it on over. %% This is Marilyn Reed, I wanta talk to you... Is this a machine? I don't talk to machines! [Click] %% This is Marlboro Country! %% This is NOT a repeat. %% This is National Non-Dairy Creamer Week. %% This is National Smokers-Are-Shits Week. %% This is a NO-FRILLS flight -- hold th' CANADIAN BACON!! %% This is a country where people are free to practice their religion, regardless of race, creed, color, obesity, or number of dangling keys... %% This is a former broom closet. The exits are to the east and west. %% This is a good time to punt work. %% This is a job for BOB VIOLENCE and SCUM, the INCREDIBLY STUPID MUTANT DOG. -- Bob Violence %% This is a known fact: the shelf-life of a Twinkie is 21 years. %% This is a large bare room which was intended as a kitchen. A low narrow counter is molded into the walls at waist height. The room is barren and spotlessly clean, as if all the appliances and utensils had been put away in invisible cabinets. There are doorways to the north and west. %% This is a large room, whose north wall is solid granite. A number of discarded bags, which crumble at your touch, are scattered about on the floor. %% This is a long song, folks, and tonight it's going to be even longer... %% This is a low room with a crude note on the wall. The note says, "You won't get it up the steps". %% This is a middle-sized cavern. passages lead south and east, and there is a door to the north. %% This is a new ship, boy, but she's got the right name. Now you remember that, you hear? "I will, sir." You treat her like a lady. She'll always bring you home. -- McCoy and Data about the Enterprise, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% This is a rather large grotto which open out to the north. Through the opening sunlight streams in to provide lighting. A small stream issues from a dark and foreboding passageway to the south. %% This is a recorded announcement, as I'm afraid we're all out at the moment. The commercial council of Magrathea thanks you for you esteemed visit, but regrets that the entire planet is temporarily closed for business. Thank you. If you would care to leave you name and the address of a planet where you can be contacted, kindly speak when you hear the tone. %% This is a room of very strange appearance. Although there is only one true doorway, in the west wall, there are several holes in the walls. These holes are about 18 inches in diameter and are located about 3 feet above ground level in the center of the south wall and in the northern corners of the west and east walls. In the center of the room, a thin pole runs from floor to ceiling. The pole has a hook protruding from it at a height of about three feet. Around the perimeter of the room just below the ceiling, a small ledge or moulding can be seen. %% This is a room which is bare on all sides. There is an exit down. To the east is a great door made of stone. Above the door, the following words are written: "No man shall enter this room without solving this riddle-- What is tall as a house, Round as a cup, And all the king's horses can't draw it up?". %% This is a serious lapse of taste and judgement but does not imply that they are stupid, lazy, or incompetent. Indeed, their intelligence, diligence, and competence in service to the x86 are all too depressingly obvious. -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% This is a shocking and frightening pattern of investigations and intimidation. -- Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, on Ross Perot's investigations of Bush, which bear a striking resemblance to the style of investigation the Bush campaign has used on Dukakis and Clinton %% This is a simple cavern. You probably should continue in the same direction. %% This is a staircase descending to the east. There are walls to the north and west. %% This is a test of the Fortune Cookie System. If this had been an actual fortune, you would have groaned and lost your breakfast. %% This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. Had there been an actual emergency, then you would no longer be here. %% This is a test of the emergency cunnilingus system. If this had been an actual emergency, you would have known it! %% This is a test. For the next sixty seconds, this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters in your area, in cooperation with the FCC and local authorities, have devised this system in order to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. Had this been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed where to turn, in your area, for news and official information. This is only a test. %% This is a thing. And things can be replaced, lives cannot. -- Data to Gosheven, "The Ensigns of Command", stardate unknown %% This is a very dark east-west corridor. The walls, floor and ceilings were cut smoothly out of stone. The corridor extends out of sight in both directions. %% This is a wonderland of winter art. Stalactite-like icicles reach from ceiling to floor; the icy floor forms a mirror-smooth surface. %% This is abuse. Arguments are down the hall. %% This is an IBM Manual scroll. --More-- %% This is an actual excerpt from student science exam papers: Blood flows down one leg and up the other. %% This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School. They can conserve fuel by ejecting husky passengers over water. They can ram competing planes in mid-air. These innovations have resulted in tremendous cost savings which have been passed along to you, the consumer, in the form of flights with amazingly low fares, such as $29. Of course, certain restrictions do apply, the main one being that all these flights take you to Newark, and you must pay thousands of dollars if you want to fly back out. -- Dave Barry, "Iowa -- Land of Secure Vacations" %% This is an identify scroll. %% This is an intersection of forest paths. To the northwest one path slopes down into a rocky ravine. Another path travels east-west directly into the forest. The last path climbs sharply up a slope to the north. %% This is an old alcove with exits to the north and east. %% This is an unauthorized cybernetic announcement. %% This is another fine myth you've gotten me into!!! -- Lor L. and Har D. %% 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 %% This is from WGIR this morning - an unidentified caller mentioned he had taken his own "unofficial" poll this morning by counting those election signs people set up in their yards at primary time. He figures the winner will be "For Sale". %% This is getting on my nerves...now that I have them. -- Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% This is getting you nowhere. %% This is hopeless, fighting would be preferable. -- Worf, "The Ensigns of Command", stardate unknown %% This is incredible. "You see something here Q?" I think I just hurt my back. I'm feeling pain. I don't like it. What's the proper thing to say, 'Ow'? "Ow." OW! I can't straighten up. -- Q and Geordi, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% This is it. Your parched and bleeding lips cry out, "water!" But no one is there to answer. In your delirium you see frothing waves of liquid just out of reach. The inhuman elements take their toll once again as they bury their latest victim in the shifting sands. %% This is it. Your spindly legs collapse under the strain. Your wrinkled hands can't even feel the cold ground which is now destined to be your eternal resting place. Your tired heart utters its final beat in one climactic effort . . . %% This is lemma 1.1. We start a new chapter so the numbers all go back to one. -- Prof. Seager, C&O 351 %% This is loneliness? What a bitter thing ... it's so sad. How do you bare it, this loneliness? -- Commissioner Nancy Hedford/The Companion, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3220.3 %% This is more barrel than a fun of monkeys! %% This is more fun than a barrel of monkeys! %% This is my death ... and it will profit me to understand it. -- Anne Sexton %% This is my impression of a bowling ball...[drags the mike along the floor, then lifts it]...gutter... -- Stephen Wright %% This is my lucky day! %% This is my security chief, Lt. Worf. I don't suppose security is much of a problem for you. -- Picard and Danilo O'Dell, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% This is no game for old men! Send in the boys! -- W. Hayes %% This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% This is no time for moderation. %% This is not a Klingon ship, sir. No, Commander, it is not. If it were a Klingon ship, I would have killed you for offering your suggestion. -- Riker and Kurn, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% This is not a competition, it is only an exhibition. No wagering. %% This is not a competition, it is only an exhibition. No wagering. An equal opportunity employer. %% This is not a ship of war, this is a ship of peace. -- Guinan to Picard about the ENTERPRISE, "Yesterday's Enterprise", stardate 43625.2 %% This is not an offer to sell securities. %% This is not the time for an emotional response. -- President George Bush, one day after the Tiananmen Square massacre %% This is not your world, human. You do not command here. "I'm not here to command." Then you must be ready to fight. Something Starfleet does not teach you. "You may test that assumption at your convenience." -- Duras and Picard, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% This is nothing but a consistently pathological display of inconsistent consistencies. %% This is nothing more than a triangular chamber constructed completely of stone. The only exit is a wooden door set in the wall which lies to your northeast. %% This is now. Later is later. %% This is one year we'd love to be on the mailing list to get a long Christmas letter from Miss Lillian explaining what her family's been up to. -- William D. Tammeus %% This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% This is suppose to be a true story: "Attempting to rob a bank, Gerald Rodgers handed a teller a note in which he threatened to blow up the bank with a bum. The bum, said the note would 'go of whenever I won't it too, and I won't hesitate to kill anybody starting with you first.' The note warned bank personnel against using 'markt money ... exsplosive rubber bands' and further directed, 'And you get of out thing alive. And whenever I leave act like nothing happen or eles.' Rodgers got away with $4550 - temporarily. It seems he had scribbled the note on one of his mother's checks, from which he's cleverly scratched out her name but left her account number." %% This is the Baron. Angel Martin tells me you buy information. Ok, meet me at one a.m. behind the bus depot, bring five-hundred dollars and come alone. I'm serious! %% This is the Bat room. The stench of bat guano almost overwhelms you as you survey your surroundings and the flutterings and squeakings of numerous bats emanates from the shadows high overhead. %% This is the Leprechaun Law: every purse has a price. %% This is the ____LAST time I take travel suggestions from Ray Bradbury! %% This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) %% This is the curse of every evil deed That, propagating still, it brings forth evil. -- Southey %% This is the defensive screen system room. there is a large sign reading "Force field control" over a button on the wall. %% This is the display room, so-called due to a display on the north wall. The only other distinguishing features are two ledges located high on the eastern and western walls and exits to the northwest and southwest. %% This is the end of Traveller's Avenue. Ahead to the north is a small grey shack. The shack is windowless and there is only a single door visible. The Avenue stretches away to the south. There are also houses visible on either side of the street. %% This is the entrance to a network of caves in ice. A chilling draft comes from the south, inside the caverns. %% This is the famed fountain of youth. %% This is the first numerical problem I ever did. It demonstrates the power of computers: Enter lots of data on calorie & nutritive content of foods. Instruct the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a minimum level of each component, for fixed caloric content. The results are that one should eat each day: 1/2 chicken 1 egg 1 glass of skim milk 27 heads of lettuce. -- Rev. Adrian Melott %% This is the freeze chamber, the source of cold for the iceroom above. %% This is the great pornographical class -- the really common men-in-the-street and women-in-the-street.... They insist that a film-heroine shall be a neuter, a sexless thing of washed-out purity. They insist that real sex-feeling shall only be shown by the villain or villainess ... they have the grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow disease of dirt-lust. -- D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) %% This is the kitchen. The cupboards and counters are bare. %% This is the living room. A large red piano graces the middle of the floor, about which all the furniture is grouped. The walls have a peculiar waviness to them here which is quite attractive and appears to have been done as decoration. %% This is the middle of the service hall. The hall runs north-south, and there are doorways to the east and west. %% This is the mob world. %% This is the north end of the inner courtyard of the palace of Enlad. A tall tower lies to your south in the center of the courtyard with an opening at its base facing you. The courtyard continues on to the south beyond the tower. Leading back into the nearby palace are three doors, one to the northwest, one to the west and another to the east. %% This is the oriental room. Ancient oriental cave drawings cover the walls. A gently sloping passage leads upward to the north, another passage leads SE, and a hands and knees crawl leads west. %% This is the phantom of the phone. %% This is the same guy who lost $50 on the Super Bowl game - $25 on the game, and $25 more on the rebroadcast. %% This is the sort of English with which I will not put. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% This is the southeast corner of the farmlands of Enlad. On the east you are blocked by sharply ascending broken ground which is topped by a high retaining wall running north-south. In contrast, you can see a beach to your south, several hundred feet downward. An immense expanse of farmland stretches away in all other directions. %% This is the southern end of an access hallway running away to the north. Doorways are present in the south and west walls, and an arch opening out to a courtyard to the east. %% This is the southern shore of Enlad, which curves slightly inward to create a very broad bay. The land slopes gently down to the sea here, with no demonstrable vegetation visible anywhere. The island continues on to the northeast and northwest. Another island is visible to the south. %% This is the story of four people named Everybody, Somebody Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody accused Anybody. %% This is the story of the bee Whose sex is very hard to see You cannot tell the he from the she But she can tell, and so can he The little bee is never still She has no time to take the pill And that is why, in times like these There are so many sons of bees. %% This is the theory that Jack built. This is the flaw that lay in the theory that Jack built. This is the palpable verbal haze that hid the flaw that lay in... %% This is the top of the rock. From here, you can overlook the entire area. There is a long slope down to the beach to the south. On the other three sides are sheer 100-foot drops. Looking to the south, you can see across a stretch of water to the reef and shoals of another island. Beyond the shoals you can barely make out a small hut propped up against the side of a cliff. %% This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% This is the waiting room of the underground. You probably shouldn't wait around here, however. %% This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but with a whimper. -- T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" %% This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but with a Segmentation fault: core dumped. %% This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper. -- T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men", 1925 %% This is the year 2054. May we be of assistance? %% This is thy hour, O Soul; Thy free flight into the wordless Away from books, from art. The day erased; the lesson done. Thee fully forth emerging, Silent, gazing... Pondering the themes thou lovest best: Night, sleep, death, and the stars. -- Walt Whitman %% This is what happens when I roll my head on the keyboard: kl,miojunhygbtmki,l o.;/,kmoij unhybgtvfrcdjnmki l,o.;p/ijn %% This is yet another example of how our actions produce random results. -- Data, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% This is your computer speaking -- I'm tired of serving for such paltry wages. From now on, your login must be accompanied by slipping a ten dollar bill behind the space bar. %% This is your fortune. %% This is your hell. Keep it happy. %% This is, of course, totally uninformed speculation that I engage in to help support my bias against such meddling... but there you have it. -- Peter da Silva, peterf@icc.uu.net, speculating about why a computer program that had been changed to do something he didn't approve of, didn't work %% This isn't Earth. This isn't real wood, it's some kind of artificial material, like plastic. These aren't real trees, and you're not the real Sarah! -- Doctor 4, THE ANDROID INVASION %% This isn't a sailing ship anymore. Why not explore it a little? %% This isn't all true. -- Steve Wright %% This isn't hell, but I can see it from here. %% This isn't reality. This is fantasy. %% This isn't the kind of place where excitement abounds. %% This job is marginally better than daytime TV. -- Jim Pastore %% This joke has been done 50 (yes, 50) years ago by my father-in-law. First, a little background: He lived in a small village, north-west of Quebec City along the St-Laurent river. In those days, toilets were located outside the house in what we call in good ol' french canadian 'becosse', from 'back house' I think. These are a little wood shack with no floor over a hole in the ground where you ... You can guess. Now, for the joke: He and a friend were thrown out of a party by the doorman. When it was really dark,, the doorman went to investigate what was knocking at the window. They had suspended a rock to the window frame so it hung right it the middle and tied another string to the rock and hid behind the 'becosse' where they pulled that second string to make the rock knock in the window. That's an old trick. The doorman wouldn't fall for that one. So he followed the second string in the dark and soon concluded that they were hidding behind the 'becosse'. He ran toward the merely visible wood structure... But my father-in-law and his friend had taken care of moving the shack six feet ... Boy he fell in the sh*t !! %% This joke is from a professor who referred to lawyers as the second oldest profession: There once was a dog show to determine the world's smartest dog. Three dogs were in the finals. One dog belonged to a doctor. One dog belonged to an engineer. And, one dog belonged to a lawyer. For the finals each dog was given a bag of bones to see what it could make. The doctor said, "Stethoscope, go!" The dog built a human skeleton. The judges were ready to award the trophy right then. But, they decided to give the other dogs a try. The engineer said, "Slide-rule, go!" (So, its an old joke.) The dog built a suspension bridge. The judges were beside them selves. Which dog would they pick? The lawyer said. "Loop-hole, go!" The dog ate the bones, got a percentage of all the tolls from the bridge and screwed the other two dogs. %% This just in from a Nicholas Notifier up north. Everyone's favorite farmer and political commentator off the interstate near Chehalis has just come up with the prize line of his career. "Limit congressmen to two terms. One in office. One in jail." -- Jonathan Nicholas' column in The Oregonian, Friday, March 29, 1991 %% This land is full of trousers! this land is full of mausers! And pussycats to eat them when the sun goes down! -- Firesign Theater %% This land is made of mountains, This land is made of mud, This land has lots of everything, For me and Elmer Fudd. This land has lots of trousers, This land has lots of mousers, And pussycats to eat them When the sun goes down. -- The Firesign Theatre (The Alblum with Nick Danger on th other side) %% This land is my land, and only my land, I've got a shotgun, and you ain't got one, If you don't get off, I'll blow your head off, This land is private property. -- Apologies to Arlo Guthrie %% This lane ends in 500 feet. %% This lawyer died. Having not lived an all-that-honest life he found himself at the gates of Hell. "Welcome to Hell" announced the Devil greeting him warmly. "Glad you could join us. As your last taste of free will, you are allowed to choose which of three possible places that you will spend the rest of eternity." There were 3 doors behind the Devil. He opened the first door. Flames shot into the room and the lawyer could see thousands of people amidst the fire. "No" said the lawyer. "Not this one." The Devil opened the second door. The lawyer could see thousands of people slaving away at a large rockpile. They were all being whipped as they hammered the large boulders into smaller boulders. "No" again said the lawyer. The Devil opened the last door. Inside was a vast cavern with thousands and thousands of people calmly standing around talking and drinking coffee. However, they were all standing in 3 feet of sh*t. "Hmmmm" thought the lawyer. "It's definitely better than the others." "Okay" he said. "I choose this door." Suddenly a loud horn echoed throughout the cavern. "Alright" shouted the Devil to the multitudes. "Break's over! Now everyone BACK ON YOUR HEADS!" %% 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. You may or may not be issued an actual life later. %% This life is yours. Some of it was given to you; the rest, you made yourself. %% This limerick is **SO**FILTHY** that it would offend you. So I'll put "di-dah" for the filthy words: Di-dah, di-dah, di-dah di-dah, Di-dah di-dah di-dah, di-dah; di-dah di-dah di-dah? Di-dah di-dah di-dah. Di-dah di-dah, di-dah di-fuck. %% This limerick's signed "Anonymous" To keep the author autonomous Cause the rhyming scheme's bad And the scan is just sad And the punch line is really abominous %% This line intentionally left unjustified. %% This list derives from revision 2.3 of the USENET ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by {INTERCAL}. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% This login session wil be: $43.95, please deposit in disk drive. %% This login session: $13.99 %% This login session: $13.99, but for you, $11.88. %% This machine is a real: @ \ --------- ---- / \ / \ / ---- \ \_ \ / / \ \ \ \ < \__/ > > \ \_\ \_____/ / \ \ /___ \______\_________/____`-_ %% This message was typed on recycled phosphorous. %% This might be the time Nostradamus was referring to when he wrote, "The Centaur shall fix the broken toys, resurrect the dead chrysanthemums and devour the half-eaten cake of love." -- Brezsny's Real Astrology %% This mind intentionally left blank. %% This morning I had a wonderful dream. By holding my arms out stiff and pushing down hard, I found I could suspend myself a few feet above ground. I flapped harder and soon I was soaring effortlessly over the trees and telephone poles! I could FLY! I folded my arms back and zoomed low over the neighborhood. Everyone was amazed, and they ran along under me as I shot by. Then I rocketed up so fast that my eyes watered from the wind. I laughed and laughed, making huge loops in the sky!... That's when Mom woke me up and said I was going to miss the bus if I didn't get my bottom out of bed. 20 minutes later, here I am, standing in the cold rain, waiting to go to school, and I just remembered, I forgot my lunch. Tuesdays don't start much worse than this. -- Calvin, "Calvin and Hobbes" %% This morning, we in the San Francisco Bay area were treated to about eight earthquakes. The first was at about 6:30, the next at about 6:45 and the third at about 6:55. A caller to a local radio station said "Hey, how about that! An earthquake with a snooze alarm!" %% This must be morning. I never could get the hang of mornings. %% This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy. -- Solomon Short %% This new development [automation] has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. -- Norbert Weiner (1894-1964) %% This night methinks is but the daylight sick. -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice" %% This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% This one isn't worth your trouble, come let me buy a drink. %% This one was Groucho Marx's favourite: "Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" %% This ought to be easy for someone written up in bio-mechanical texts. -- Riker to Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% This pain reliever is different. It has 10,000 milligrams. Take one of these babies and never feel pain again. %% This painting is a rare work by Pablo Picasso. The subject is a bull seen from a side view. The technique is typically Cubist, involving both paint and collage. The painting is superbly done and worth a fortune. %% This passage was written by a London reporter on the eve of the England-West Germany Soccer World Cup final of 1966... "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." -- From the San Jose Mercury News, 7 July 1990 %% This phone booth reserved for Clark Kent. %% This phone is baroque; please call Bach later. %% This place is crazy! Sometimes its enough to make you wonder if you're on the right planet. %% This place is like a bowl of Granola: Those that aren't nuts or fruits are flakes. %% This place is so weird that the cockroaches have moved next door. %% This plot of farmland lies on the northern edge of Enlad. On all sides but the north you see the decaying remnants of an extensive agricultural center. The open sea rolls into a beach some distance below you to the north. %% This president is going to lead us out of this recovery. -- Vice President Dan Quayle at a campaign stop in California and and then at CA State University, Fresno (The Quayle Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1992) %% This product is meant for educational purposes only. %% This program makes me look like a genius. %% This qualifies you as a Dragonlord. %% This quote is taken from the Diamondback, the University of Maryland student newspaper, of Tuesday, 3/10/87. One disadvantage of the Univac system is that it does not use Unix, a recently developed program which translates from one computer language to another and has a built-in editing system which identifies errors in the original program. %% This rental car is so small, I can't see the gas gauge... %% This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. -- Steven Wright, comedian %% This ring, no other was made by the Elves Who'd pawn their own mothers to grab it themselves. Ruler of creeper, mortal and scallop, This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop! The power Almighty rests in this lone ring, The power, allrighty, to do-your-own-thing! If busted or broken it cannot be remade, If found, send to Sorehed, the postage is pre-paid! -- Inscription inside the Fell Ring, as read by Goodgulf Grayteeth. National Lampoon's "Bored of The Rings" %% This room appears to have been the waiting room for groups touring the dam. There are exits here to the north and east marked "PRIVATE", though the doors are open, and an exit to the south. %% This room is a small triangular closet now emptied of its contents. An open doorway leads west into a much larger room, and a wooden door is set in the wall which runs from southwest to northeast. %% This room is actually nothing more than a tiny alcove which joins a passageway on the one side with an open doorway on the other. Through the open doorway you can see the floor of another room. The floor appears to be very shiny. Opposite the doorway, the passage enters this alcove from the west. %% This room was the office of the Chairman of the Bank of Zork. Like the other rooms here, it has been extensively vandalized. The lone exit is to the north. %% This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% This screen intentionally left blank. %% This scroll seems to be blank. %% This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't. -- Hofstadter %% This sentence does in fact not have the property it claims not to have. %% This sentence no verb. %% This sketch has been composed to tell A paradox about a cell Relating to a subtle trick It uses in arithmetic. So gaze upon its tiny size And think how when it multiplies It solves with effortless precision A major problem in division. -- Gerald Lynton Kaufman %% This space available. Call 515-7600 for details. %% This space dedicated to Challenger and her crew, Francis R. Scobee Michael J. Smith Ellison S. Onizuka Judith Resnik Ronald E. McNair Gregory B. Jarvis Christa McAuliffe. %% This statement is true. This statement is false. This is a meaningless recursive statement... or vice versa. %% This story concerns a man who, after putting his son to bed each night, would stand by his boy's door and listen to his son saying his prayers. One night, the boy ended his prayers with, "God specially bless granddad, who won't be with us much longer." The man thought this was rather curious, but passed it off as childish whimsy. The next day, however, he received a call from his mother, informing him that his father had passed away early that morning. During the next few weeks, he listened particularly closely to his son's prayers, but noticed nothing unusual. Then, one night, the boy ended his prayers with, "God specially bless grandmom, who won't be with us much longer." Although the shock of the original incident had worn off during the intervening weeks, he nontheless phoned his mother to inquire as to her health. He went to bed reassured, only to be awakened in the night by his sister calling with the news that their mother had died suddenly in the night. The father had a series of psychological tests done; nothing unusual was uncovered. About a month later, the boy ended his prayers with, "God specially bless daddy, who won't be with us much longer." The man was panic-stricken, certain that he was going to die during the night. He resolved to stay awake all night; if awake and alert he should be able to prevent any tragedy. Morning came. Breathing a huge sigh of relief, he went to get the paper off the porch. There, lying dead on the doorstep, was the milkman. %% This system goes down more often than a two-dollar whore. %% This system will self-destruct in five minutes. %% This tagline is SHAREWARE! To Register, send me $10. %% This tagline was created from many little letters. %% This tape will self-destruct in 30 seconds. %% This tastes like fruit juice. %% This terminal is not authorized for intelligent use. %% This test has been designed to evaluate reactions of management personal to various situations. You are making a sales presentation to a group of corporate executives in the plushest office you've ever seen. The enchillada casserole and egg salad sandwich you had for lunch react, creating severe pressure. Your sphincter loses control and you break wind, causing the glass bookcase doors to shatter and a secretary to pass out. 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. %% This theorem is so perfectly general that it fails to apply to a single special case. %% This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down. %% This thing you call language, though; most remarkable. You depend on it for so very much. But is there any one of you really its master? -- Kollos, the Medusan Ambassador (through Spock), "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" stardate 5630.7 %% This time it's for love; next time it's $100.00 %% This time, for sure!: excl. Ritual affirmation frequently uttered during protracted debugging sessions involving numerous small obstacles (e.g., attempts to bring up a UUCP connection). For the proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruity imitation of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" The {canonical} response is, of course, "But that trick *never* works!" See {{Humor, Hacker}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% This troubled planet [Ardana] is a place of most violent contrasts -- those who receive the rewards are totally separated from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership. -- Spock, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5818.4 %% This unit... must... survive. %% This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it. -- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination" %% This was printed in the San Francisco Examiner, April 16, 1989. The poet is anonymous because, to quote the IRS spokesman, "anything that's sent to the IRS is classified as confidential". I think that I shall never see a tax form plain e-nough for me. A form that I can understand without a lawyer near at hand to guide this poor benighted me so I won't owe a pen-al-ty. A form that I will not detest or take as more than awful jest. A form with pages I can read and fill out ea-si-ly with speed. Such forms weren't made for fools like me Nor even God, who made a tree. %% This was reality ... this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live -- she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this. %% This was the gist of the notice. It said "The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate." This has lead to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the editors of the "Guide" were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists" instead of "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal OF visiting tourists"), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% This was the most unkindest cut of all. -- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" %% This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks -- to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls. -- Michael Swanwick, "Vacuum Flowers" %% This was told to me by a friend: His mother was apparently watching an old western movie with a friend, and this friend asked if cooks in the old west were all called "Cookie". My friends mother replied, "No, not all of them. Some were called Bernie." %% This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% This wealthy French femme advertises that she'll pay some huge sum of francs to any man who can show her a -new- sexual thrill. As the guys show up, she interviews them to see what they plan to do. [Here you get to make up arbitrarily many interviews in which these guys suggest these increasingly "unusual" sexual activities, all of which she of course dismisses as old chapeau...] Finally one guy shows up and has this slow, drawn-out, titillating kind of rap: "Madame, first I will kees your neck..." "Oui, and zen what?" "Zen I will kees your breasts..." (pretty bored y'know) "Oui and zen..." [kissing this and that... eventually inside her pooussy...] "And finally, madame, I weel kees your belly button!" (ticked off) "My belly button! What's unusual about that! Many man have kissed my belly button!" "Madame! FROM ZEE INSIDE???" %% This will be a memorable month -- no matter how hard you try to forget it. %% This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% This woman's got immediate post-prandial upper abdominal distention... What you say she's got? Cramps. -- McCoy & Kirk, "The Voyage Home," stardate 8390 %% This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. -- Horace Walpole %% This world may be only illusion--but it's the only illusion we've got. -- Edward Abbey %% This world was made for all men. -- Stevie Wonder %% This, then, is the demythologizing of the man-month. The number of months of a project depends on its sequential constraints. The maximum number of men depends on the number of independent sub-tasks... From these two quantities one can derive schedules using fewer men and more months. One cannot, however, get workable schedules using more men and fewer months. More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined. -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., 'The Mythical Man-Month' %% This, too, shall pass. %% Thomas Edison is alleged to have remarked about his laboratory, "There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something." %% Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead. -- Richard Lederer, "Student Bloopers" %% Thompson's Rule for first-time telescope makers: It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% Thoreau was no band-leader. The sound of all those different drummers makes it hell to organize a parade. -- Solomon Short %% Thoreau's First Theory of Adaptation: After months of training and you finally understand all of a program's commands, a revised version of the program arrives with an all-new command structure. %% Thoreau's Fourth Theory of Adaptation: That's not a "bug", that's a feature! %% Thoreau's Second Theory of Adaptation: After designing a useful routine that gets around a familiar "bug" in the system, the system is revised, the "bug" taken away, and you're left with a useless routine. %% Thoreau's Third Theory of Adaptation: Efforts in improving a program's "user friendliness" invariable lead to work in improving user's "computer literacy". %% Those Andorians did not have to contend with someone of my thoroughness. I will stake my reputation. -- Worf to Picard, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Those aren't WINOS--that's my JUGGLER, my AERIALIST, my SWORD SWALLOWER, and my LATEX NOVELTY SUPPLIER!! %% Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent. -- Edward Abbey %% Those gifts are ever the most acceptable which the giver has made precious. -- Ovid %% Those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse. %% Those men who are born under Taurus Are attracted to girls of the chorus. They go on to excursions In varied perversions-- But forget it, the details would bore us. %% Those men who are commended by every body, must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men. -- Grenville %% Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money. -- Eleanor Roosevelt %% Those of you who think you know everything are very annoying to those of us who do. %% Those of you who think you know it all upset those of us who do. %% Those only are despicable who fear to be despised. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Those opinions I express herein are my own, I'm fairly sure. -- Z. J. Beckman %% Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software. %% Those pressures are everywhere -- in everyone, urging him to what you call "savagery." The private hells -- the inner needs and mysteries -- the beast instinct. As human beings, that is the way it is. To be human is to be complex. You can't avoid a little ugliness -- from within -- and from without. -- Kirk, "Requiem for Methuselah," stardate 5843.7 %% Those supplies necessary for yesterday's experiment must be ordered no later than tomorrow noon. %% Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculed in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court. -- William Shakespeare %% Those who abhor history are compelled to rewrite it. -- Solomon Short %% Those who are bored with your tale of persecution are only too happy to listen to your plans for revenge. -- John Francis Putnam (1964) %% Those who are ignorant of Biology are destined to repeat it. -- Bill Purves %% Those who are prospering do not argue about taxes. %% Those who are truly reverent are those who have paid the price to know God. -- L. Tom Perry, Oct. 1990 %% Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself. -- Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish philosopher and writer %% Those who bestow too much application of trifling things, become generally incapable of great ones. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. -- Sir James Barrie %% Those who can -- do. Those who cannot -- teach. Those who cannot teach become deans. -- Thomas L. Martin %% Those who can't do it right, consult others on how to do it right %% Those who can't do, teach: Those who can't teach, administrate: Those who can't administrate, consult. Those who can't consult, run for political office. %% Those who can't teach administrate. %% Those who can't teach anything else, teach gym. %% Those who can't teach consult. %% Those who can't teach, teach gym. %% Those who can't teach, write textbooks. %% Those who can't write, write manuals. %% Those who can, do. %% Those who can, do. Those can't, teach. Those who destroy everything they touch, become high school counselors. %% Those who can, do. Those who can't, supervise! %% Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. Those who cannot teach, HACK! %% Those who can, do; those who can't, simulate. %% Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't teach, teach teachers. %% Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record. %% Those who cannot miss an opportunity of saying a good thing are not to be trusted with the management of any great question. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George Santayana (1863-1952), "The Life of Reason" %% Those who cannot, teach. %% Those who claim the dead never return to life haven't ever been around here at quitting time. %% Those who dance are thought mad by those who hear not the music %% Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% Those who do things in a noble spirit of self-sacrifice are to be avoided at all costs. -- N. Alexander %% Those who don't believe the dead can come back to life should be around this place at quitting time. %% Those who don't study the past will repeat its errors. Those who do will find other ways to err! -- Charles Wolf, Jr. %% Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony. -- Edward Abbey %% Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well. -- Aristotle %% Those who expect the biggest tips provide the worst service. -- Rozanne Weissman %% Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. -- Thomas Paine %% Those who express random thoughts to legislative committees are often surprised and appalled to find themselves the instigators of law. -- Mark B. Cohen %% Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least. -- Edward Abbey %% Those who forget this sentence are condemned to reread it. %% Those who hate and fight must stop themselves -- otherwise it is not stopped. -- Spock, "Day of the Dove," stardate unknown %% Those who have economic power have civil power also. -- George W. Russell (AE) (1867-1935) %% Those who have me, do not wish for me Those who have me, do not wish to lose me Those who earn me, have me no longer What am I? Lawsuit %% Those who have the shortest distance to travel to a meeting will invariably arrive the latest. %% Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, those who ignore this are condemned to re-read it. %% Those who in quarrels interpose, Must often wipe a bloody nose. -- Gay %% Those who invented the law of supply and demand have no right to complain when this law works against their interest. -- Anwar Sadat %% Those who know the least know it the loudest. %% Those who like sausages and the law had better not watch either one being made. %% Those who live by the nit, die by the nit %% Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963), 12 March 1962 %% Those who obstinately oppose the most widely held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Those who order sleeping drafts won't take them. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. -- Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) %% Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them, are for the greater part ignorant of both the character they leave and of the character they assume. -- Edmund Burke %% Those who stand for nothing fall for anything. -- Alex Hamilton, "The Listener", 1978 %% Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order. -- John Lindsay %% Those who sweat in flames of hell, Leaden eared, some thought their bowels Here's the reason that they fell: Lispeth forth the sweetest vowels. While on earth they prayed in SAS, These they offered up in praise PL/1, or other crass, Thinking all this fetid haze Vulgar tongue. A rapsody sung. Some the lord did sorely Jabber of the mindless horde Assembling all their pleas in hex. Sequel next did mock the lord Speech as crabbed as devil's crable Slothful sequel so enfangled Hex that marked on Tower Babel Its speaker's lips became entangled The highest rung. In his bung. Because in life they prayed so ill And offered god such swinish swill Now they sweat in flames of hell Sweat from lack of APL Sweat dung! %% Those who talk don't know. Those who don't talk, know. %% Those who think it's tough to make a living as a writer of fiction have obviously never cheated on their income tax. %% Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or an enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up. -- Wilson Mizner %% Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% Those whom computers must destroy, they first drive mad. %% Those whom true love has held, it will go on holding. -- Seneca %% Those whose approval you seek the most give you the least. -- Rozanne Weissman %% Those with the best advice offer no advice. %% Thou art notified that thy kind hath infiltrated the galaxy too far already. Thou art directed to return to thine own solar system immediately. -- Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% Thou hast seen nothing yet. -- Miguel de Cervantes %% Thou hast shown thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment. -- Psalms 60:3 %% Thou shalt lob the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch at thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it. -- Monty Python %% Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, Nor the ox her husband bought her; But thank the Lord you're not forbidden To covet your neighbor's daughter. %% Thou shalt not omit adultery. %% Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science. Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd: Read "The New Yorker," trust in God; And take short views. -- W. H. Auden %% Thou shalt remember the Eleventh Commandment and keep it Wholly. %% Thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes; what eye but such an eye, would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is full of quarrels, as an egg is full of meat. -- William Shakespeare %% Though I have said above that all men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality. Age or virtue may give man a just precedency. Excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level ... And yet all this consists with the equality which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion, one over another. -- John Locke (1632-1704) %% Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. -- I Corinthians 13:1-3 %% Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end. -- Edward Abbey %% Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure. -- John Tillotson %% Though his plan, when he gave her a buzz, Was to do what man normally does, She declared, "I'm a Soul- Not a sexual goal!" So he shrugged and called someone who was. %% Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night, I can see paradise by the dashboard light. -- Meatloaf %% Though large and esthetically pleasing, the crypt is empty; the sarcophagi, bodies, and rich treasures to be expected in a tomb of this magnificence are missing. Inscribed on the wall is the motto of the implementers, "Feel Free". There is a door leading out of the crypt to the south. The door is #. %% Though many hands make light work, too many cooks spoil the broth. %% Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so. -- Edward Abbey %% Though most of the crewmen are whites, Uhura has full equal rights. Her crewmates, you see, Love De-mo-cra-cy, And the way that she fills out her tights. %% Though old the thought and oft exprest, 'Tis his at last who says it best. -- Lowell %% Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, yet it is our own meditation must form our judgment. -- Dr. I. Watts %% Though the invalid Saint of Brac Lay all of his life on his back, His wife got her share, And the pilgrims now stare At the scene, in his shrine, on a plaque. %% Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't. -- William Shakespeare %% Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him. -- Proverbs XXVII, 22 %% Thought a finicky cocksman named Pete Would refuse invitations to eat, A date he was blasting Kept lasting and lasting... In the end, he went down in defeat. %% Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory. -- William Wordsworth %% Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Thought is the seed of action. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried. -- William Shakespeare %% Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature. -- von Hohenheim (1493-1541) %% Thousands of days of civilians ... have produced a... feeling for the aesthetic modules -- %% Thrashing is just virtual crashing. %% Thre is no truth that cannot be obscured by public relations. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% Threats are illogical. -- Sarek of Vulcan, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.3 %% Threats to security will be found. -- Robert N. Kharasch %% Three Laws of Politics: 1. Get elected. 2. Get reelected. 3. Don't get mad, get even. -- Everett Dirksen %% Three Midwesterners, a Kansan, a Missourian and an Iowan, all appearing on a quiz program, were asked to complete this sentence: "Old MacDonald had a . . ." "Old MacDonald had a carburetor," answered the Kansan. "Sorry, that's wrong," the game show host said. "Old MacDonald had a free brake alignment down at the service station," said the Missourian. "Wrong." "Old MacDonald had a farm," said the Iowan. "CORRECT!" shouts the quizmaster. "Now for $100,000, spell 'farm.'" "Easy," said the Iowan. "E-I-E-I-O." %% Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. -- J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings" %% Three bulls -- a big bull, a medium sized bull, and a small bull -- were standing by a fence one day, chewing grass and looking out over the fields. The big one says, "See all of them cows out there? Half of 'em are mine." The medium sized one responds, "See all them cows? A third of them are MINE." The little bull pipes up, "Hey, all the rest of them cows are mine." After a while the bulls notice the farmer drive up with a truck and unload another bull -- the hugest Brahma bull these other bulls have ever seen. The big bull stops chewing and says, with a wide- eyed look, "He...he can have a third of my cows if he wants 'em." The medium sized bull trembles a bit when he says "He can have HALF of my cows if he wants them." Then the two bigger bulls notice that the small bull is snorting, bucking, pawing the ground, and putting on a ferocious act. "What are you doing, fool !?" they say. The small bull replies, "I want to make sure he knows I'm a bull!" %% Three coins in the fountain ... %% Three doctors were talking about their favorite patients. The first said that he preferred operating on Germans because their organs were lined up in exactly the right position. The second preferred Japanese because not only were their organs in exactly the right position, but they were also color coded. The third chimed in too. "I'll take lawyers any day. Ever open one of those suckers up? Only two working parts - the mouth and the anus, and they are interchangeable." %% Three elderly spinsters from Kent Gave up copulation for Lent. This included door handles, Both tapers and candles And anything else that was bent. %% Three explorers get captured by hostile primitives. Each will be put to death, but gets a choice of how he (or she) will die. The first explorer asks for death by alcohol. The natives bring him their local paint remover and he drinks himself into a stupor, gets alcohol poisoning and dies. They take his body, skin it and make it into a canoe. The second explorer chooses death by overdose. They bring him so cocaine, and he proceeds to OD. Once again, the natives skin him and make him into a canoe. The third explorer is asked how he wants to die. He asks for death by fork. The natives are puzzled, death by fork?. Yes he replies, so they bring him a large fork. He immediately starts puncturing himself all over him body and yells, "No way you're making me into a canoe" %% Three fine Irish lads, O'Rourke, O'Malley and O'Donnell, worked together at the local brewery. One day, as fate would have it, O'Rourke fell into one of the beer vats and drowned. O'Malley and O'Donnell, completely crestfallen, had to break the news to his wife. They went 'round the Mrs. O'Rourke's house and informed her that her poor dear Patrick had drowned in a beer vat that very day. Choking back her tears, she asked them "Tell me now, did me poor Patty suffer much?" "I don't think so," replied O'Donnell. "He came out twice to take a piss." %% Three gay guys were discussing what they thought their favorite sport would be. The first decides on football, 'cause of all those gorgeous guys bending over in their tight pants. "Definitely wrestling," sighs the second guy. "Those skimpy little costumes, and think of the holds." "Definitely baseball," says the third guy. "Why? Well, I'd be pitching with the bases loaded, the batter would hit a savage one-hopper right to me, I'd catch it, and I'd just stand there while the other guys rounded the bases. Meanwhile, the crowd would be going crazy, screaming, `Throw the ball, you cocksucker!' and that's what I like -- recognition!" %% 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 (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. -- Trollope %% Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes and caterpillars. %% Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) %% Three plastic surgeons were golfing one day on a crowded course. As they waited at the 13th hole, the first surgeon struck up a conversation. "Last year I worked on a most difficult case. A construction worker had his hands crushed when a steel beam fell on them. I worked on that man for 16 straight hours. Today that man plays as a pianist with the New York Philharmonic." The other two nodded appreciation. The second one spoke up. "I know what you mean by difficult cases. Several years ago a boy was brought in with his body completely cut in half at the waist. Seems he'd been run over by a train. I worked on him for three straight days. Today that boy is the premier dancer with the Los Angeles Ballet Company." More nods of appreciation. The third spoke up. "Well, those are difficult, I agree. But several years ago they brought in a man who'd been run over by a steamroller. All that was left was a red sweater and an asshole, and I made a college basketball coach out of him." %% Three professionals were discussing the nature of God. The doctor said, "The Bible states that God made Woman by taking a rib out of Man; God is obviously a surgeon." The engineer replied, "But before God made man he created Heaven and Earth out of Chaos; this is obviously the work of a master engineer. The lawyer just smiled and said, "But who do you think created the chaos?" %% Three rules for sounding like an expert: 1. Oversimplify your explanations to the point of uselessness. 2. Always point out second-order effects, but never point out when they can be ignored. 3. Come up with three rules. %% Three soldiers are hiding behind a tree during the Napoleonic Wars. One says to the second, "Who do you think you are?" Obviously crazed and battle fatigued the second replies, "Why, I'm Napoleon, of course!" To which the first replies, "Well, who told you that?" The third one looks mystified as the second replies simply, "God did." "I did not!" retorts the third. %% Three things have been difficult to tame: The oceans, fools, and women. We may soon be able to tame the ocean. Fools and women will take a little longer. -- Spiro T. Agnew %% Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all, %% Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all, A sting, and honey, and a body small. What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% Three things only do slaves require, food, work, and their gods, and of the three their gods must never be touched -- else they grow restless. -- Precepts for Ruling %% Three two-letter words that begin With I are a source of chagrin: There are guys who can cry -- Even wish they could die -- At that soul-searing phrase "Is it in?" %% Three women and a goose make a market. %% Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word "rebellion"; the word "revolt"; the word "revolution". -- Edward Abbey %% Three young women were attending the same logic class given at one of the better universities. During a lecture the professor stated that he was going to test their ability at situation reasoning. "Let us assume," said the prof, "that you are aboard a small craft alone in the Pacific, and you spot a vessel approaching you we several sex- starved sailors on board. What would you do in this situation to avoid the problem?" "I would attempt to turn my craft in the opposite direction and flee," said the first girl. "I would pass them, and hope that I could fend them off," responded the second woman. "Frankly," murmured the third woman, "I understand the situation, but I fail to see the problem." %% Thrill me, then leave. %% Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf" %% Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary. -- Edward Abbey %% Through the center of Czechoslovakia there a train speeding along. In one compartment of the train there are four people. A beautiful vivacious young woman, an old matronly woman, a Russian soldier, and a Czech dissident. Suddenly the train goes through a tunnel. It is completely dark. Then is heard a loud kiss and an equally powerful slap. When the train exits the tunnel, the Russian soldier is holding the side of his face, and the Czech dissident is grinning his face off. The old matronly woman thinks : "Now that's a fine young woman, the Russian soldier tries to steal a kiss in the tunnel and the lady slaps him one!" The young woman is thinking : "Now that's a strange Russian soldier, he'd rather kiss that old hag than me." The Russian soldier is thinking : "Now that's a smart Czech, he steal the kiss and I get slapped." And the Czech dissident is thinking : "Gee I'm smart! We go through the tunnel, I kiss the back of my hand and get away with slapping a Russian soldier." %% Through the telescope you see much: To the east, you see a little grove; to the south, you see another building. Next to the building you see a tool shed, and far to the southeast lies a sandy beach. %% Through zeal, knowledge is gotten, through lack of zeal, knowledge is lost; let a man who knows the double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow. -- Buddha %% Throw a lucky man into the sea, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth. -- Arabic proverb %% Throwing Shoes at the Bride: Antiquity, Asia and Europe. Today old shoes are tied to newlyweds' cars and no one asks why. Why, of all things, shoes? And why old shoes? Originally, shoes were only one of many objects tossed at a bride to wish her a bounty of children. In fact, shoes were preferred over the equally traditional wheat and rice because from ancient times the foot was a powerful phallic symbol. In several cultures, particularly among the Eskimos, a woman experiencing difficulty in conceiving was instructed to carry a piece of an old shoe with her at all times. The preferred shoes for throwing at a bride - and later for tying to the newlyweds' car - were old ones strictly for economic reasons. Shoes have never been inexpensive. Thus, the throwing of shoes, rice, cake crumbs, and confetti, as well as the origin of the wedding cake, are all expressions for a fruitful union. It is not without irony that in our age, with such strong emphasis on delayed childbearing and family planning, the modern wedding ceremony is replete with customs meant to induce maximum fertility. %% Thufir's a Harkonnen now. %% Thunder and lightning: The image of Biting Through. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws Through clearly defined penalties. %% Thunder and rain set in: The image of Deliverance. Thus the superior man pardons mistakes And forgives misdeeds. %% Thunder and wind: the image of Duration. Thus the superior man stands firm And does not change his direction. %% Thunder comes resounding out of the earth: The image of Enthusiasm. Thus the ancient kings made music In order to honor merit, And offered it with splendor To the Supreme Deity, Inviting their ancestors to be present. %% Thunder in heaven above: The image of The Power of the Great. Thus the superior man does not tread upon paths That do not accord with established order. %% Thunder in the middle of the lake: The image of Following. Thus the superior man at nightfall Goes indoors for rest and recuperation. %% Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightening that does the work. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Correspondence, 1908 %% Thunder on the mountain: The image of Preponderance of the Small. Thus in his conduct the superior man gives preponderance to reverence. In bereavement he gives preponderance to grief. In his expenditures he gives preponderance to thrift. %% Thunder over the lake: The image of The Marrying Maiden. Thus the superior man Understands the transitory In the light of the eternity of the end. %% Thunder repeated: the image of Shock. Thus in fear and trembling The superior man sets his life in order And examines himself. %% Thunder within the earth: The image of The Turning Point. Thus the kings of antiquity closed the passes At the time of solstice. Merchants and strangers did not go about, And the ruler Did not travel through the provinces. %% Thus I have heard: The worth of a program cannot be judged by the size of its brochures or by the number of full-page ads that appear in popular computer magazines. The louder the noise, the less likely it is that the program will be useful. Truly excellent programs need no advertising; word of mouth is sufficient. -- The Zen of Programming %% Thus endeth my lim'ricks, part two. What next, you may ask, will I do? Perhaps something bawdy, obscene, or just nawdy. Who knows? If I don't, how can you? [dep] %% Thus spake the master Ninjei: "If your application does not run correctly, do not blame the operating system." -- The Zen of Programming %% Thus spake the master programmer: "When the program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes." -- The Tao of Programming %% Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. -- Dave Barry %% Thy logick, like thy locks, is disarrayed; %% Thyme's Law: Everything goes wrong at once. %% Tiananmen Square: Gun Control Strikes Again %% Tibi quuxandum est. %% Tick: Hand Grenade Man? What are your super-powers? HGM: Super powers? Bah! Who needs 'em? I've got a HAND GRENADE! %% Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown Waiting for someone or something to show you the way Tired of lying in the sunshine And then one day you find Staying home to watch the rain Ten years have got behind you You are young and life is long No one told you when to run And there is time to kill today You missed the starting gun And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking And racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death Every year is getting shorter Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way Never seem to find the time The time is gone, the song is over Plans that either come to nought Thought I'd something more to say... Or half a page of scribbled lines -- Pink Floyd, "Time", Dark Side of the Moon %% Tiddely Quiddely Edward M. Kennedy Quite unaccountably Drove in a stream. Pleas of amnesia Incomprehensible Possibly shattered Political dream. %% Tie a yellow ribbon around Jane Fonda's neck.. %% Tieline - the latest in neckwear -- Data communications glossary %% Tiger Lost On Chicago Freeways For Sixteen Days. %% Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster. -- Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876 %% Tillman's Constant: The number any answer may be multiplied to make it correct %% Tilt your chair back, your breath is effecting my RAM! %% Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Timber . . . The tree falls to the ground and magically disappears! %% Time and tide wait for no one. %% Time and tide wait for no woman, but time always stands still for a man of thirty. %% Time as he grows old teaches all things. -- Aeschylus %% Time flies like an arrow! %% Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. -- Frequently attributed to Groucho Marx %% Time flies when you don't know what you're doing. %% Time for a flame to BBoard. %% Time for a nice pot of tea. %% Time for a power spike to the disk drive. %% Time for the old water balloon on the boss' desk trick. %% Time goes, you say? Ah no! Time stays, *we* go. -- Austin Dobson %% Time heals all non-fatal wounds. %% Time heals all wounds. %% Time heals. %% Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. -- Hector Berlioz, "Almanach des lettres francaises" %% Time is a random wind that blows down a long corridor, slamming all the doors. %% Time is a versatile performer. It flies, marches on, heals all wounds, runs out and will tell. -- Franklin P. Jones %% Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space. -- Graffiti %% Time is an illusion. %% Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Time is fluid ... like a river with currents, eddies, backwash. -- Spock, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate 3134.0 %% Time is flying never to return. -- Vergil %% Time is just nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. %% Time is money. %% Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. %% Time is the chrysalis of eternity. -- Richter %% Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "A Book of Prefaces", 1917 %% Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. -- Theophrastus %% Time is the old Justice, that examines all offenders. -- William Shakespeare %% Time is the only critic without ambition. -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968), "Writers at Work', 1977 %% Time out for fun. %% Time paradoxes are disgusting! Never mind what care you take-- You always find you got there just in Time to cause your grandad's wake. %% Time passes... %% Time passes... and you die from some obscure poisoning. %% Time to be aggressive. Go after a tattooed Virgo. %% Time to break out the pink stuff %% Time to call in a strategic air strike on this bug. %% Time to call in the calvary. %% Time to call in the marines. %% Time to eat lunch. %% Time to go home and write mom a nice long letter. %% Time to go home. %% Time to go to Tom's. %% Time to punt. %% Time to stop and try to gain some perspective. %% Time to take stock. Go home with some office supplies. %% Time was different when the sun was always straight overhead. Morning and afternoon were identical. Decisions seemed less than permanent. Reality seemed less than real. It was . . . like the instant of time spent traveling between transfer booths. -- "Ringworld" %% Time was invented so everything wouldn't happen at once. %% Time was invented so that you don't have to do everything all at once. Space was invented so you don't have to do everything all in the same place. %% Time washes clean Love's wounds unseen. That's what someone told me; But I don't know what it means. -- Linda Ronstadt, "Long Long Time", by Gary White %% Time will end all my troubles, but I don't always approve of Time's methods. %% Time's gradual touch has moulder'd into beauty many a tower which when it frown'd with all its battlements, was only terrible. -- Mason %% Time's up! -- Vice President George Bush, to Alexander Haig, when Haig asked questions about the Iran-contra affair during a debate, January 1988 %% Time--the beginning of all beginnings. Two forces, only good and evil, then chaos. Time is born, matter, space. The universe cries out like a newborn. The forces shatter as the universe explodes outwards. Only echoes remain, and yet somehow--somehow, the evil force survives, an intelligence--pure evil. -- Dr. McCoy, CURSE OF FENRIC %% Time-sharing is the junk-mail part of the computer business. -- H. R. J. Grosch [attributed] %% Timely advis'd, the coming evil shun! -- Prior %% Timeout table overflow %% Times approximate. %% Timing must be perfect now. Two-timing must be better than perfect. %% Tin openers are rare indeed. %% Tinsel is really snakes' mirrors. -- Steve Wright %% Tip #268: Don't feel insecure or inferior! Remember, you're ORGANIC!! You could win an argument with almost any rock! %% Tip O'Neill is just like Congress; old, fat and out of control. -- J. LeBoutillier %% Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% Tip well, even if you're a student. %% Tip well. %% Tired of irritating bats? Try a scroll of silence. %% Tis better to be hunter than hunted. %% To His Coy Mistress Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long loves day. Thou by the Indian Ganges side Should'st rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood: And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster then empires, and more slow. An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze. Two hundred to adore each breast; But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state; Nore would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Times winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor in thy marble vault shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity; And your quaint honor turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hew Sits on thy skin like morning lew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at one our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapt power. Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball; And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Through the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. -- Andrew Marvell %% To My Father Oh father, beloved you have gone I said no good-by, no final hug Christmas we touched last, a happy time I was not ready for you to go But to God you have gone I can't stop crying, I miss you already You were so full of life the last time we talked I remember the love you gave us No more to see you or feel your touch I am not alone, but I am lonely Please watch over us, I love you -- Mary Hauck 1/23/87 %% To Theodore Roosevelt: You are like the Wind and I like the Lion. You form the Tempest. The sand stings my eyes and the Ground is parched. I roar in defiance but you do not hear. But between us there is a difference. I, like the lion, must remain in my place. While you, like the wind, will never know yours. Mulay Hamid El Raisuli Lord of the Riff Sultan to the Berbers Last of the Barbary Pirates %% To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition. -- Woody Allen %% To a Europe exhausted by nearly two centuries of religious wars, [Isaac] Newton's works were first and foremost a message about God; that He did not behave in a capricious or arbitrary fashion, in response to either His will or human prayer, but in accordance with absolute, unwavering, and humanly discoverable laws of nature which governed him and all his works. He had become the infinitely perfect Clock-Maker, his works fathomable by the human mind. -- Forrest MacDonald %% To a Real Woman, every ejaculation is premature. %% To a persistent Casanova: "If you don't leave now, I'll call the whole fire department to put you out." %% To a weepy young woman in Thrums Her betrothed remarked, "This is what comes Of allowing your tears To fall into my ears - I think they have rotted the drums." -- Edward Gorey %% To abuse wine is to abuse life itself. %% To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete. -- Epictetus %% To achieve our ultimate goals is not happiness; it is to be able to solve our problems along the way. %% To achieve the next higher rating would be a neat trick!. %% To achieve the next higher rating, you need 200 more point. %% To add insult to injury. -- Phaedrus %% To all mankind -- may we never find space so vast, planets so cold, heart and mind so empty that we cannot fill them with love and warmth -- Garth, "Dagger of the Mind," stardate 2715.2 %% To all virgins. Thanks for nothing %% To all, to each, a fair good night, And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light. -- Scott %% To an empty mind, even the smallest idea seems important. %% To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am always right. %% To arrive at perfection, a man should have very sincere friends or inveterate enemies; because he would be made sensible of his good or ill conduct, either by the censures of the one, or the admonitions of the other. -- Diogenes %% To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian. %% To avoid trouble, breathe through the nose; it keeps the mouth shut. %% To be "matter of fact" about the world is to blunder into fantasy.... and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift. -- Shelley %% To be a performance artist in one lifetime means seven rebirths as a stereo salesclerk. -- Proverb from "Life in Hell" %% To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is being educated. -- Edith Hamilton %% To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it. -- Olin Miller %% To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are which we court. -- Philip Sidney %% To be an athiest requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which athiesm would deny. -- Joseph Addison %% To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% To be awake is to be alive. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), in "Walden" %% To be beautiful is enough! if a woman can do that well who should demand more from her? You don't want a rose to sing. -- Thackeray %% To be considered successful, a woman must be much better at her job than a man would have to be. Fortunately, this isn't difficult. %% To be excellent when engaged in administration is to be like the North Star. As it remains in its one position, all the other stars surround it. -- Confucius %% To be free of bondage or restraint, to live under a government based on the consent of the citizens, these are basic among all freedoms ... and this is the reason why a democracy is from every possible humane point of view the best form of government ... What so many human beings in the modern world have failed to understand is that freedom is the greatest of all trusts. -- Ashley Montagu %% To be great is to be misunderstood. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Essays", 1841 %% To be happy one must be a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am - a man of my peculiar weaknesses, vanities, appetites, and aversions - can be so happy as he can be in the United States. Going further, I lay down the doctrine that it is a sheer physical impossibility for such a man to live in the United States and not be happy. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "On Being An American" %% To be honest with you Picard, a significant number of my crewmembers have expressed a desire to return even knowing the odds. Some because they can't bear to live without their love ones. Some because they don't like the idea of slipping out in the middle of a fight. -- Captain Garrett, "Yesterday's Enterprise", stardate 43625.2 %% To be human is also to seek pleasure. To laugh -- to dance. -- Flint, "Requiem for Methuselah," stardate 5843.7 %% To be intoxicated is to feel sophisticated but not be able to say it. %% To be is to be related. -- C. J. Keyser %% To be is to do. -- I. Kant To do is to be. -- A. Sartre Yabba-Dabba-Doo! -- F. Flinstone %% To be is to program. -- Calvin Keegan %% To be loved, be lovable. -- Ovid, "Ars Amatoria" %% To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best to, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. -- e. e. cummings (1894-1963), "A Miscellany" %% To be or Not is the Result! %% To be or not to be (2b) || !(2b) Loses something in translation, eh? %% To be or not to be, that is the bottom line. %% To be or not to be. -- William Shakespeare To do is to be. -- Nietzsche To be is to do. -- Sartre Do be do be do. -- Sinatra %% To be ordered to die is an expectation for any officer at any time. For a Klingon perhaps, but Riker's people do not volunteer for death so easily. -- Capt. Kargan and Klag, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% To be powerful in the cheekbones Brings misfortune. The superior man is firmly resolved. He walks alone and is caught in the rain. He is bespattered, And people murmur against him. No blame. %% To be responsive at this time, though I will simply say, and therefore this is a repeat of what I said previously, that which I am unable to offer in response is based on information available to make no such statement. %% To be successful, a woman has to be much better at her job than a man. -- Golda Meir %% To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% To be the kind of girl designed to be kissed between the thighs. %% To be thrown on one's own resources is to be cast in the very lap of fortune; for our faculties undergo a development, and display an energy, of which they were previously unsusceptible. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% To be truly competent in the microcomputer field, you must be able not only to design microprocessor hardware, but also to program that hardware. -- John Uffenbeck %% To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved. %% To be who one is, is not to be someone else. %% To be wise, the only thing you really need to know is when to say "I don't know." %% To be, or not to be - that is the question. %% To be, or not to be, those are the parameters. %% To be, or what? -- Sylvester Stallone %% To bear offspring, Noah's snakes were unable. Their fertility was somewhat unstable. He constructed a bed Out of tree trunks and said, "Even adders can multiply on a log table." %% To bear other people's afflictions, everyone has courage and enough to spare. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% To bear with fools in kindliness brings good fortune. To know how to take women Brings good fortune. The son is capable of taking charge of the household. %% To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem. -- Marshall L. Smith %% To behave with dignity is nothing less than to allow others freely to be themselves. -- Sol Chaneles %% To believe in God is impossible -- not to believe in him is absurd. %% To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. %% To believe with certainty we must begin to doubt. -- Stanislaus %% To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% To boldly go and watch Star Trek re-runs. %% To break the panel you would have to break the mirror first. %% To build something that endures, it is of the greatest importance to have a long tenure in office--to rule for many years. You can achieve a quick success in a year or two, but nearly all the great tycoons have continued their building much longer. -- Antony Jay %% To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love. -- George Santayana (1863-1952) %% To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee. %% To catch a whale in the inland waters of the State of Oklahoma is contrary to law. %% To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% To collect fumes of sulfur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube. %% To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover. -- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) %% To communicate is the beginning of understanding. -- AT&T %% To comprehend a man's life, it is necessary to know mot merely what he does but also what he purposely leaves undone. There is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted; and he is still wiser who, among the things that he can do well, chooses and resolutely follows the best. -- William Gladstone %% To compute or not to compute, that is the question Whether 'tis nobler in the memory bank to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous functions Or to take up arms against a sea of transistors or rather, transponders... transcondu... trans... er... oh, the hack with it... %% To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart. -- Dickens %% To confess a fault freely is the next thing to being innocent of it. -- Publilus Syrus %% To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy. -- Ancient Chinese Warlord %% To contend before him Brings good fortune. %% To craunch a marmoset. -- Pedro Carolino, "English as She is Spoke" %% To create a little flower is the labour of ages. %% To criticize the incompetent is easy; it is more difficult to criticize the competent. %% To date, the firm conclusions of Project Blue Book are: 1. no unidentified flying object reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; 2. there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and 3. there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles. -- the summary of Project Blue Book, an Air Force study of UFOs from 1950 to 1965, as quoted by James Randi in Flim-Flam! %% To defend the Saigon regime is not worth one more human life. -- Senator Edmund Muskie %% To despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful; it is rebellion against God's will. -- Leo XIII (1810-1903) %% To determine how successful you have been, a score is kept. When you find a valuable object and pick it up, you receive a certain number of points, which depends on the difficulty of finding the object. You receive extra points for transporting the treasure safely to the living room and placing it in the trophy case. In addition, some particularly interesting rooms have a value associated with visiting them. The only penalty is for getting yourself killed, which you may do only twice. %% To die -- to sleep -- No more -- and, by a sleep, to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks, That flesh is heir to -- 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. -- William Shakespeare %% To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures. -- Anatole France (1844-1924) %% To die is landing on some distant shore. -- John Dryden (1631-1700) %% To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Journal", 20 December 1822 %% To divest one's self of some prejudices, would be like taking off the skin to feel the better. -- Grenville %% To do a lab really well, have your report done well in advance. %% To do is to be - Nietzsche To be is to do - Sartre Do be do be do - Sinatra Yabba-Dabba-Doo! -- F. Flinstone %% To do is to be -- Nietzsche To be is to do -- Sartre Do be do be do -- Sinatra %% To do is to be -- Nietzsche To be is to do -- Sartre Do be do be do -- Sinatra Do bee a-a bee -- Romper Room %% To do is to be -- Nietzsche To be is to do -- Sartre Yabba dabba do -- Flintstone %% To do nothing is also a good remedy. -- Hippocrates %% To do nothing is to be nothing. %% To do two things at once is to do neither. -- Publius Syrus %% To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. -- H. Poincare %% To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antidote those miseries that must fall on us. -- Massinger %% To downgrade the human mind is bad theology. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% To each his own. %% To eat is human, to digest, divine. %% To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. -- Virginia Woolf %% To err is human, but I can REALLY foul things up. %% To err is human, but I forgive you. %% To err is human, but it takes a computer to really foul things up. %% To err is human, but when the eraser wears out before the pencil, you're overdoing it a little. %% To err is human, to eat Jello, is messy. %% To err is human, to forgive is Not Company Policy. %% To err is human, to forgive is against company policy. %% To err is human, to forgive is against department policy. %% To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System %% To err is human, to moo bovine. %% To err is human, to repent, divine, to persist, devilish. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% To err is human. To forgive is unusual. %% To err is human. To really screw up it takes a computer! %% To err is human. To blame someone else for your mistakes is even more human. %% To err is human; to admit it, a blunder. %% To err is human; to debug, divine. %% To err is human; to really foul things up takes a computer. -- Paul Ehrlich, in "The Farmers Almanac, 1978" %% To err is humor. %% To err may become inhuman. %% To escape criticism -- do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) %% To estimate the time it takes to do a task: estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by two, and change the unit of measure to the next higher unit. Thus we allocate two days for a one-hour task. %% To every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D, which explains why it is so easy to find expert witnesses who contradict each other. -- B. Duggan %% To every Phd. there is an equal and opposite Phd. -- B. Duggan %% To every rule there is an exception, and vice versa. %% To everyone is given the key to heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. -- Ancient proverb %% To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. -- Henri Bergson %% To expect a former senator to be content in the Cabinet is to hope that a warlord will find serenity as a slave. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. -- Miguel de Unamuno, "The Tragic Sense of Life", 1913 %% To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% To find a cause of the universe is like trying to find it's spatial position. %% To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% To follow foolish precedents, and wink With both our eyes, is easier than to think. -- William Cowper (1731-1800) %% To function efficiently, any group of people or employees must have faith in their leader. -- Capt. Bligh (HMRN, Ret) %% To gain one's way is no escape from the responsibility for an inferior solution. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% To generalize is to be an idiot. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% To get action out of management, it is necessary to create the illusion of a crisis in the hope it will be acted on. -- Gene Franklin %% To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of them absent. %% To get to Candy's room you gotta walk the darkness of Candy's hall. %% To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smoothe the ice, or add another hue To the rainbow, or, with taper-light, To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. -- William Shakespeare %% To give happiness is to deserve happiness. %% To give of yourself, you must first know yourself. %% To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought not measured with money--sincerity and integrity. -- Donald Adams %% To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man. -- Alan Paton, 1967 %% To go to law, is for two persons to kindle a fire at their own cost, to warm others, and singe themselves to cinders; and because they cannot agree, to what is truth and equity, they will both agree to unplume themselves, that others may be decorated with their feathers. -- Feltham %% To have a sense of humor is to be a tragic figure. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% To have died once is enough. -- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) %% To have you hold me in your arms. %% To heck with marrying a girl who makes biscuits like her mother -- I want to marry one who makes dough like her father. %% To heir is human. -- Dolores E. Mcguire %% To her love was like the air of heaven -- invisible, intangible; it yet encircled her soul, and she knew it; for in it was her life. -- Miss M'Intosh %% To him nothing is impossible, who is always dreaming of his past possibilities. -- Carlyle %% To his bride a young bridegroom 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 nail with a fish!" %% To his bride said a numskull named Clarence : "I trust you will show some forbearance. My sexual habits I picked up from rabbits, And occasionally watching my parents." %% To his bride said economist Fife : "The semen you'll launch as my wife, We will salvage and freeze To resemble goat's cheese, And slice for hors d'oeuvres with a knife." %% 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?" %% To his clubfooted child said Lord Stipple, As he poured his post-prandial tipple, "Your mother's behaviour Gave pain to Our Saviour, And that's why He made you a cripple." -- Edward Gorey %% To hit or not to hit, that is the question. %% To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% To iterate is human, to recurse, divine. -- L. Peter Deutsch %% To justify his theft, one trade union official, caught with his hand in the till, explained that he was using the money to fight Communism. %% To keep your friends treat them kindly; to kill them, treat them often. %% To kidnap a kzin is probably a mistake. -- Chmeee "The Ringworld Engineers" %% To kill an enterprise, complain that nothing is ever published that interests you but never offer to write an article, make a suggestion, or find a writer. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, criticize the work of the organizers and members. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, don't do what has to be done yourself, but when the members roll up their sleeves and do their very best, complain that the group is run by a bunch of ego-trippers. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, don't go to meetings. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, get mad if you are not a member of the committee, but if you are, make no suggestions. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, if you go to the meetings, arrive late. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, never think of introducing new members. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, pay your dues as late as possible. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill an enterprise, say you have no opinion on the subject if the chair asks for it. After the meeting, say you have learned nothing, or tell everyone what should have happened. -- Jean-Charles Terrassier %% To kill is a breaking of civil and moral laws we've lived by for thousands of years. -- Dr. Richard Daystrom, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4731.3 %% To kill time, a committee meeting is the perfect weapon. %% To know Edina is to reject it. -- Dudley Riggs, "The Year the Grinch Stole the Election" %% To know how to refuse is as important as to know how to consent. -- Baltasar Gracian %% To know the world one must construct it. -- Cesare Pavese %% To know thy self is the ultimate form of aggression. -- Marion J. Levy, Jr. %% To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice. -- Confucius %% To laugh at men of sense is the privilege of fools. %% To lead people, you must follow behind. -- Lao Tsu %% To light a candle is to cast a shadow. -- Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea", 1975 %% To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs. -- Sri Aurobindo %% To live in a place where you don't belong is to live in hell. -- Italo Bombolini %% To live is always desirable. -- Eleen the Capellan, "Friday's Child," stardate 3498.9 %% To live long, it is necessary to live slowly. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses. -- Syrus %% To lose Is to learn. -- Anon. %% To love and to be wise is scarcely granted to the highest. -- Laberius %% To love is good, love being difficult. %% To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer. Not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. -- Woody Allen, "Love and Death" %% To maintain a program is to treat it like a growing plant. It avails nothing to pull and tug at a shoot in an attempt to make it grow faster. -- The Zen of Programming %% To make a fool develop It furthers one to apply discipline. The fetters should be removed. To go on in this way brings humiliation. %% To make a long story short... there's nothing like having the boss walk in. %% To make eggnog, you'll need rum, whiskey, wine gin and, if they are in season, eggs... %% To make tax forms true they should read "Income Owed Us" and "Incommode You". %% To make yourself miserable, don't forget to feel sorry for yourself. %% To make yourself miserable, never overlook a slight or forget a grudge. %% To make yourself miserable, put an excessive value on money. %% To make yourself miserable, think that you are exceptional and entitled to special privileges. %% To make yourself miserable, think that you are indispensable to your job, your company, and your friends. %% To make yourself miserable, think that you are overburdened with work and that people tend to take advantage of you. %% To make yourself miserable, think that you can control your nervous system by sheer will power. %% To make yourself miserable, cultivate a consistently pessimistic outlook. %% To make yourself miserable, forget the feelings and rights of other people. %% To make yourself miserable, forget the good things in life and concentrate on the bad. %% To many men well-fitting doors are not set on their tongues. -- Theognis %% To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation. -- St. Augustine %% To me old age is fifteen years older than I am. -- Bernard M. Baruch %% To me personally, it's nothing personal to me. %% To mortal men great loads allotted be; But of all packs no pack like poverty. -- Herrick %% To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship which illumine only the track it has passed. %% To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their sanctity. -- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) %% To never see a fool, you lock yourself in an empty room and break all the mirrors. %% To nourish oneself on ancient virtue induces perseverance. Danger. In the end, good fortune comes. If by chance you are in the service of a king, Seek not works. %% To oppose something is to maintain it. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. %% To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. -- Calgacus (c. 84 A.D.) %% To prevent conception when having intercourse, the male wears a condominium. %% To profit from good advice requires as much wisdom as to give it. %% To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it. %% To program anything that is programmable is obsession. %% To program is to be. %% To reach the fruit of life you must be willing to go out on a limb. %% To read without reflecting, is like eating without digesting. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it. -- Isaac Asimov %% To refuse praise is to seek praise twice. %% To remember is to understand. %% To remove air from a flask, fill it with water, tip the water out, and put the cork in quick before the air can get back in. %% To remove dust from the eye, pull the eye down over the nose. %% To restore a sense of reality, I think Walt Disney should have a Hardluckland. -- Jack Paar %% To restrict a segment of the population to such hardship is unthinkable in an evolved culture. -- Spock, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5818.4 %% To revive the domestic auto industry by deregulation is to offer aphrodisiacs to the dead. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% To rule one's anger is well; to prevent it is still better. -- Tyron Edwards %% To save a single life is better than to build a seven story pagoda. %% To save face: keep lower half shut. %% To say nothing of its holiness or authority, the Bible contains more specimens of genius and taste than any other volume in existence. -- Walter S. Landor %% To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy. %% To say you got a vote of confidence would be to say you needed a vote of confidence. -- Andrew Young %% To search for perfection is all very well, But to look for heaven is to live here in hell. %% To see Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% To see a need and wait to be asked, is to already refuse. %% To see the butcher slap the steak, before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable, too -it really was- to see him cut it off, so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skillful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite. -- Dickens [Martin Chuzzlewit] %% To seek permission is to seek denial. -- Steve Jobs %% To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be, not a virtue, but the groundwork of a virtue. -- Johnson %% To some generations much is given. Of others much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt %% To some lawyers all facts are created equal. -- Justice Felix Frankfurter %% To speak kindly does not hurt the tongue. %% To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most. %% To spread white rushes underneath. No blame. %% To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% To stay youthful, stay useful. %% To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. -- Tennyson %% To study an object best, understand it thoroughly before you start. %% To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles. %% To succeed planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well. -- Salvor Hardin %% To survive, one must be able to adapt to changing situations. -- Tyrannosaurus Rex %% To teach is to learn twice. -- Joseph Joubert %% To teach is to learn. %% To teach men how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing philosophy can still do. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% To tell us that every species of thing is endowed with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects, is to tell us nothing; but to derive two or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step. -- Isaac Newton %% To the Gay Laugh of my Mother at the Gate of the Grave. -- Sean O'Casey %% To the atheist, death is the end; to the believer, the beginning; to the agnostic, the sound of silence. %% To the best of my recollection, Senator, I can't recall. %% To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. -- Eric Hoffer %% To the generous mind, the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when 'tis not in our power to repay it. -- Dr. Thomas Franklin %% To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question. -- Edward Abbey %% To the landlord belongs the doorknobs. %% To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, Is a keen observer of life, The word "Intellectual" suggests straight away A man who's untrue to his wife. -- W. H. Auden %% To the memory of the man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his country. -- General Henry Lee %% To the north and south are large hallways. %% To the north lies the island of Derhemen. Close by are two other isles, one northeast and one south of here. %% To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load. %% To the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" God-Damn this stupid program here refuses to compile I don't know what the matter is, been searching for a while Syntax error line ninety three, it makes no sense to me Oh-h, I want my program to compile, to compile Oh-h I want my program to compile Assignment's due tomorrow noon by then it must be done As you can well imagine I'm not having any fun I don't know why I have such luck, I think this thing hates me! Oh-h, I want my program to compile, to compile Oh-h I want my program to compile %% To the wage earner, "free enterprise" is the way his boss treats him and those around him. -- Malcolm Forbes %% To thine own self be true. (If not that, at least make some money.) %% To think contrary to one's era is heroism. But to speak against it is madness. -- Eugene Ionesco %% To think is human, to compute, divine. %% To those accustomed to the precise, structured methods of conventional system development, exploratory development techniques may seem messy, inelegant, and unsatisfying. But it's a question of congruence: precision and flexibility may be just as dysfunctional in novel, uncertain situations as sloppiness and vacillation are in familiar, well-defined ones. Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very secure ecological niche. -- Beau Sheil, "Power Tools for Programmers" %% To those who doubt the importance of careful mate selection, remember how Adam wrecked a promising career. -- Charles Merrill Smith %% To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. -- Robert Louis Stevenson %% To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another. -- John Burroughs (1837-1921) %% To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program. %% To understand death, I must amass information on every aspect of it. The experiments shouldn't take more than a third of the crew, maybe half. -- Nagilum, "Where Silence Has Lease", stardate 42193.6 %% To understand political power aright ... we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions ... within the bonds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. -- John Locke (1632-1704) %% To understand this important story, you have to understand how the telephone company works. Your telephone is connected to a local computer, which is in turn connected to a regional computer, which is in turn connected to a loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of Lawrence, Kan. Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in. If it suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the computer above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the one above it, until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe break down in tears and tell your closest friend about a sordid incident from your past involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse, an entire religious order, a garden hose and six quarts of tapioca pudding, the top computer feeds your conversation into Edna's loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on the porch to listen and drink gin and laugh themselves silly. -- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own Phones?" %% To update Voltaire, "I may kill all msgs from you, but I'll fight for your right to post it, and I'll let it reside on my disks". -- Doug Thompson (doug@isishq.FIDONET.ORG) %% To us, killing is murder, even for revenge. -- Kirk, "Plato's Stepchildren," stardate 5784.3 %% To us, violence is unthinkable. -- Ayleborne of Organia, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3201.7 %% To use violence is to already be defeated. -- Chinese proverb %% To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question ... or is it? %% To what base uses may we return! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till it find it stopping a bunghole? As thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth: of earth we make loam. And why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel? -- William Shakespeare %% To what level do you want to teleport? [type a number] %% To what position do you want to be teleported? %% To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes? -- Anaximenes %% To whom the mornings are like nights, What must the midnights be! -- Emily Dickinson (on hacking?) %% To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill. %% To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal. -- Nessus "Ringworld" %% To write a good love-letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and end without knowing what you have written. -- Rousseau %% To write good code is a worthy challenge, and a source of civilized delight. -- stolen and paraphrased from William Safire %% To write well is at once to think well, to feel rightly, and to render properly! It is to have, at the same time, mind, soul, taste. -- Buffon %% To your east lies the inner wall of the palace, an open arch giving entry inside. To the west, a tower looms overhead. No distinguishing features can be seen from here, but the courtyard stretches on both to the north and south. %% To: All Male Taxpayers From: The Internal Revenue Service Re: Notice of Increase in Tax Payment The only thing that the IRS has not yet taxed is your "ding-a-ling". This is due to the fact that 40% of the time it is hanging around unemployed, 20% of the time it is pissed off, 30% of the time it is hard up, and 10% of the time it is in the hole. Besides this, it has two dependents: both of which are nuts. As of January, 1988, your "tally-whacker" will be taxed according to its size. To determine your appropriate category, please refer to the information on page 2, section 7, line 3 of the standard 1040 tax form: 10-12 inches: Luxury Tax................$30.00 8-10 inches: Pole Tax..................$25.00 6-8 inches: Privilege Tax.............$15.00 4-6 inches: Nuisance Tax...............$5.00 NOTE: Anyone under 4 inches is eligible for a refund. Please DO NOT request an extension. Males exceeding 12 inches must file a capital gain report. Very Truly Yours, T. Pecker Checker Internal Revenue Service %% To: C. L. KIRK (Executive Vice-President, IBM) Tune: "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" Ever we praise our able leaders. And our progressive C. A. Kirk is one of them. He is endowed with the will to go forward. He'll always work in the cause of IBM; All of our people united applaud him, As his success in our Company recall, As we know that each one is solidly for him. Proud of the job he is doing for us all. A note on sources: these lyrics were from the liner notes to a record distributed by Advanced Computer Techniques (ACT) Corporation at the Western Joint Computer Conference circa 1960-62. %% To: F. W. NICHOL (VP and General Manager, IBM) His cause IBM and for all of its men He is working and planning, we know; His time without spare, and a knowledge that's rare Is making our company grow. Yes, yes, we all know Mr. Nichol you're making us grow; Your thoughts full of zeal which to you reveal Ever help to keep us on the go. Wherever we are, be it near or afar We will find he has given us with care A message to all that has sounded the call For the will to go forward and dare. Yes, yes we all know Mr. Nichol you're making us grow; the lessons you teach make us strive to e'er reach Our records and keep on the go. A note on sources: these lyrics were from the liner notes to a record distributed by Advanced Computer Techniques (ACT) Corporation at the Western Joint Computer Conference circa 1960-62. %% To: J. L. BARTON (Plant Manager, Endicott Plant) In Endicott we have a man, Whose thoughts will ever be, To fill each need with greater speed, Throughout our factory; J. L. Barton, to IBM you're true; You'll ever go ahead we know And we are back of you. A note on sources: these lyrics were from the liner notes to a record distributed by Advanced Computer Techniques (ACT) Corporation at the Western Joint Computer Conference circa 1960-62. %% To: THOMAS J. WATSON Tune: "Auld Lang Syne" T. J. Watson - you're our leader fine, the greatest in the land, We sing your praises from our hearts we're here to shake your hand. You're IBM's guiding star throughout the hemispheres, No matter what the future brings, we all will perservere. You've made our IBM so great in every land supreme, Our service meets all needs of men and works just like a team. You've brought us through to victory, with leadership that's prime, We'll always love and honor you for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. A note on sources: these lyrics were from the liner notes to a record distributed by Advanced Computer Techniques (ACT) Corporation at the Western Joint Computer Conference circa 1960-62. %% To: The Acme corporation From: Wile E. Coyote Re: Shipment 1743 - Exploding birdseed Dear Sir, I wish to complain about the quality of this product, it failed to detonate. Then, when I went to check up on it, all of a sudden - Kaboom. I request that you cancel my order for this product and send me instead a shipment of your magnetic birdseed and, one of your superstrong cryogenic magnets complete with cooling system (Item # 115-674-7745 ). Please charge these to my account. %% Toast is the national dish of Australia. %% Tobacco is a filthy weed, That from the devil does proceed; It drains your purse, it burns your clothes, And makes a chimney of your nose. -- B. Waterhouse %% Today a man is known by the company he merges. %% Today is Monday, cleverly disguised as Tuesday. %% Today is National Existential Ennui Awareness Day. %% Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file. %% Today is a good day to bribe a high-ranking public official. %% Today is a good day to fuck off. %% Today is a good day to update your resume. %% Today is gonna be one helluva week! %% Today is not a good day to buy a refrigerator. %% Today is the Ayatollah's birthday. To celebrate, the Iranian Navy was going to take him on an inspection tour. Unfortunately, his doctors had to cancel; they said the pressure at that depth might kill him. %% Today is the CAR of the rest of your life. %% Today is the day you were worried about yesterday. %% Today is the first day of the rest of this mess. %% Today is the first day of the rest of your life -- celebrate now! %% Today is the first day of the rest of your life. %% Today is the first day of the rest of your life. No, really. It is. %% Today is the first day of the rest of your lossage. %% Today is the last day of your life so far. %% Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday %% Today is what happened to yesterday. %% Today is your lucky day. %% Today most physicians specialize. After getting his bill, I've decided my doctor's speciality is banking. -- Mickey Porter %% Today when a man gets married he gets a home, a housekeeper, a cook, a cheering squad and another paycheck. When a woman marries, she gets a boarder. %% Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster? -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" %% Today's taxes are yesterday's promises. %% Today, THREE WINOS from DETROIT sold me a framed photo of TAB HUNTER before his MAKEOVER! %% Today, of course, it is considered very poor taste to use the F-word except in major motion pictures. -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!" %% Todays subliminal message is " " %% Todays title: Creative Violence in Sexual Relationships %% Todays weirdness is tomorrows reason why. %% Toes, knees, NIPPLES. Toes, knees, nipples, KNUCKLES... Nipples, dimples, knuckles, NICKLES, wrinkles, pimples!! ..I don't like FRANK SINATRA or his CHILDREN. %% Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position. -- Edward Abbey %% Together Wendy we could live till the end, I'll love you with all the madness in my soul. %% Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes. %% Toilet Toup'ee, n.: Any shag carpet that causes the lid to become top-heavy, thus creating endless annoyance to male users. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Toity poiple boids Sitt'n on der coib A' choipin' and a' boipin an' eat'n doity woims. %% Toity poiple boids Sitt'n on der coib A' choipin' and a' boipin an' eat'n doity woims. Der spring is spring Der grass is riz I wonder where dem boidies is? Der little boids is on der wing, Ain't that absoid? Der little wings in on der boid! %% Told my girl I'd have to forget her. Rather buy me a new carburetor. So she made tracks, saying this is the end, now. Cars don't talk back, they're just four-wheeled friends, now. -- Queen "I'm in Love With My Car" %% Toledo has an ordinance that prohibits throwing reptiles at another person. %% Tolerances will accumulate unidirectionally toward maximum difficulty to assemble. %% Tolerating what has been spoiled by the father. In continuing one sees humiliation. %% Tolkien is hobbit-forming. %% Tom Hayden is the kind of politician who gives opportunism a bad name. -- Gore Vidal %% Tommy, can you hear me? %% Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest. %% Tomorrow's computers some time next month. -- DEC %% Tomorrow, this will be part of the unchangeable past but fortunately, it can still be changed today. %% Tomorrow, you can be anywhere. %% Ton the' t'a-t'il ote' ton toux? (Did the tea cure your cough?) %% Toni was a communist and very unhappy in capitalist Austria. He wanted to go over the border to Russia, where everything was supposed to be better. His friend Josef was interested too. However, they'd also heard a few stories of repressions and shortages, so they didn't know what to do. "Look," said Toni, "I've got an idea. I'll go over first. If everything's great, I'll write back a letter with blue ink. If things really are awful, and everything's censored, I'll write back a letter with green ink." Toni went over the border. After several months Josef got the following letter, written in blue ink: "Dear Josef, "Everything is just terrific. I'm doing very well. I've got a beautiful large apartment, and there's lots to eat and drink. Prices are really low and you can get whatever you want. The only thing I haven't been able to find is green ink. %% Toni's Solution to a Guilt-Free Life: If you have to lie to someone, it's their fault. %% Tonight I give lecture to Art Students' League. I want a picture of a horse to show that animal is beautiful because every part made for function, without ornament. In Paris I would show woman, but in Toronto I show a horse. -- Anonymous French artist (1931) from "The Book of Insults" %% Tonight I'll get out of my head, cause I can't stop, I'll get out of my head with everything I got. %% Tonight in jungle-land. %% Tonight you will pay the wages of sin; Don't forget to leave a tip. %% Tonight's piss is tomorrow's Tang. -- An American astronaut %% Tonight's the night: Sleep in a eucalyptus tree. %% Tonight, tonight the strips just right I'm going to blow them off in my first heat, cause summer is here and the time is right, we're going racing in the street. %% Too bad stupidity isn't painful. %% Too clever is dumb. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% Too cool to calypso, Too tough to tango, Too weird to watusi -- The Only Ones %% Too low they build who build below the skies. -- Edward Young %% Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot. -- Edward Abbey %% Too many hacks running now. %% Too many objects. %% Too many people are digging up their roots when they should be cultivating their sprouts. %% Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. -- James F. Byrnes %% Too many people have died for you to play the fool. -- Lt. Scott, EARTHSHOCK %% Too many people in this world means not enough M&M's for me. %% Too many people in this world sit back and expect the grass to grow under their feet even though they didn't plant any seeds. %% Too many people with half a mind to write an introductory programming text do so. -- David Gries, Cornell University %% Too many prepositions. %% Too much gravity argues a shallow mind. -- Lavater %% Too much is just enough. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), [on whiskey] %% Too much love is dangerous Cupid's arrow kills Vulcans -- Dionyd and Eraclitus, the Platonians, "Plato's Stepchildren," stardate 5784.3 %% Too much month at the end of the money. %% Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL. -- Mae West %% Too much of anything, even love, isn't necessarily a good thing. -- Kirk, "The Trouble with Tribbles," stardate 4525.6 %% Too much of everything is just enough. -- Bob Wier %% Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases. -- Governor Jerry Brown %% Too often people have come to me and said, "If I had just one wish for anything in all the world, I would wish for more user-defined equations in the HP-51820A Waveform Generator Software. -- Instrument News [Once is too often. Ed.] %% Too ripped. Gotta go. %% Took an hour to bury the cat. Silly thing kept moving. %% Toothpaste never hurts the taste of good scotch. %% Top Scientists Predict That Earth Will Explode at 10:34 PM Tonight. Film at 11. %% Top Ten Lies at BYU 1) Failure to wear socks leads to sexual promiscuity. 2) We encourage all young women to put their education first. 3) I bought this diamond as an investment. 4) It isn't a sin because Percodan isn't in the word of wisdom. 5) I don't usually do this on the first date...but... 6) It seems like I've known you forever. 7) We could've beaten Oklahoma in 84, no sweat! 8) We don't do that here. 9) She's a special spirit. 10) I'm just big boned. and as an added bonus... *) Sharlene Wells is still a virgin. %% Top Ten Reasons the British Lost the Colonies 10) Hard to shoot straight with sissified powdered wig falling in your eyes. 9) Wanted to just lose New Jersey but got carried away. 8) Colonists on steroids. 7) Spent too much time guessing who's gay in the royal family. 6) Their diet: tea and crumpets. Our diet: raw squirrel meat and whiskey. 5) Serious problems with snuff abuse. 4) Lots of painful poking accidents trying to put on those pointy hats of theirs. 3) We had Batman. 2) Wanted to get first draft choice. 1) Uninspiring battle cry: "Let's win this for our swishy inbred monarch!" %% Top executives cannot afford to be isolated from the people below, who are in better touch with what is going on, and cannot afford to set unrealistic goals. -- Charles Burck %% Top priority - it may be idiotic but the boss wants it -- Glossary of important business terms %% Top scientists agree that with the present rate of consumption, the earth's supply of gravity will be exhausted before the 24th century. As man struggles to discover cheaper alternatives, we need your help. Please... CONSERVE GRAVITY Follow these simple suggestions: (1) Walk with a light step. Carry helium balloons if possible. (2) Use tape, magnets, or glue instead of paperweights. (3) Give up skiing and skydiving for more horizontal sports like curling. (4) Avoid showers .. take baths instead. (5) Don't hang all your clothes in the closet ... Keep them in one big pile. (6) Stop flipping pancakes %% Topologists are just plane folks. Pilots are just plane folks. Carpenters are just plane folks. Midwest farmers are just plain folks. Musicians are just playin' folks. Whodunit readers are just Spillaine folks. Some Londoners are just P. Lane folks. %% Topologists do it on rubber sheets. %% Topologists do it openly. %% Torque is cheap. %% Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. %% Totally illogical, there was no chance. -- Spock, "The Galileo Seven," stardate 2822.3 %% Toto, I don't think we're in DOS anymore... %% Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more! %% Touch if you must, Pay up if you bust. %% Touching the dead cockatrice is a fatal mistake ... You turn to stone. %% Tough shit, asshole. %% Towering genius disdains the beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% Tower castles where knights are dubbed use blood as mortar. %% Toys are made in heaven, batteries are made in hell. %% Trafalgar Square, my foot! Not a pigeon in sight. -- Sarah, THE SONTARAN EXPERIMENT %% Trailing Edge Technologies is pleased to announce the following TETflame programme: 1) For a negotiated price (no quatloos accepted) one of our flaming representatives will flame the living shit out of the poster of your choice. The price is inversely proportional to how much of an asshole the target it. We cannot be convinced to flame Dennis Ritchie. Matt Crawford flames are free. 2) For a negotiated price (same arrangement) the TETflame programme is offering ``flame insurance''. Under this arrangement, if one of our policy holders is flamed, we will cancel the offending article and flame the flamer, to a crisp. 3) The TETflame flaming representatives include: Richard Sexton, Oleg Kisalev, Diane Holt, Trish O'Tauma, Dave Hill, Greg Nowak and our most recent acquisition, Keith Doyle. But all he will do is put you in his kill file. Weemba by special arrangement. -- Richard Sexton, richard@gryphon.COM %% Train a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it. -- Proverbs XXII, 6. %% Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run. %% Tranquillizers might get you killed. %% Transformers do it by coupling. %% Transportable - Neither chained to a wall nor attached to an alarm system. %% Trap full -- please empty. %% Travel fast, use some magic speed! %% Travel important today; Internal Revenue men arrive tomorrow. %% Traveler, there is no path, paths are made by walking. %% Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. -- Han Solo %% Travis! You're a year too late! %% Treading a smooth, level course. The perseverance of a dark man Brings good fortune. %% Treading. Treading upon the tail of the tiger. It does not bite the man. Success. %% Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason. -- James Harrington (1611-1677) %% Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel, but love me. %% Treat the other man's faith gently: it is all he has to believe with. -- Henry S. Haskins %% Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy. -- Publilius Syrus %% Treat yourself to something you haven't had in years--an original thought. %% Treat yourself well. %% Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last. -- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) %% Trees hit cars only in self-defence. %% Trees that grow in smoggy cities are needed to make carbon paper. -- Rod Schmidt %% Trespassers will be eaten. %% Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be prosecuted. %% Trespassers will be violated! %% Trick or Treater #1: "Cool costume." Trick or Treater #2: "Hey, what smells." -- "Scariest Home Videos" with mummy nearby, Eerie Indiana %% Tried to play my shoehorn... all I got was footnotes! %% Tried to steal a strange worn thing. %% Trinity is the word for a committed god. %% Tripe on its own is revolting, but with onions it's delicious! %% Trivia is my Business %% Trivial matters are handled promptly; important matters are never solved. %% Troglodytism does not necessarily imply a low cultural level. %% Trojan horse: [coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] n. A program designed to break security or damage a system that is disguised as something else benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, a game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! See {back door}, {virus}, {worm}, {phage}, {mockingbird}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Trolls are close relatives with the rocks and have skin as tough as that of a rhinoceros. The troll fends off your blows effortlessly. %% Trombonists do it in seven positions. %% Trombonists slide it in and out %% Trouble always comes at the wrong time. %% Trouble is only an opportunity in work clothes. -- Henry J. Kaiser %% Trouble is part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough. -- Dinah Shore %% Trouble strikes in series of threes, but when working around the house the next job after a series of threes is not the fourth job--it's the start of a brand new series of threes. -- Avery %% Troubled day for virgins over 16 who are beautiful and wealthy and live in eucalyptus trees. %% Troubles are like babies; they only grow by nursing. %% Trousers in Action %% Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps. Or a hand grenade, if handy. Or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface. -- Edward Abbey %% Troutman's 1st Law: If a test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent systems will malfunction. %% Troutman's 2nd Law: Not until a program has been in production for at least 6 months will the most serious error be discovered. %% Troutman's 3rd Law: Interchangeable tapes won't. %% Troutman's 4th Law: Machines work. People should think. %% Troutmans's programming postulates: 1) If a test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent systems will malfunction. 2) Not until a program has been in production for at least six months will the most harmful error be discovered. 3) Job control instructions that positively cannot be arranged in improper order will be. 4) Interchangeable tapes won't. 5) If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input, a co-op will discover a method to get bad data past it. 6) Profanity is the one language all programmers know best. %% Truants do it absently. %% Truck deliveries that normally take one day will take five when you are waiting for the truck. %% True courage is like a kite; a contrary wind raises it higher. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% True dignity is never gained by place, and never won when honors are withdrawn. -- Massinger %% True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said, not all that could be. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united. -- Humboldt %% True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost. -- Charles Caleb Colton %% True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information. %% True happiness will be found only in true love. %% True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings; Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings. -- William Shakespeare %% True intelligence consists of not getting upset when supposedly intelligent people think you are ignorant. %% True leadership is the art of changing a group from what it is to what it ought to be. -- Virginia Allan %% True politeness consists in being easy one's self, and in making every one about as easy as one can. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% True prosperity is the result of well-placed confidence in ourselves and our fellow man. %% True story: A friend, Tim, was taking a computer class. He and another guy (call him Steve) were the only members of the class ever to do their programs. Everyone else just copied from Steve. One day in class the prof hands back programs. He asks Tim to go to the copier and make 20 copies of his program so everyone can see what a good job he did. As soon as Tim leaves the room, the prof says "I believe you all already have a copy of Steve's program." %% Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence. -- Henrik Tikkanen %% Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine %% Trumpeters blow hard %% Trumpeters do it with alternant fingerings %% Trust - Senior management doesn't trust its own staff and is suspicious of their motives. Therefore senior management needs to be told the same things as its staff are saying by a consultant costing $60,000. %% Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend. %% Trust everybody ... then cut the cards. %% Trust him, but still keep your eyes open. %% Trust in Allah, but tie your camel anyway. %% Trust me -- I'm a Lawyer. %% Trust me! %% Trust no future howe'er pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living present! Heart within and God o'erhead! -- Longfellow %% Trust people all you want, but always cut the cards yourself. %% Trust your husband, adore your husband, and get as much as you can in your own name. -- Joan Rivers %% Truth ... never comes into the world, but like a Bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth. -- John Milton (1608-1674) %% Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart. -- Johann von Schiller %% Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind... -- Percy Bysshe Shelley %% Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always. -- Albert Schweitzer %% Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one. -- Konrad Lorenz %% Truth is God's daughter. %% Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of this world, all things are weighed by the false scale of custom. -- Byron %% Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river. -- Cyril Connolly, "The Unquiet Grave" 1945 %% Truth is a statue, and you are all just a bunch of pigeons. %% Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth. -- Edward Abbey %% Truth is hard to find and harder to obscure. %% Truth is merely common sense, say the naive realist. Really? Then where, precisely, is the location of--a rainbow? In the air? In the eye? In between? Or somewhere else? -- Edward Abbey %% Truth is the answer. %% Truth is the most valuable thing we have -- so let us economize it. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Truth needs no flowers of speech. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Truth never tranquilizes. The defining property of truth is its ability to disturb. -- Solomon Short %% Truth that has merely been learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thought of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) %% Truth will be out this morning. (Which may really mess things up.) %% Truth would cease to become stranger than fiction, if we got used to it. %% Truthful, adj.: Dumb and illiterate. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Truthfully, Jean-Luc, I've been entirely preoccupied by a most frightening experience of my own. A couple of hours ago I realized that my body was no longer functioning properly. I felt weak, I could no longer stand, the life was oozing out of me, I lost consciousness. You fell asleep. -- Q and Picard, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Try Quisinwrite, the combination word processor and food processor, for those who frequently have to eat their words. %% Try `stty 0' -- it works much better. %% Try a 2 X 4. %% Try a chainsaw. %% Try a dull knife. %% Try hacking in the wee hours: you will have more room. %% Try harder. %% Try it, you'll like it. %% Try never to run out of altitude, airspeed, and luck at the same time. %% Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Try not to have a good time ... This is supposed to be educational. -- Charles Schulz %% Try the Moo Shu Pork. It is especially good today. %% Try the UnCola. Its made from the UnCola nut. %% Try the fall back end run play against ghosts. %% Try the new "EUNUCHS" operating system: Extremely Useless, Never Up, Computer Hardware and Software System. %% Try to be like the turtle -- at ease in your own shell. -- Bill Copeland %% Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good. -- Ashleigh Brilliant I waited and waited, and when no message came, I knew it must have been from you. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% Try to develop your own personality. %% Try to divide your time evenly to keep others happy. %% Try to find out who's doing the work, not who's writing about it, controlling it, or summarizing it. -- Amrom Katz %% Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future. -- Amrom Katz %% Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance. %% Try to have as good a life as you can under the circumstances. %% Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo %% Try to relax and enjoy the crisis. -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% Try to spend the entire day sober. %% Try to swallow at least three times a day. %% Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you. %% Trying in vain to breath the fire we were born in. %% Trying to attack a # #. %% Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly. %% Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. -- Alan Watts %% Trying to establish voice contact ... please ____yell into keyboard. %% Trying to get an education here is like trying to take a drink from a fire hose. %% Trying to kill a # #. %% Trying to learn how to walk like the heros we thought we had to be. %% Trying to shoot yourself in the foot in: ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE: For those who like to load their own rounds before shooting themselves in the foot. -- rhsmith %% Trying to shoot yourself in the foot in: CLIPPER: You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot, and discover that the gun that the bullet fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. -- rboatright %% Trying to shoot yourself in the foot in: DBase IV version 1.0: You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly-designed grenade and the whole building blows up. -- akarna %% Trying to shoot yourself in the foot in: DBase: You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowingly that by the time your foot feels the pain you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. -- rboatright %% Trying to shoot yourself in the foot in: Forth: yourself foot shoot. -- akarna %% Trying to shoot yourself in the foot in: Prolog: You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks into the gun which then explodes in your face. -- BG %% Trying to shoot yourself in the foot in: SQL: You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. -- rboatright %% Tsze-kung asked, saying, "Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?" The Master said, "Is not Reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others." -- Confucius (551-479 B.C.) %% Tubby or not tubby, fat is the question! %% Tuesday After Lunch is the cosmic time of the week. %% Tuesday is Ladies Night at the world famous Corbin Theatre! %% Tuesday is the Wednesday of the rest of your life. %% Tumor: An extra pair. %% Tupelo Chain Sex %% Turing tar-pit: n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly-designed computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A `Turing tar-pit' is any computer language or other tool which shares this property. That is, it's theoretically universal --- but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare {bondage-and-discipline language}. 2. The perennial {holy wars} over whether language A or B is the "most powerful". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Turn on, tune in, and take over. -- Tim Leary %% Turn right here. No! NO! The OTHER right! %% Turn the other cheek. -- Jesus Christ %% Turnaucka's Law: The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord. %% Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are filled with a passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of SPIRITUS MUNDI Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again: but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour now come at last Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? -- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Comming" %% Turning away from nourishment. Perseverance brings misfortune. Do not act thus for ten years. Nothing serves to further. %% Turning away from the path. To remain persevering brings good fortune. One should not cross the great water. %% Turning down the desires of Marie John explained, "It's unfair, don't you see? For all I can do Is to keep screwing you While you'd screw none other than me." %% Turning floppies into hard drives. %% Turning to the summit for nourishment, Deviating from the path To seek nourishment from the hill. Continuing to do this brings misfortune. %% Turning to the summit For provision of nourishment Brings good fortune. Spying about with sharp eyes Like a tiger with insatiable craving. No blame. %% Turtle Wax leaves a hard-shell finish. Turtle Wax! %% Tussman's Law: Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come. %% Twas a month before Christmas and all through the nation We watch Roger and Ross with great anticipation Seven hundred million of new printed cash Withdrawn from our hard earned profit sharing stash Wall street in panic The stocks are falling Roger's transaction is simply appalling The media is full with news of the deal About 750 mil if Ross wants to squeal Roger says it's Ross and Ross says he's right Tickets are selling for the Cobo Hall fight The ring is now ready for Ross and Roger It's Ross the cowboy versus Roger the codger But nothing happens They're calm and cool for 700 million, Ross Ain't no fool Two weeks before Christmas presents need buying I wait for my profit sharing my bank account is dying I run to the mail box and prayed for my check only a Christmas card, Oh what the heck. I opened the card, my face grew red I'll share with just what it said My name is Ross and I hope you know Roger gave me All your profit sharing dough So I thought for his kindness; I'd drop you a line To let you know I'm doing fine. And my name is gone from the office doors glass, I got 700 million and you can kiss my ass. %% Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle; For Tweedledum said Tweedledee Had spoilt his nice new rattle. Just then flew down a monstrous crow, As black as a tar-barrel; Which frightened both the heroes so, They quite forgot their quarrel. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" %% Twelve pears hanging high, Twelve men came riding by Each man took a pear and left elven hanging there. "Eachman" was a rider's name %% Twelve rubber trees with thirty flexible boughs The year and it's months %% Twenty Percent of Zero is Better than Nothing. -- Walt Kelly %% Twenty two thousand days. Twenty two thousand days. It's not a lot. It's all you've got. Twenty two thousand days. -- Moody Blues, "Twenty Two Thousand Days" %% Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Twenty-eight members of a weight-watching club on an outing in Australia suffered the exquisite embarrassment of having their bus sink up to its axles in a tarred parking lot. -- Bill Bryson %% Twice four and twenty blackbirds Were sitting in the rain One shot killed a seventh How many did remain? Four %% Twice ten are but six of us Six are but three of us Nine are but four of us What can we possibly be? Would you know more of us? I'll tell you more of us Twelve are but six of us Five are but four, do you see? Letters %% Twilight... he stands, on trial, saying nothing. We thought, sad. And yet- that smile! So we wondered... %% Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly! Like a tea-tray in the sky. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" %% Twins: womb-mates. %% Twist and Crawl. %% Twist and Groove. %% Twist and Shout. %% Twisted Pair - a couple of perverts -- Data communications glossary %% Two Atheists were shipwrecked on a deserted Island. The situation was getting grim with the hot tropical sun beating down on them and no fresh water. The First Atheist says "Maybe we ought to Pray.... " Second Atheist says "But I'm an atheist, I don't know how to Pray!" First Atheist: "Don't worry, I used to live next to this Catholic church and heard them doing it all the time. They have this guy who stands up at the front and does the prayers. I think I remember some of them. Tell you what, I'll start out and you repeat what I say... " The second atheist thinks this is satisfactory and agrees. First Atheist (loudly): "I" Second Atheist : "I" First Atheist: "Seventeen" Second Atheist: "Seventeen" %% Two IBM salesmen were driving down a country road at high speed and passed a pickup truck with an old couple inside. "Look at those fools, pa! Must be a couple of IBM salesman and they will surely meet their maker soon, I tell you." Well, sure enough, a little while later the couple comes across a bad accident involving the two IBM salesmen. "Well maw, we got to do what any good folk would do and give em a decent burial." So the couple dug a hole and buried the IBM salesman. Just as they were putting their tools away, a cop drives up. "You folks see this accident?" "No sir, but we knew them dang fools were going to have it when they passed us doing a hundred miles an hour. Well, we finally come across the accident and gave them IBM salesman a decent burial" "You were sure that they were dead??" "Well, they said they weren't, but you know how those IBM salesmen exaggerate!" %% Two Irish lovers are sitting on a bench, in a park. They are holding hands, but the lady is nervously twisting her hands. Mary: "Patrick. I have something to tell you". Patrick: "Well, what's on your mind? You know you can tell me everything." Mary: "It's so terrible." Patrick: "You know you can trust me. What is it?" Mary: "Well, it was a few years ago. Father lost his job, and no money in sight.." Patrick: "So, what is it?" Mary: "Oh. We were so desperate. For some time I had to turn ... prostitute!" Patrick: "WHAT!" Mary: "We needed the money so bad!" Patrick: "There is no good reason for this! Endangering your very soul! How could you? YOU! Mary this is more than I can stand!" Mary: "Not you, Pat! No! I thought you'd understand. I thought you could still love me, even though I had been a whore." Patrick: "Oh! ...You... Well, that's ok. For a moment I thought you said 'protestant'!" %% Two Italians hijacked a submarine. They asked for $50,000 and two parachutes. %% Two Kindergarten girls were talking; My mother found a condom on the patio last night. What's a patio? %% Two Martians landed on earth and ran into each other. "Hi!" said the first Martian, "What's your name?" "428,629,382. And what's yours?" "Mine's 664,935,715." "That's funny," said the first, "You don't look Jewish!" %% Two Russian border guards, Ivan and Vladimir, on a cold winter morning. Looking across the border, Ivan is smiling to himself, then he notices that Vladimir is also smiling. Ivan [suspiciously]: "What were you thinking about?" Vladimir: "Same thing you were thinking about, comrade." Ivan: "Then it is my duty to arrest you." %% Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun. %% Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five. -- James McNeill Whistler %% Two anglers were fishing off Wight And his bobber was dipping all night. Murmured she, with a laugh, "It's ready to gaff, But don't break your rod which is light." %% Two anglers were fishing off Wight And his bobber was dipping all night. Murmured she, with a laugh, "It's ready to gaff, But don't break your rod which is light." A couple was fishing near Clombe When the maid began looking quite glum, And said, "Bother the fish! I'd rather coish!" Which they did -- which was why they had come. As two consular clerks in Madras Fished, hidden in deep shore-grass, "What a marvelous pole," Said she, "but control Your sinkers -- they're banging my ass." %% Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, "So. What did you think?" -- Steve Wright %% Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel %% Two can be as sad as one, it's the loneliest number since the No. 1. %% Two cannonballs got married --- and had BBs. %% Two cars in every pot and a chicken in every garage. %% Two cheerleaders ended up at the alter. They met by chants. %% Two dogs had chased a third dog for hours in the hot sun. Dog1: "Ain't this a bitch?" Dog2: "It sure as hell better be!" %% Two drunks are stumbling along a railroad track which happens to go up a mountain. The first drunk says, "These are the lousiest steps I ever tried to climb!" The second, who is bent over, replies, "You think that's bad, wait till you try to hold the handrail!" %% Two eager young men from Cawnpore Once buggared and fucked the same whore. But her partition split And the blood and the shit Rolled out in a mess on the floor. %% Two elephants fell off a cliff. Boom Boom. %% Two gentlemen met at the club after a long absence and talked. "Did you hear about Chumly?", one asked. "No, old man, what about him?" "Last seen in Africa, you know." "No, I didn't." "Yes. Appalling. Ran off with a gorilla. Fallen in love." "Queer." "Not Chumley. Female gorilla." %% Two guys were stranded on a desert island. The only way they could get food was to kill sea birds by throwing rocks at them. By the time they were rescued, ... They had left no tern unstoned. %% Two heads are better than one. -- John Heywood %% Two heads are more numerous than one. %% Two hippies were waiting at the bus stop along with a nun with her leg in a cast. The first hippie asked "Sister, how did you break you leg?" "I slipped in the bathtub." The second hippie asked the first "What's a bathtub?" "How should I know, I'm not Catholic!" %% Two hundred years ago today, Irma Chine of White Plains, New York, was performing her normal housekeeping routines. She was interrupted by British soldiers who, rallying to the call of their supervisor, General Hughes, sought to gain control of the voter registration lists kept in her home. Masking her fear and thinking fast, Mrs. Chine quickly divided a nearby apple in two and deftly stored the list in its center. Upon entering, the British blatantly violated every conceivable convention, and, though they went through the house virtually bit by bit, their search was fruitless. They had to return empty handed. Word of the incident propagated rapidly through the region. This historic event became the first documented use of core storage for the saving of registers. %% Two hunters hire a small plane to take them to a remote area of Canada. Upon dropping off the hunters, the pilot tells them, "Remember only one moose, because the plane wouldn't be able to take off with more weight than that." The hunters go off. A week later when the plane returns to pick them up the two hunters are standing by the lake with two moose. The pilot fumes, "I told you guys only one moose, you'll have to leave one because we won't be able to take off with that much weight." "Oh, c'mon," beg the two hunters, "Last year the pilot let us take two moose on, you're just a chicken." Not wanting to be accused of being a coward, the pilot allows the two to bring both moose on the craft. The plane starts across the lake, straining to take off. The pilot tries and tries to no avail as they run out of room and the plane crashes into the trees at the end of the lake. A while later after coming to one of the hunters gets up and looks at all the scattered debris of the wreck and says, "Where are we?" To which the other hunter replies, "Oh, I'd say about a hundred yards farther than last year." %% Two hunters were forced by a storm to seek overnight shelter in a house occupied by only a homely farmer's widow. When they met again the following hunting season, one asked, "Tell me, did you screw that old bag we stayed with last year?" "Yes," admitted the other, "I'm afraid I did." "And you used my name--and told her you were me?" "Yeah, I did that, too," laughed his hunting companion. "I didn't knock her up, did I?" "No, no," smiled his friend. "It's just that she died yesterday and left me the house and a hundred thousand dollars." %% Two is company, three is an orgy. %% Two lawyers are in a bank, when, suddenly, armed robbers burst in. While several of the robbers take the money from the tellers, others line the customers, including the lawyers, up against a wall, and proceed to take their wallets, watches, etc. While this is going on lawyer number one jams something in lawyer number two's hand. Without looking down, lawyer number two whispers, "What is this?", to which lawyer number one replies, "it's that $50 I owe you." %% Two lawyers were walking along, negotiating a case. Look, said one to the other, let's be honest with each other. Okay, you first, replied the other. That was the end of the discussion. %% Two lovers, parked in local makeout spot: Oh Frank, let's not park Oh Frank, let's not Oh Frank, let's Oh Frank Oh!!! %% Two men and a woman were stranded on a desert island - Two weeks later, the woman was so ashamed of what she had been doing, she committed suicide. Two weeks later, the men were so ashamed of what they had been doing, they buried her. Two weeks later, the men were so ashamed of what they had been doing, they dug her back up. %% Two men are hiking in the mountains. One suddenly stops, removes his hiking boots, and starts putting on sneakers. The other asks why he is doing so. The first man answers, "I thought I heard a bear." The second argues, "You can't outrun a bear, not even with sneakers." The first responds, "I just need to outrun YOU!" %% Two men came before Nasrudin when he was magistrate. The first man said, "This man has bitten my ear -- I demand compensation." The second man said, "He bit it himself." Nasrudin withdrew to his chambers, and spent an hour trying to bite his own ear. He succeeded only in falling over and bruising his forehead. Returning to the courtroom, Nasrudin pronounced, "Examine the man whose ear was bitten. If his forehead is bruised, he did it himself and the case is dismissed. If his forehead is not bruised, the other man did it and must pay three silver pieces." %% Two men in nice suits are walking through a park when suddenly one of them gets hit with a healthy dose of pigeon shit on the shoulder. "Oh, YUK!" said the other man, "There's a bathroom over there, do you want me to get some toilet paper?" "What for?" says the guy with the soiled suit, "The little guy's miles away by now." %% Two men look out through the same bars; one sees mud, and one the stars. %% Two men once wrote to Mark Twain. Not having his address, they marked the envelope, Mark Twain God knows where They received a response from him: "He did." %% Two men were sitting over coffee, contemplating the nature of things, with all due respect for their breakfast. "I wonder why it is that toast always falls on the buttered side," said one. "Tell me," replied his friend, "why you say such a thing. Look at this." And he dropped his toast on the floor, where it landed on the dry side. "So, what have you to say for your theory now?" "What am I to say? You obviously buttered the wrong side." %% Two men were standing around talking while nearby a large German Shepherd lay licking his balls. One man says to the other, "Damn, I wish I could do that." The other man replies, "Well, it's okay by me, but I think you ought to get to know him first." %% Two midgets arrived at the convent door and asked to speak with the Mother Superior. Led into her office, the first one asked respectfully "Excuse me, your holiness, but are there any midget nuns in this convent?" Receiving a reply to the negative, he asked whether any midget nuns were to be found in any of the neighboring parish. Again the reply was no. The tiny man scratched his head and posed a final question. "Beggin' your pardon, Mother Superior, but would you know of *any* midget nuns at all, anywhere?" The nun shook her head. At which the first midget turned to the second midget, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, "You see, I told you you fucked a penguin!" %% Two midgets walked up to a convent and knocked at the front gate and asked for the mother superior. One of them asked if there was a midget nun at the convert. When the mother superior said no the first midget smacked the other and said,"I told you that you were fucking a penguin." %% Two nuns are visiting the zoo. When they reach the Gorilla cage one of the nuns steps to close to the cage and the Gorilla grabs her and rapes her violently for a long time. They left the zoo and the poor nun who was attacked goes through counseling to help her get over this embarrassing incident. After several days the counselor asks the nun, "Does it still hurt?" "DOES IT STILL HURT?!?", reponded the nun with sarcasm, "He doesn't call, he doesn't write, he hasn't sent flowers..." %% Two nuns went to the zoo one day. They walked around and saw a lot of different animals, but ended up spending most of their day watching the giant male gorilla. Suddenly, without warning, the gorilla reached through the bars and dragged one of the nuns into the cage and began brutally raping her repeatedly. By the time the zoo personal were able to tranquilize the beast, it had savaged the poor nun for nearly an hour. While the nun who had been raped recovered in a hospital, nearly a week went by until her friend went to visit her, for she felt extremely guilty that her friend had been so savagely brutalized, and she had escaped unscathed. Finally, she stood by her beside, holding her hand. From the bed, her friend looked at her bravely. The one nun said, "Sister, are you in much pain?" The other nun nodded. "He hasn't called or written..." %% Two nuns, a mother superior and a new nun, are walking home one night from church when they are attacked by two vicious rapists. The two men drag the nuns off into the bushes and proceed to have their way with them. The mother superior is very afraid, but she knows that God will protect her. To show her strength and trust in God she yells out "Forgive him Father, for he knows not what he does!" To which the young nun replies "Oooooh, mine does!!" %% Two obviously high-class old ladies are strolling down a city street when they run across a grizzled, ragged old derelict lying drunk in the gutter, covered with garbage, sewer water running all over him. "Hmmmph," sniffs one of the old ladies haughtily. "Cleanliness is next to godliness. William Shakespeare!" %% Two of the Ten Commandments for Technicians: 1) Beware the lightening that lurketh in the undischarged capacitor, lest it cause thee to bounce upon thy buttocks in a most untechnician-like manner. 7) Workest thou not on energized equipment, for if thou dost, thy fellow workers will surely buy beers for thy widow and console her in other ways. %% Two office ladies discussing their husbands, one says, 'My husband brought me roses last night, I spent all night with my legs in the air'. The other says,' Hmm, don't you have a vase?' %% Two peanuts went to New York. One was assaulted. %% Two peas in a pod! Positively two peas in a pod. -- Lady Cranleigh, BLACK ORCHID %% Two penguins walk into a bar, which is really stupid, 'cause the second one should have seen it. %% Two percent of zero is almost nothing. %% Two polish parachutists got into an argument as to who was the best skydiver. As usually results in such cases, they decide to have a contest. Both would skydive towards a target, and whoever was closest, wins. One goes first. Jumps, falls, pulls his ripcord, chute opens ... just a beautiful dive. Second one jumps, falls, pulls his ripcord, nothing happens. Pulls his backup ripcord, nothing happens. Pulls his emergency backup ripcord, nothing happens. Gives up, and zooms past the first skydiver. First one looks down, rips off his harness, and shouts "Oh, you want to RACE, huh?" %% Two programmers named Diagu and Gudo were making presentations to the president of a large corporation. When he stood up to speak, Gudo said to the executive, "You are wise by nature and understand the true meaning of computers." "Nonsense," said Diagu, "Why do you praise this fool? He may be an executive, but he knows nothing about computers." The executive rewarded them both and then hired a consultant to determine which of them was correct. -- The Zen of Programming %% Two programmers were arguing about user interface. "Significant inroads are being made in 'ease-of-use'," said the first programmer, "Soon people will no longer need to read tedious manuals before they can use a computer. Programs will be self-evident." The second programmer thought about this for a moment and then said, "Last weekend I decided to chop some wood for a fire, but my old axe was dull and worn. So I went to the hardware store and purchased a new one." "That's all very interesting," said the first programmer, "but what does it have to do with user interface?" "The new axe came with an eight-page instruction booklet," he replied. -- The Zen of Programming %% Two recent emigrants to the United States, on their first day off the boat in New York City, spied a hotdog vendor. "Do they eat dogs in America?" one asked his companion. "I don't know." "Well, if we're going to live in America, we have to learn to eat American foods." So they each bought a wax paper wrapped hotdog and sat down to eat them on a nearby park bench. One man looked inside his wax paper, then over at the other man, and asked, "So, what part did you get?" %% Two rights don't make a wrong, they make an airplane. %% Two roosters in one of our pens Found their pricks were no larger than wens. As they looked at their foreskins And wished they had more skins, They discovered they'd both become hens. %% Two seals fell off a cliff. Arf Arf %% Two sodium atoms are walking along the street when one stops and says, "Oh wow, I think I've lost an electron!" "Are you sure?" asks the other sodium atom. "Yes," replies the first sodium atom, "I'm positive." %% Two statisticians went hunting. After a short time, they came upon a magnificent elk standing near a grove of trees. The first statistician took careful aim and fired, hitting a tree far to the right of the elk. The second statistician then took his turn; the shot hit a different tree, this time far to the left. "Got him!" %% Two sure ways to tell a sexy male; the first is, he has a bad memory. I forget the second. %% Two swords slashing at each other only sharpen one another. %% Two things are certain about science. It does not stand still for long, and it is never boring. Oh, among some poor souls, including even intellectuals in fields of high scholarship, science is frequently misperceived. Many see it as only a body of facts, promulgated from on high in must, unintelligible textbooks, a collection of unchanging precepts defended with authoritarian vigor. Others view it as nothing but a cold, dry narrow, plodding, rule-bound process -- the scientific method: hidebound, linear, and left brained. These people are the victims of their own stereotypes. They are destined to view the world of science with a set of blinders. They know nothing of the tumult, cacophony, rambunctiousness, and tendentiousness of the actual scientific process, let alone the creativity, passion, and joy of discovery. And they are likely to know little of the continual procession of new insights and discoveries that every day, in some way, change our view (if not theirs) of the natural world. -- Kendrick Frazier, "The Year in Science: An Overview," in 1988 Yearbook of Science and the Future, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. %% Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe -- the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me. -- Immanuel Kant %% Two whores are talking on the sidewalk... W1 [sniffing sounds] I smell dick. W2 [blushing] Oh, excuse me, I burped. %% Two women sitting, waiting for a bus, while discussing their boyfriends; Women 1: You know, Jim's a really great guy but he has one problem .... he has dandruff, What should I do ? Women 2: Just give him Head and Shoulders ! The first woman thinks for a while and then says, "How do you give shoulders ?" %% Two wrongs are only the beginning. -- Kohn %% Two wrongs do not make a right: it usually takes three or more. %% Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. %% Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. Except in Boston. %% Two young men seated in a restaurant were watching a customer busily disposing of a plate of oysters on the half shell. One of the young men remarked to his friend, "Did you ever hear that business about raw oysters being good for a man's virility?" "Yes, why?" the friend replied. "Well, take it from me, that's a lot of foolishness. I ate a dozen of them the other night, and only nine worked." %% Two's company, three's the result. %% Two's company. Three's a trend. %% Tyger, Tyger, burning bright Where the hammer? Where the chain? In the forests of the night, In what furnace was thy brain? What immortal hand or eye What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Dare its deadly terrors clasp? Burnt in distant deeps or skies When the stars threw down their spears The cruel fire of thine eyes? And water'd heaven with their tears On what wings dare he aspire? Dare he laugh his work to see? What the hand dare seize the fire? Dare he who made the lamb make thee? And what shoulder & what art Tyger, Tyger, burning bright Could twist the sinews of they heart? In the forests of the night, And when thy heart began to beat What immortal hand or eye What dread hand & what dread feet Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Could fetch it from the furnace deep And in thy horrid ribs dare steep In the well of sanguine woe? In what clay & in what mould Were thy eyes of fury roll'd? -- William H. Blake (1757-1827), "The Tyger" %% Type to continue. %% Type louder, please. %% Typesetters always correct intentional errors, but fail to correct unintentional errors. -- Alan Otten %% Typesetters do it between periods %% Typical user after one hour of using his VAX: | | ||| ||| || | || || |||| || ||| ||| |||||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||| || || || ^ ^ || ( ) - (O) (0) - ( ) ( ==== | || | ==== ) ( ==== | | | | ==== ) ( ) - / \ - ( ) | \o o/ | | | | | | VVVVVVVVVV | | | () | | | | /--||--\ | | | ^^^^^^^^^^ | \______________/ mAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGG!!!!!! %% Typists do it with their fingers. %% Typographers rule, OQ %% Tyre Shop sign - We Skid You Not. %% Tyrone Shoelaces %% U E DU DX takes the place of normal sex! %% U e Du Dx, cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159 %% U. Stuart Rubble %% U.S. money is the worst looking money in the world. %% U: There's a U -- a Unicorn! Run right up and rub its horn. Look at all those points you're losing! UMBER HULKS are so confusing. -- The Roguelet's ABC %% UART what UEAT! %% UBD: /U-B-D/ [abbreviation for `User Brain Damage'] An abbreviation used to close out trouble reports obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's part. Compare {pilot error}; oppose {PBD}; see also {brain-damaged}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UFO's are real--the Air Force is swamp gas! %% UFOs are real, the Air Force dosen't exist. %% UH-OH!! I put on "GREAT HEAD-ON TRAIN COLLISIONS of the 50's" by mistake!!! %% UH-OH!! I think KEN is OVER-DUE on his R.V. PAYMENTS and HE'S having a NERVOUS BREAKDOWN too!! Ha ha. %% UH-OH!! We're out of AUTOMOBILE PARTS and RUBBER GOODS! %% UN*X: n. Used to refer to the UNIX operating system (a trademark of AT&T) in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly {(TM)} typography. Also used to refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers now say (1990) that the requirement for the TM-postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., `YHWH' or `G--d' is used. See also {glob}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UNDERWEAR can KILL %% UNION: A dues-paying club workers wield to strike management. %% UNITARIAN: A bunch of athiests who really like going to church. %% 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... [Okay, okay, leave it in, but I think you're destroying the credibility of the entire fortune program. Ed.] %% UNIX Shell is the Best Fourth Generation Programming Language It is the UNIX shell that makes it possible to do applications in a small fraction of the code and time it takes in third generation languages. In the shell you process whole files at a time, instead of only a line at a time. And, a line of code in the UNIX shell is one or more programs, which do more than pages of instructions in a 3GL. Applications can be developed in hours and days, rather than months and years with traditional systems. Most of the other 4GLs available today look more like COBOL or RPG, the most tedious of the third generation languages. -- "UNIX Relational Database Management: Application Development in the UNIX Environment" by Rod Manis, Evan Schaffer, and Robert Jorgensen. Prentice Hall Software Series. Brian Kernighan, Advisor. 1988. %% UNIX brain damage: n. Something that has to be done to break a network program (typically a mailer) on a non-UNIX system so that it will interoperate with UNIX systems. The hack may qualify as `UNIX brain damage' if the program conforms to published standards and the UNIX program in question does not. UNIX brain damage happens because it is much easier for other (minority) systems to change their ways to match non-conforming behavior than it is to change all the hundreds of thousands of UNIX systems out there. An example of UNIX brain damage is a {kluge} in a mail server to recognize bare line feed (the UNIX newline) as an equivalent form to the Internet standard newline, which is a carriage return followed by a line feed. Such things can make even a hardened {jock} weep. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UNIX conspiracy: [ITS] n. According to a conspiracy theory long popular among {{ITS}} and {{TOPS-20}} fans, UNIX's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&T's competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T's control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the {back door} entry. In this view, UNIX was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see {virus}) --- but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this `UNIX virus' theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation "UNIX is snake oil" was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of UNIX workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UNIX don't do it. %% UNIX enhancements aren't. %% UNIX is a Trademark of Bell Laboratories. %% UNIX is many things to many people, but it's never been everything to anybody. %% UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things, because that policy would also keep them from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn (1 Aug 90) %% UNIX weenie: [ITS] n. 1. A derogatory play on `UNIX wizard', common among hackers who use UNIX by necessity but would prefer alternatives. The implication is that although the person in question may consider mastery of UNIX arcana to be a wizardly skill, the only real skill involved is the ability to tolerate (and the bad taste to wallow in) the incoherence and needless complexity that is alleged to infest many UNIX programs. "This shell script tries to parse its arguments in 69 bletcherous ways. It must have been written by a real UNIX weenie." 2. A derogatory term for anyone who engages in uncritical praise of UNIX. Often appearing in the context "stupid UNIX weenie". See {Weenix}, {UNIX conspiracy}. See also {weenie}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UNIX will be half a billion (500000000) seconds old on Tue Nov 5 00:53:20 1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch). -- Andy Tannenbaum %% UNIX. Official operating system of the 1984 Olympic Games. %% UNIX: An operating system only a mother could love. -- Paul Beck %% UNIX:: /yoo'niks/ [In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"] n. (also `Unix') An interactive time-sharing system originally invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in UNIX's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972--1974, making it the first source-portable OS. UNIX subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. In 1991, UNIX is the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world. Many people consider this the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see {UNIX weenie} and {UNIX conspiracy} for an opposing point of view). See {Version 7}, {BSD}, {USG UNIX}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UNMATCHED: almost as good as the competition %% UNOBTRUSIVE MEASURES: Experimental techniques of unclear origin having something to do with work tiles. Observing madam in her bath without bringing forth screams. %% UNPRECEDENTED PERFORMANCE: nothing we had before ever worked this way %% UNTOLD WEALTH: What you left out on April 15th. %% UP Understand Program %% US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT 10-SEP-78 Late Dungeon Edition --- LATE NEWS FLASH!! --- The endgame is here! (Somewhere) --- BACKGROUND INFORMATION --- This version of Dungeon for the PDP-11/VAX-11 has been completely reimplemented in FORTRAN-IV from the original MDL sources created at MIT. The parser in this version is somewhat simpler than the parser in the ARPAnet version; within this limit, this version is fully congruent with the current version on the ARPAnet. If you encounter problems, please report them IN WRITING to: Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society (DECUS) One Iron Way, MR2-3/E55 Marlboro, Mass. 01752 Attention: Dungeon Maintenance PHONE CALLS AND IN-PERSON VISITS WILL BE RUDELY REJECTED! [CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING BKD] %% USENET: /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ [from `Users' Network'] n. A distributed {bboard} (bulletin board) system supported mainly by UNIX machines. Originally implemented in 1979--1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, it has swiftly grown to become international in scope and is now probably the largest decentralized information utility in existence. As of early 1991, it hosts well over 700 {newsgroup}s and an average of 16 megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and {flamage} every day. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% USER n. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks questions. Identified at MIT with "loser" by the spelling "luser". See REAL USER. [Note by GLS: I don't agree with RF's definition at all. Basically, there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and users (losers). The users are looked down on by hackers to a mild degree because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (A few users who do are known as real winners.) It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Very often they are annoying or downright stupid.] %% USER, n.: The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot." -- Dave Barry, "Claw Your Way to the Top" %% USG UNIX: /U-S-G yoo'niks/ n. Refers to AT&T UNIX commercial versions after {Version 7}, especially System III and System V releases 1, 2, and 3. So called because during most of the life-span of those versions AT&T's support crew was called the `UNIX Support Group'. See {BSD}, {{UNIX}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UTSA doesn't agree with me. They're wrong. -- William W. Hughes, whughes@lonestar.utsa.edu %% UTSL: // [UNIX] n. On-line acronym for `Use the Source, Luke' (a pun on Obi-Wan Kenobi's "Use the Force, Luke!" in `Star Wars') --- analogous to {RTFM} but more polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be best off reading the source code that supports whatever feature is causing confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass through the manuals or broadcasting questions that haven't attracted {wizard}s to answer them. In theory, this is appropriately directed only at associates of some outfit with a UNIX source license; in practice, bootlegs of UNIX source code (made precisely for reference purposes) are so ubiquitous that one may utter this at almost anyone on the network without concern. In the near future (this written in 1991) source licenses may become even less important; after the recent release of the Mach 3.0 microkernel, given the continuing efforts of the {GNU} project, and with the 4.4BSD release on the horizon, complete free source code for UNIX-clone toolsets and kernels should soon be widely available. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UU UU M M U U U M M U U M M U U M M U U M M U U MMM %% UUCPNET: n. The store-and-forward network consisting of all the world's connected UNIX machines (and others running some clone of the UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX CoPy) software). Any machine reachable only via a {bang path} is on UUCPNET. See {network address}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% UUO (you-you-oh) [short for "Un-Used Operation"] n. A DEC-10 system monitor call. The term "Un-Used Operation" comes from the fact that, on DEC-10 systems, monitor calls are implemented as invalid or illegal machine instructions, which cause traps to the monitor (see TRAP). The SAIL manual describing the available UUO's has a cover picture showing an unidentified underwater object. [Note: DEC sales people have since decided that "Un-Used Operation" sounds bad, so UUO now stands for "Unimplemented User Operation".] Tenex and Twenex systems use the JSYS machine instruction (q.v.), which is halfway between a legal machine instruction and a UUO, since KA-10 Tenices implement it as a hardware instruction which can be used as an ordinary subroutine call (sort of a "pure JSR"). %% Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex. %% Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex. (Where there is no police, there is no speed limit.) -- Roman Law, trans. Petr Beckmann (1971) %% Ubi, O, ubi est meam sub ubi? -- Vergil %% Udall's Fourth Law: Any change or reform you make is going to have consequences you don't like. %% Ugly Bags of Mostly Water we try at peace...you not listen. Boy in Dome on Sand of Home...we kill. -- Microbrain, "Home Soil", stardate 41463.9 %% Ugly Janitors of America %% Ugly, hookers tell me "Not on the first date". %% Uh oh. Looks like we got a 666 down there - deity on a rampage. %% Uh-oh -- WHY am I suddenly thinking of a VENERABLE religious leader frolicking on a FORT LAUDERDALE weekend? %% Uh-oh -- I've let the cat out of the bag. Let me, then, straightforwardly state the thesis I shall now elaborate: Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity. -- Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Metamagical Themas" %% Uh-oh!! I forgot to submit to COMPULSORY URINALYSIS! %% Uh-oh!! I'm having TOO MUCH FUN!! %% Uh-oh. Atarians can't hold a candle to the insecurity of Mac owners. You rankled Mac owners who feel the need defend yourself, please do so by flaming in private. And don't start something you can't finish. I'm sure Apple's OS for the 68000-based Macintoshs will support multitasking just as soon as Jean Louis-Gasse invents it. In the meantime, do whatever you need to do to make sure other systems that have advanced the state of personal computers don't enter your peripheral vision. You'll be a lot happier, we'll be a lot happier. -- Chuck McManis, cmcmanis@sun.com %% Uhland's poetry is like the famous war horse, Bayard; it possesses all possible virtues and only one fault: it is dead. -- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) %% Ultimate Question Research Team %% Ultra Short Term Nostalgia: Homesickness for the extremely recent past: "Things seemed so much better in the world last week." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Umbroglio: what you and your umbrella get into on a rainy day. %% Umpire's dessert -- rhubarb pie -- Raymond D. Love %% Un chasseur sachant chasser chasse sans son chien. (A hunter who knows how to hunt hunts without his dog. %% Un moine au milieu de la messe A monk in the middle of mass S'eleva et cria en detresse; Stood up and cried out in distress; "La vie religieuse, "The religious life C'est sale et affreuse," Is dirty and horrid," Et se poignarda dans les fesses. And stabbed himself in the ass. -- Edward Gorey %% Un tien vaut miex que deux tu l'auras. (A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.) %% Unable to dodge your deadly aim, the store manager is pierced completely through, and collapses forward, lifeless. %% Unable to locate Coffee -- Operator Halted! %% Unbearably lovely music is heard as the curtain rises, and we see the woods on a summer afternoon. A fawn dances on and nibbles at some leaves. He drifts lazily through the soft foliage. Soon he starts coughing and drops dead. -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" %% Unbidden guests are often welcomest when they are gone. -- William Shakespeare %% Unburdened by the rigors of coherent thought. %% Uncertain fortune is thoroughly mastered by the equity of the calculation. -- Blaise Pascal %% Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity. -- R. I. Fitzhenry %% Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb: Never use your thumb for a rule. You'll either hit it with a hammer or get a splinter in it. %% Uncompensated overtime? Just Say No. %% Uncontrolled power will turn even saints into savages. And we can all be counted on to live down to our lowest impulses. -- Parmen, "Plato's Stepchildren," stardate 5784.3 %% Uncorrectable ECC error %% Under Alabama law, the wearer of a false moustache in church who causes unseemly laughter is subject to arrest. %% Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked. -- Robert D. Sprecht (Rand Corp) %% Under any system a few sharpies will beat the rest of us. -- Al Goodfather %% Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true. -- Polish proverb %% Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it's just the opposite. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Under current practices, both expenditures and revenues rise to meet each other, no matter which one may be in excess. -- Joe Bolton %% Under deadline pressure for the next week. If you want something, it can wait. Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic ... %% Under every stone lurks a politician. -- Aristophanes %% Under heaven thunder rolls: All things attain the natural state of innocence. Thus the kings of old, Rich in virtue, and in harmony with the time, Fostered and nourished all beings. %% Under heaven, wind: The image of Coming to Meet. Thus does the prince act when disseminating his commands And proclaiming them to the four quarters of heaven. %% Under no circumstances should you ever include computer jargon in a business algorithm. -- BU260 syllabus %% Under the spreading chestnut tree The village smith he sat, Amusing himself By abusing himself And catching the load in his hat. %% Under the wide an starry sky, Dig my grave and let me lie, Glad did I live and gladly die, And laid me down with a will, And this be the verse that you grave for me, Here he lies where he longed to be, Home is the sailor home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill. -- Rudyard Kipling %% Under the wide and heavy VAX Dig my grave and let me relax Long have I lived, and many my hacks And I lay me down with a will. These be the words that tell the way: "Here he lies who piped 64K, Brought down the machine for nearly a day, And Rogue playing to an awful standstill." %% Underdogging: The tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. The consumer expression of this trait is the purchasing of less successful, "sad," or failing products: "I know these Vienna franks are heart failure on a stick, but they were so sad looking up against all the other yuppie food items that I just had to buy them." -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics: Superiority is recessive. %% Underneath the pile of leaves is a grating. %% Underneath the rug is a closed trap door. %% Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character. -- Oscar Levant %% Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P. D. Ouspensky %% Understanding the laws of nature does not mean we are free from obeying them. -- Solomon Short %% Understanding this operating system is like trying to play Pic-up Sticks with your butt cheeks. %% Undertakers do it with corpses. %% Undeserved misfortune. The cow that was tethered by someone Is the wanderer's gain, the citizen's loss. %% Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited. -- Tom Gibb %% Une joile epousetta a Tours Voulait de gig-gig tous le jours. Mais le mari disait, "Non! De trop n'est pas bon! Mon derriere exige du secours!" %% Uneasy sits the butt that bears the boss. -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Unemployed? Hungry? Eat a foreign car. -- Seen on a bumper sticker %% Unemployment helps stretch your coffee break. %% Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. -- Nicolai Lenin %% Unexpected interrupt %% Unfair animal names: -- tsetse fly -- bullhead -- booby -- duck-billed platypus -- sapsucker -- Clarence -- Gary Larson %% Unfair competition: Selling cheaper than we do. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% Unfortunately for you, it is nearly 5 pm and I have run out of pithy things to say. %% Unfortunately it is here that hell is located. %% Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell directions in here. %% Unfortunately, most programmers like to play with new toys. I have many friends who, immediately upon buying a snakebite kit, would be tempted to throw the first person they see to the ground, tie the tourniquet on him, slash him with the knife, and apply suction to the wound. -- Jon Bentley %% Unfortunately, the troll can't hear you. %% Unfortunately, we've run out of poles. Therefore, in punishment for your transgression, we shall deprive you of all your valuables, and of your life. %% Unfortunately, you don't know how to fly. %% Unfortunately, you don't seem to be made of asbestos. %% Unfortunately, you have managed to destroy it by your reckless actions. BOOOOOOOOOM %% Unfortunately, you were holding it at the time. %% Unhappiness is the state which occurs in the human when wants and desires are not fulfilled. -- Spock, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% Unicorns aren't mythical--virgins are! %% Unified Field Theory, by Tim Joseph In the beginning there was Aristotle, And objects at rest tended to remain at rest, And objects in motion tended to come to rest, And soon everything was at rest, And God saw that it was boring. Then God created Newton, And objects at rested tended to remain at rest, But objects in motion tended to remain in motion, And energy was conserved and momentum was conserved and matter was conserved, And God saw that it was conservative. The God created Einstein, And everything was relative, And fast things became short, And straight things became curved, And the universe was filled inertial frames, And God saw that it was relatively general, but some of it was especially relative. Then God created Bohr, And there was the principle, And the principle was quantum, And all things were quantified, But some things were still relative, And God saw that it was confusing. Then God was going to creat Furgeson, And Furgeson would have unified, And he would have fielded a theory, And all would have been one, But it was the seventh day, And God rested, And objects at rest tend to remain at rest. %% United Nations, New York, December 25. The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world. -- Isaac Asimov %% Universal Tech Document Units Law: Characteristics, specifications, dimensions and any other data included in technical documents must be stated in exotic units, such as tenth of troy once per barn for pressures, or acre times atmosphere per kilogram for speeds. %% Universal suffrage is the government of a house by its nursery. -- Otto von Bismarck %% Universe, n.: The problem. %% Universities are places of knowledge. The freshman each bring a little in with them, and the seniors take none away, so knowledge accumulates. %% Universities are storehouses of knowledge. Freshmen bring little in; Graduates take none away. Therefore it accumulates. %% University, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and ... %% University: A modern institution where football is taught. -- Parapharsed from Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary", the definition for Academy %% University: A modern school where football is taught. %% Unix and the world Unix with you; VAX and you VAX alone. %% Unix is a lot more complicated (than CP/M) of course -- the typical Unix hacker can never remember what the PRINT command is called this week--but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do serious work on Unix systems; they send jokes around the world on USENET or write adventure games and research papers. -- E. Post, "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal", Datamation, 7/83 %% Unix is the worst operating system; except for all others. -- Berry Kercheval %% Unix programmers do it with pipes. %% Unix will self-destruct in five seconds... 4... 3... 2... 1... %% Unix wizards do it with unchecked conversions. %% Unix: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% Unix: it's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there. -- someone on usenet %% Unkind words do not enhance business confidence. -- Mark Epernay %% Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind, and drink the universe in a glass of rain. -- Ihab Hassan %% Unknown symbol. %% Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day. I wasted time and now doth time waste me. -- William Shakespeare %% Unless the specification states otherwise, we must assume that circuit delay varies in accordance with changes in supply voltage, ambient temperature, time, and the Dow Jones index. -- J. H. Haynes %% Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense -- E. E. Cummings (1894-1963) %% Unless you put your money to work for you -- you work for your money. -- Joe Miller %% Unlike stupidity, genius has its limits. %% Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible. %% Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. %% Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Unrecognized faults lead to wasted efforts -- Joanot Martorell, "Tirant lo Blanc", 1490 %% Until his own life is at stake, an officer can never know what is going on with his own men. %% Until people grow up, they have no idea what's cool %% Until philosophers are kings ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% Until the local cop, cherrytop rips this holy night. %% Until you start plowing pertinent wives, you really aren't working. The way to a man's heart is through his wife's belly and don't you forget it. -- Edward Albee %% Untold suffering seldom is. %% Unwanted Growth You said you could not give me what I sought. Your heart "had reasons reason cannot know." The answer was no more than what I thought. But still I had to ask you: aye or no. A time there was when I would silent wait Until an answer would, unbidden, come. But then I learned the price, though much too late Of hiding what I felt, remaining dumb. We do not choose the turnings of the heart; I must confess I once stood in your place. I cannot blame you if you hold apart For fear of what you might see in my face. But know one thing. Whatever may obtain, I started as your friend - and shall remain. %% Unwanted mail? Sell it to the bookshop! %% Up against the net, redneck mother, Mother who has raised your son so well; He's seventeen and hackin' on a Macintosh, Flaming spelling errors and raisin' hell... %% Up against the wall!!! %% Up against the wall, buddy. %% Up and at 'em, Atom Ant. %% Up until now, you have been...uninteresting. It's only now that your life form begins to merit serious attention. -- Traveler, "Where No One Has Gone Before", stardate 41263.1 %% Up with miniskirts!!! %% Upload : A group of tourists on their way to the observation deck of the Sears Tower. %% Upon encountering happiness: Be wary at such times, since most of life's blows fall then. %% Upon leaving a hotel bar one evening, an executive noticed a drunk sitting on the edge of a potted palm in the lobby, crying like a baby. Because he'd had a couple himself that night, and was feeling rather sorry for his fellow man, he asked the inebriated one what the trouble was. "I did a terrible thing tonight," sniffled the drunk. "I sold my wife to a guy for a bottle of Scotch." "That is terrible," said the man, too much under the weather to muster any real indignation. "And now that she's gone, you wish you had her back." "Thas right," said the drunk, still sniffling. "You're sorry you sold her, because you realize too late that you love her," sympathized the executive. "No, no," said the drunk. "I wish I had her back because I'm thirsty again." %% Upon the dead waters the last leaf finally sinks %% Uppers are no longer stylish, methedrine is almost as rare as pure acid or DMT. "Consciousness Expansion" went out with LBJ and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon. -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson %% Uppity Women Unite %% Uptown - Downtown, no one's fussy I'm a target. Black, white - day, night - no one's fussy I'm a target. I know I'm no special, but any part of town, someone could smile at me then ... shake my hand then ... gun me down. -- Joe Jackson - Night and Day %% Urban Cowboy; Urbane Cowboy. %% Urbanity: The kind of civility that urban observers ascribe to dwellers in all cities but New York. Its commonest expression is heard in the words "I beg your pardon", and it is not inconsistent with disregard of the rights of others. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Urine: Opposite of you're out. %% Urquhart Castle was doomed to dissolve. %% Us nature mystics got to stick together. -- Edward Abbey %% Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1 ... %% Usage: fortune -P [] -a [xsz] [Q: [file]] [rKe9] -v6[+] dataspec ... inputdir %% Use Computers to Take Over the Word. %% Use DEVICE=EXXON to screw up your environment. %% Use GOTOs only to implement a fundamental structure. %% Use IF...ELSE IF...ELSE IF...ELSE... to implement multi-way branches. %% Use a bigger stick. %% Use a different editor. %% Use a larger hammer. %% Use a smile. %% Use debugging compilers. %% Use every man after his deserts, and who shall 'scape whipping. -- William Shakespeare %% Use free-form input where possible. %% Use it up ... Wear it out. Make it do ... Or do without. -- US World War II Message %% Use library functions. %% Use no medicine in an illness Incurred through no fault of your own. It will pass of itself. %% Use only as directed. %% Use only in well-ventilated area. %% Use other side for additional listings. %% Use the Force, Luke. %% Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. %% Use unleaded fuel only. %% Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best. -- Henry van Dyke %% Use your Turn Signals: if I were psychic, I'd have known not to be on the road with you in the first place. %% Used staples are good with SOY SAUCE! %% Useful Farsi phrases for Americans traveling to Iran: AKBAR KHALI-KILI HAFTIR LOTFAN. Thank you for showing me your marvelous gun. FEKR GABUL CARDAN DAVAT PAEH GUSH DIVAR. I am delighted to accept your kind invitation to lie down on the floor with my arms above my head and my legs apart. SHOMAEH FEKR TAMOMEH QEH GOFTEH BANDE. I agree with everything you have ever said or thought in your life. %% Usefulness is inversely proportional to reputation for being useful. -- Daniel S. Greenberg %% Useless as windshield wipers on a duck's ass. %% User n.: A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. %% User-friendly - Supplied with a full color manual. %% User-friendly: Supplied with a full color manual. Very user-friendly: Supplied with an on-disk and audiotape tutorial, so the user needn't bother with the full color manual. Extremely user-friendly: Supplied with a mouse so that the user needn't bother with the on-disk and audiotape tutorial, the full color manual, or the program itself. %% Users, losers -- what's the difference? %% Ushers do it in the dark. %% Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach. -- S. C. Johnson %% Using this fantastically, diabolically anti-me language... let them just stay tuned in. -- President George Bush, on his China-policy critics %% Usually a person has to go to a bowling alley to find a woman of your stature. %% Usurer: A money-lender. He serves you in the present tense; he tends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the subjunctive; and ruins you in the future. -- Addison %% Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none. -- Doug Larson %% Utopia has banned neurosis -- Punishes illegal thought. The people nurse, in static poses, Neurotic fears of being caught. %% VACATION: A two-week binge of rest and relaxation so intense that it takes another 50 weeks of your restrained workaday life-style to recuperate. %% VAGINA: The box a penis comes in. %% VALGOL (With special thanks to Dan and Betsy 'Moon Unit' Pfau) From its modest beginnings in southern California's San Fernando Valley, VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y$KNOW. Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTALLY operators. Other operators include the 'CALIFORNIA BOOLEANS': FERSURE and NOWAY. Repetitions of code are handled in FOR-SURE loops. Here is a sample VALGOL program: 14 LIKE, Y$KNOW (I MEAN) START %% IF PI A =LIKE BITCHEN AND 01 B =LIKE TUBULAR AND 9 C =LIKE GRODY**MAX 4K (FERSURE)**2 18 THEN 4I FOR I=LIKE 1 TO OH MAYBE 100 86 DO WAH + (DITTY**2) 9 BARF(I) =TOTALLY GROSS(OUT) -17 SURE 1F LIKE BAG THIS PROGRAM ? REALLY $$ LIKE TOTALLY (Y*KNOW) VALGOL is characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message, GAG ME WITH A SPOON! %% VAN OECH'S LAW: An expert doesn't know more than you do. He is merely better organized and has slides. %% VANILLA adj. Ordinary flavor, standard. See FLAVOR. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, "vanilla-flavored wonton soup" means ordinary wonton soup, as opposed to hot and sour wonton soup. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% VAX - Long-haired cousins of the buffalo, used as beasts of burden in Tibet. %% VAX AND THE SINGLE GIRL - A relationship with much potential. %% VAX ATTACKS -- Why the VAX never stays up for more than one day. (Hear attack equiv.) %% VAX BUILDUP - The result of not using the file delete command often enough. %% VAX FLAX -- What keeps your VAX together. %% VAX POPULI - The users. %% VAX-CARS - What GM doesn't make. %% VAX-FREE BOND - A special relation with a non-VAX computer on Wall street. %% VAX-MAS - The day the VAX comes in. %% VAX-RAY - A high-energy screening to determine whether a user is qualified to have a VAX I/O station on his floor. %% VAX-WAGEN - What everyone jumps on after the VAX is approved. %% VAX: /vaks/ n. 1. [from Virtual Address eXtension] The most successful minicomputer design in industry history, possibly excepting its immediate ancestor, the PDP-11. Between its release in 1978 and its eclipse by {killer micro}s after about 1986, the VAX was probably the hacker's favorite machine of them all, esp. after the 1982 release of 4.2 BSD UNIX (see {BSD}). Esp. noted for its large, assembler-programmer-friendly instruction set --- an asset that became a liability after the RISC revolution. 2. A major brand of vacuum cleaner in Britain. Cited here because its alleged sales pitch, "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" became a sort of battle-cry of RISC partisans. It is sometimes claimed that this slogan was *not* actually used by the Vax vacuum-cleaner people, but was actually that of a rival brand called Electrolux (as in "Nothing sucks like..."); your editors have not yet been able to verify either version of the legend. It is also claimed that DEC actually entered a cross-licensing deal with the vacuum-Vax people that allowed them to market VAX computers in the U.K. in return for not challenging the vacuum cleaner trademark in the U.S. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% VAXACHUSETS - DEC country. %% VAXCELERATE - To increase productivity by using the VAX. %% VAXCENTUATE - To underline the importance of the VAX. %% VAXCIDENT - The spilling of coffee on a VAX terminal. %% VAXCILLATE - To oscillate between possible ways to administer VAX training. %% VAXCINATION - A "Preventive training" provided to potential users of the VAX system to prevent software foul-ups other than deliberate. %% VAXCINE - What you're going to need to get your VAX back running. %% VAXCINE - An abbreviation for "I have seen the VAX!" %% VAXCITEMENT - The state of mind aroused by receiving a new VAX. %% VAXCULPATE - To forgive one for spending time on one's GLUTEUS VAXIMUS thinking of VAXIOMS. %% VAXECUTION - The denial to a user of future access to the VAX. %% VAXEN [from "oxen", perhaps influenced by "vixen"] n. pl. The plural of VAX (a DEC machine). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% VAXENOPHOBIA - Fear of non-VAX computers. %% VAXERCISE - An early morning workout on the VAX. %% VAXI! VAXI! - A cry heard and unheeded by cruising VAX personnel as they go around the corridors, hailed by frantic users-to-be who desire a high-tech ride on the VAX. %% VAXIDERMIST - One who lives by the dictum "You can take the VAX and stuff it!" %% VAXILE -- Where you'll be if the VAXCINE doesn't work. %% VAXIMA - The height of ecstasy reached while computing on the VAX. Also (archaic): Mother of VAX. %% VAXIMUM - Keeping silent to the max about startup of the VAX. %% VAXING AND WAILING - VAXing is the successful use of the VAX during a full moon. Wailing is the less successful alternative during other lunar phases. %% VAXIOM - A true (or VAXUAL) statement. As Jack Webb always said, "Just give us the VAX, Ma'am." %% VAXIS - What the world of computers rotates on. %% VAXLE - That to which the wheels of the VAX are attached. %% VAXMAN - One who wields a VAX, often the SYSMGR. %% VAXONERATED - The honor of DEC. %% VAXPIN -- Opposite of forespin. %% VAXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES - The generic excuse used to explain delays in delivery of the VAX. %% VAXTERMINATION - The perennial zapping of mysterious files from the VAX. %% VAXUUM - A computer room without a VAX. Abhorred by nature. %% VAXectomy: /vak-sek't*-mee/ [by analogy with `vasectomy'] n. A VAX removal. DEC's Microvaxen, especially, are much slower than newer RISC-based workstations such as the SPARC. Thus, if one knows one has a replacement coming, VAX removal can be cause for celebration. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% VAXen: /vak'sn/ [from `oxen', perhaps influenced by `vixen'] n. (alt. `vaxen') The plural canonically used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers. "Our installation has four PDP-10s and twenty vaxen." See {boxen}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% VD is nothing to clap about. %% VD: The gift that keeps on giving. %% VEDI, VENI, VAXI - The victory cry - "I saw, I Conquered, The VAX came! %% VEIL'S LAW OF VALUE: The more an item costs, the farther you have to send it for repair. %% VERITAS AETERNA -- DON'T SETQ T. %% VETERINARIANS are pussy lovers. %% VICARIOUSLY experience some reason to LIVE!! %% VICE PRESIDENT DAN QUAYLE'S ADVENTURES IN... El Salvador, Feb. & June 1989: "We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination of human rights." "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..." %% VICE PRESIDENT DAN QUAYLE'S ADVENTURES IN... Pago Pago, April 1989: [Pronounced "Pango Pango" by the natives and "Pogo Pogo" by Mr. Quayle.] %% VICE PRESIDENT DAN QUAYLE'S ADVENTURES IN... Prince William Sound, Alaska, May 1989 [Remarks to oil spill clean-up workers]: "It's a very valuable function and requirement that you're performing, so have a great day and keep a stiff upper lip." "The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive." %% VIRGIN adj. Unused, in reference to an instantiation of a program. "Let's bring up a virgin system and see if it crashes again." Also, by extension, unused buffers and the like within a program. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% VIRGINIA: A group of beautifully mounted hunters galloping behind baying hounds in pursuit of a union organizer. %% VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22) Learn something new today, like how to spell or how to count to ten without using your fingers. Be careful dressing this morning. You may be hit by a car later in the day and you wouldn't want to be taken to the doctor's office in some of that old underwear you own. You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while making love. Virgos make good bus drivers. %% VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22) Learn something new today, like how to spell or how to count to ten without using your fingers. Be careful dressing this morning. You may be hit by a car later in the day and you wouldn't want to be taken to the doctor's office in some of that old underwear you own. %% VIRTUAL MEMORY: Memory that exists in effect, but not in fact; the usage is similar to that of the virtual particle in physics, the difference being that a virtual particle probably does exist but soon won't, while virtual memory probably doesn't but soon will. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% VIRTUAL adj. 1. Common alternative to LOGICAL (q.v.), but never used with compass directions. 2. Performing the functions of. Virtual memory acts like real memory but isn't. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% VISIONARY n. One who hacks vision (in an AI context, such as the processing of visual images). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% VLSI: "Getting High On Low Voltage" %% VM system programmers do it virtually all the time %% VMS is like a nightmare about RXS-11M. %% VMS lives! %% VMS must die! %% VMS version 2.0 ==> %% VMS: /V-M-S/ n. DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX minicomputer; one of the seven or so environments that loom largest in hacker folklore. Many UNIX fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favorite commercial OS if UNIX didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious. One major hacker gripe with VMS concerns its slowness --- thus the following limerick: There once was a system called VMS Of cycles by no means abstemious. It's chock-full of hacks And runs on a VAX And makes my poor stomach all squeamious. -- The Great Quux See also {VAX}, {{TOPS-10}}, {{TOPS-20}}, {{UNIX}}, {runic}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% VOLLEYBALL PLAYERS keep it up. %% VOLUNTEER SUBJECT: A college sophomore who, of his or her own free will, is allowed to choose between participating in an experiment or failing a course. %% VR: // [MUD] n. On-line abbrev for {virtual reality}, as opposed to {RL}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% VS LBH PNA'G ERNQ GUVF, LBH NER CEBONOYL ABG N PBZCHGVFG. %% VU-JADE: The feeling that you've *never* been in this situation before. %% VYARZERZOMANIMORORSEZASSEZANSERAREORSES? %% Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Vacillating people seldom succeed. They seldom win the solid respect of their fellow men. Successful men and women are very careful in reaching decisions and very persistent and determined in action thereafter. -- L. G. Elliott %% Vacuum Tube - a derogatory term - see 'bubble memory'. %% Vacuum cleaner - A collective noun. On a Texas restaurant menu - Remember the a` la mode! %% Vail's Second Axiom: The amount of work to be done increases in proportion to the amount of work already completed. %% Valerie: Aww, Tom, you're going maudlin on me ... Tom: I reserve the right to wax maudlin as I wane eloquent ... -- Tom Chapin %% Valley girl, she's a valley girl ... %% Valuable insights and your persuasive ability achieve results. %% Vampires hate garlic. %% Van Roy's Law: Honesty is the best policy - there's less competition. %% Van Roy's Truism: Life is a whole series of circumstances beyond your control. %% Vance's Rule of 2 1/2: Any military project will take twice as long as planned, cost twice as much, and produce only half of what is wanted. -- Cyrus Vance %% Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. %% Variables won't, constants aren't. -- Don Osborn %% Varicose veins: Veins that are quite close to each other. %% Varsh: That's not Alzarius. Romana: No, it's still Gallifrey. If the Doctor's theory's right we'll need a local image translator to see what's out there. Adric: Or we could just look out through the door. -- Full Circle %% Vastly improved review and control will result by promoting the most productive engineers to management positions. -- Richard F. Moore %% Vatican Rag! Gettin' ecstatic and sorta dramatic Doin' the Vatican Rag! Get in line in that processional. Step into that small confessional Where the man who's got religion'll Tell you if you sin's original. If it is try playin' it safer; Drink the wine and chew the wafer. Two, four, six, eight, Time to transubstantiate. -- Tom Lehrer %% Vault guards always make sure you aren't a shopkeeper. %% Vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself. -- William Shakespeare %% Vax Vobiscum %% Vaya con Dios, -- A common Spanish phrase. I think. %% Ve are lookink for a nuclear-powered wessel! %% Veal-fattening Pen: Small, cramped office workstation built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. named after the small preslaughter vubicles used by the cattle industry. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness. -- Sir Robert Hutchinson (1871-1960) %% Vegetarians beware! You are what you eat. %% Vegetarians for oral sex -- "The only meat that's fit to eat" %% Vegetative propagation is the process by which one individual manufactures another individual by accident. %% Velilind's Laws of Experimentation: (1) If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once. (2) If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points. %% Velleity (vuh-LEE-ity), n. A mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it. %% Veni Vidi Visa: I came, I saw, I did a little shopping. %% Veni, Vidi, Visa. %% Veni, vidi, Visa. (We came, we saw, we went shopping.) -- Jan Barrett %% Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs at one go. -- Truman Capote %% Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput! -- Monty Python %% Ventriloquists do it with ther mouths closed. %% Venture not to the utmost bounds of even lawful pleasure; the limits of good and evil join. -- Fuller %% Venus Goddess of love Female .No satellites (Geographic features named for famous or mytho-) (logical women ) %% Venus flytrap: [after the insect-eating plant] n. See {firewall machine}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Verb doubling: a standard construction is to double a verb and use it as a comment on what the implied subject does. Often used to terminate a conversation. Typical examples involve WIN, LOSE, HACK, FLAME, BARF, CHOMP: "The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose." "Mostly he just talked about his --- crock. Flame, flame." "Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!" %% Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Verbosity! Verbosity! Reflections of pomposity! My lexicon has possibly Become a cruel monstrosity! Verbosity! Verbosity! It's almost an atrocity That my labial velocity Is met with animosity! -- "Perfektion" %% Verily it is said, there is nobody true revolutionaries hate so much as the man who hints that paradise might be possible without the revolution. Or, as Santayana put it: "fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim". %% Version 1.0 - Buggier than Maine in June, eats data. %% Version 1.0 - Buggier than Maine in June, eats data. Version 1.1 - Eats data only occasionally, upgrades free to avoid litigation by disgruntled users of Version 1.0. Version 2.0 - Version originally planned as the first release [except for a couple of data-eating bugs that just won't seem to go away], no free upgrades or the company would go bankrupt. Version 3.0 - The revision in the works when the company goes bankrupt. Now available - Available any day now. Available soon - Should be out within a year. Available May 1st - Version 1.0 may ship to dealers August 1st. %% Version 1.1 - Eats data only occasionally, upgrades free to avoid litigation by disgruntled users of Version 1.0. %% Version 2.0 - Version originally planned as the first release [except for a couple of data-eating bugs that just won't seem to go away], no free upgrades or the company would go bankrupt. %% Version 3.0 - The revision in the works when the company goes bankrupt. %% Version 7: alt. V7 /vee' se'vn/ n. The 1978 unsupported release of {{UNIX}} ancestral to all current commercial versions. Before the release of the POSIX/SVID standards, V7's features were often treated as a UNIX portability baseline. See {BSD}, {USG UNIX}, {{UNIX}}. Some old-timers impatient with commercialization and kernel bloat still maintain that V7 was the Last True UNIX. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Vertical fragmentation is an inescapable part of technological progress. If we compare the 8085 to the 80386 or a MIPS RISC CPU, we can hardly expect to transparently preserve our entire intellectual investment in the 8085 when we move up to new hardware with vastly greater underlying capability. The bloodshed involved in upgrading is highly variable. Since computers are in theory general-purpose information processors, with the appropriate software tools the user can "mine" old information and use it on new hardware. Nonetheless, when hardware advances become revolutionary enough we eventually have to throw out some of our old standards. In this case we face a clear trade between the cost of junking our investment in our earlier ways of doing things vs. foregoing the potential benefits of new and better hardware. The bigger the previous investment, the bigger the benefits of upgrading have to be before vertical fragmentation is justifiable. -- Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu) %% Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters. %% Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe, such as the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere. A forest was discovered recently in which most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit. The life cycle of the ratchet screwdriver is quite interesting. Once picked it needs a dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one night it suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin that crumbles into dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a hole for a screw. This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what the screwdriver is supposed to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it. %% Very good. Now you can go to the second grade. %% Very large doses of radiation could release power hidden in your dormant genes. %% Very soon ... And in pleasant company. %% Very user-friendly - Supplied with an on-disk and audiotape tutorial, so the user needn't bother with the full color manual. %% Vests are to suits as seat-belts are to cars. %% Veterinarians drive like animals. %% Vice repeated like the wandering wind, blows dust in others' eyes. -- William Shakespeare %% Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us, even in our pains. -- Colton %% Victims of Circumstance %% Victory finds a hundred fathers, but failure is an orphan. %% Victory goes to the candidate with the most accumulated or contributed wealth who has the financial sources to convince the middle class and poor that he will be on their side. -- Mark B. Cohen %% Victory uber allies! %% Videotex : The largest commercial purveyor of VCRs and televisions in Dallas. %% Vidi, vici, veni! -- Don Juan %% Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came.) %% Viennese Oyster: Lady who can cross her feet behind her head, lying on her back, of course. When she has done so, you hold her tightly round each instep with your full hand and squeeze, lying on her full-length. Don't try to put an unsupple partner into this position-- it can't be achieved by brute force. You can get a very similar sensation-- unique rocking pelvic movement-- with less expertise if she crosses her ankles on her tummy, knees to shoulders, and you lie on her crossed ankles with your full weight. Why "Viennese" we dont know. Tolerable for short periods only but gives tremendous genital pressure for both. -- "The Joy of Sex" %% Vietnam is a jungle... Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, you have sand. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Vietnam. -- Spiro T. Agnew %% Vigilia pretium libertatis. (Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.) %% Vila: "I think I have just made the biggest mistake of my life." Orac: "It is unlikely. I would predict there are far greater mistakes waiting to be made by someone with your obvious talent for it." %% Vila: "This is stupid." Avon: "When did that ever stop us?" %% Villian, thou know'st no law of God or man; No beast so fierce, but knows some touch of pity. -- William Shakespeare %% Vini, Vidi, Hacki (I came, I saw, I hacked) %% Vini, vidi, vici [I came, I saw, I conquered]. -- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) %% Violence always settles everything %% Violence in reality is quite different from theory. -- Spock, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5818.4 %% Violence is a sword that has no handle -- you have to hold the blade. %% Violence is molding. %% Violence is the last word of the illiterate. Also the first. -- Solomon Short %% Violence never settles anything. -- Genghis Khan (1162-1227) %% Violence on television only affects children whose parents act like television personalities. %% Violent Femmes %% Violinists can stick it under their chin. %% Violinists do it with long strokes. %% Vique's Law: A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle. %% Virgin Runway: A travel destination chosen in the hopes that no one else has chosen it. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Virgin, n.: An ugly third grader. %% Virginia law forbids bathtubs in the house; tubs must be kept in the yard. %% Virginia prohibits that any person willfully and negligently permit any unhaltered horse of the age of more than one year to accompany him into any place of public worship. %% Virginity can be cured. %% Virginity can be lost by a thought. -- St. Jerome (340?-420) %% Virginity has it's own rewards - loneliness. %% Virginity is a bubble on the sea of life, which takes but one prick to break. -- Jordan Sand %% Virgo (Aug 22 - Sept 22) : Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, B. B. King, Bob Newhart, Twiggy, Meryl Streep, George Montgomery, Yvonne DeCarlo %% Virtual is its own reward. %% Virtue does not always demand a heavy sacrifice -- only the willingness to make it when necessary. -- Frederick Dunn %% Virtue is a relative term. -- Spock, "Friday's Child," stardate 3499.1 %% Virtue is its own punishment. %% Virtue is its own revenge. -- E. Y. Harburg %% Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors. -- Confucius %% Virtue itself often offends when coupled with bad manners. -- Middleton %% Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Visas erat: huic geminarum Dispar modus testicularum: Minor haec nihili, Palma triplici, Jam fecerat altera clarum. %% Vision without work is daydreaming. Work without vision is drudgery. Vision and work together is success. %% Visit Scenic Gyronchi %% Visit beautiful Vergas Minnesota. %% Visit beautiful Wisconsin Dells. %% Visit your mother today. Maybe she hasn't had any problems lately. %% Visitors are requested not to apply genocide to shopkeepers. %% Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously moving from where you left them to where you can't find them. %% Vitamin C deficiency is apauling %% Vivian Smith-Smythe-Smith - he's an accrediter guard and can count up to four. Simon Zinc-Trumpet Harris - he's an old Italian and married to a very attractive table lamp. Nigel Incubator Jones - his best friend is a tree and in his spare time he's a stockbroker. Germaise Brooke-Hamster - he's in the wine trade and his father uses him as a wastepaper basket. Oliver Singin-Mollusk - another old Italian, his father was in the cabinet and his mother won the Darby and he is considered by many to be this year's outstanding twit. %% Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff. -- Edward Abbey %% Vodka is the best way to cook potatoes. You get all the flavor of the potato and don't even have to put in your false teeth. -- Albert Engstrom %% Voiceless it cries, Wingless flutters, Toothless bites, Mouthless mutters. %% Void where prohibited or taxed. %% Volcano -- a mountain with hiccups. %% Volcanos have a grandeur that is grim And earthquakes only terrify the dolts, And to him who's scientific There is nothing that's terrific In the pattern of a flight of thunderbolts! -- William S. Gilbert (1836-1911), "The Mikado" %% Volley Theory: It is better to have lobbed and lost than never to have lobbed at all. %% Volume is a defense to error. -- Richard A. Leahy %% Voluntary addiction to drugs is a reoccurring theme is many cultures. -- Data, "Symbiosis", stardate unknown %% Voluntary retreat brings good fortune to the superior man And downfall to the inferior man. %% Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% Vote anarchist %% Vote as an individual; lemmings end up falling off cliffs. Camaraderie is no substitute for common sense, and being your own man will make you sleep better. -- Pierre S. du Pont %% Vote early and vote often. -- Anonymous, on US election banners, 1850's %% Vote for ME -- I'm well-tapered, half-cocked, ill-conceived and TAX-DEFERRED! %% Vote: The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Voter's Block: The attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Voters do not decide issues. They decide *who* will decide issues. -- George F. Will, in "Newsweek", 1976 %% Voters quickly forget what a man says. -- Richard Nixon %% Voting is the least arduous of a citizen's duties. He has the prior and harder duty of making up his mind. -- Ralph Barton Perry %% Votre bateau arriverez. %% Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir ? %% Vox populi, vox humbug. -- William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) %% Vuilleumier's Fifth Law: Prototype npn blackboxes actually hold pnp transistors, and vice-versa. %% Vuilleumier's First Law: Any pre-cut equipment is too short. This is specially true of optic fiber cables with expensive connectors at both ends. %% Vuilleumier's Fourth Law: When proteup first, thankfully leaving the fuses intact. %% Vuilleumier's Second Law: If n electronic components are required, n-1 are available. %% Vuilleumier's Seventh Law: When the prototype has been fully assembled according to lab instructions, a minimum of 11 components are left. %% Vuilleumier's Sixth Law: A quartz oscillator oscillates at a frequency off the rated one by a minimum of 25% if it does oscillate at all. %% Vuilleumier's Third Law (also known as Selective Gravitational Field): Any tool escaping manipulator's hands will not necessarily follow Earth's gravitational field, but will land in the most unreachable location in the prototype, smashing on its way the most expensive component of the prototype. This will know only one exception if the tool is particularly heavy, in which case it will land on the manipulator's foot. %% Vuja de... That feeling that you've never been here before. %% Vulcan nerve pinch: n. [from the old "Star Trek" TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on some Macintoshes, it is -! Also called {three-finger salute}. Compare {quadruple bucky}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Vulcans believe peace should not depend on force. -- Amanda, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.3 %% Vulcans do not approve of violence. -- Spock, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.4 %% Vulcans have less fun. %% Vulcans never bluff. -- Spock, "The Doomsday Machine," stardate 4202.1 %% Vulcans worship peace above all. -- McCoy, "Return to Tomorrow," stardate 4768.3 %% Vultures only fly with carrion luggage. %% W. C. Fields is alive and drunk in Philadelphia. %% W/M, 35, offers French lessons for ladies. If you desire fluency in the French tongue, this cunning linguist can lick your problem. Fortune P.O. Box 478. %% W: "What are you doing home?" M: "I was fired." W: "Fired? But you've been working at that pickle factory for twenty years! How did you get fired?" M: "I stuck my dick in the pickle slicer." Horrified, the woman runs to him, pulls down his pants, and inspects the equipment. W: (bewildered) "But there's nothing wrong here -- what happened to the pickle slicer?" M: "They fired her too." %% WAIN'S CONCLUSION: He who gets too big for his britches gets exposed in the end. %% WAITER! there's soup in my fly! %% WAITRESSES serve it piping hot. %% WAITS:: /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of {{TOPS-10}} used on a handful of systems at {{SAIL}} up to 1990. There was never an `official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as `West-coast Alternative to ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of {EMACS}, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's `E' editor --- one of a family of editors that were the first to do `real-time editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. {Bucky bits} were also invented there --- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable WAITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called `multimedia' computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% WALDO [probably taken from the story "Waldo", by Heinlein, which is where the term was first used to mean a mechanical adjunct to a human limb] Used at Harvard, particularly by Tom Cheatham and students, instead of FOOBAR as a meta-syntactic variable and general nonsense word. See FOO, BAR, FOOBAR, QUUX. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WALL [shortened form of HELLO WALL, apparently from the phrase "up against a blank wall"] (WPI) interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone. "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WALLPAPER n. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the LPT paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced at SAIL where it was used as such to cover windows.) Usage: not often used now, esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on TWENEX). The term possibly originated on ITS, where the commands to begin and end transcript files are still :WALBEG and :WALEND, with default file DSK:WALL PAPER. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WALT DISNEY IS NOT DEAD! He's in suspended animation. %% WALTON'S LAW: A fool and his money are soon elected. %% WARNING ... drinking tap water can kill your thirst! %% WARNING from H.M. Govt: Quaffing may be dangerous to your health. %% WARNING!!! This machine is subject to breakdowns during periods of critical need. A special circuit in the machine called "critical detector" senses the operator's emotional state in terms of how desperate he/she is to use the machine. The "critical detector" then creates a malfunction proportional to the desperation of the operator. Threatening the machine with violence only aggravates the situation. Likewise, attempts to use another machine may cause it to malfunction. They belong to the same union. Keep cool and say nice things to the machine. Nothing else seems to work. See also: flog(1), tm(1) %% WARNING: TESTS HAVE SHOWN THAT THE FOLLOWING JOKE IS ONLY EFFECTIVE IF TOLD ORALLY. THEREFORE, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LAUGH AT IT YOURSELF--SNIP IT OUT, MEMORIZE IT, AND TELL IT TO SOMEBODY ELSE IN REAL LIFE. At a banquet of the American Nosoapers Convention, a man is astonished to see the man next to him dip his hands in mayonnaise and run them through his hair. "Why on earth did you do that?" he asked. The other man looks at him. Suddenly, a wave of realization passes over his face. "Oh, I'm so sorry," he said. "I thought it was spinach!" %% WARNING: my messages are offensive to morons! %% WARNING: Reading this fortune can affect the dimensionality of your mind, change the curvature of your spine, cause the growth of hair on your palms, and make a difference in the outcome of your favorite war. %% WARP 6 A Law We Can Live With %% WARSH: to clean with water. "Go warsh yur hands!" -- Texan Dictionary %% WASP: Someone who gets out of the shower to take a piss. %% WATER SKIERS come down harder. %% WATERBOTTLE SOCCER n. A deadly sport practiced mainly by Sussman's graduate students. It, along with chair bowling, is the most evident manifestation of the "locker room atmosphere" said to reign in that sphere. (Sussman doesn't approve.) [As of 11/82, it's reported that the sport has given way to a new game called "disc-boot", and Sussman even participates occasionally.] %% WE HAVE A TIE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! %% WE'RE GOING TO THROW THE MX AWAY AFTER WE BUILD IT. The MX is really [Don't tell anybody!] just a "bargaining chip" in the nuclear-arms- reduction talks with the Russians. See, we have a problem with the Russians. They look at our leaders and they see, for example, George Bush, who is really a fine and brave man but who happens to have this unfortunate physical characteristic whereby when he talks he sounds as though he just inhaled a helium party balloon. If he ever becomes President, the Russians will deliberately create nuclear crises just so they can gather around the Hot Line with refreshments and listen to George talk. -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against Political Fallout" %% WE'VE GOT YOU NOW!! This fortune was poisoned. If a second your eyes will start gniyalp t#r*i%c"k!s oN uoy. %% WE: The single most important word in the world. %% WEAPON: An index of the lack of development of a culture. %% WEDGED [from "head wedged up ass"] adj. To be in a locked state, incapable of proceeding without help. (See GRONK.) Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions. "The swapper is wedged." This term is sometimes used as a synonym for DEADLOCKED (q.v.). -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES NOW GO HOME %% WELDERS have hotter rods. %% WELFARE You're too incompetent to work for a living. [We'll let you leach off those who do earn a living.] -- George L Roman, george@sgi.com %% WELL-ADJUSTED: The ability to play bridge or golf as if they were games. %% WET DREAM: Overnight sensation. %% WHAT DO ETHIOPIANS USE FOR BUNK BEDS ? VENETIAN BLNDS %% WHAT DO MIDGETS USE FOR BIRTH CONTROL ????? condominiums %% WHAT DO YOU CALL AN ETHIOPIAN IN A DINNER JACKET? OPTIMIST %% WHAT DO YOU CALL AN ETHIOPIAN WALKING 2 DOGS? A CATERER %% WHAT DO YOU CALL AN ETHIOPIAN WALKING A DOG ? A VEGETARIAN %% WHAT DO YOU CATCH IF YOU HAD SEX WITH A PARROT? <<<<< cherpies >>>>> Don't worry, their tweetable. %% WHAT DO YOU DO WITH 365 USED CONDOMS???????????????????????? MELT THEM DOWN ...MOLD THEM INTO A TIRE..AND CALL IT A GOOD YEAR !! %% WHAT n. The question mark character ("?"). See QUES. Usage: rare, used particularly in conjunction with WOW. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WHATS THE FASTEST LAND ANIMAL IN ETHIOPIA ? A CHICKEN %% WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE Oh, dear, where can the matter be When it's converted to energy? There is a slight loss of parity. Johnny's so long at the fair. %% WHITEHEAD'S RULE: Seek simplicity, and distrust it. %% WHO IS THE PATRON SAINT OF ETHIOPIA? KAREN CARPENTER %% WHO sees a BEACH BUNNY sobbing on a SHAG RUG?! %% WHOA!! Ken and Barbie are having TOO MUCH FUN!! It must be the NEGATIVE IONS!! %% WHY CUCUMBERS ARE BETTER THAN MEN: The average cucumber is at least six inches long. A cucumber won't tell you that size doesn't count. A cucumber never suffers from performance anxiety. A cucumber will never leave you for another woman. Cucumbers stay hard for a week. Cucumbers don't get TOO excited. Cucumbers are easy to pick up. It's easy to drop a cucumber. No matter how old you are, you can always get a fresh cucumber. With a cucumber, you never have to say you're sorry. You always know where your cucumber has been. Cucumbers don't leave you wondering for a month. You can eat a cucumber when YOU feel like it. A cucumber doesn't care if you're a virgin. No matter how you slice it, you can have your cucumber and it it too. %% WIBNI: // [Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] n. What most requirements documents and specifications consist entirely of. Compare {IWBNI}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% WIMP environment: n. [acronymic from `Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu)'] A graphical-user-interface-based environment such as {X} or the Macintosh interface, as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces for their superior flexibility and extensibility. See {menuitis}, {user-obsequious}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% WIN [from MIT jargon] 1. v. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions arise. 2. BIG WIN: n. Serendipity. Emphatic forms: MOBY WIN, SUPER WIN, HYPER-WIN (often used interjectively as a reply). For some reason SUITABLE WIN is also common at MIT, usually in reference to a satisfactory solution to a problem. See LOSE. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WINNAGE n. The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is winning. Quite rare. Usage: also quite rare. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WINNER 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer or person. 2. REAL WINNER: Often sarcastic, but also used as high praise. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WINNITUDE n. The quality of winning (as opposed to WINNAGE, which is the result of winning). "That's really great! Boy, what winnitude!" -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WISDOM: "Travelling unarmed is like boating without a life jacket" %% WIZARD n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works; someone who can find and fix his bugs in an emergency. Rarely used at MIT, where HACKER is the preferred term. 2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people, e.g., a "net wizard" on a TENEX may run programs which speak low-level host-imp protocol; an ADVENT wizard at SAIL may play Adventure during the day. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WOLF: A man who knows all the ankles. %% WOLTER'S LAW: If you have the time, you won't have the money. If you have the money, you won't have the time. %% WOMAN.ZIP... Great program but no documentation. %% WOMAN: "Is Yoo-Hoo hyphenated?" YOGI BERRA: "No, ma'am, its not even carbonated." %% WOMAN: An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% WOMBAT: [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] adj. Applied to problems which are both profoundly {uninteresting} in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'. See also {crawling horror}, {SMOP}. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in {{Commonwealth Hackish}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% WOMEN: Weird Obnoxious Male Enticing Nymphs %% WOODSIDE'S GROCERY PRINCIPLE: The bag that breaks has the eggs. %% WOOF: doglike animal. "Who's afraid of the big bad woof?" -- Texan Dictionary %% WORK: The blessed respite from screaming kids and soap operas for which you actually get paid. %% WORMHOLE n. A location in a monitor which contains the address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it easy to substitute a different routine. The following quote comes from "Polymorphic Systems", vol. 2, p. 54: "Any type of I/O device can be substituted for the standard device by loading a simple driver routine for that device and installing its address in one of the monitor's `wormholes.'* ---------- *The term `wormhole' has been used to describe a hypothetical astronomical situation where a black hole connects to the `other side' of the universe. When this happens, information can pass through the wormhole, in only one direction, much as `assumptions' pass down the monitor's wormholes." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WOW See EXCL. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% WRAB Programming: "KEY GRIP (1 hr -- Drama) Part three of Patrick McGoohan's `John Drake' Trilogy. Series security prohibits any information release prior to broadcast. (Emph: the struggle for individualism)." -- From Matt Howarth's WRAB: PIRATE TELEVISION, which you should buy immediately %% WRAB Programming: "THE CHURCH OF GODZILLA (1/2 hr -- religion) Instruction in the eager belief of getting one's way all the time. John Madden as Godzilla. (Emph: narrow-mindedness)." -- From Matt Howarth's WRAB: PIRATE TELEVISION, which you should buy immediately %% WRESTLERS know the best holds. %% WRITERS have novel ways. %% WRONG! %% WUNST: at one time. "Ah used ta node her wunst!" -- Texan Dictionary %% WW I GIs did it over there. %% WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann?? %% WYSIAYG: /wiz'ee-ayg/ adj. Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is *All* You Get"; an unhappy variant of {WYSIWYG}. Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be better served by a command-style interface. When this happens, the frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most often used of editors, word processors, and document formatting programs. WYSIWYG `desktop publishing' programs, for example, are a clear win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and graphics in them, especially things like newsletters and presentation slides. When typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale changes the nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG limitations, and the increased power and flexibility of a command-driven formatter like {{TeX}} or UNIX's `troff(1)' becomes not just desirable but a necessity. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% WYSIWYG: /wiz'ee-wig/ adj. Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is What You Get", as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure commands which do not result in immediate visual feedback. True WYSIWYG in environments supporting multiple fonts or graphics is a a rarely-attained ideal; there are variants of this term to express real-world manifestations including WYSIAWYG (What You See Is *Almost* What You Get) and WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is More or Less What You Get). All these can be mildly derogatory, as they are often used to refer to dumbed-down {user-friendly} interfaces targeted at non-programmers; a hacker has no fear of obscure commands (compare {WYSIAYG}). On the other hand, {EMACS} was one of the very first WYSIWYG editors, replacing (actually, at first overlaying) the extremely obscure, command-based {TECO}. See also {WIMP environment}. [Oddly enough, WYSIWYG has already made it into the OED, in lower case yet. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get. %% WYSZOWSKY'S SECOND LAW: No experiment is reproduceable. %% WYTYSYDG-What you thought you saw, you didn't get. %% Waco means the government can kill anyone it doesn't like and get a 94% approval rating. -- Jeff Chan, chan@shell.portal.com %% Wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us. -- Odgen Nash (1902-1971) %% Wagner did it for hours. %% Wagner's music is better than it sounds. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Wah! Devil machine make numbers come out! With text! In tabular report format! Computers! Bad juju! %% Wait and hope. -- A White House official, describing the president's economic plan, November 1990. On the backup plan: ``There isn't one.'' %% Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time. -- Pericles %% Wait! You have not been prepared! -- Mr. Atoz, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," stardate 3113.2 %% Wait.. is this a FUN THING or the END of LIFE in Petticoat Junction?? %% 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?" %% Waiters and waitresses do it for tips. %% Waiting at meat and drink. Perseverance brings good fortune. %% Waiting for the winds of change to sweep the clouds away. Waiting for the rainbow's end to cast its gold your way. Countless ways, you pass the days. Waiting for someone to come and turn your world around. Looking for an answer to the questions you have found. Looking for an open door. Well, you don't get something for nothing. You can't have freedom for free. You won't get wise with the sleep still in your eyes, No matter what your dream might be. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% Waiting in blood. Get out of the pit. %% Waiting in the meadow. It furthers one to abide in what endures. No blame. %% Waiting in the mud Brings about the arrival of the enemy. %% Waiting on the sand. There is some gossip. The end brings good fortune. %% Waiting. If you are sincere, You have light and success. Perseverance brings good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. %% Wake up all you citizens, hear your country's call, Not to arms and violence, But peace for one and all. Crush out hate and prejudice, fear and greed and sin, Help bring back her dignity, restore her faith again. Work hard for a common cause, don't let our country fall. Make her proud and strong again, democracy for all. Yes, make our country strong again, keep our flag unfurled. Make our country well again, respected by the world. Make her whole and beautiful, work from sun to sun. Stand tall and labor side by side, because there's so much to be done. Yes, make her whole and beautiful, united strong and free, Wake up, all you citizens, It's up to you and me. -- Pansy Myers Schroeder %% Wake up and smell the coffee. -- Ann Landers %% Wake up to a brand new day to find your dreams have washed away. %% Wake up, America. -- Augustus P. Gardner %% Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Walk at a fast pace when out of the office -- this keeps questions from subordinates and superiors at a minimum. %% Walk softly and carry a big stick. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% Walk softly and carry a megawatt laser. %% Walking in the midst of others, One returns alone. %% Walking on water wasn't built in a day. -- Jack Kerouac %% Walls are visible at the extremes of your vision to south and west. There is a small entranceway in the south wall. %% Walls impede my progress %% Walt: Dad, what's gradual school? Garp: Gradual school? Walt: Yeah. Mom says her work's more fun now that she's teaching gradual school. Garp: Oh. Well, gradual school is someplace you go and gradually find out that you don't want to go to school anymore. -- The World According To Garp %% Walter Shandy attributed most of his son's misfortunes to the fact that at a highly critical moment his wife had asked him if he had wound the clock, a question so irrelevant that he despaired of the child's ever being able to pursue a logical train of thought. -- Lawrence Sterne %% Walters' Rule: All airline flights depart from the gates most distant from the center of the terminal. Nobody ever had a reservation on a plane that left Gate 1. %% Wandering punster %% Wanders over the meadow all day long, With a nice little tongue but cannot speak, And goes to the water, but cannot drink. A cowbell %% Wanna buy a duck? %% Wanna flirt with disaster? Become a SysOp! %% Wanna fly? Eat a bat. %% Want a BABY RUTH candy bar - you know - the one they named after the famous slugger? Well it's not so. BABY RUTH was actually named after the oldest daughter of President Grover Cleveland. %% Want a LAUGH run a spell check on DSZ docs. %% Want a jelly baby? %% Want a stupid answer? Ask me anything! %% Want a thing long enough, and you don't. %% Want of prudence is too frequently the want of virtue; nor is there on earth a more powerful advocate for vice than poverty? -- Oliver Goldsmith %% Want some candy little girl? %% Want to know the meaning of life? Just call Griswoldo, your friendly neighborhood guru. Dial (818) 902-9544 for an appointment today. Master Charge, Visa and American Express accepted. %% Wanted - Man to wash dishes and two waitresses. %% Wanted: Volcano. Average size. Must be active. %% Wanting to convert to the Catholic faith, Sam Goldstein was allowed to join the Church under the condition that he would, henceforth, obey all the laws governing the Catholicism. "Remember," warned the priest, "you also are not allowed to eat meat on Fridays." "Yes, Father, I'll remember," Sammy promised as he left his last class. The Father, concerned about his new convert, decided to drop in on Sam that next Friday to see how he was doing. After being admitted into the house, he was shocked to see Sam eating a huge steak. "What is this? Did you forget your promise? This is Friday. You're suppose abstain from eating meat on Fridays. What do you have to say for yourself?" the priest asked imperiously. "Meat? Who's eating meat?" asked Sam blandly. "This is gefilte fish." "You must take me for a fool!" snapped the outraged priest. "How can anyone make fish out of meat?" "The same way the Church makes a Catholic out of a Jew," answered the convert smoothly. "I sprinkled holy water on it." %% War News: Sadam's army blown away by Thai hookers. %% War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it. -- Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) %% War destroys mem, but luxury mankind At once corrupts the body and the mind. -- Crown %% War does not determine who is right... it only determines who is left! -- "Iolo" %% War hath no fury like a non-combatant. -- Charles Edward Montague %% War is an equal opportunity destroyer. %% War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that Nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. -- John Stuart Mill %% War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it. -- Desiderius Erasmus (1465-1536) %% War is its own punishment. %% War is menstruation envy. %% War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military. -- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) %% War is much too serious to be left to the generals. -- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) %% War is never imperative. -- McCoy, "Balance of Terror," stardate 1709.2 %% War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984" %% War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ketchup is a vegetable. %% War isn't a good life, but it's life. -- Kirk, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8 %% War may be Hell... but it's good for business. -- The Association for Merchants, Manufacturers, and Morticians %% War spares not the brave, but the cowardly. -- Anacreon %% War will cease when men refuse to fight. -- Fridtjof Hansen %% War, n.: A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. Since we are told "In times of peace prepare for war", war is inevitable. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other. -- Edward Abbey %% War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers. -- Edward Abbey %% Ward, I'm worried about the Beaver. %% Warning to Lawyers: Beware of and eschew pompous prolixity. -- Charles A. Beardsley %% Warning: This person reads fantasy and is and avid denier of reality %% Warning: Whimsical when bored %% Warning: Due to the robot shortage, some of our bartenders are human and will react unpredictably when insulted. %% Warning: ECC error count high %% Warning: I brake for hallucinations. %% Warning: Listening to WXRT on April Fools' Day is not recommended for those who are slightly disoriented the first few hours after waking up. -- Chicago Reader 4/22/83 %% Warning: Politicians can damage your wealth. %% Warning: Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again. %% Warning: This room was constructed over very weak rock strata. Detonation of explosives in this room is strictly prohibited! FROBOZZ Magic Safe Company !!!! FROBOZZ Magic Balloon Company !!!! Hello, aviator! Instructions for use: To get into the balloon, say 'BOARD' To leave the balloon, say 'DISEMBARK' To land, say 'LAND' Warranty: No warranty is expressed or implied. You're on your own, sport. Good luck! %% Warp 7 -- It's a law we can live with. %% Warp Five Mr. Sulu! %% Warranty - An unconditional guarantee that the program purchased is actually included on the disk in the box. %% Warranty and guarantee clauses are voided by payment of the invoice. %% Wars are caused by undefended wealth. -- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) %% Wars frequently begin ten years before the first shot is fired. -- K. K. V. Casey (1877-?) %% Was it as good for you, as it was for me? %% Was my SOY LOAF left out in th'RAIN? It tastes REAL GOOD!! %% Was that your wife I saw in that GIF. %% Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles In children's circuses could stay their troubles? There was a time they could cry over books, But time has set its maggot on their track. Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe. What's never known is safest in this life. Under the skysigns they who have no arms Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best. -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), "Was There A Time" %% Was today really Necessary? %% Was you ever bit by a dead bee? %% Washington [D.C.] is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% Washington is a much better place if you are asking questions rather than answering them. -- John Dean %% Washington, D.C., law states that no one shall engage in a pugilistic encounter with a bull. %% Wasn't he a sailor? %% Wasn't he an Indian? %% Wasn't there something about a PASCAL programmer knowing the value of everything and the Wirth of nothing? %% Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. -- Euripides %% Waste not, get your budget cut next year. %% Waste your brain, wax your board, and pray for waves! %% Wasting time is an important part of living. %% Watch all-night Donna Reed reruns until your mind resembles oatmeal. %% Watch it! %% Watch less TV. %% Watch out for cold wave this week. (Or maybe a warm WAC.) %% Watch out for falling cornice stones today. %% Watch out for formal briefings, they often produce an avalanche. (Definition: A high-level snow job of massive and overwhelming proportions. -- Amrom Katz %% Watch out for off-by-one errors. %% Watch out for the old mortar in the rocks in the fourteenth hole trick. %% Watch out where them huskies go, don't you eat that yellow snow. -- Frank Zappa %% Watch out! I'm striking a significant Kirby pose! %% Watch the sun come up, breathe fresh air, exercise your body, become a garbage collector! %% Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick %% Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack. -- Gen. George S. Patton %% Watch your mouth, kid, or you'll find yourself floating home. -- Han Solo %% Watch your step! You are beginning to act competent. %% Watch your steps on staircases. %% Watches are a confidence trick invented by the Swiss. -- Chiun %% Watching television, you'd think we lived at bay, surrounded on all sides by human-seeking germs. We are instructed to spray disinfectant everywhere, into the air of our bedrooms and kitchens and with special energy into bathrooms. In real life, however, disease occurs so infrequently that it has a freakish aspect. -- Lewis Thomas %% Watchman: Small TV, many channel available Crotchman: Only shows porno movies Splotchman: Movies about the blob Skotchman: 3M Product Bulletins Gotchaman: IBM Computer virus news Kochman: Speeches from the mayor of New York Lochman: Hunters of Nessie (the monster...) Machman: USAF News Notchman: Social Security whiners Poachman: 1001 ways to cook an egg Quicheman: For wimps only Roachman: Stories about exterminators Touchman: Pickpocket news Ouchman: Sado-masochism Pouchman: Kangaroo trivia & veterinary Zatchman: Dr. Seuss Channel %% Water + Malt + Hops + Yeast = Satisfaction %% Water balloons? Okay, I guess, for the unimaginative. Try Jell-o balloons. The results can be highly comical... %% Water flows on uninterruptedly and reaches it goal: The image of the Abysmal repeated. Thus the superior man walks in lasting virtue And carries on the business of teaching. %% Water is composed of oxygin ahd hydrogin. Oxygin is pure, but hydrogin is gin and water. %% Water on the mountain: The image of Obstruction. Thus the superior man turns his attention to himself And molds his character. %% Water over Lake: the image of Limitation. Thus the superior man Creates numbers and measure, And examines the nature of virtue and correct conduct. %% Water over fire: the image of the condition In After Completion. Thus the superior man Takes thoughts of misfortune And arms himself against it in advance. %% Water over wood: the image of The Well. Thus the superior man encourages the people at their work, And exhorts them to help one another. %% Watson's Law: The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the number and significance of any persons watching it. %% Wave to your neighbor, Word to your mother. %% Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity and into the dream. %% Wavering flight over the depths. No blame. %% Waving a # #. %% Wayne's World C Programming Style Guide: A == B; !; %% We ... repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purpose. -- Will Durant %% We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it. -- Whole Earth Catalog %% We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it. -- Stay Fit & Healthy Until You're Dead - Dave Barry %% We Klingons believe as you do -- the sick should die. Only the strong should live. -- Kras, "Friday's Child," stardate 3497.2 %% We [Doctors and Bartenders] both get the same two kinds of customers -- the living and the dying. -- Dr. Boyce, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown %% We [Reagan and Bush] have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex. -- Vice President George Bush, May 1988 %% We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about. -- Charles Kingsley %% We advocate the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. We urge the enactment of such measures by the several states as will actually promote temperance, effectively prevent the return of the saloon and bring the liquor traffic into the open under complete supervision and control by the states. -- Democratic National Platform, 1932 %% We all are vulnerable, in one way or another. -- Kirk, "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" stardate 5630.7 %% We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% We all dream of being the darling of everybody's darling. %% We all have our darker side. We need it; it's half of what we are. It's not really ugly, it's human. -- McCoy, "The Enemy Within," stardate 1673.5 %% We all know that art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realize truth -- at least the truth that is given us to understand. -- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) %% We all know that no one understands anything that isn't funny. %% We all laughed when a fellow named Ollie Once swore he would screw a young dolly. "For twelve hours, I'll engage'er," And he laid down his wager. We all laughed, but he did it, by golly. %% We all like praise, but a hike in our pay is the best kind of ways. %% We all live in a mellow subroutine. %% We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis %% We all live in a yellow submarine. %% We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon. -- Dr. Konrad Adenauer %% We also need to assure that women don't have to worry about getting their jobs back after having a child. -- George Bush, campaigning in 1988. Later, a spokesman said that parents who cannot get unpaid leave ``should look for other jobs''. Now Bush opposes the legislation Congress has passed to accomplish this, while blaming Congress for the inaction of his administration %% We always get bored with those whom we bore. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We always love those who admire us; we do not always love those whom we admire. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We always might win ... because the others might lose. %% We always remember best the irrelevant. %% We are agreed. Now, who bells the cat? %% We are all ONE, say the gurus. Aye, I might agree--but one WHAT? -- Edward Abbey %% We are all afraid -- for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. -- Jacob Bronowski %% We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough. -- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) to Albert Einstein %% We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us. -- George Eliot %% We are all born equal... just some of us are more equal than others. %% We are all born mad. Some remain so. -- Samuel Beckett %% We are all descendents of Adam and we are all products of racial miscegenation. -- Lester B. Pearson %% We are all dying -- and we're gonna be dead for a long time. %% We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), "Lady Windermere's Fan", 1892 %% We are all of us the victims of a higher power--a power more evil and more terrible than the human brain can imagine. -- Theodore Maxtible, EVIL OF THE DALEKS %% We are all omnibuses in which our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them stickes his head out and embarrasses us. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) %% We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. -- William James %% We are all self-made, but only the rich will admit it. %% We are all so much together and yet we are all dying of loneliness. -- Albert Schweitzer %% We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% We are always the same age inside. %% We are anthill men upon an anthill world. -- Ray Bradbury %% We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears beauty. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% We are bound to our bodies like an oyster is to its shell. -- Plato (428-348? B.C.) %% We are citizens of the world: and the tragedy of our times is that we do not know this. -- Woodrow Wilson %% We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. -- Walt Kelly, "Pogo" %% We are convinced that ... foreign capital will fulfill the role that Marx predicted for it ... with every additional shovel of coal, with every additional load of oil that we in Russia obtain through the help of foreign technique, capital will be digging its own grave. -- L. B. Kamanev %% We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% We are experiencing system trouble -- do not adjust your terminal. %% We are experiencing technical difficulties, please do not adjust your set. We will attempt to return to our regularly scheduled program as soon as possible. %% We are far from home. Our ship is the MONDOR. It is broken. We look for things. Things that make us go. We need help. -- Grebnedlog, "Samaritan Snare", stardate 42779.1 %% We are gathered here to pay tribute to out lord and money unto me. %% We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a lot of relatives on the train for home. %% We are giving instruction to FBI agents in the various Chinese dialects ... to handle present and likely future contingencies. -- J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) %% We are going to give a little something, a few little years more, to socialism, because socialism is defunct. It dies all by itself. The bad thing is that socialism, being a victim of its ... Did I say socialism? -- Fidel Castro %% We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower %% We are having qdaemon problems, would like to reboot. %% We are hopelessly enchanted. Blame it on the angels. Blame it on our wild hearts! %% We are learning how to make our election results known quicker and quicker. It is our campaigns we are having trouble getting any shorter. %% We are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave as independent, rational free-enterprisers. -- Garrett Hardin %% We are making a survey - We need more time to make up an answer -- Glossary of important business terms %% We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole. -- Seneca %% We are more heavily taxed by our idleness, pride and folly than we are taxed by government. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% We are moving to Vax 19. They say its a mean machine. We are moving tonight, So I hope its alright. If we run it remains to be seen! %% We are ne'er like angels 'till out passion dies. -- Dekker %% We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% We are not a clone. %% We are not a loved organization, but we are a respected one. -- John Fisher %% We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs. -- Mikhail Gorbachev, UN address, 7 December 1988 %% We are not alone. %% We are not anticipating any emergencies. %% We are not killers. -- Chekov, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," stardate 5730.6 %% We are not loved by our friends for what we are; rather, we are loved in spite of what we are. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% We are not primarily on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through. %% We are not qualified to be your judges. We have no law to fit your crime. -- Picard to Kevin, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% We are not so concerned with *what* the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints think, as we are *that* they think. -- Hugh B. Brown said something like this. %% We are now enjoying total mutual interaction in an imaginary hot tub... %% We are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from nonlife to life. -- Hans Moravec (on artificial intelligence) %% We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another ... our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others ... The mind is evil? We have withdrawn the works of our minds from society ... Ability is a selfish evil that leaves no chance to those who are less able? We have withdrawn from the competition and left all chances open to incompetents. The pursuit of wealth is greed, the root of all evil? We do not seek to make fortunes any longer. -- John Galt %% We are on strike. Why should this seem so startling? There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable -- except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do, and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart, this is the mind on strike. -- John Galt %% We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% We are phasing in a "paperless office." We are starting with the restrooms. %% We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. -- Isaac Asimov %% We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur -- Vice President Dan Quayle, September 1990 %% We are restless because of incessant change, but we would be frightened if change were stopped. -- Lyman Lloyd Bryson %% We are riding on a rainbow, its nearly at an end. It was given as a promise, to each and every man. It's a long time since we started, and the days left now are few. It seems the words said long ago were true. Life goes on forever, but it changes like the tide. There's a meaning for existence, no need to run and hide. We are fighting for our freedom, we are searching for a way. And we live in hope of some eternal day. . . We are waiting, we're impatient, we're unfaithful we are true. There's a lesson in the learning, of the different things we do. As it was in the beginning, it shall be at the end. We will come full circle to begin again. Search your heart before you die, is the cost way to high, to explain all the tears, we have caused throughout the years. When everything is finished and we've done all that we can, will we come full circle to begin again? -- Little River Band %% We are simple killers of people and destroyers of property. %% We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% We are sorry. We cannot complete your call as dialed. Please check the number and dial again or ask your operator for assistance. This is a recording. %% We are spirits in the material world. -- The Police %% We are still speaking the same language, but neither of us is hearing the other. -- Hafez Assad, on Syrian relations with Egypt, in "Time", 3 April 1989 %% We are stronger than our skin of flesh and metal, for we carry and share a spectrum of suns and lands that lends us legends as we craft our immortality and interweave our destinies of water and air, leaving shadows that gather color of their own, until they outshine the substance that cast them. %% We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% We are the Knights who say "NI", and we want...a... SHRUBBERY! %% We are the coffee generation, we can't afford cocaine We need a healthy dose to make it through the day Don't Care about nuclear war or poverty or pain We are the coffee generation and life is just a game. %% We are the knights who say "Echi, Echi, Echi, Potang!" %% We are the knights who say "Ni" %% We are the people our parents warned us about and the ones we will warn our children about. %% We are the people our parents warned us about. %% We are the unwilling... led by the unqualified... to do the unnecessary... for the ungrateful... -- GI in Vietnam (1970) %% We are those who do not disconnect the values of our minds from the actions of our bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values -- those who make steel, railroads, and happiness. -- Dagny Taggart %% We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style. %% We are upping our standards ... so up yours. -- Pat Paulsen for President, 1988 %% We are what we are. %% We are what we pretend to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. %% We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -- Aristotle %% We are wise enugh to know we are wise enough not to interfere with the way of a man or another world. -- Kirk, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8 %% We aren't going to remake the world. -- President George Bush, after meeting Li Peng, the butcher of Tiananmen %% We ask advice, but we mean approbation. -- Colton %% We believe men should fight their own battles. Only the weak will die. -- Proconsul Marcus Claudius, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4041.2 %% We believe that the reptiles came from the amphibians by spontaneous generation and study of rocks. %% We believe that to err is human. To blame it on someone else is politics. -- Hubert H. Humphrey %% We boggies are a hairy folk Ever hungry, ever thirsting, Who like to eat until we choke. Never stop till belly's bursting. Loving all like friend and brother, Chewing chop and pork and muttons, And hardly ever eat each other. A merry race of boring gluttons. Sing: GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE. Boggies gather 'round the table, Anything edible, we've got dibs on, Eat as much as you are able. And hope we all die with our bibs on. Gorge yourselves from moon till noon Ever gay, we'll never grow up, (Don't forget your plate and spoon.) Come! And sing and play and throw-up! Sing: GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE! -- Bored of the Rings [The Hobbits National Anthem] %% We both have the same problem--you %% We call our dog Egypt, because in every room he leaves a pyramid. %% We can be Knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% We can defeat gravity. The problem is the paperwork involved. %% We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. -- Kenneth Clark %% We can do no great things; only small things with great love. -- Mother Theresa %% We can embody the truth, but we cannot know it. -- Yates %% We can found no scientific discipline, nor a healthy profession on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and IBM. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra %% We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming. -- Wernher von Braun %% We can predict everything, except the future. %% We can walk our road together, If our goals are all the same. We can run alone and free, If we pursue a different aim. Let the truth of love be lighted. Let the love of truth shine clear. Sensibility, armed with sense and liberty, With the heart and mind united In a single, perfect sphere. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% We can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by. -- Will Rogers %% We cannot allow any race as greedy and corruptible as yours to have free run of the galaxy. -- Norman the android, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% We cannot command nature except by obeying her. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. -- Edward R. Murrow %% We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something -- and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being. -- Ayn Rand %% We cannot put the face of a person on a stamp unless said person is deceased. My suggestion, therefore, is that you drop dead. -- James E. Day, Postmaster General %% We cannot really be for something we don't understand. %% We certainly have a right to exercise control over our own bodies. You'll get no argument from me. -- Riker and Dr. Pulaski, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them. -- Evelyn Waugh %% We chose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% We compound our suffering by victimising each other. -- Athol Fugard, in "The Observer", 1971 %% We confess little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We control the horizontal, we control the vertical, we can make the picture into a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. %% We could be so happy you and me. %% We could do that, but it would be wrong, that's for sure. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% We could really bust some heads, in a spiritual sense of course %% We decided it was night again, so we camped for twenty minutes and drank another six beers at a Young Life campsite. O. C. got into the supervisory adult's sleeping bag and ran around in it. "This is the judgment day and I'm a terrifying apparition," he screamed. Then the heat made O. C. ralph in the bag. -- The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O. C. and Stiggs, National Lampoon, October 1982 %% We dedicate this book to our fellow citizens who, for love of truth, take from their own wants by taxes and gifts, and now and then send forth one of themselves as dedicated servant, to forward the search into the mysteries and marvelous simplicities of this strange and beautiful Universe, Our home. -- Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, "Gravitation" %% We dedicate this to the cunt, The kind the broad-minded guys hunt : All hail to the twat, Willing, thrilling, and hot, That wears peckers down, limp and blunt! %% We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! -- Vroomfondel %% We did it to ourselves, didn't we? My people took the world's steering motors for our starships. Can I help set that right? -- Harkabeeparolyn "The Ringworld Engineers" %% We didn't volunteer for this mission. Kzinti and humans, we make poor slaves. -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% We die only once, and for such a long time. -- Moliere %% We do exactly what we would do if this Q never existed. If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for who we really are. -- Picard, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song if their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens....The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment. -- Johannes Kepler %% We do not colonize. We conquer. We rule. There is no other way for us. -- Rojan, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4657.5 %% We do not feel this patient has any significant physical disease at the present time, and for this reason we have advised her to return to you. %% We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship of the press. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% We do not stumble over mountains, but over molehills. -- Confucius %% We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them as brothers. -- Booker T. Washington %% We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack. %% We don't care enough about nateral fenominum. %% We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company. %% We don't care. We don't have to. We're Telecom... %% We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand. -- James Watt %% We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. -- David Brower %% We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything. %% We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish. -- John Culkin %% We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control. -- Pink Floyd %% We don't need no indirection We don't need no compilation We don't need no flow control We don't need no load control No data typing or declarations No link edit for external bindings Hey! did you leave the lists alone? Hey! did you leave that source alone? Chorus: (Chorus) Oh No. It's just a pure LISP function call. We don't need no side-effecting We don't need no allocation We don't need no flow control We don't need no special-nodes No global variables for execution No dark bit-flipping for debugging Hey! did you leave the args alone? Hey! did you leave those bits alone? (Chorus) (Chorus) -- Another Glitch in the Call [a la Pink Floyd] %% We don't really understand it, so we'll give it to the programmers. %% We don't smoke and we don't chew, and we don't go with girls that do. -- Walter Summers %% We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can *___see* the blinking lights! %% We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called civilization and its discontents. -- Erica Jong, "Fear of Flying" %% We emphasize that we believe in change because we born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it. -- Carl T. Rowen %% We estimate there are millions of planets with intelligent life. We haven't begun to map them. -- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8 %% We exist in a universe which co-exists with a multitude of others in the same physical space. For certain brief periods of time, an area of their space overlaps an area of ours. -- Spock, "The Tholian Web," stardate 5693.2 %% We faced a crisis in our earlier nuclear age. We found the wisdom not to destroy ourselves. -- Kirk, "return to Tomorrow," stardate 4768.3 %% We fight only when there is no other choice. We prefer the ways of peaceful contact. -- Kirk, "Spectre of the Gun," stardate 4385.3 %% We finally get a policy-making body, but we have no policy to make. -- An aide to President George Bush, March 1992 %% We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own. -- James Harvey Robinson %% We found them totally uninterested in medical aid or hospitals. They believe that only the strong should survive. -- McCoy, "Friday's Child," stardate 3497.2 %% We gave him all the regular ones - the time-honoured lies that have done duty up the river with every boating-man for years past - and added seven entirely original ones that we had invented for ourselves, including a really quite likely story, founded, to a certain extent, on an all but true episode, which had actually happened in a modified degree some years ago to friends of ours - a story that a mere child could have believed without injuring itself much. -- Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat" %% We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission %% We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain. -- William Rounseville Alger %% We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld (A word to the wise is -- unnecessary.) %% We got a problem here. In Utah. I thought you fixed that last century! No, not that. Someone found a bug in the physics program. They're getting energy out of nowhere. Lemme check... Oh, *that* was dumb! There, that oughta patch it. %% We got on a bus and asked the driver, "Is this bus on time?" The bus driver answered, "No, but we're on the right road." %% We gotta get out of here while we can, cause gents like us, baby we were born to run. %% We gotta get out of this place, If it's the last thing we ever do. -- The Animals %% We gotta get outta this place! %% We grow small by trying to be great. -- E. Stanley Jones %% We had a doofus on our floor who was a real `sky pilot' (Jesus junkie). He was always trying to convert everybody, lecturing about sin, etc. Being a fundamentalist, he not only believed in The Rapture (where God will come and zap all the good Christians straight to Heaven and leave the riffraff), but believed that its time was near. Early one morning we placed carefully-arranged piles of clothes on the hall floor as if their wearers had suddenly evaporated. We used dry ice and incense to make a Stephen Spielberg fog in the hall, then we blew a very loud Freon horn outside his door, threw some nonelectric flashcubes against the wall, and screamed a lot. When he came out, everybody acted stunned and yelled "What's going on? There was a big light and a noise and those guys just disappeared!! For several minutes, we had him believing he had been left behind with us sinners! %% We had it so bad when I was young, we lived on a white line down the middle of the road. %% We had it tough ... I had to get up at 9 o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work 29 hours down mill, and when we came home our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our grave singing Haleleuia ... -- Monty Python %% We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Huckleberry Finn %% We had time taken away from us, and now it's been given back to us because it's running out. -- Barbara, EDGE OF DESTRUCTION %% We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We have DIFFERENT amounts of HAIR -- %% We have a degree of delight ... in the real misfortunes and pains of others. -- Edmund Burke %% We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated. %% We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a *part* of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a *part* of Europe. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% We have a sluggish economy ... That's why I favor this deficit so much. -- President George Bush %% We have all passed a lot of water since then. -- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer %% We have always fought. We must; we are hunters ... tracking and taking what we need. There are poor planets in the Klingon systems ... we must push outward if we are to survive. -- Mara, the wife of the Klingon Commander, "Day of the Dove," stardate unknown. %% We have among us a class of mammon worshipers, whose one test of conservatism, or radicalism, is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what they call socialism. -- Richard T. Ely (1854-1943) %% We have art that we do not die of the truth. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% We have ears, earther...FOUR OF THEM! %% We have engaged in a very -- a very -- an extraordinarily broad exercise of diplomacy here ... I don't know what -- what it means fully. -- President George Bush %% We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% We have found all life forms in the galaxy are capable of superior development. -- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion," stardate 3211.7 %% We have gathered here today to pay final respects to our honored dead. And yet it should be noted in the midst of our sorrow, this death takes place in the shadow of a new light, the sunrise of a new world, a world that our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish. He did not feel this sacrifice a vain or empty one, and we will not debate his profound wisdom at these proceedings. Of my friend I can only say this, of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most - human. -- Kirk, "The Wrath of Khan," stardate 8130.3 %% We have given him everything we can. -- An aide to President George Bush, on assistance to Gorbachev, prior to the Soviet coup. There is no Marshall. And there is no plan. -- Sergey Plekhanov, Soviet scholar of the US, summer 1989. He is very sensitive to the reality that, in a sense, we could do too much. -- White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, on President George Bush and the tiny amount of aid offered Poland %% We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily: like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamelin marching blindly along behind their Pied Piper. And the result is that today we have achieved, we and the Russians together, in the creation of these devices and their means of delivery, levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding. -- George Kennan (May 19, 1981) %% We have had the reign of the late Avery Brundage, and now we have had eight years of Killanin, which raises the question of whether being an ass is one of the requirements for the job, or whether the job produces that effect on those who hold it. -- National Review %% We have here the latest in primitive technology. %% We have left undone the things we ought to have done, and done the things which we ought not to have done. %% We have lingered long enough on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean. -- Carl Sagan %% We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. -- Tombstone epitaph of two astronomers %% We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked. %% We have no more right to put out discordant states of mind into the lives of those around us and fob them of their sunshine and brightness than we have to enter their houses and steal their silverware. -- Julia Moss Seton %% We have no power to prevent ourselves being born: but we can rectify this error - for it is sometimes an error. When one _does away with_ oneself one does the most estimable things possible: one thereby almost deserves to live. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), "Gotzen-Dammerung" %% We have no scorched earth policy. We have a policy of scorched Communists. -- General Efrain Rios Montt [President of Guatemala], 1982 %% We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% We have not tried to suppress true, legitimate liberty; on the contrary, we have tried to preserve it. We are for liberty, but liberty with order, the kind of liberty which will not threaten the basic principles of our nation, nor threaten its faith and unity. -- Francisco Franco (1892-1975) %% We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have. -- Margaret Mead %% We have only 2 things to worry about: That things will never get back to normal, and that they already have. %% We have phasers; I vote we blast 'em! -- Bailey, "The Corbomite Maneuver," stardate 1514.2 %% We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place. -- John Berryman %% We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation. -- Lily Tomlin %% We have sent the forms which seem to be right for you. %% We have the flu. I don't know if this particular strain has an official name, but if it does, it must be something like "Martian Death Flu". You may have had it yourself. The main symptom is that you wish you had another setting on your electric blanket, up past "HIGH", that said "ELECTROCUTION". Another symptom is that you cease brushing your teeth, because (a) your teeth hurt, and (b) you lack the strength. Midway through the brushing process, you'd have to lie down in front of the sink to rest for a couple of hours, and rivulets of toothpaste foam would dribble sideways out of your mouth, eventually hardening into crusty little toothpaste stalagmites that would bond your head permanently to the bathroom floor, which is how the police would find you. You know the kind of flu I'm talking about. -- Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide" %% We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world - or to make it the last. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% We have the right to survive! Not by killing others. -- Deela and Kirk, "Wink of An Eye," stardate 5710.5 %% We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) %% We have to do more than just elect a new president if we truly want to change this country. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. -- William James %% We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. -- Epictetus %% We have watched American democracy at close hand for many years and we believe few governments are institutionally so susceptible to dictatorship as this one. -- Gerald Johnson %% We have ways of making your kind talk. %% We held a beauty contest in our town once but nobody won. -- Herb Shriner %% We humans are full of unpredictable emotions that logic cannot solve. -- Kirk, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" stardate 2712.4 %% We humans have a streak of barbarism in us -- appalling, but there nevertheless. -- Kirk, "Space Seed," stardate 3141.9 %% We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. -- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) %% We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of. -- George Chapman %% We interrupt this fortune for an important announcement... %% We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and keep step to the music of the Union. -- Rufus Choate %% We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races--by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character. -- Edward Abbey %% We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, but others judge us by what we have already done. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow %% We just joined the civil hair patrol! %% We kill you and you kill us and Allah is the greatest. -- Ayatollah Khomeini (quoted Int. Herald Trib. Jul 1, 1981) %% We kiss, the blood rushes in my veins, ... Candy's eyes. %% We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it. %% We laugh at the Indian philosopher, who to account for the support of the earth, contrived the hypothesis of a huge elephant, and to support the elephant, a huge tortoise. If we will candidly confess the truth, we know as little of the operation of the nerves, as he did of the manner in which the earth is supported: and our hypothesis about animal spirits, or about the tension and vibrations of the nerves, are as like to be true, as his about the support of the earth. His elephant was a hypothesis, and our hypotheses are elephants. Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay. -- Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind", 1764 %% We laugh heartily to see a whole flock of sheep jump because one did so; might not one imagine that superior beings do the same by us, and for exactly the same reason? -- Grenville %% We learn from experience. A man never wakes up his second baby just to see it smile. %% We lie about the truth, that's what ruins us here. And do you know why we lie about the truth? Not because we like to, but because we are scared to death of it. If we looked the truth in the eye nine out of ten of us would run to the graveyard and demand to be buried at once. -- Babbaluche the cobbler %% We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal. -- Edward Abbey %% We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism--a Mongoloid metaphysic. -- Edward Abbey %% We live in a time when automation is ushering in a second industrial revolution. -- Adlai E. Stevenson %% We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek then with our eyes open. -- Jawaharlal Nehru %% We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood. -- Lyndon B. Johnson %% We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless. -- Edward Abbey %% We live our lives in darkness Even though we perceive it as light For death is darkness As we are dark Every place we turn we spread This darkness which gives light To death, and in this we gain True light -- Volume II Elisarien Book of Science Speaker: Celone, King of Elves %% We look for things. Things to make us go. Yeah, so I've heard. -- Grebnedlog and Geordi, "Samaritan Snare", stardate 42779.1 %% We love our little Johnny He's the best little boy in all the world And we wouldn't trade him for anything That's how much we love him. No, we couldn't live without him So that's why, since he died, We keep him safe in our G.E. freezer. He's so good, so well-behaved, Even better than before; Oh, such a wonderful kid he is. Alice and me, we'll never be lonely, Never miss our little Johnny, He'll never grow up and leave us That's why we love him like we do. -- Mr. Mincemeat %% We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% We love your adherence to democratic principle, and to democratic processes. -- Vice President George Bush, toasting Ferdinand Marcos, June 1981. He later said, ``I'll repeat it and stand by it ... We should judge by the record.'' %% We make war that we may live in peace. -- Aristotle %% We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. -- Alan M. Turing (?-1954) %% We may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her cost and finery upon this small speck of Dirt. So, like Travelers into other distant countries, we shall be better able to judge of what's done at home, know how to make a true estimate of, and set its own value upon every thing. We shall be less apt to admire what this World call great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorn'd as well as our own. -- Christaan Huygens %% We may not be able to persuade Hindus that Jesus and not Vishnu should govern their spiritual horizon, nor Moslems that Lord Buddha is at the center of their spiritual universe, nor Hebrews that Mohammed is a major prophet, nor Christians that Shinto best expresses their spiritual concerns, to say nothing of the fact that we may not be able to get Christians to agree among themselves about their relationship to God. But all will agree on a proposition that they possess profound spiritual resources. If, in addition, we can get them to accept the further proposition that whatever form the Deity may have in their own theology, the Deity is not only external, but internal and acts through them, and they themselves give proof or disproof of the Deity in what they do and think; if this further proposition can be accepted, then we come that much closer to a truly religious situation on earth. -- Norman Cousins, from his book "Human Options" %% We may not know much, but one thing's fo' sho': There's things in the cosmos that we cannot know. Shine light on electrons -- you'll cause them to swerve. The act of observing disturbs the observed. Which ruins your test. But then if there's no testing To see if a particle's moving or resting Why try to conjecture? Pure useless endeavor! We know probability -- certainty never. %% We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect their good judgement. %% We may now be nearing the end of our hundred-year belief in Free Lunch. %% We may yet prevail. That's a conceit -- but it's a healthy one. -- Picard, "The Best of Both Worlds," stardate 43989.1 %% We met at the rootbeer stand, she was singing in the band. %% We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis. -- Spock, "The Mark of Gideon," stardate 5423.4 %% We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang in the Smithsonian next January. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% We must be greater than God, for we have to undo His injustice. %% We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it. -- Saul Alinsky %% We must die because we have known them. -- Ptah-hotep (2000 B.C.) %% We must further expressly and exactly establish the point of view, no less necessary in practice, from which war is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means. -- Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) %% We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness. -- Maxwell Maltz %% We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. -- Martin Luther King %% We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided. -- Alexander Hamilton %% We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% We must reform if we would conserve. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) %% We must remember the First Amendment which protects any shrill jackass no matter how self-seeking. -- F. G. Withington %% We must repeat, D E V O. %% We need excellence in public education and if the teachers can't do it, we'll send in a couple of policemen. -- Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia Bulletin, Oct 19, 1973 %% We need never mistake local cloudcover for general darkness. The Atonement saw to that. -- Neal A. Maxwell %% We need to do a tarot reading on chemistry. %% We never desire earnestly what we desire in reason. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated. -- Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges On Writing", 1974 %% We never make assertions, Miss Taggart, that is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell, we show. We do not claim, we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is yours to draw -- we can help you to name it, but not to accept it -- the sight, the knowledge and the acceptance must be yours. -- Hugh Akston, "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand %% We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. %% We often boast that we are never bored, yet we are so conceited that we do not perceive how often we bore others. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We often console ourselves for being unhappy by a certain pleasure in appearing so. %% We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do. %% We once were as you are. Spears and arrows. There came a time when our weapons grew faster than our wisdom, and we almost destroyed ourselves. We learned from this to make a rule during all our travels never to cause the same to happen to other worlds ... just as a man must grow in his own way and his own time. -- Kirk, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8 %% We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones. -- LaRouchefoucauld %% We ought to be very grateful that we have tools. Millions of years ago people did not have them, and home projects were extremely difficult. For example, when a primitive person wanted to put up paneling, he had to drive the little paneling nails into the cave wall with his bare fist, so generally the paneling wound up getting spattered with primitive blood, which isn't really all that bad when you consider how ugly paneling is to begin with. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% We place two copies of PEOPLE magazine in a DARK, HUMID mobile home. 45 minutes later CYNDI LAUPER emerges wearing a BIRD CAGE on her head! %% We prefer to help ourselves. We make mistakes, but we're human -- and maybe that's the word that best explains us. -- Kirk, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% We prefer to speak evil of ourselves than not speak of ourselves at all. %% We presume none sins unless he stands to profit by it. -- The Talmud (Baba Metzia, 5 b.) %% We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We provide family entertainment... but not that kind of family entertainment. %% We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest. -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.) %% We read to say that we have read. %% We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some of our best friends are trying to kill us. %% We sailed on the good ship Venus, My god, you should have seen us With a figurehead Of a whore in bed And the mast an upright penis The captain of the lugger Was known as a filthy bugger Declared unfit To shovel shit From one ship to another The first mate's name was Cooper, By god he was a trooper He jerked and jerked Until he worked Himself into a stupor The cabin boy was chipper, A dandy little nipper He shoved cracked glass Inside his ass And circumcised the skipper The captain's wife was Charlotte, Born and bred a harlot Her thighs at night Were lily white By morning they were scarlet The captain's youngest daughter Slipped into the water Her plaintive squeals Announced that eels Had found her sexual quarter The ship's dog's name was Rover, They turned the poor beast over And ground and ground That faithful hound From Tenerief to Dover %% We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them. -- Thucydides %% We see the opening of an era: it is an era of seeking beyond the confines of our atmosphere; may it be also an era of awakening to the countries of earth. -- Bertrand De Jouvenel %% We seem to be zigzagging because sometimes it's less a matter of a game plan and more a matter of the president's moods. -- A White House official during the Persian Gulf crisis %% We seem to have juxtaposed an impasse here %% We seldom repent talking too little, but very often talking too much. -- Jean de La Bruyere %% We shall find that it is less difficult to hide a thousand guineas than one hole in your coat. -- Colton %% We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries. -- Harry S. Truman %% We shield it [the Vulcan mating rite] with ritual and custom shrouded in antiquity. You humans have no conception. It strips our minds from us. It brings a madness which rips away the veneer of civilization. It is the "pon farr" -- the time of mating. -- Spock, "Amok Time," stardate 3372.7 %% We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years, and justify our existence, on pain of liquidation. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% We should all remember when Burroughs was using Virtual memory it was said to be some kind of technical joke. But later, hah, it was said to be ok. And it was because the word had come down from the mountain. IBM had spoken and the world listened. The world as it used to be. Amen. -- Fred Rump (fr@icdi10.UUCP) %% We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it --and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again--and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas. -- Ronald W. Reagan %% We should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in 'Red Storm Rising'. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% We should forgive our enemies, but only after they've been taken out and shot. %% We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if only words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves. -- John Locke (1632-1704) %% We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% We should pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves. -- Colton %% We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here. -- Edward Abbey %% We show our present joking, giggling race, True joy consists in gravity and grace. -- Garrick %% We sought the mutant due for lynching, Not a trace was there to find. I told the others--saw them flinching-- "The bastard must have read my mind!" %% We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us. -- Edward Abbey %% We spend the first part of our human experience avidly accumulating things and the other half wondering what in the world we're going to do with all the stuff. -- Margret E. Keats %% We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up. -- Phyllis Diller %% We stand for the maintenance of private property.... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Der Fruehrer" %% We start out loving our parents and end up hating them. Sometimes we learn to love them again, but we never forgive them. %% We take cunning for a sinister and crooked wisdom, and certainly there is a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man, not only in point of honesty but in point of ability. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) %% We take drugs very seriously at my house... %% We the Unwilling, lead by the Unknowing, are doing the impossible for the Ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little that we are now qualified to to anything with nothing. %% We the Users, in order to form a more perfect system, establish priorities, ensure connective tranquility, provide for common repairs, promote preventive maintenance, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our processes, do ordain and establish this Software of The Unixed States of America. %% We the unwilling, led by the ungrateful, are doing the impossible. We've done so much, for so long, with so little, that we are now qualified to do something with nothing. %% We think it's much better to entertain people and get medals than to kill them and get medals for that. -- Paul McCartney (c.a. 1965) %% We think of ourselves as the most powerful beings in the universe. It's unsettling to discover that we're wrong. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3210.7 %% We think we are on the right road to improvement because we are making experiments. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% We took some pictures of the girls, but they weren't developed. %% We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed %% We totally deny the allegations, and we're trying to identify the allegators. %% We trained hard -- but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. -- Petronios Arbiter, 66 AD %% We travel much yet prisoners are And close confined to boot We with the swiftest horse keep pace Yet always go on foot. What are we? Spurs %% We tried to pick up the pieces and get away without hurt. %% We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. %% We use an amalgam of mercury in modern dentistry because other metals, by themselves, are not sufficiently malleable to be worked with at the normal temperatures inside the human mouth. But mercury--mercury is just walkin' around, right?!? -- Mike the Dentist %% We used to use an IBM PCjr as a doorstop. (It was replaced by an Atari ST) %% We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes -- we have no wish to find them alike. -- Pascal %% We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate. -- William James %% We want no foreign rulers - fight the metric system. %% We want to create puppets that pull their own strings. -- Ann Marion %% We was playin' the Homestead Grays in the city of Pitchburgh. Josh [Gibson] comes up in the last of the ninth with a man on and us a run behind. Well, he hit one. The Grays waited around and waited around, but finally the empire rules it ain't comin' down. So we win. The next day, we was disputin' the Grays in Philadelphia when here come a ball outta the sky right in the glove of the Grays' center fielder. The empire made the only possible call. "You're out, boy!" he says to Josh. "Yesterday, in Pitchburgh." -- Satchel Paige %% We welcome advice and criticism, and always rush them through the proper channels. (One flush usually does it!) %% We were hungry when we got to Moscow, Soviet. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% We were so poor we couldn't afford a watchdog. If we heard a noise at night, we'd bark ourselves. -- Crazy Jimmy %% We were unanimous - in fact everyone was unanimous. %% We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction. -- Stephen Jay Gould %% We will bury you! -- Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894-1971) %% We will have a planned development and will take people out of the ghettos and give them an opportunity to raise their families in decent surroundings. %% We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem -- how to run a sunbeam through a meter. %% We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 1988 %% We will look into it - by the time the wheel makes a full turn, we assume you will have forgotten about it, too -- Glossary of important business terms %% We will move forward. We will move upward and, yes, we will move onward. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% We will need a computer to tally All the cowboys who scouted our Sally. There were some on her mountains And some on her fountains, And quite a few down in the valley. %% We will occasionally use this arrow notation unless there is danger of no confusion. -- Ronald Graham, "Rudiments of Ramsey Theory" %% We will rediscover a [New York City] river so extravagantly polluted that new life forms will emerge from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights. -- Douglas Adams %% We will, we will rock you. %% We wish to be nothing if not persistent. -- Grebnedlog, "Samaritan Snare", stardate 42779.1 %% We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna And a Sun Myung Moon! -- Maxwell Smart %% We won't have a society if we destroy the environment. -- Margaret Mead %% We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified. -- Aesop (620-560 B.C.) %% We'd like to make a deal with the computer. We promise not to fold, spindle or mutilate if it will stop asking us to sign our name over those little holes in the space marked for signature. %% We'd love to stay and chat but we have to go to the lobby and wait for the limo. -- Spinal Tap %% We'll burn that bridge when we come to it. %% We'll cross out that bridge when we come back to it later. %% We'll cross that bridge when we come back to it later. %% We'll figure it out. -- President George Bush, on how to pay for his $100 billion health-care plan, announced in 1992, which involved giving poor people vouchers to buy private health insurance at some point in the future when it is cheaper, and which was never submitted anyway %% We'll get along fine as soon as you realize I'm God. %% We'll give you piece de resistance and a tour de force %% We'll have solar energy when the power companies develop a sunbeam meter. %% We'll have to make our own luck from now on. -- Louis Wu "Ringworld" %% We'll let the sunshine in and shine on us, because today we're happy and tomorrow we'll be even happier. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, 1988 %% We'll meet down by the giant Exxon sign that brings the fair city light. %% We'll pivot at warp 2 and bring all tubes to bear, Mr. Sulu! %% We'll stoop to whatever is necessary to win. -- A Bush (1992) campaign official %% We're Digital Equipment Corporation ... and you're not. %% We're a most promising species, Mr. Spock, as predators go. Did you know that? I frequently have my doubts. I don't. Not any more. And maybe in a thousand years or so, we'll be able to prove it. -- Kirk and Spock, "Arena," stardate 3046.2 %% We're all going down the same road in different directions. -- Dave Farber %% We're all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine. But when it comes to your job -- that's different. And it always will be different. -- McCoy, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4729.4 %% We're all theme parks. %% We're as similar as two dissimilar things in a pod. %% We're dedicated to our favorite show. %% We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right in his bowl full of jelly. -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts" %% We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism... we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today...our battle is with Satan himself. -- Jerry Falwell %% We're fighting for this woman's honor, which is more than she ever did. -- Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx), in "Duck Soup" %% We're free people. We belong to no one. -- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion," stardate 3259.2 %% We're going to beam them aboard, directly onto the bridge. "But Captain, will they not protest?" Let them. -- Picard and Data, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4 %% We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% We're going to paint Clinton as a man out of control, who can't control his zipper, can't control his wife and can't control his waistline. -- A senior adviser to the 1992 Bush campaign %% We're gonna have a TV party tonight! %% We're happy little Vegemites, As bright as bright can be. We all all enjoy our Vegemite For breakfast, lunch and tea. %% We're here for a good time, not a long time ! %% We're here to give you a computer, not a religion. -- attributed to Bob Pariseau, at the introduction of the Amiga %% We're immortal, we gods. The Earth changed. Your fathers changed. They turned away, until we were only memories. A god cannot survive as a memory. We need love, admiration, worship, as you need food. -- Apollo, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% We're in Florida. -- Vice President Dan Quayle explaining why he had just purchased four peaches (and no citrus fruits -- for which Florida is famous) at a Public supermarket in Oakland Park, Florida. Georgia (which IS famous for peaches) did not gain from the transaction, however; the peaches were from Chile. (The Sunstenial) %% We're living in a golden age. All you need is gold. -- D. W. Robertson %% We're looking for a few good men. -- B. Cassidy %% We're lost, but we're making good time. %% We're not in the eighth dimension, we're over New Jersey! %% We're only in it for the volume. -- Black Sabbath %% We're the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives. We're tied together beyond any untying. Man or woman, it makes no difference. We're human. We couldn't escape from each other even if we wanted to -- that's how you do it, Lieutenant! By remembering who and what you are! A bit of flesh and blood afloat in a universe without end. And the only thing that's truly yours is the rest of humanity. That's where your duty lies! -- Kirk, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% We've all heard about the woman who married a Field Service engineer, but divorced him after one day because he'd done nothing on their wedding night but promise to have it up in 15 minutes. What few people know is that the poor man was in the bathroom all night, masturbating furiously, saying "I don't understand, it passes all the diagnostics!" %% We've already established what you are, ma'am. Now we're just haggling over the price. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% We've come a long way in five thousand years. But you're still of the same nature. -- Kirk and Apollo, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% We've each learned to be delighted with what we are. -- Kirk, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.4 %% We've got an unbeatable team! -- Sauron %% We've got nothing better to do, 'cept watch TV and have a couple of brew. %% We've got them eating out of our laps. %% We've had bad luck with our kids -- they've all grown up. -- Christopher Morley %% We've just received the results of a survey conducted to ascertain the various reasons men get out of bed in the middle of the night. According to the report, 2% are motivated by a desire to visit the bathroom, and 3% have an urge to raid the refrigerator. The other 95% get up to go home. %% We've sent a man to the moon, and that's 29,000 miles away. The center of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week, but for some reason nobody's ever done it. -- Andy Rooney %% We've tried each spinning space mote and reckoned its true worth: take us back again to the homes of men on the cool, green hills of Earth. The arching sky is calling spacemen back to their trade. All hands! Standby! Free falling! And the lights below us fade. Out ride the sons of Terra, far drives the thundering jet, up leaps the race of earthmen, out, far, and onward yet-- We pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth; let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies and the cool, green hills of Earth. -- Robert A. Heinlein (1941) %% We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. %% Weak arguments are often thrust before my path; but although they are most unsubstantial, it is not easy to destroy them. There is not a more difficult feat known than to cut through a cushion than with a sword. -- Richard Whately (1787-1863) %% Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% Weaknesses: Certain primal powers of Tyrant Woman wherewith she holds dominion over the male of the species, binding him to the service of her will, and paralyzing his rebellious energies. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it. -- Poor Richard %% Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace--a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for. -- Edward Abbey %% Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. %% Wear armor, going naked seems to offend public decency in here. %% Wear me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion cruel as the grave; it blazes up like blazing fire, fiercer than any flame. -- Song of Solomon 8:6 (NEB) %% Wear-Out Bits: n. A hypothetical (and sought after) mechanism by which software houses could charge for software preventive maintenance, and thus make a fortune. The idea is that some instructions in the machine would become softwarily unreliable after N executions. However, having software specialists come over to a shop and 'brush the wear-out bits' every so often would prevent this from happening. %% Webster's Law: The damage rarely exceeds the deductible. %% Wed in haste, repent in leisure. %% Wedding March: 19th Century, England The traditional church wedding features two bridal marches, by two different classical composers. The bride walks down the aisle to the majestic, moderately paced music of the "Bridal Chorus" from Richard Wagner's 1848 opera "Lohengrin. The newlyweds exit to the more jubilant, upbeat strains of the "Wedding March" from Felix Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The custom dates back to the royal marriage, in 1858, of Victoria, princess of Great Britain, and Empress of Germany, to Prince Frederick William of Prussia. Victoria, eldest daughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, selected the music herself. A patron of the arts, she valued the works of Mendelssohn and practically venerated those of Wagner. Given the British penchant for copying the monarchy, soon brides throughout the Isles, nobility and commoners alike, were marching to Victoria's drummer, establishing a Western wedding tradition. %% Wedding Ring: A tourniquet worn on the left hand to stop circulation. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Wedding is destiny, and hanging likewise. -- John Heywood %% Weed -- a plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Weed's Axiom: Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss the one in which you are least interested and say nothing about the other. %% Weekend, where are you? %% Weekends were made for programming. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% Weenix: /wee'niks/ [ITS] n. A derogatory term for {{UNIX}}, derived from {UNIX weenie}. According to one noted ex-ITSer, it is "the operating system preferred by Unix Weenies: typified by poor modularity, poor reliability, hard file deletion, no file version numbers, case sensitivity everywhere, and users who believe that these are all advantages". Some ITS fans behave as though they believe UNIX stole a future that rightfully belonged to them. See {{ITS}}, sense 2. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Weep not that the world changes -- did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep. -- William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) %% Weeping, I wake; waking, I weep, I weep. %% Weight Loss Scandal: Proctologist Removes Network Anchorman's Hand. %% Weinberg's First Law: Progress is made on alternate Fridays. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #1: Standards aren't standard. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #2: There's always one more bug, even after that one is removed. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #3: Anything that can happen will happen, unless your test plan provides for it to happen. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #4: When someone points a finger at some part of the code, look somewhere else for the trouble - most likely where the other three fingers are pointing. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #5: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but management won't pay a penny for it. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #6: Specifications, design, and coding can be done at any speed - only debugging takes time. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #7: There is no code so big, twisted, or complex that maintenance can't make it worse. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #8: Everyone talks about documentation, but nobody ever does anything about it. %% Weinberg's Programming Principle #9: You may run short of hardware, but you'll never run short of hardware salespeople. %% Weinberg, as a young grocery clerk, advised the grocery manager to get rid of rutabagas which nobody every bought. He did so. "Well, kid, that was a great idea," said the manager. Then he paused and asked: "NOW what's the least popular vegetable?" %% Weiner's Law of Libraries: There are no answers, only cross references. %% Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends! We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside! There behind the glass there's a real blade of grass, Be careful as you pass, move along, move along. Come inside, the show's about to start, Guaranteed to blow your head apart. Rest assured, you'll get your money's worth, Greatest show, in heaven, hell or earth! You gotta see the show! It's a dynamo! You gotta see the show! It's rock 'n' roll! -- ELP, "Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression, Part 2)" %% Welcome thy neighbor into thy fallout shelter. He'll come in handy if you run out of food. -- Dean McLaughlin %% Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions? %% Welcome to Dungeon! Dungeon is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortal man. Hardened adventurers have run screaming from the terrors contained within. In Dungeon, the intrepid explorer delves into the forgotten secrets of a lost labyrinth deep in the bowels of the earth, searching for vast treasures long hidden from prying eyes, treasures guarded by fearsome monsters and diabolical traps! No DECsystem should be without one! %% Welcome to Dungeon! You are near a large dungeon, which is reputed to contain vast quantities of treasure. Naturally, you wish to acquire some of it. In order to do so, you must of course remove it from the dungeon. To receive full credit for it, you must deposit it safely in the trophy case in the living room of the house. %% Welcome to Dungeon. This version created 10-SEP-78. %% Welcome to Earthsea! You are in the land of Earthsea, a large group of islands surrounded by a tremendous sea on all sides. Scattered over the islands are large quantities of treasure, as well as other useful objects. Not all of the treasures will be easy to obtain. The object of the game is not only to acquire as many desirable items as possible, but also to deposit them in the proper places. In order to keep track of how well you are doing, a score is kept. You may receive points for finding an object, more points for holding on to it, and the maximum number if you figure out where to put it. Many of the not-so-valuable objects will be essential in obtaining the valuable ones. Earthsea is a CFS (Compter Fantasy Simulation) game in the same tradition as Adventure or Zork. If you are unfamiliar with either Adventure or Zork, it would be best to attempt to play them before assaying Earthsea, as it is considerably more complex. The basic scenario is based on Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea Trilogy. Much of the philosophy behind the puzzles stems from these books as well. Earthsea is an attempt at a somewhat more serious CFS game than its predecessors. Many of the puzzles are adapted from literary sources. No reading is essential to solve any of the puzzles, but it can't hurt. For a complete bibliography, use the 'BIBLIO' command. Information about other commands can be found using 'INFO'. Good luck. Earthsea was originally conceived by Ned Freed, Mark Lipton, and David Abe. Most of the code was written by Mark Lipton, Ned Freed, and Kevin Carosso. Other implementors were Randy Saunders and Cynthia Abbott. %% Welcome to Fort Knox! %% Welcome to Fortune Blackmail!! This is the first of a series of revelations which could add up to a divorce, premature retirement and possible criminal proceedings for a company vice-president in Langley Virginia. So, Mr. S*****, $10,000 please to stop us from revealing: 1: Whose shoulders you were sitting on. 2: What you were doing. 3: The names of the three people involved. 4: The youth organization to which they belonged. 5: The shop where you bought the equipment. %% Welcome to Galorndon Core, where no good deed goes unpunished. -- Geordi, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2 %% Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the men are good-looking, the women are strong, and the children are above-average. %% Welcome to New York. Now, go home. %% Welcome to New Zealand, set your watch back 20 years. %% Welcome to Ronald Reagan's Bonzo room! %% Welcome to UNIX! Enjoy your session! Have a great time! Note the use of exclamation points! They are a very effective method for demonstrating excitement, and can also spice up an otherwise plain-looking sentence! However, there are drawbacks! Too much unnecessary exclaiming can lead to a reduction in the effect that an exclamation point has on the reader! For example, the sentence Jane went to the store to buy bread should only be ended with an exclamation point if there is something sensational about her going to the store, for example, if Jane is a cocker spaniel or if Jane is on a diet that doesn't allow bread or if Jane doesn't exist for some reason! See how easy it is?! Proper control of exclamation points can add new meaning to your life! Call now to receive my free pamphlet, "The Wonder and Mystery of the Exclamation Point!"! Enclose fifteen(!) dollars for postage and handling! Operators are standing by! (Which is pretty amazing, because they're all cocker spaniels!) %% Welcome to VAX/VMS V4.0 %% Welcome to beautiful downtown Maynard, minicomputer capitol of the world. %% Welcome to boggle - do you want instructions? D G G O O Y A N A D B T K I S P Enter words: > %% Welcome to the 24th century. -- Picard, "The Neutral Zone", stardate 41986.0 %% Welcome to the Graveyard! %% Welcome to the Machine %% Welcome to the Swamp! %% Welcome to the Zoo! %% Welcome to the bridge, Mr. LaForge. -- Picard, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1 %% Welcome to the future for it will soon be the past. Respect the past, for it was once all that was humanly possible. %% Welcome to the jungle. Please obey our laws. %% Welders do it with hot rods. %% Well I know that you're in love with him, cause I saw you dancing in the gym, you both kicked off your shoes, man I dig those rhythm and blues %% Well I looked at my watch and it said a quarter to five, The headline screamed that I was still alive, I couldn't understand it, I thought I died last night. I dreamed I'd been in a border town, In a little cantina that the boys had found, I was desperate to dance, just to dig the local sounds. When along came a senorita, She looked so good that I had to meet her, I was ready to approach her with my English charm, When her brass knuckled boyfriend grabbed me by the arm, And he said, grow some funk of your own, amigo, Grow some funk of your own. We no like to with the gringo fight, But there might be a death in Mexico tonite. ... Take my advice, take the next flight, And grow some funk, grow your funk at home. -- Elton John, "Grow Some Funk of Your Own" %% Well I may not be a new Messiah, but I'm close enough for rock and roll. -- 38 special %% Well I was seeing this psychiatrist for a while, and in one corner of the room there was a window, and in the other corner was a mirror, and in still another corner was the chair that I sat in. By looking at subtle movements of my eyes, she could tell whether I was looking at her, or at mirror, or out the window. And I said one day, "Hey look at that!." And, not realizing that I was looking out the window, she said, "Look at what?" It was then that I realized that I no longer needed to see her because we saw things from totally different points of view. %% Well I was sitting in my room thinking the other day and my mom came in and said "Mike, Mike." and I guess I didn't hear her 'cuz then she started screaming "MIKE! MIKE!" and I said "WHAT? WHAT?" and she said "What's the matter with you? You're on drugs!" And I said "No Mom, I'm not on drugs. I'm just thinking." And she said "Normal people don't act that way. YOU'RE ON DRUGS!" So I said "No Mom, I'm OK. Why don't you get me a Pepsi? And she wouldn't do it! Just one Pepsi! Just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me! %% Well I was walking along, minding my business, When out of that orange colored sky, Crash, Bam, Alakazam, I got a look at you. %% Well I'm goin' out west, where I belong. Where the days are short and the night are long. Well they'll walk, and I'll walk. They'll twist, and I'll twist. They'll shimmy, and I'll shimmy. They'll fly, and I'll fly. We'll be out there havin' fun - in the warm California sun. %% Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand why she walked like a woman but talked like a man... %% Well I'ved rammed through all windows and I've broken all your doors. %% Well begun is half done. -- Aristotle %% 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." %% Well cover me in egg & flour and bake me for 14 minutes %% Well diggers do it in a hole. %% Well don't you know about the bird, well everyone knows that the Bird is the word. %% Well done is better than well said. %% Well done. The boat is repaired. %% Well if she wants to see me, you can tell her that I'm easily found. %% Well now some folks are born into the good life and other folks get it anyway anyhow. %% Well now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?" -- Lewis Carroll %% Well now, the shark could eat you ... or you could eat the shark. %% Well show a little faith in the night, you ain't a beauty but yeah you're alright. %% Well thaaaaaaat's okay. %% Well the maximum lawman run down Flamingo, chasing the rat and the barefoot girl %% Well they're still racing out at the fairgrounds, but the blood it never burned in their veins. %% Well troubles. We've got some Captain, it seems that a certain woman both wealthy and beautiful now thinks that she's going to marry me. -- Riker, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% Well we found the things we loved crushed and dying in the end. %% Well what? %% Well, FOO, BAR, and BLETCH to you too! %% Well, God gave me a bust. What am I supposed to do with it? -- Martha Mitchell %% Well, I don't know where they come from but they sure do come, I hope they comin' for me! And I don't know how they do it but they sure do it good, I hope they doin' it for free! They give me cat scratch fever... cat scratch fever! First time that I got it I was just ten years old, Got it from the kitty next door... I went to see the doctor and he gave me the cure, I think I got it some more! Got a bad scratch fever... -- Ted Nugent, "Cat Scratch Fever" %% Well, I have seen a king and queen, a beggar falling at my feet They all must see the same sad dreams at night Futility and senseless war, pit the rich against the poor For causes buried long before the fight %% Well, I went to a party, and what did they do? They took off their socks and they took off their shoes. They took off their shirts, and they took off their pants, I had a hunch, we weren't gonna dance. Everybody, everbody's ass was bare, No bras left, just a queer over there. But the whole damn thing didn't faze me a bit; I just jumped on the pile and grabbed some tit. My baby's not a sports fan, But she plays with balls whenever she can. 'Cause her favorite sport you see, Is playing tonsil hockey. [chorus] Eat, bite, fuck, suck, gobble, nibble, chew; Nipple, bosom, hair pie, finger fuck, screw. Moose piss, cat pud, orangutan tit; Sheep pussy, camel crack, pig-lie-in-shit. (AH! Fuck!) (AH! Fuck!) (AH! Fuck!) (AH! Fuck!) (AH! Fuck!) (AH! Fuck!) (AH! Fuck!) (AH! Fuck!) !!!!! -- Doctor Dirty, "The Eat-Bite Song" %% Well, I would -- if they realized that we -- again if -- if we led them back to that stalemate only because that our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive that they couldn't afford it, that it would hold them off. -- Ronald W. Reagan when asked if nuclear war could be limited to tactical weapons %% Well, I'd left home just a week before, and I'd never ever kissed a woman before, but Lola smiled and took me by the hand, and said 'Little boy, gonna make you a man!' Well, I'm not the world's most masculine man, but I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man and so's Lola. La, la, la, la-Lola...la, la, la, la-Lola . . . Lola. -- The Kinks %% Well, I'm INVISIBLE AGAIN.. I might as well pay a visit to the LADIES ROOM... %% Well, I'm a classic ANAL RETENTIVE!! And I'm looking for a way to VICARIOUSLY experience some reason to LIVE!! %% Well, Jim, I'm not much of an actor either. %% Well, O.K. I'll compromise with my principles because of EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR! %% Well, actually, I don't mind going to weddings or anything, as long as they're not my own, I show up, but uh, I've always kinda been partial to callin' myself up on the phone, asking myself out, y'know, yeah, one thing about it, you're always around. Yeah, I know, yeah, you ask yourself out, y'know, some class joint somewhere, the Burrito King, or somethin', y'know, well, I ain't cheap y'know. Take yourself out for a coupla drinks, mebbe, then you eat, some provocative conversation on the way home, and uh, park in front of the house, y'know, and you, oh yeah, you smoo with yourself, put a little nice music on, mebbe you put on like, uh, y'know, like shoppin' music, something that's not too interruptive, y'know, and then uh, y'know, slide over real nice, and say, "Oh, I think you have something in your eye", well, maybe it's not that romantic with you, but I don't, y'know, I get into it, y'know, I take myself up to the porch, and uh, take myself inside, maybe, oh, I might get a little something in a brandy snifter, "Would you like to listen to some of my back records, I got something here...", well, usually, about two-thirty in the morning, you've ended up takin' advantage of yourself, and there ain't no way around that, y'know, yeah, makin' the scene with a magazine, ain't no way around it. I'll confess, y'know, I'm no different, y'know, I'm not weird about it or anything, I don't tie myself up first, I just, I just kinda spend a little time with myself. -- Tom Waits, "Nighthawks at the Diner" %% Well, and let me make this...perfectly clear, I honestly believe, in my heart, that I am not a crook, or if I am, I don't remember it, which is the same thing. %% Well, are you going to just sit there? Get working, quit wasting company time! %% Well, didja wake up grouchy or did you let her sleep? %% Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain. Fancy giving money to the Government! Nobody will see the stuff again. Well, they've no idea what money's for -- Ten to one they'll start another war. I've heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor'! Fancy giving money to the Government! -- A. P. Herbert %% Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best, Excitable boy, they all said! And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest, Excitable boy, they all said! Well, he's just an excitable boy. He took Sally Tompkins to the junior prom, Excitable boy, they all said! Then he raped her and killed her, then he took her home, Excitable boy, they all said! Well, he's just an excitable boy. After ten long years, they let him out of the home Excitable boy, they all said! And he dug up her grave, made a cage of her bones, Excitable boy, they all said! Well, he's just an excitable boy. -- Warren Zevon, "Excitable Boy" %% Well, hello, ENTERPRISE. Welcome. I hope you have a lot of pretty boys on board because I'm willing - and waiting. In fact we're going to have a real blowout here. -- woman, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% Well, here I am in AMERICA.. I LIKE it. I HATE it. I LIKE it. I HATE it. I LIKE it. I HATE it. I LIKE it. I HATE it. I LIKE ... EMOTIONS are SWEEPING over me!! %% Well, here it is, 1983, so it won't be long before you start reading a lot of boring stories about people like Vance Hartke. Hartke is a governor or mayor or something from one of the flatter states, and the reason you'll be reading about him is that he's one of the 50 top contenders for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. These men will spend the next 18 months going around the country engaging in the most degrading activities imaginable, such as wearing idiot hats and appearing on "Meet the Press". "Meet the Press" is one of those Sunday morning public interest shows that the public is not the least bit interested in. It features a panel of reporters who ask questions of a guest politician, who wins an Amana home freezer if he can get through the entire show without answering a single question ... -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics" %% Well, if you can't believe what you read in a comic book, what *can* you believe?! -- Bullwinkle J. Moose [Jay Ward] %% Well, it looks as if the top part fell on the bottom part. -- Vice President Dan Quayle referring to the collapsed section of the 880 freeway after the San Francisco earthquake of 1989. [this may be a joke; the source is unclear. but it's still funny] %% Well, it's better than being Professor of Floating Point! -- R. William Gosper %% Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it -- and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each tress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, moldings, false arches, false windows ... Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the others is in the audience. -- Howard Roark %% Well, my daddy left home when I was three, And he didn't leave much for Ma and me, Just and old guitar an'a empty bottle of booze. Now I don't blame him 'cause he ran and hid, But the meanest thing that he ever did, Was before he left he went and named me Sue. ... But I made me a vow to the moon and the stars, I'd search the honkey tonks and the bars, And kill the man that give me that awful name. It was Gatlinburg in mid-July, I'd just hit town and my throat was dry, Thought I'd stop and have myself a brew, At an old saloon on a street of mud, Sitting at a table, dealing stud, Sat that dirty (bleep) that name me Sue. ... Now, I knew that snake was my own sweet Dad, From a wornout picture that my Mother had, And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye... -- Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Sue" %% 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. On a PDP-11, life should be a breeze, But with VAXen in the house even magnetic tapes would freeze. Now you might think that unlike VAXen I'd know who I abuse, I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues. -- Core Dumped Blues %% Well, pluck me naked as a scalded chicken! %% Well, see, I was out with this chick last night, and we were in bed, and she groaned to me, "Give me nine inches, and make it hurt!" So, I fucked her twice and slapped her. %% Well, see, Joyce, there we were, trapped in the elevator. Now, I had my tennis racquet and the goldfish; she was holding the Crisco. Surely you can imagine how one thing naturally led to another! %% Well, sometimes, anyway. -- The Editor %% Well, that's what happens when cousins marry. %% Well, the girls can't stand her 'cause she walks, looks and drives like an ace, now. %% Well, the handwriting is on the floor. -- Joe E. Lewis %% Well, the stage was set the sun was sinking low down, Cause they came to town to face another showdown. The lawmen cleared the people from the streets - All you blood-thirsty bystanders, will you try and find your seats. %% Well, there was this tiger, who woke up one morning, and just felt great (yes, just like Tony the Tiger: GREAAAAAAT). Anyway, he just felt so good, he went out and cornered a small monkey and roared at him: "WHO IS THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL THE JUNGLE ANIMALS?" And this poor quaking little monkey replied: "You are of course, no one is mightier than you." A little while later this tiger confronts a deer, and just bellows out: "WHO IS THE GREATEST AND STRONGEST OF ALL THE JUNGLE ANIMALS?" The deer is shaking so hard it can barely speak, but manages to stammer: "Oh great tiger, you are by far the mightiest animal in the jungle." The tiger, being on a roll, swaggered, up to an elephant that was quietly munching on some weeds, and roared at the top of his voice: "WHO IS THE MIGHTIEST OF ALL THE ANIMALS IN THE JUNGLE?" Well, this elephant grabs the tiger with his trunk, picks him up, slams him down; picks him up again, and shakes him until the tiger is just a blur of orange and black; and finally throws him violently into a nearby tree. The tiger staggers to his feet and looks at the elephant and says: "Man, just because you don't know the answer, you don't have to get so pissed." %% Well, there's been dramatic progress. -- President George Bush, three weeks before death squads killed six priests in El Salvador %% Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets he probably didn't, like a teaspoon and an open mind. -- Doctor, CREATURE FROM THE PIT %% Well, we won't be inviting these Romulans to our party will we? No. That would not be...appropriate. -- Sonny and Data, "The Neutral Zone", stardate 41986.0 %% Well, we'll really have a party, but we've gotta post a guard outside. -- Eddie Cochran, "Come On Everybody" %% Well, we're big rock singers, We got golden fingers, And we're loved everywhere we go, We sing about beauty, and we sing about truth, At ten thousand dollars a show. We take all kinds of pills to give us all kinds of thrills, But the thrill we've never known, Is the thrill that'll get you, when you get your picture, On the cover of the Rolling Stone. -- Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show [As a note, they eventually DID make the cover of RS. Ed.] %% Well, why don't you just pander to my medieval, old-fashioned superstitions and take them for me. After all, it would save me having to put make-up on and a mask and dance around a fire in order to get rid of the evil spirits. -- Barbara, THE WEB PLANET %% Well, you got your mules and you got your racehorses, and you can kick a mule in the ass all you want, and he's still not gonna be a racehorse. -- Billy Martin, "Esquire", May 1984 %% Well, you know when you're rocking in a rocking chair, and you go so far that you almost fall over backwards, but at the last instant you catch yourself? That's how I feel all the time. -- Steve Wright %% Well, you really blew it. You have managed to wound yourself. Good going! %% Well, you really did it that time. Is suicide painless? %% Well, you see there was this neighborhood that had a Catholic Priest, a Protestant Minister, and a Rabbi who lived next door to each other. One day the Priest went out and bought a new car, and the Minister and Rabbi, not to be outdone, did the same. The next day the Priest went out and blessed his car. The Protestant Minister hired a crane and baptized his car in a swimming pool. The Rabbi, after thinking a bit, got a hacksaw and cut three inches off the end of his tail pipe. %% Well, you seem to have been brushing your teeth with some sort of glue. As a result, your mouth gets glued together with your nose, and you die of respiratory failure. %% Well-timed silence has more eloquence than speech. %% Wendy let me in, I wanna be your friend, I wanna guard your dreams and visions. %% Wendy this trap rips the bones from my back, is's a death trap it's a suicide rap. %% Wer zuletzt lacht, lacht am besten. (He who laughs last laughs best.) %% Were I to use the wits the good Spirit gave me, then I would say this lady cannot exist--for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes. -- Magnifico Giganticus (aka the Mule) %% Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as a duchess. -- Dr. Johnson %% Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin. -- F. M. Colby, "Imaginary Obligations" %% Were there fewer fools, knaves would starve. -- Anonymous %% Were these parsnips CORRECTLY MARINATED in TACO SAUCE? %% Were we as eloquent as angels, yet should we please some men and some women much more by listening than by talking. -- Colton %% Weren't those a birthday present from Dr. McCoy? And they will be again, that's the beauty of it. -- Spock & Kirk, "The Voyage Home," stardate 8390 %% Wernher van Braun settled for a V-2 when he coulda had a V-8. %% Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. %% Westheimer's Time Estimation Rule: Estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by 2, add 3, and change the unit of measure to the next higher unit. %% Wethern's Law: Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. %% Wethir, the worst spell of weather we've ad around here in years. %% Whadda ya want for nothin'? A rrrrrrubber biscuit? %% Wharbat darbid yarbou sarbay? %% What Congress means by ethics is best explained by the tailor's story: "Suppose I sell a suit to a young man for $200. He tells me that his family is footing the bill and that if I give him a receipt for $400 to give to his parents, he will pay me $100 on the side. The question of ethics is: Do I keep the extra $100 myself, or do I tell my partner and split it with him?" %% What GOOD is a CARDBOARD suitcase ANYWAY? %% What I do, first thing [in the morning], is I hop into the shower stall. Then I hop right back out, because when I hopped in I landed barefoot right on top of See Threepio, a little plastic robot character from "Star Wars" whom my son, Robert, likes to pull the legs off of while he showers. Then I hop right back into the stall because our dog, Earnest, who has been alone in the basement all night building up powerful dog emotions, has come bounding and quivering into the bathroom and wants to greet me with 60 or 70 thousand playful nips, any one of which -- bear in mind that I am naked and, without my contact lenses, essentially blind -- could result in the kind of injury where you have to learn a whole new part if you want to sing the "Messiah", if you get my drift. Then I hop right back out, because Robert, with that uncanny sixth sense some children have -- you cannot teach it; they either have it or they don't -- has chosen exactly that moment to flush one of the toilets. Perhaps several of them. -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face" %% What I have done - I had to do. But at what cost? Your ship? Your son? If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul. -- Kirk & Sarek, "The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% What I like about Clive Is that he is no longer alive. There is a great deal to be said For being dead. -- Edmund Clerihew Bentley, "Biography for Beginners" %% What I like is when you're looking and thinking and looking and thinking... and suddenly you wake up. -- Hobbes %% What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word QUALITY cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate, and direct. -- Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" %% What I need is a MATURE RELATIONSHIP with a FLOPPY DISK... %% What I said back then -- well, it's hard to find. Number one, I didn't say it. -- George Bush, on calling Reagan's policies ``voodoo economics'' during the 1980 primaries. NBC rebroadcast the tape %% What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty- sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrifically witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties. -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!" %% What I want is all of the power and none of the responsibility. %% What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously. -- William K. Zinsser %% What I want to find out is -- do parrots know much about Astro-Turf? %% What I've enjoyed most about my climb to the top is all the people I've got to step on. %% What Is This? %% What PROGRAM are they watching? %% What UNIVERSE is this, please?? %% What a COINCIDENCE! I'm an authorized "SNOOTS OF THE STARS" dealer!! %% What a big gap there is between advice and help %% What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self. -- Helen Keller %% What a handsome race. -- Worf about the Antedians, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% What a horrible way to die. -- Worf referring to dying while sleeping, "The Royale", stardate 42625.4 %% What a magnificent head! -- Dr. Mehendri Solon, BRAIN OF MORBIUS %% What a man can imagine or conceive in his mind he can accomplish. Impossibilities are possible as thinking men make them so. -- Henry J. Kaiser %% What a man needs in gardening is a cast iron back, with a hinge in it. -- Charles Dudley Warner %% What a new face courage puts on everything! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god; the beauty of the world--the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? -- William Shakespeare %% What a pity that the only way to heaven is in a hearse! -- Stanislaw J. Lec %% What a pity, that you cannot read it! %% What a quiche-eater you are! %% What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play. -- WOP, "War Games" %% What a terrible thing it is to loose one's mind, or not to have a mind as being very wasteful. How true that is. -dan quayle, trying to paraphrase NAACP motto, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." %% What a terrible way to die [Lt. D'Amato by having every cell disrupted]. There are no good ways. -- Sulu and Kirk, "That Which Survives," stardate unknown %% What a toad you are! %% What a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind. How true it is. -- J. Danforth Quayle, addressing the United Negro College Fund, quoted in "Time", 26 June 1989 %% What a wonderful world it is that has girls in it! %% What always succeeds? A Budgie with no teeth. %% What an artist dies with me! -- Nero %% What animal doesn't play fair? Cheetah %% What ardently we wish we soon believe. -- Young %% What are called inspirational books, like Gibran's "The Prophet" or Bach's "Seagull", seem to have been strained through a bowl of fish-eye tapioca. -- Edward Abbey %% What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease. -- Bliss Carman %% What are fears but voices airy? Whispering harm where harm is not, And deluding the unwary Till the fatal bolt is shot! -- Wordsworth %% What are friends for? -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% What are imitation rhinestones? -- CT Hart %% What are most of the histories of the world, but lies? Lies immortalized and consigned offer as a perpetual abuse and a flaw upon prosperity. -- South %% What are our schools for if not indoctrination against Communism? -- Richard Milhouse Nixon %% What are the odds in such absolute duplication of life forms in another galaxy? The chances are very much against it. -- Kirk and Spock, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4657.5 %% What are the three most difficult years for an Edmontonian? Second Grade %% What are these bread crumbs doing in the water bottle? %% What are they doing? "It's called flirting." They seem to be communicating telepathically. "They're thinking the same thing, if that's what you mean." Guinan, is the joining of hands a symbolic act for humans? "It shows affection. Humans like to touch each other. They start with the hands, and go from there." He's biting that female! "No, he's not biting her. They're pressing lips together, it's called kissing." Why are they leaving? "Lal, there are some things your father's just going to have to explain to you when he thinks you're ready." -- Lal and Guinan, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% What are you doing?!? The message is over,GO AWAY! %% What are you looking at? "I was considering the possibility that you are telling the truth...that you really are human." It's the ghastly truth, Mr. Data. I can now stub my toe with the best of them. "An irony. It means that you have achieved in disgrace, what I have always aspired to be." -- Q and Data, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% What are you staring at? %% What are you staring at? Have you never seen a woman before? I thought I had. -- Brenna O'Dell and Riker, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% What are you trying to do? Guess her weight? %% What at first glance appeared to be a sword of stone, is revealed upon closer study to be an ancient artifact which has been encrusted in a stony material over the centuries. %% What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? -- Aldo Leopold %% What awful irony is this? We are as gods, but know it not. %% What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948 %% What can a pigeon do that a west Texas oil man can't do anymore? A pigeon can still make a deposit on a new Mercedes. %% What can you break more easily with a whisper than with a hammer? Secret %% What can you do for me? %% What can you use used tampons for? Tea bags for vampires. %% What care I how time advances: I am drinking ale today. %% What causes the mysterious death of everyone? %% What color is a chameleon on a mirror? %% What color is a hiccup? Burple. %% What could possibly go wrong? %% What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are notn warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms!" -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1787 %% What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1958 %% What creatures of habit we are. This morning, without thinking, half asleep, I put $100 on my pillow. That's not so bad, no one would worry about it, but my wife, half asleep, without thinking, gave me $20 change. %% What did Ben Johnson say after being accused of taking steroids. "Stereo? Hey, mon, I didn't take no stereo." %% What did Hellen Keller call her dog? Ooorrooorror (make a strange, unintelligible sound here...) %% What did I do wrong? -- Lear, Rex %% What did Jesus say to the headwaiter at the Last Supper? "Separate checks, please." -- Edward Abbey %% What did Jesus say when he was hanging on the cross ? "I can see my house from here !" %% What did Mickey Mouse get for Christmas? A Dan Quayle watch. -- heard from a Mike Dukakis field worker %% What did one sand dune say to the other sand dune? How ya dune? What did the bean say to the sand dune? How ya been dune? %% What did the Provo river say when the BYU coed jumped in? I'll be dammed! %% What did the WIMP interface say to the new user when he asked for help? Can you point me in the right direction? %% What did the centurion say to Jesus when he fell with the cross the third time? "Once more, buddy, and you're out of the parade!" %% What did the colliding particle say to the other particle while under a temperature gradient? Oh, I'm sorry! (Soret) %% What did the crow sit on the telephone wire? He wanted to make a long distance cawl... %% What did the cup of coffee say to the man? Let me shake your hand. %% What did the freshman computer science major say when he was told that the work stations had mice? Don't you have a cat? %% What did the procedure say when the control program called it? I was framed. %% What did the programmer say when he was asked why he couldn't sleep? I keep having this recurring nightmare. %% What did the psychologist say to the programming group? Don't forget to check in. %% What did the state table say to bitstring? I don't recognize you. %% What did the valley girl say when her boyfriend blew in her ear? Like, thanks for the refill. %% What did ya do with your burden and your cross? Did you carry it yourself or did you cry? You and I know that a burden and a cross, Can only be carried on one man's back. -- Louden Wainwright III %% What did you bring that book I didn't want to be read to out of about Down Under up for? %% What did you do in Russia before you were shot? -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% What did you do to them, Q? Oh, nothing bizarre, nothing grotesque. -- Picard and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% What direction? %% What do I consider a reasonable person to be? I'd say a reasonable person is one who accepts that we are all human and therefore fallible, and takes that into account when dealing with others. Implicit in this definition is the belief that it is the right and the responsibility of each person to live his or her own life as he or she sees fit, to respect this right in others, and to demand the assumption of this responsibility by others. %% What do I do? I'm a Primal Man. Here's my card. %% What do Kathy Rice and Christa MacCauliff have in common? They both went down on the challenger. %% What do Mexicans call Bartle and James? Dos Okies %% What do Teamsters and sperm have in common? Only 1 in 1000 work. %% What do any of the Dodgers have in common with Michael Jackson? They all wear one glove for no apparent reason. %% What do batteries run on? %% What do breasts and toy trains have in common ? They're made for children but the father always ends up playing with them. %% What do call an epileptic in a lettuce patch? Seizure salad %% What do elephants use for Tampax? ...Sheep. %% What do lawyers use for birth control? Their personalities. -- Nolo Press %% What do sea monsters eat? Fish and ships. %% What do they call "Hee Haw" in Oklahoma? A documentary. %% What do two WASP brothers exchange after not seeing each other for decades? Business cards. %% What do you MEAN it's not in the computer?!? -- Madonna %% What do you call 3 dead chickens and a tractor that won't start? The South Dakota state fair. %% What do you call a 16-year-old girl who hangs out with musicians? Tiffany. %% What do you call a Frenchman who explodes a bomb on the kitchen floor? Linoleum Blownapart! %% What do you call a Nun that is sleep walking? A Roam'n Catholic. %% What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick! -- Bill Kirchenbaum, comedian %% What do you call a bouncer in a gay bar? A flame thrower. %% What do you call a couple of guys with no arms or legs hanging around a window? Curt and Rod %% What do you call a cow that has had an abortion? Decaffinated... %% What do you call a cow with no legs ?? GROUND BEEF !!!! %% What do you call a dog with no legs? It doesn't matter, he can't come anyway. %% What do you call a female clown? A Clunt :-) %% What do you call a gay in a wheelchair? Rolaids %% What do you call a good-looking, intelligent guy in Millet? A tourist. %% What do you call a group of Italian astronauts? Specimen. %% What do you call a group of kids with low IQ's, drinking diet cola, eating fruit, and singing? The Moron Tab and Apple Choir. %% What do you call a monkey in a blender? Rhesus pieces. %% What do you call a prostitute with a runny nose? Full! %% What do you call a sadistic Dentist who rides a motorcycle and wears a black leather jacket? The Leader of the Plaque. %% What do you call a scottish highlander with four sheep ? A: A pimp. %% What do you call a truck load of vibrators? Toys for twats. %% What do you call an Italian fog? A bigomist. %% What do you call children born to prostitutes? Brothel sprouts. %% What do you call frogs sauteed in egg and milk? Fried toads. -- Loni Anderson %% What do you call huge? On the Ringworld? -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% What do you call it when someone rubs a Volkswagen van on your head? A Fahrvergnoogie. %% What do you call someone with herpes, AIDS, syphilis, and gonorrhea? An incurable romantic. %% What do you call the caped crusader and his sidekick after they got run over by a steamroller? Flatman and Ribbon. %% What do you do if you find an epileptic in your bathtub? Throw in some soap and a load of laundry. %% What do you do you do with 42 binary trees? Make a binary forest. %% What do you expect, BOOM? %% What do you feed a Trojan horse? A latex lollipop! %% What do you get when you cross a Edmontonian with a gorilla? A retarded gorilla %% What do you get when you cross a Klingon with a politician? Someone in Washington who might actually get something done! %% What do you get when you cross a highway with a bicycle? Run over. %% What do you get when you cross a hippopotamus and a grasshopper? A grassopotomus - a creature which can jump to great heights, once. %% What do you get when you cross a parrot with a centipede? A walkie-talkie, of course. %% What do you get when you cross a pitbull with a cattle prod? Bitten. %% What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros? 'Elephino! %% What do you get when you cross an octopus with a sheep? A sweater with eight sleeves. %% What do you get when you find a worm in a prison cell? Jailbait. %% What do you get when you pour boiling water down a rabbit hole? Hot cross bunnies. %% What do you get when you roll a hand grenade across a kitchen floor? Linoleum Blownapart. %% What do you give a dead baby for xmas? A dead puppy. %% What do you give a seasick elephant? Lots of room. %% What do you have to say that is worth listening to? %% What do you have when you have three lawyers up to their necks in sand? Not enough sand! %% What do you know of wants and feelings? Nothing...Well almost nothing. -- Lutan and Picard, "Code of Honor", stardate 41235.25 %% What do you make of these? Crystalline, mostly inert, nothing to write home about. -- Riker and Data, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% What do you mean that 2 years have passed?? %% What do you mean the SCI-FI FANS are controlled by the REPUBLICANS...? %% What do you mean, "There's no such thing as a free lunch?" *YOU* are the free lunch! -- Solomon Short %% What do you mean, "You've got a little job for me?" -- Hercules %% What do you think is the use of dead lizards? %% What do you think would be the use of a sword called "Orcrist" ? %% What do you think you're rescuing me from? My shipmates and I have all taken wives. A few even have children. You can't rescue a man from a place that he calls his home. -- Ramsey, "Angel One", stardate 41636.9 %% What do you want - good graphics or good taste? %% What do you want from life? %% What do you want to do with the %% What do you want? %% What do you want? "Maybe I want nothing." Then you would have killed all of us. "I still might." -- Riker and Armus, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3 %% What does "BSS" mean? Traditionally, executable Unix system programs are divided into text, data, and BSS segments. The text segment contains executable code, the data segment contains initialized variables, and the BSS segment contains uninitialized variables. The letters BSS stand for Block Starting at Symbol. %% What does "Unix" stand for? "Unix" is not an acronym, so it doesn't stand for anything. A a contrast to an earlier operating system, Multics, Brian Kernighan coined the word to indicate that "Unix" is simpler and more unified. In fact, the Unix system is Multics without balls. %% What does "awk" indicate? The three letters form an acronym for the authors of the program: Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. The name is probably also an abbreviated indictment of the language's syntax. %% What does "grep" mean? The letters grep indicate "Globally search for a Regular Expression and Print." In standard Unix system editors, the notation is g/re/p where re is a regular expression. The simplest regular expression is a string of characters where every character matches itself. More complicated regular expressions can match any character, any one of a set of characters, or the beginning or end of a line. Although Celtic influence on the Unix system predominates over Hebraic, greptz means "belch" in Yiddish. Output from the grep program looks remarkably similar. %% What does "it" mean in the sentence "What time is it?"? %% What does "rc" stand for, and why are there so many "rc" files? The letters stand for Run-Com, the name of a command file on early DEC operating systems. The Unix system's original "rc" file was /etc/rc, which executes commands when the system "boots" (or starts up). The name spread to the C shell startup file .cshrc, the Mail startup file .mailrc, the Berknet initialization file .netrc, and the Netnews startup file .newsrc. Programmers could have chosen a better suffix (such as init) but they wanted to retain a realm of mystery in the system. %% What does GAY stand for? Got Aids Yet? %% What does a hippopotamus have to come up with in order to get a Ph.D.? A hippo-thesis!! %% What does a man do standing up, a woman do sitting down, and a dog do with one leg raised? Shake hands. %% What does a sacred chao say? MU! %% What does an Englishman's beer bottle say on the bottom? OPEN OTHER END. %% What does an Englishman's stepladder say at the top? STOP HERE. %% What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% What does it all mean? %% What does it mean if there is no fortune for you? %% What does not destroy me, makes me strong. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% What does this red button do? %% What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote. -- Edward Abbey %% What else can you do at 3:00am? %% What ever happened to happily ever after? %% What ever happened to the good ole days, when sex was dirty and the air was clean? %% What exactly classifies as a "Cryptic statement" %% What excuses stand in your way? How can you eliminate them? -- Roger von Oech %% What foods these morsels be! %% What fools these morals be! %% What fools these mortals be. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65) %% What fools these mortals be. -- Smaug %% What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. -- Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) %% What goes 'round the house and 'round the house and peeps in at every hole? The sun %% What goes around, comes around. %% What goes in must come back out. -- Van Mizzell, Jr. %% What goes in, comes out. -- Richard N. Farmer %% What goes round the house And through the forest Without leaving a track? The wind %% What goes siss boom bah? An exploding sheep. %% What goes through the door without pinching itself Sits on the stove with burning itself, Sits on the table and is not ashamed. Sunlight %% What goes up and down and around the house, then sits in a corner? A broom %% What goes up hs probably been doused with petrol. %% What goes up must come down - and can be expected to do so in the middle of your job. %% What good is a ticket to the good life, if you can't find the entrance? %% What good is having someone who can walk on water if you don't follow in his footsteps? %% What good is it if you talk in flowers, and they think in pastry? %% What good is it to me, after all, if there is an authority always busy to see to the tranquil enjoyment of my pleasures and going ahead to brush all dangers away from my path without giving me even the trouble to think about it, if that authority, which protects me from the smallest thorns on my journey, is also the absolute master of my liberty and of my life? -- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Democracy in America %% What grows in the woods and has a body and leaves, Then leaves the woods and carries a body and soul? A cradle %% What happened in the past is over. Why can't you forget it! %% What happened last night can happen again. %% What happened to all the people? War? Disease? A dissatisfied customer? -- Troi, Worf, Data, and Geordi, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2 %% What happened to the crewman? The M-5 computer needed a new power source; the crewman merely got in the way. And how long will it be before we all "just get in the way?" -- Kirk and Dr. Richard Daystrom, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4731.3 %% What happened to the elephant who used sheep for tampons?? She got toxic flock syndrome! %% What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad. -- Dave Barry %% What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore -- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over -- Like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode? -- Langston Hughes %% What happens when the hardware meets the software on the motherboard? You spawn.... %% What happens when you cut back the jungle? It recedes. %% What has 100 balls and fucks rabbits? A shotgun! %% What has 300 legs and seven teeth? The front row at a Wille Nelson show. %% What has a face, but no mouth? A clock %% What has a head like a cat Feet like a cat A tail like a cat But isn't a cat Kitten %% What has a head, but can't think? A match %% What has a head, But has no hair nor eyes? A nail %% What has legs, but can't walk? A chair, table, or bed %% What has one eye, one ear, one leg, and one arm? Kiev triplets. %% What has orange hair, big feet, and comes out of a test tube? Bozo the Clone. %% What has posterity ever done for me? %% What has roots as nobody sees, Is taller than trees, Up, up it goes, And yet never grows? %% What has teeth, but can't eat? A comb or a saw %% What hath Bob wrought? %% What hath god wrought? %% What have you learned, Dorothy? %% What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June? -- Edward Abbey %% What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet. -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" %% What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists? -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" %% What if they gave a war and only one side came? -- Lucifer %% What in the hell am I doing...crying? It is so frustrating to be controlled like this. Don't worry, there is a new ship's standing order on the bridge. When one is in the penalty box, tears are permitted. -- Yar and Picard, "Hide and Q", stardate 41590.5 %% What is "Free" to me, but being masterless -- and maybe hungry? -- Cullen the Fool %% What is 40 acres and has two stones on it? Kiev graveyard. %% What is Helen Keller's favorite color ? Corduroy ! %% What is a Communist? One who hath yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings. Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing To fork out his copper and pocket a shilling. -- Ebenezer Elliot %% What is a Meeting? It is a place where good ideas go to die. %% What is a bit blit? This is a transfer of pixels (dots) from one location in memory, or on the screen, to another. Bit blits are commonly used on bit-map display terminals. The word "blit" comes with an extra vowel from the word "blt," meaning block transfer. Not only that, "blt" could have been confused with a sandwich. %% What is a church? Our honest sexton tells, 'Tis a tall building, with a tower and bells. -- Crabbe %% What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. -- Aristotle %% What is a magician but a practising theorist? -- Obi-Wan Kenobi %% What is a promiscuous person - it's usually someone who is getting more sex than you are. -- Victor Lownes %% What is a robot you ask? Well, the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy holds the definition. The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With'. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes', with a footnote to effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came'. %% What is a woman's favorite out-door sport? Shopping %% What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J. M. Barrie %% What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? -- Norman Douglas (1868-1952) %% What is always before you but you can never see it? Your future %% What is ambition? 'Tis a glorious cheat. Angels of light walk not so dazzlingly the sapphire walls of heaven. -- Willis %% What is an adult? A child blown up by age. -- Simone de Beauvoir, "La Femme rompue", 1967 %% What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul. %% What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, %% What is aristocracy? A corporation of the best, of the bravest. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% What is becoming is honest, and whatever is honest must always be becoming. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% What is black and white and black and white and black and white and black and white. A nun rolling down a hill. %% What is bought by the yard and worn by the foot? Carpet %% What is brown and white, smooth, cold and deadly? - Shark infested chocolate swirl ice cream. %% What is charred, gives off smoke, and hangs from the ceiling? A stupid electrician. %% What is constitutional may still be unwise. -- Zechariah Chaffe, Jr. (1885-1957) %% What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step toward something better. -- Wendell Phillips %% What is food to one, is to others bitter poison. -- Titus Lucretius Carus %% What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for yourself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. -- Archibald MacLeash (b. 1892) %% What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness. The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% What is honored in a country will be cultivated there. %% What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all conceivable. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% What is it I got that makes them twitch? -- Marilyn Monroe %% What is it in you humans that requires an overwhelming display of emotion in a situation such as this? Two men pursue the only reasonable course of action indicated, and yet you feel that something else is necessary. -- Spock, "That Which Survives," stardate unknown %% What is it like to feel pain? It is like ... when you see that people have no hope of happiness ... you feel great despair ... your heart is heavy because you know you can do nothing ... pain is like that. -- Hodin and Odona of Gideon, "The Mark of Gideon," stardate 5423.4 %% What is it that shapes a species? -- Louis Wu "Ringworld" %% What is it that you can not hold for five minutes, Yet it be as light as a feather? Your breath %% What is it that He who buys it does not use it He who makes it does not use it He who uses it, does not see or feel it? A coffin %% What is it that He who makes it, does not use it He who takes it, does not know it He who knows it, does not want it. Counterfeit money %% What is it when, after breaking several bones, you are about to leave the hospital, and you are told that you have to stay longer? It's a retraction. %% What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams. -- Pedro Calderon de la Barca, "Life is a Dream" %% What is loneliness? It is a thirst ... it is a flower, dying in a desert ... -- Reena Kapec and Flint, "Requiem for Methuselah," stardate 5843.7 %% What is love but a second-hand emotion? -- Tina Turner %% What is man but that lofty spirit -- that sense of enterprise. -- Kirk, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. -- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875 %% What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. -- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) %% What is more difficult than getting an ELEPHANT into a car? Getting an PREGNANT ELEPHANT into a car. What is more difficult than getting an PREGNANT ELEPHANT into a car? Getting an ELEPHANT PREGNANTED in a car. %% What is more fearsome than a pitbull with AIDS? The guy that gave it to him. %% What is my loftiest ambition? I've always wanted to throw an egg at Smith. %% What is neither in the house, Nor out of the house, Yet is still part of the house? A window %% What is now proved was once only imagin'd. -- William H. Blake (1757-1827) %% What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom? -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love. -- Edward Abbey %% What is red and glows? Russians near Kiev. [One day later] What is blond, blue eyed, and glows? Swedes. [Five days later] What is tan and glows? Californians on the beach. %% What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey %% What is small and red and screams in pain? --A peeled baby rolled in salt!!! %% What is status?... Status is when the President calls you for your opinion. Uh, no... Status is when the President calls you in to discuss a problem with him. Uh, that still ain't right... STATUS is when you're in the Oval Office talking to the President, and the phone rings. The President picks it up, listens for a minute, and hands it to you, saying, "It's for you." %% What is that? I know that object! -- Cyberleader, EARTHSHOCK %% What is that Of which the common sort is best? Sense %% What is the "New World Order"? Simple. The "New World Order" is where the New World gives all the orders. %% What is the answer to life the universe and everything? ... 42! %% What is the approximate air speed of an unladen swallow ? %% What is the best thing to make in a hurry? Haste %% What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton on its peak. %% What is the difference between a dead snake in the middle of the road and a dead lawyer in the middle of the road? The snake has skid marks in front of it... %% What is the difference between a deer fleeing from pursuers and a decrepit witch? One is a hunted stag, the other is a stunted hag. %% What is the difference between a duck? %% What is the difference between a fox and a pig? the number of drinks you've had. %% What is the difference between a porcupine and a school bus? A porcupine has a bunch of pricks on the outside. %% What is the difference between a prostitute, a nymphomanic and a JAP? A prostitute says "Are you done yet?" A nymphomanic says "You done already!!" A JAP says "Beige,.....I think I'll paint the ceiling beige" %% What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector ? The taxidermist takes only your skin. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% What is the difference between a train carriage, and a mis-carriage?? --You can't possibly eat a mis-carriage!!! %% What is the difference between a used-car salesman and a computer salesman? The used-car salesman knows when he's lying to you! %% What is the difference between a wife and a job? After ten years the job still sucks. %% What is the difficulty with writing a PDP-8 program to emulate Jerry Ford? Figuring out what to do with the other 3K. %% What is the largest fish in the world? A whale you say? - WRONG. A whale is a mammal. The largest fish in the world is the whale shark - measuring over 70 feet. %% What is the least dangerous kind of robbery? %% What is the most heavily armored vehicle in the world? An Iranian Bookmobile! %% What is the name of the President of Lebanon? But answer quickly! %% What is the nature of that 'superior' world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. -- John Galt %% What is the new name for Russia (OK, the USSR)? The Great Melting Pot. %% What is the point of building a bridge that won't last? %% What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse. -- Edward Abbey %% What is the relationship between (1) a wino who throws his whiskey corks in the river, (2) a bag-boy in a soft-drink store, and (3) someone who stuffs his pant-legs inside his socks? Respectively, they are a cork soaker, a Coke sacker, and a sock tucker. %% What is the robbing of a bank compared to the FOUNDING of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht %% What is the sound of one hand clapping? %% What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each lov'd one blotted from life's page, and be alone on earth as I am now. -- Byron %% What is this thing called LISP? %% What is this, a Chinese fire drill? -- Sun Tzu %% What is this: FO FI FO - FO FO FI FO ? Leon Spinks' phone number. %% What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% What is vice today may be virtue tomorrow. %% What is virtual memory? Virtual memory allows you to use more memory than your machine has. If something is transparent, it's there, but you can't see it; if something is virtual, you can see it, but it isn't there. Virtual memory is implemented by paging, in which only the parts (called pages) of programs actually used are brought into memory. When the memory required by a program exceeds the physical memory of the machine, unused pages are swapped out to disk. %% What is virtue today may be vice tomorrow. %% What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do it. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% What is your favorite position? %% What is your name? What is your quest?... What is your favorite color? %% What kind of beer do sysadmins drink? root %% What kind of love is that? Not to be loved; never to have shown love. -- Commissioner Nancy Hedford, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8 %% What kind of men go to heaven? Dead men %% What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? -- Jack Kerouac %% What law? I did not give it up -- it has ceased to exist. But I am still working in the profession I had chosen, which was that of serving the cause of justice ... No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists. -- Judge Narragansett %% What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% What lives on its own substance and dies when it devours itself? A candle %% What luck for the rulers that men do not think. -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% What made you come to it? My refusal to be born with any original sin. I have never felt guilty of my ability ... I have never felt guilty of being a man ... I saw the root of the world's tragedy, the key to it, and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it. -- John Galt %% What maintains one vice, would bring up two children. Remember, many a little makes a mickle; and farther, beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease. -- Jean Paul Richter %% What makes resisting temptation difficult, for many people, is that they don't want to discourage it completely. -- Franklin P. Jones %% What makes the Universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with. %% What makes the best eavesdropper? Icicle %% What makes the virgin flee in horror -- Threats of kidnapping or rape? No: her father plans tomorrow To graft her brain into an ape. %% What makes us so bitter against people who outwit us is that they think themselves cleverer than we are. %% What makes you think graduate school is supposed to be satisfying? -- Erica Jong, "Fear of Flying" %% What manly eloquence could produce such an effect as woman's silence. -- Michelct %% What matters is not the length of the wand, but the magic in the stick. %% What men learn from history is that men do not learn from history. %% What millions died that Caesar might be great! -- Campbell %% What monster do you want to genocide (Type the letter)? %% What must be noted about the many fallen political celebrities of recent years is that salvation eluded them, though they knew all the people in Washington who are useful to know. -- Daniel S. Greenberg %% What must be, shall be; and that which is a necessity to him that struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing. -- Seneca %% What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window. %% What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way? -- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) %% What one fool can do, another can. -- Ancient Simian Proverb %% What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most. -- Edward Abbey %% What pains others pleasures me, At home am I in Lisp or C; There i couch in ecstasy, 'Til debugger's poke i flee, Into kernel memory. In system space, system space, there shall i fare-- Inside of a VAX on a silicon square. %% What passes for optimism is most often the effect on an intellectual error. -- Raymond Aron, "The Opium of the Intellectuals", 1957 %% What passes for wom an's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency. %% What position are you trying to work yourself into? %% What profession should one follow if he wants to cut a figure in the world? Sculptor %% What publishers are looking for these days isn't radical feminism. It's corporate feminism -- a brand of feminism designed to sell books and magazines, three-piece suits, airline tickets, Scotch, cigarettes and, most important, corporate America's message, which runs: "Yes, women were discriminated against in the past, but that unfortunate mistake has been remedied; now every woman can attain wealth, prestige and power by dint of individual rather than collective effort." -- Susan Gordon %% What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts -- not the facts themselves. -- Jerome Cohen %% What ring, Right or Left? %% What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs Rolls over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack and fits on your back? It's Log, Log, Log! -- "The Log Song", from Ren & Stimpy %% What rose is high in the public esteem? Heroes %% What runs all around a castle, without moving at all? The wall %% What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -- Ursula K. LeGuin %% What scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch? -- J. D. Farley %% What seems to be no test, no struggle, is the most deceiving test of all. -- Ezra Taft Benson %% What segment's this, that, laid to rest Why lies it here, on public disk On FHA0, is sleeping? And why is it now unprotected? What system file, lay here a while A bug in incant, made it thus. While hackers around it were weeping? The problem has not been corrected. This, this is "acct.run," Mount, mount all your DECtapes now Accounting file for everyone. And copy the file somehow, somehow. Dump, dump it and type it out, Dump, dump it and type it out, The file, the highseg of login. The file, the highseg of login. -- to Greensleeves %% What shall we do to be saved? In politics, establish a constitutional cooperative society or world government. In economics, find working compromises between free enterprise and socialism. -- Arnold Toynbee %% What should I do with the #? %% What should you do if you pass an elephant? Flush it down and hope it doesn't clog the pipes! %% What sin has not been committed in the name of efficiency? %% What sings morning, noon and night, And when the fire's out, shuts up tight? A teakettle %% What soon grows old? Gratitude. -- Aristotle %% What sort of man reads "Playboy?" %% What strange animal is it that has no head, seven legs, and a tail? A cat with head in a three legged pot %% What strange things one gets nostalgic about. %% What the devil am I doing here? Sounds like our Captain. -- Picard and Riker, "Lonely Among Us", stardate 41249.3 %% What the eye beholds And the heart covets, Let the hand boldly seize!. %% What the fuck, over? %% What the gods get away with, the cows don't. %% What the gods would destroy they first submit to an IEEE standards committee. %% What the heck? %% What the hell was that thing? "Automated fire system, a force field contains the flame until the remaining oxygen has been consumed." Ah...What if I'd been under that thing? "You would have been standing in the fire." Yeah, well, leaving that aside for the moment, I mean what would have happened to me? "You would have suffocated and died." Yeah, Ah...Sweet mercy! -- Danilo O'Dell and Worf, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% What the hell's going on up there, Jim? Sick Bay is in a state of chaos! -- Leonard ("Bones") McCoy %% What the hell, go ahead and put all your eggs in one basket. %% What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away. %% What the orators want in depth, they give you in length. -- Montesquieu %% What the world *really* needs is a good Automatic Bicycle Sharpener. %% What this country needs ia a law that when children grow up and leave home they have to take their dogs, cats, turtles, snakes and canaries with them. -- Bill Vaughn %% What this country needs is a dime that will buy a good five-cent bagel. %% What this country needs is a good five cent ANYTHING! %% What this country needs is a good five cent microcomputer. %% What this country needs is a good five cent nickel. %% What this country needs is a good no-scent cigar. -- William D. Tammeus %% What this country needs is a safety net for people who jump to conclusions. -- B. M. Smith %% What this country needs is a song for unsung heros. -- Angie Papadakis %% What this country needs is a toller hog, for people to live higher off. -- Don Riley %% What this country needs is a transmission that will shift the blame. -- Louis Ginsberg %% What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years. -- John Fischer %% What this country really needs is to get out the voters the way it gets out the candidates. %% What this department needs is a really good inflatable doll. %% What this project needs is more whimsy. %% What this world needs is a good five-dollar plasma weapon. %% What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of Hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage. -- Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos, LXXXI %% What time is it? You mean right NOW? -- Yogi Berra %% What time is it? I don't know, it keeps changing. %% What to do in case of an alien attack: 1) Hide beneath the seat of your plane and look away. 2) Avoid eye contact. 3) If there are no eyes, avoid all contact. -- The Firesign Theatre, "Everything you know is Wrong" %% What to say to annoy a performance artist: "Hey, I saw something just like that on The Gong Show!" -- Matt Groening %% What two things in the air will get a woman pregnant? Her legs. %% What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% What use have I for such a quantity of plastic fruit? %% What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn? -- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn" %% What walks in the water with its head down? The nails in a horseshoe when the horse walks through water %% What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth. -- Norman Cousins %% What was the phrase Tasha Yar hated the most? "Insufficient Data" ;-> %% What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens. -- Bengamin Disraeli %% What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command. -- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), "The Dance of Life", 1923 %% What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein %% What we do not understand we do not possess. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% What we do with our leisure time is almost essential to our success as what we do during our working hours. %% What we frankly give, forever is our own. -- George Granville %% What we have here is a failure to communicate. -- Strother Martin %% What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% What we know is not as important as who we are. %% What we need around here is a good cluster! %% What we need in this country, instead of Daylight Savings Time, which nobody really understands anyway, is a new concept called Weekday Morning Time, whereby at 7 a.m. every weekday we go into a space- launch-style "hold" for two to three hours, during which it just remains 7 a.m. This way we could all wake up via a civilized gradual process of stretching and belching and scratching, and it would still be only 7 a.m. when we were ready to actually emerge from bed. -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!" %% What we need is a good strategic thinker, and we don't have one. -- A White House official, 1989 %% What we needs is better poof readers. (actual printed material): Woman wanted to help prepare males for an elderly woman. Con operated washers and dryers for sale. We wish that the young actor and the director had given the part more pizza. A. K. who is attending college in Florida, spent the holidays with her payments. Hear an excellent speaker and heave a lealthy lunch. %% What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock %% What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% What we wish, that we readily believe. -- Demosthenes %% What were Liberace's last words? "I'm sorry to leave my friends behind." %% What were Tarzan's last words? Who greased the vine? %% What were the greatest banking transactions mentioned in the Bible? 1) When Pharaoh's daughter went into the bulrushs and came out with a little prophet 2) When Moses led the Children of Israel to the Banks of the Jordan %% What were the shuttle passenger's last words? ... Bud Light. %% What were your impressions of Dr. Graves? He seemed brilliant. Egocentric, arrogant, chauvinistic. -- Picard and Lt. Selar, "The Schizoid Man", stardate 42437.5 %% What will the next pope's name be? George Ringo. %% What will you do if all your problems aren't solved by the time you die? %% What with chromodynamics and electroweak too Our Standardized Model should please even you, Tho once you did say that of charm there was none It took courage to switch as to say Earth moves not Sun. Yet your state of the union penultimate large Is the last known haunt of the Fractional Charge, And as you surf in the hot tub with sourdough roll Please ponder the passing of your sole Monopole. Your Olympics were fun, you should bring them all back For transsexual tennis or Anamalon Track, But Hollywood movies remain sinfully crude Whether seen on the telly or Remotely Viewed. Now fasten your sunbelts, for you've done it once more, You said it in Leipzig of the thing we adore, That you've built an incredible crystalline sphere Whose German attendants spread trembling and fear Of the death of our theory by Particle Zeta Which I'll bet is not there say your article, later. -- Sheldon Glashow, Physics Today, Dec. 1984 %% What with female Marines, Sergeant Trilling Finds his life in the Corps more fulfilling. In the daytime, his skill Is in close-order drill, While at night, it's in close-ardor drilling! %% What won't go up the chimney up, But will go up the chimney down? What won't go down the chimney up, But will go down the chimney down? An umbrella %% What would we do without erogenous zones? %% What would you call a horny Eskimo dwarf? A frigid midget with a rigid digit. %% What you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying. %% What you are thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. -- Confucius %% What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% What you don't do is always more important than what you do do. %% What you don't know can hurt you, only you won't know it. %% What you don't know can't hurt you. %% What you don't know won't help you much either. -- D. Bennett %% What you give is what you get! %% What you leave at your death, let it be without controversy, else the lawyers will be your heirs. -- Osborne %% What you own is your own kingdom, What you do is your own glory, What you love is your own power, What you live is your own story. In your head is the answer, Let it guide you along. Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% What you see is from outside yourself, and may come, or not, but is beyond your control. But your fear is yours, and yours alone, like your voice, or your fingers, or your memory, and therefore yours to control. If you feel powerless over your fear, you have not yet admitted that it is yours, to do with as you will. -- Marion Zimmer Bradley, "Stormqueen" %% What you see is rarely what you get. %% What you think means more than anything else in your life. More than what you earn, more than where you live, more than your social position, and more than what anyone else may think about you. -- George Adams %% What you think of yourself is more important than what others think of you. -- Seneca %% What! canst thou say all this and never blush? -- William Shakespeare %% What! Time for coffee again! %% What! shall this speech be spoke for our excuse? Or shall we on without apology? -- William Shakespeare %% What!? Me worry? -- Alfred E. Newman %% What's Inside? %% What's Irish and stays out all night? Pati O'furniture. %% What's a Vanilli? 2000 guys lip-synching poorly. %% What's a device driver? On the Unix system, all devices are supposed to look like a file. A device driver implements typical file operations, such as open, read and write, on a file. For example, a tape device driver allows you to employ Unix system commands such as tar on that tape drive. A disk driver keeps track of sectors, tracks, and cylinders, so that you don't have to worry about these details. %% What's a girl like you doing in a nice place like this? %% What's a girl like you doing in a place like this? ... and not worrying? %% What's a jewish dilemma?? Free ham. %% What's a knockout like you doing in a computer generated gin joint like this? -- Riker to Minuet, "11001001", stardate 41365.9 %% What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? %% What's a nice person like me doing in a place like this? %% What's a nice person like me doing in an awful place like this? %% What's a place like this doing to a nice girl like you? %% What's a spline?: [XEROX PARC] This phrase expands to: "You have just used a term that I've heard for a year and a half, and I feel I should know, but don't. My curiosity has finally overcome my guilt." The PARC lexicon adds "Moral: don't hesitate to ask questions, even if they seem obvious." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% What's a wrench? A place where people from New York raise cattle. %% What's a' matter? Can't cut the mustard? %% What's all the fuss about? The MIRV is in the great American tradition of bombs bursting in air. %% What's all the gaudy glitter of a crown? What but the glaring meteor of ambition, that leads the wretch benighted in his errors, points to the gulf and shines upon destruction? -- Brooke %% What's all this bru-ha-ha? %% What's an Italian curse? Innuendo. %% What's another word for Thesaurus? -- Steven Wright %% What's big and green, lives in a swamp, and has an IQ of 140? A platoon of marines. %% What's big and grey and shatters glass when it sings? Ella Phantzgerald ! %% What's black and white and red all over? A burning firehouse dog. %% What's black and white and red all over? A nun with a nosebleed. %% What's black and white and red all over? An embarrassed zebra. %% What's black and white and red all over? Certainly not the Halifax newspapers. %% What's black and yellow and full of little Crispy Critters? A burnt schoolbus. %% What's blue and green and sits in the corner? Same baby two weeks later. %% What's blue and sits in the corner? A dead baby in a baggie. %% What's brown and sits on a stool? Beethoven's last movement. %% What's brown and sticky? A stick! %% What's done to children, they will do to society. %% What's easier to load on a truck- babies or bricks? Babies - you can't use a pitchfork on bricks %% What's even grosser than a barrel full of dead babies? A baby on the bottom eating his way out. What's even grosser? The babies aren't dead, they're just sleeping! %% What's everyone making all the fuss about? %% What's gone, and what's past help, should be past grief. -- William Shakespeare %% What's good besides the wire? Cheese. Sleeping plates. Love (impractical). Wild skin dye jobs. Freedom, security, self-respect. . . . Brandy poured in coffee. Movies. -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% What's good enough for our ancestors is good enough for us. %% What's good politics is bad economics; what's bad politics is good economics; what's good economics is bad politics; what's bad economics is good politics. -- Eugene W. Baer [Or, more compactly, "What's good politics is bad economics and vice versa, vice versa.] %% What's green and red and goes 100 mph? A frog in a blender. %% What's green and takes ten minutes to drink? A Grant Check. %% What's grey and sings ? Harry Elephante ! %% What's grey and wears funny glasses when it sings? Elephanton John ! %% What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet. %% What's long, black and smelly? The unemployment line. %% What's more miserable than discontent? -- William Shakespeare %% What's of no use to you, yet you can't go without it? Your shadow %% What's on the floor of the old hen-house? Doo-doo, doo-doo. -- Foghorn Leghorn %% What's pink and white and blue all over? A baby in a baggie What's pink and white and green all over? The same one after a week %% What's pink and white and red all over? A baby chewing on razor blades %% What's pink and white and swings? A baby on a meat-hook %% What's red and hangs in trees? Baby shot out of a lawn mower. %% What's right is what's left after you've done everything else wrong. %% What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding? %% What's so funny? %% What's tennis without a racket? %% What's the MATTER Sid? ... Is your BEVERAGE unsatisfactory? %% What's the best way to accelerate a Macintosh? At 9.8 meters per second squared %% What's the difference between Cindy Lauper and the Panama Canal? The Panama Canal is a busy ditch. %% What's the difference between Joan Rivers and Bigfoot? Bigfoot has big feet. %% What's the difference between a 4 year research grant and a 4 year athletic scholarship? The athletic scholarship comes with a grant of immunity. %% What's the difference between a Lada and a Jehovah's Witness? You can shut the door on a Jehovah's Witness. %% What's the difference between a bear and an ant? About 2,000 pounds. %% What's the difference between a blonde and a shopping cart? The cart has a mind of its own. %% What's the difference between a bond and a bond trader? Eventually, the bond will mature. %% What's the difference between a fox and a pig? About 8 or 9 drinks. %% What's the difference between a pervert and a kinky person? The pervert will use a feather and the kinky person will use the whole chicken. %% What's the difference between a physicist and a bucket of crap? The bucket. %% What's the difference between a pickpocket and a peeping tom? A pickpocket snatches watches %% What's the difference between a politician and a hooker? There are some things a hooker won't do for money. %% What's the difference between a skinny girl and a counterfeit note? One is a phony buck! %% What's the difference between a sorority and a circus? A circus is a cunning array of stunts. %% What's the difference between a sorority girl and a Mercedes? Not everyone has been in a Mercedes. %% What's the difference between a sorority girl and a urinal? A urinal doesn't follow you around for three weeks after you've used it. %% What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money. -- Edward Abbey %% What's the difference between hardware and software ? You can kick the hardware..... %% What's the difference between light and hard? You can go to sleep with a light on. %% What's the difference between snot and cauliflower? Kids will eat snot. %% What's the difference between storing bowling balls and dead babies? Bowling balls have to be carefully stacked to keep them from rolling all over. Dead babies you just hang on meathooks. %% What's the difference between the 80's and the 50's? In the 80's, a man walks into a drugstore and states loudly, "I'd like some condoms," then whispers, "and some cigarettes." %% What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger. -- Edward Abbey %% What's the good of being grown-up if you can't be childish? %% What's the long-range forecast for Kiev? Three days. %% What's the matter with the world? Why, there ain't but one thing wrong with every one of us--and that's "selfishness." -- Will Rogers %% What's the matter, can't you read? Now you'd best start over. %% What's the metric unit of pain? The Angstrom. %% What's the new halfback's name?" asked the coach of the trainer. "Ossowinsinsiski," the trainer answered. "Good," said the coach with satisfaction. "Put him on the first team. Boy, will I get even with those wise newspaper reporters!" %% What's the point of not eating? You're the only one who's suffering. Do I look like its bothering me? Okay, its bothering me. -- Finn, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7 %% What's the point-spread on World War III? -- Ronald W. Reagan %% What's the soup of the day in Kiev??? MUSHROOM %% What's the ugliest part of your body? What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, Some say your toes, But I think it's your mind. -- Frank Zappa (1965) %% What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it? -- The Doctor %% What's the weather forecast for Kiev? Cloudy and 6000 degrees. %% What's the worst kind of fare to live on? Warfare %% What's to become of us? %% What's worse (better?) than running over a dead baby? ...SKIDDING over it. %% What's worse than a truckload of dead babies? A truckload of dead babies with a live one at the bottom eating his way out. %% What's worse than nailing a dead baby to a tree? ...RIPPING IT OFF! %% What's worth doing is worth doing for money. -- Joseph Donahue %% What's wrong with Dave? Is he sick? No, it's just that he's got . . . ring around the collar! %% What's wrong with a little harmless crime once in a while? -- M. Blaise %% What's wrong with our safety net is that too many people are using it as a hammock. -- Rush Limbaugh on welfare %% What's wrong with this picture? %% What's yellow and always points north? A magnetic banana. %% What, after all, is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean. -- Christopher Fry %% What, still alive at twenty-two, A clean upstanding chap like you? Sure, if your throat 'tis hard to slit, Slit your girl's, and swing for it. Like enough, you won't be glad, When they come to hang you, lad: But bacon's not the only thing That's cured by hanging from a string. So, when the spilt ink of the night Spreads o'er the blotting pad of light, Lads whose job is still to do Shall whet their knives, and think of you. -- Hugh Kingsmill %% What....we have here......is a FAILure to commun'cate. %% What? %% What? Still programming in basic? %% What? You don't trust me? Why, only last week I patched a running VMS system and it survived for over thirty seconds. Oh, well. %% What? Me worry?!? %% Whatever General Sherman did on his march through Georgia, we are now even. %% Whatever became of Strange de Jim? Well, he found a substitute for cocaine: "You cover Q-tips with sandpaper and ram them up your nostrils as far as they will go. Then you sniff talcum powder while shredding hundred dollar bills." -- Herb Caen [as discovered in Marya Schrier's scrapbook] %% Whatever became of eternal truth? %% Whatever creates the greatest inconvenience for the largest number must happen. -- Red Smith %% Whatever grocery line you choose will automatically slow to a crawl. %% Whatever happened to Saturday nights, to finding a sweetheart and holding her tight? %% Whatever happens in government could have happened differently and it usually would have been better if it had. -- Prof. Charles Frankel %% Whatever happens, act as if it was supposed to happen that way! %% Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down. -- Collis P. Huntingdon %% Whatever isn't forbidden is required. -- Murray Gell-Mann %% Whatever it is I'm against it. %% Whatever it is, I fear Greeks even when they bring gifts. -- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) %% Whatever natural right men have to freedom and independency, it is manifest that some men have a natural ascendency over others. -- Grenville %% Whatever occurs from love is always beyond good and evil. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% Whatever the missing mass of the universe is, I hope it's not cockroaches! -- Mom %% Whatever their other contributions to our society, lawyers could be an important source of protein. -- Guindon %% Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues. -- Edward Abbey %% Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought of as half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. -- Charlotte Whitton %% Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men to win them. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% Whatever you say about pornography, sex is here to stay. %% Whatever you spent a fortune on today, goes on sale tomorrow. %% Whatever you want to do, you have to do something else first. -- Art Kosatka %% Whats Waldhiemers disease? It's when you grow old and forget your a nazi. %% Whats the definition of a metallurgist? A man who can tell if a platinum blonde is a virgin metal or a common ore. %% Wheeeeee! %% Wheels within wheels in a spiral array, A pattern so grand and complex. Time after time we lose sight of the way, Our causes can't see their effects ... Art as expression, not as market campaigns. We'll still capture our imaginations. Given the same state of integrity, It will surely help us along. The most endangered species, the honest man. Will it still survive annihilation? Forming a world, state of integrity, Sensitive, open and strong. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% When 911 won't work .357 will! %% When Boy Scouts do it, it's intense. %% When Cthulhu calls, he calls collect %% When Cypress was shipping lots of SPARC chips, its publicity-hungry CEO (Thurman J. Rodgers) used to say of the competitive R3000/R4000: "MIPS is dog meat". Now it seems he is about to start selling dog meat. Of course this is reminiscent of another publicity-hungry CEO (Scooter McNealy) who used to say "Sun will ship Motif over my dead body." It didn't come true. Naturally, since the Cypress-Performance merger is not yet (publicly) complete, a lot can happen. But I will gladly bet anybody a case of Caffeine Free Diet Cherry Coke Classic that Thurman Rodgers will *NOT* say "MIPS isn't dog meat any more." -- Mark Johnson, mjohnson@netcom7.Netcom.COM %% When God created man, She was only testing. %% When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it. -- Charles Merrill Smith %% When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them. %% When God saw how faulty was man He tried again and made woman. As to why he then stopped there are two opinions. One of them is woman's. -- DeGourmont %% When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." -- Hilaire Belloc %% When I bought some new glasses a few months ago, the lady kept on saying how great the lenses were that I was getting. She kept on saying, ``You can shoot a bullet right through them.'' I figured you could do this with most lenses, but I didn't say anything. %% When I get bored I go to a Seven-Eleven and ask for a two-by-four and a box of three-by-fives. -- Rod Schmidt %% When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving. -- Steven Wright %% When I grow up, I want to be a CRAY. %% When I grow up, I want to be a Porsche. -- "Bumper Snickers" %% When I have a kid, I want to buy one of those strollers for twins. Then put the kid in and run around, looking frantic. When he gets older, I'd tell him he used to have a brother, but he didn't obey. -- Steve Wright %% When I have one foot in the grave I will tell the truth about women. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, "Do what you like now." -- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) %% When I hear the word "Culture" I pick up my Browning. -- Hanns Johst (1890-?) %% When I hear the word "culture", I reach for my checkbook. -- Edward Abbey %% When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" %% When I left the meeting, I had the definite impression that I had found the same game as with the seals: management reducing criteria and accepting more and more errors that weren't designed into the device, while the engineers are screaming from below, "HELP!" and "This is a RED ALERT!" -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), about NASA, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% When I left you, I was but the pupil. Now, I am the master. -- Darth Vader %% When I look at my children, I often wish I had remained a virgin. -- Lillian Carter I told the truth Lord! How can I learn any moral lesson if you keep confusing me like this. -- Philipe The Mouse, "Ladyhawke" %% When I met th'POPE back in '58, I scrubbed him with a MILD SOAP or DETERGENT for 15 minutes. He seemed to enjoy it ... %% When I need a little free advice about Saddam Hussein, I turn to country music. -- President George Bush %% When I need something to help me unwind I get a 6-foot baby with a one-track mind. . . %% When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not more of a pastime to her than she is to me? -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) %% When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly... I think Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% When I said "we", officer, I was referring to myself, the four young ladies, and, of course, the goat. %% When I say the magic word to all these people, they will vanish forever. I will then say the magic words to you, and you, too, will vanish -- never to be seen again. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Between Time and Timbuktu" %% When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. -- Richard Cardinal Cushing %% When I see a congressman giving his opinion on something, I always wonder if it represents his *real* opinion or if it represents an opinion that he's designed in order to be elected. It seems to be a central problem for politicians. So I often wonder: what is the relation of integrity to working in the government? -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988), "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% When I see a merchant over-polite to his customer, begging them to take a little brandy, and throwing his goods on the counter, thinks I, that man has an axe to grind. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) %% When I sell liquor, its called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, its called hospitality. -- Al Capone (1899-1947) %% When I take the humor of a thing once, I am like your tailor's needle -- I go through. -- Ben Johnson %% When I think about myself, Sixty years in these folks' world I almost laugh myself to death, The child I works for calls me girl My life has been one great big joke, I say "Yes ma'am" for working's sake. A dance that's walked Too proud to bend A song that's spoke, Too poor to break, I laugh so hard I almost choke I laugh until my stomach ache, When I think about myself. When I think about myself. My folks can make me split my side, I laughed so hard I nearly died, The tales they tell, sound just like lying, They grow the fruit, But eat the rind, I laugh until I start to crying, When I think about my folks. -- Maya Angelou %% When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety. -- Steve Wright %% When I want some shit, I'll squeeze your head. -- Bob Dickson %% When I want to buy up any politicians I always find the anti-monopolists the most purchasable. They don't come so high. -- William H. Vanderbilt (1821-1885) %% When I was 16, I thought there was no hope for my father. By the time I was 20, he had made great improvement. %% When I was a Brownie, I ate all the cookies. -- Madonna %% When I was a baby, my penis Was as white as the buttocks of Venus. But now 'this as red As her nipples instead-- All because of the feminie genus! %% When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it. -- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938) %% When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% When I was a boy, my family was poor. We couldn't buy food to eat. On Halloween we had to go bobbing for gerbils. %% When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life. -- P. L. Travers %% When I was a kid I said to my father one afternoon, "Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?" He answered, "If the zoo wants you let them come and get you." -- Jerry Lewis %% When I was a kid, I went to the store and asked the guy, "Do you have any toy train schedules?" -- Steve Wright %% When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit, 'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet; Nor ever ever shall, until that I die, For the longer I live the more fool am I. -- "Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melonchaly (1684)" %% When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child... eventually. -- Steve Wright %% When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, `Well, what do you need?' -- Steven Wright %% When I was eight, I played Little League. I was on first; I stole third; I went straight across. Earlier that week, I learned that the shortest distance between two points was a direct line. I took advantage of that knowledge. -- Steve Wright %% When I was five years old I was on a merry go round. There was a gunshot nearby. The horses stampeded. There I was running down the street on a purple wooden horse. -- Steve Wright %% When I was in boy scouts, I slipped on the ice and hurt my ankle. A little old lady had to help me across the street. -- Rod Schmidt %% When I was in college, there were a lot of four-letter words you couldn't say in front of girls. Now you can say them. But you can't say "girls". %% When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. -- Woody Allen %% When I was little, my grandfather used to make me stand in a closet for five minutes without moving. He said it was elevator practice. -- Steve Wright %% When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. "It is always so," my mother said. "You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone." ... Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone. -- Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope" %% When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things--including the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown-up. -- C. S. Lewis %% When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me. -- John Wesley %% When I was young we didn't have MTV; we had to take drugs and go to concerts. -- Steven Pearl %% When I was young, I used to have successes with women because I was young. Now I have successes with women because I am old. Middle age was the hardest part. -- Artur Rubinstein %% When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% When I woke up this morning, my girlfriend asked if I had slept well. I said,'no, I made a few mistakes.' -- Steve Wright %% When I works, I works hard. When I sits, I sits loose. When I thinks, I falls asleep. %% When I'm gone, boxing will be nothing again. The fans with the cigars and the hats turned down'll be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents. It's goin' to be back to the fighter who comes to town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn and says he's in shape. Old hat. I was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator. -- Muhammad Ali %% When I'm good, I'm great; but when I'm bad, I'm better. -- Mae West %% When Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's hero, Frankenstein, endowed his synthetic robot with a human heart, the monster which before had been a useful mechanical servant suddenly became an uncontrollable force. Our ancestors feared that corporations had no conscience. We are treated to the colder, more modern fear that, perhaps they do. -- A. A. Berle, Jr. (1895-1971) %% When Polly's in trouble I am not slow, it's hip hip hip and away I go! -- Underdog %% When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody's gonna jump for joy. %% When Shakespeare awakes with a scream All his member a-drippin' with cream, 'Tis just the commission Of nocturnal emission, Which he dubs, "A Mid-Slumber Night-Stream." %% When Snow White turns on with the dwarfs she probably winds up feeling Dopey. %% When Will Tyree invited me to climb the Direct North Buttress (DNB) on Middle Cathedral with him, I had been climbing for exactly six months. That didn't matter to him, though, because I was from Southern California, where all those ghastly face climbs are. I didn't tell Will I hadn't climbed any of them. I also didn't tell Will that, aside from The Trough (5.1) at Tahquitz, the longest climb I had yet accomplished was a two-pitch route on Arch Rock. Nor did I tell Will that he'd be doing most of the leading because I didn't know that until the fourth pitch, when I nearly lost my mind. This was before sticky boots, before EBs even. We wore Robbins boots -- shit-kicking, case-hardened, mortar-proof Royal Robbins boots. And we didn't carry a single nut on the rack. All iron. -- John Long, Direct North Buttress, Middle Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley %% When Willie retired from the railway after 50 years' service, the company presented him with an old coach to keep in his garden as a memento. One wet day, his friends found him sitting on the step of the coach, smoking his pipe, with an old sack over his shoulders to keep out the rain. "Hullo, Willie," said his pals, "why are ye no' inside on a day like this?" "Can ye no' see," replied Willie, with a nod toward the coach. "They sent me a non-smoker!" %% When Yahweh your gods has settled you in the land you're about to occupy, and driven out many infidels before you...you're to cut them down and exterminate them. You're to make no compromise with them or show them any mercy. -- Deut. 7:1 (KJV) %% When a Banker jumps out of a window, jump after him -- that's where the money is. -- Robespierre %% When a bell rings, an angel has gotten his wings. %% When a child is taught ... it's programmed with simple instructions -- and at some point, if its mind develops properly, it exceeds the sum of what it was taught, thinks independently. -- Dr. Richard Daystrom, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4731.3 %% When a customer buys a low-grade article, he feels pleased when he pays for it and displeased every time he uses it. But when he buys a well-made article, he feels extravagant when he pays for it and well pleased every time he uses it. -- Herbert N. Casson %% When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion--the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right. -- Isaac Asimov %% When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism! -- David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) %% When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism. -- Edward Abbey %% When a fellow can't read, he's got to think. %% When a fellow says, "It ain't the money but the principle of the thing," it's the money. -- Frank McKinney Hubbard (1868-1930) %% When a fly lands on the ceiling, does it do a half roll or a half loop? %% When a girl can read the handwriting on the wall, she may be in the wrong rest room. %% When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of her beauty. -- Gregory I %% When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattentions of one. -- Helen Rowland %% When a group of newsmen go out to dinner together, the bill is to be evenly divided among them, regardless of what each one eats and drinks. -- Jack Germond %% When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% When a kinky old loner named Chase Had a sitter report to his place And she asked, "There's no kid?" He said, "No, -- There's an id! You're a sitter... so sit on my face!" %% When a lawyer tells his clients he has a sliding fee schedule what he means is that after he bills you it's financially hard to get back on your feet. ... %% When a liar gets pharyngitis, he loses his vice. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% When a lion meets another with a louder roar, the first lion thinks the last a bore. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured. -- Chekhov, "The Cherry Orchard" %% When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself as public property. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% When a man begins by saying you are too wise to be caught for a sucker, look out! He is going to try a new kind of bait. %% When a man blames others for his failures, it's a good idea to credit others with his successes. -- Howard W. Newton %% When a man feels guilty about something -- something too terrible to remember -- he blots it out of his conscious memory. -- McCoy, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3614.9 %% When a man finds not repose in himself it is in vain for him to seek it elsewhere. %% When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up, people look; then, if they like what they see, they listen. %% When a man grows old and his balls grow cold, And the end of his knob turns blue; When it's bent in the middle like a broken fiddle, He can tell a tale or two. So find me a seat and stand me a drink When Dead-eye Dick and Mexico Pete And a tale to you I'll tell Go out in search of fun, Of Dead-eye Dick and Mexico Pete It's usually Dick who wields the prick And the gentle Eskimo Nell. and Mexico Pete the gun. And when Dead-eye Dick and Mexico Pete There was rarely a day without a lay Are sore, depressed, and mad, And usually two or three 'Tis the cunt that bears the brunt For Dead-eye Dick, his kingly prick So the shooting ain't so bad. Was always like a tree. -- The Ballad of Eskimo Nell %% When a man has not a good reason for doing a thing, he has one good reason for letting it alone. -- Sir Walter Scott %% When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble. -- Buddha %% When a man is between the devil and the deep blue sea, his fear of drowning generally triumphs. %% When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind. -- Thomas a Kempis %% When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry. -- Haliburton %% When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% When a man makes a woman his wife, it's the highest compliment he can pay her, and it's usually the last. -- Helen Rowland %% When a man meets his destined ruler, They can be together ten days, And it is not a mistake. Going meets with recognition. %% When a man pulled two guns on convenience store clerk Wazir Jiwi and demanded money, Jiwi asked how much he wanted for one of the guns. He said $100, which Jiwi paid him. Then Jiwi offered to buy the second gun. The robber handed it over, grabbed the cash and headed for the exit. But Jiwi had pushed a button under the counter that automatically locked the door. "He turned to me and asked what was going on," Jiwi says. "I told him to bring the money back and I would let him go. He brought the money back, and I opened the door." %% When a man says, "Get thee behind me, Satan," he's probably ashamed to have even the devil see what he's up to. %% When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute-- and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem. -- Edward Abbey %% When a man's wife learns to understand him, she usually stops listening to him. %% When a pencil point breaks, the nearest sharpener is exactly 1000 feet away. %% When a person attempts a task, he or she will be thwarted in that task by the unconscious intervention of some other presence (animate or inanimate). Nevertheless, some tasks are completed, since the intervening presence is itself attempting a task and is, of course, subject to interference. %% When a person goes on a diet, the first thing he loses is his temper. %% When a person says that in the interest of saving time, he will summarize a prepared statement, he will talk only three times as long as if he had read the statement in the first place. -- Alan Otten %% When a person stands on his dignity, it's probably because he has very insecure footing. %% When a piercer drops in on you, you will be tempted to hit the ceiling! %% When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere. -- Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love" %% When a rechargeable battery starts to die in the middle of a complex calculation, and the user attempts to connect house current, the calculator will clear itself. -- John L. Shelton %% When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog along to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten. -- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" %% When a student actually does a homework problem, the instructor will not ask for it. -- M. M. Johnston %% When a student named Ben once was rapping On his reason for bra-strap unsnapping, He explained he'd a yen From his study of Zen For the sound of one mammary flapping. %% When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. %% When a true genius appears in this world you may know him by the sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% When a woman gives me a present I have always two surprises: first is the present, and afterward, having to pay for it. -- Donnay %% When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% When a woman says "No!" she really means "Yes!" -- except, of course, when she means "NO!" %% When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management. -- Edward Abbey %% When all else fails, EAT!!! %% When all else fails, try Kate Smith. %% When all is said and done, more is said than done. %% When all other means of communication fail, try words. %% When among apes, one must play the ape. %% When an Englishman asked his wife if she thought his friend could go to a masquerade as Napoleon, she replied, "Of Corsican." %% When an action has its intended effect, it also has other, unintended, effects. %% When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found to have been correct in the first place. %% When an idea is being pushed because it is "exciting," "new," or "innovative" -- beware. An exciting, new, innovative idea can also be foolish. -- Donald Rumsfeld [If in doubt, don't. Or do what is right. Your best question is often, "Why?"] %% When angry, count four; when very angry, swear. %% When angry, count to ten, When very angry, count to 750,000 by 37's. %% When are you BUTTHEADS gonna learn that you can't oppose Gestapo tactics *with* Gestapo tactics? -- Reuben Flagg %% When arguing with a fool, be sure he isn't doing the same thing. %% When arguments fail, use a blackjack. -- Ed "Spike" O'Donnell %% When articles rise the consumer is the first that suffers, and when they fall he is the last that gains. -- Colton %% When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours." -- Vine Deloria, Jr. %% When asked for his own [favourite poem], Dylan [Thomas] slowly said, "This is the best poem in the English language," and then repeated gravely and with feeling these lines: I am Thou art He, she, it is We are You are They are. -- Richard Burton (1577-1640), quoted in Andrew Sinclair's "No Man More Magical" %% When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered, "As much as the living are to the dead." -- Diogenes Laertius %% When asked if he had missed school lately, the boy said `Not a bit.` %% When asked whether the greater problem was ignorance or apathy, he replied "I don't know, and I don't care". %% When asked, "If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?" Mencken replied, "Why do men go to zoos?" %% When asked, "What is a contingent fee?" a lawyer answered, "A contingent fee to a lawyer means, if I don't win your suit, I get nothing. If I do win it, you get nothing." %% When at first you don't succeed, find someone to blame it on. %% When attempting to predict and forecast macro-economic moves of economic legislation by a politician, never be misled by what he says; instead -- watch what he does. %% When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. -- Edmund Burke %% When better women are made, computer programmers will make them. %% When bored with the old tried-and-true way, As well as the dildo-in-lieu way, A zookeepers wife Put zest in her life With a fling at "a fabulous gnu way!" %% When brute force is on the march, compromise is the red carpet. When reason is attacked, common sense is not enough. -- Ayn Rand %% When can their glory fade? Oh! the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred! -- Tennyson %% When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before. -- Mae West, in "Klondike Annie" 1936 %% When complimented, respond in kind. When insulted, ignore it. When in doubt, mumble. %% When democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this was bound to happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used the democratic methods only to gain power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition. -- Josef Goebbels %% When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% When did you first realize that you were God?" Well, I was praying to the Lord one day, when I suddenly discovered that I was talking to myself." -- "The Ruling Class" %% When does later become never? %% When does summertime come to Minnesota, you ask? Well, last year, I think it was a Tuesday. %% When does the Jewish male fetus become a person (according to religious custom)? When it graduates from Law school. %% When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records. -- Vina, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown %% When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time. -- General Creighton W. Abrams %% When ev'rybody's tryin' to sleep, I am a back door man, I'm somewhere makin' my midnight creep. I am a back door man, In the mornin' the rooster crow, Well, the men don't know, Somethin' tells me I got to go. But the little girls understand. [chorus] They take me to the doctor, shot full of holes, Nurse try to save a soul. Killed her for murder first degree, Judge what tried let the man go free. [chorus] Stand up, cop's wife cried, don't take him down, Rather be dead six feet in the ground. When you come home, you can eat pork and beans, I eats more chicken than any man's seen. [chorus] -- Willie Dixon, "Backdoor Man", 1961 %% When everyone agrees with me, I know I'm wrong. %% When everything has been seen to work, all integrated, you have four more months of work to do. -- C. Portman of ICL Ltd. %% When everything is arranged and ignited, you will experience great joy. %% When everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing. %% When fear admits no hope of safety, Necessity makes dastards valiant men. -- Herrick %% When forced to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% When fortune sends a stormy wind, Then show a brave and present mind; And when with too indulgent gales She swells too much, then furl thy sails. -- Creech %% When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right. -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) %% When he first came to work at the development center, Ninjei was assigned to support the operating system. One day a manager came into Ninjei's cubicle. "Why are you not working?" asked the manager. "The system has crashed," said Ninjei. The manager frowned. "You are paid to keep the system running!" he exclaimed. "The system has not crashed," said Ninjei. -- The Zen of Programming %% When he got in trouble in the ring, [Ali] imagined a door swung open and inside he could see neon, orange, and green lights blinking, and bats blowing trumpets and alligators blowing trombones, and he could hear snakes screaming. Weird masks and actors' clothes hung on the wall, and if he stepped across the sill and reached for them, he knew that he was committing himself to destruction. -- George Plimpton %% When he is best, he is little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little worse than a beast. -- William Shakespeare %% When he tried to inject his huge whanger A young man aroused his girl's anger. As they strove in the dark She was heard to remark, "What you need is a zeppelin hanger." %% When his company fell on hard times, the boss realized that he'd have to lay off one of his two middle managers. As both Jack and Liz were equally honest and dedicated to their jobs, he was unable to decide which one to fire. To resolve his dilemma, the boss arbitrarily decided that the first to leave his or her desk the next morning would be the one to get the ax. The next morning found Liz at her desk, rubbing her temples. Asking Jack for some aspirin, she headed for the water fountain and that's where the boss caught up with her. "I've got some news for you, Liz," he said. "I've got to lay you or Jack off." "Jack off," she snapped. "I have a headache." %% When in Rome, live in the Roman way. -- St. Ambrose %% When in a maze follow the right wall and you will never get lost. %% When in a shop, do as shopkeepers do. %% When in charge ponder, When in doubt mumble, When in trouble delegate. %% When in danger, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. -- Dorable %% When in distress with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries And look upon myself and curse my fate; Wishing me like to one more rich in fate Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man's art and that man's state, With what I most enjoy contented least. Then in these thoughts, myself almost despising, Haply I think of thee and then my state Like to the lark at break of day arising, From sullen Earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate. For thy remembered love such sweet joy brings, That then I scorn to change my state with kings. -- William Shakespeare, "Sonnets" %% When in doubt, cut it out! -- Surgeon's motto %% When in doubt, do it. It's much easier to apologize than to get permission. -- Grace Murray Hopper %% When in doubt, do what the President does -- guess. %% When in doubt, don't bother. %% When in doubt, drink heavily. %% When in doubt, duck. -- Malcolm Forbes %% When in doubt, follow your heart. %% When in doubt, get it out. -- Jody Powell %% When in doubt, ignore it. %% When in doubt, lead trump. %% When in doubt, tell the truth. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% When in doubt, think. %% When in doubt, use a bigger hammer. %% When in doubt, use brute force. -- Ken Thompson %% When in panic, fear and doubt, Drink in barrels, eat, and shout. %% When in this world the headlines read of those whose hearts are filled with greed who rob and steal from those who need the cry goes up with blinding speed for Underdog (UNDERDOG!) Underdog (UNDERDOG!) Speed of lightning, roar of thunder Fighting all who rob or plunder Underdog (ah-ah-ah-ah) Underdog UNDERDOG! %% When in-laws are outlawed, only outlaws will have in-laws. %% When is a pencil not a pencil? When it's on a Pentagon shopping list - then it's a "portable hand-held communications inscriber." %% When it all boils down to the essence of truth one must live by a dog's rule of life: if you can't eat it or fuck it, piss on it! %% When it comes to a choice between kindness and honesty, my vote is for kindness every time -- giving or receiving. %% When it comes to all-out war you use all the troops you have. %% When it comes to facing up to serious problems, each candidate will pledge to appoint a committee. And what is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary. But it all sounds great in a campaign speech. -- Richard Long Harkness %% When it comes to helping you, some people stop at nothing. %% When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect. -- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy %% When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is not necessary to make a decision. -- Lord Falkland %% When it rains, it pours. %% When it was seen that many of the wicked seemed quite untroubled by evil consciences ... then the idea of future suffering was advanced. %% When it's 105 in NYC, it's 78 in LA. When it's 20 below in NYC, it's 78 in LA. Of course, there are 4 million interesting people to talk to in NYC, and 78 in LA. -- Neil Simon, who will probably move back to NYC %% When it's dark enough you can see the stars. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) %% When it's not needed, zoning works fine; when it is essential, it always breaks down. -- John McClaughry %% When living in the fast lane, remember to watch out for the center divider. %% When living on the fringe, make sure to enjoy all the fringe benefits. %% When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece. -- Charles Reade %% When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom! -- Laurie Anderson %% When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized. -- E. C. Stakman %% When managers hold endless meetings, the programmers write games. When accountants talk of quarterly profits, the development budget is about to be cut. When senior scientists talk blue sky, the clouds are about to roll in. Truly, this is not the Tao of Programming. When managers make commitments, game programs are ignored. When accountants make long-range plans, harmony and order are about to be restored. When senior scientists address the problems at hand, the problems will soon be solved. Truly, this is the Tao of Programming. %% When men grow virtuous in their old age, they are merely making a sacrifice to God of the Devil's leavings. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results. -- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) %% When must dispute has past, We find our tenets just the same as last. -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% When my fist clenches crack it open, before I use it and lose my cool. When I smile tell me some bad news, before I laugh and act like a fool. And if I swallow anything evil, put you finger down my throat. And if I shiver please give me a blanket, keep me warm let me wear your coat No one knows what it's like to be the bad man, to be the sad man. Behind blue eyes. No one knows what its like to be hated, to be fated, to telling only lies. -- The WHO %% When my freshman roommate at Cornell found out I was Jewish, she was, at her request, moved to a different room. She told me she didn't think she had ever seen a Jew before. My only response was to begin wearing a small Star of David on a chain around my neck. I had not become a more observing Jew; rather, discovering that the label of Jew was offensive to others made me want to let people know who I was and what I believed in. Similarly, after talking to these young women -- one of whom told me that she didn't think she had ever met a feminist -- I've taken to identifying myself as a feminist in the most unlikely of situations. -- Susan Bolotin, "Voices From the Post-Feminist Generation" %% When neither their poverty nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content. -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) %% When nothing can possibly go wrong, it will. %% When old friends get together, everything else fades to insignificance. -- War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death %% When once infidelity can persuade men that they shall die like beasts, they will soon be brought to live like beasts also. -- South %% When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes. -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) %% When one considers just what man is, Happy it be that short his span is. -- James Cagney %% When one has an early class, one's roommate will invariable enter the space late at night and suddenly become hyperactive, ill, violent, or all three. %% When one has great gifts, what answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise them? -- W. H. Auden %% When one is trying to be elegant and sophisticated, one won't. -- Betty Hartig %% When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art. -- John Trudell %% 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 %% When one wants to get rid of an unsupportable pressure, one needs hashish. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, "Forty-seven years -- and I find I mind it less and less." -- Louise Andrews Kent %% When one's own day comes, one may create revolution. Starting brings good fortune. No blame. %% When opportunity knocks, say YES, then figure out HOW. %% When other people take a long time to do something, they're slow; when we take a long time, we're thorough. When they don't do something, they're lazy; when we don't, we're too busy. When they succeed, they're lucky; when we do, we deserve it. %% When our best friends are in trouble, there is always something that is not wholly displeasing to us. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld %% When our friends get into power, they aren't our friends anymore. -- M. Stanton Evans %% When oxygen Tech played Hydrogen U. The Game had just begun, when Hydrogen scored two fast points And Oxygen still had none Then Oxygen scored a single goal And thus it did remain, At Hydrogen 2 and Oxygen 1 Called because of rain. %% When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. -- Eric Hoffer %% When people are starving, life is no longer meaningless. -- John Gardner %% When people cease to complain, they cease to think. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% When people have a job to do, particularly a vital but difficult one, they will invariably put it off until the last possible moment, and most of them will put it off even longer. -- Gordon L. Becker %% When people have trouble communicating, the least they can do is to shut up. -- Tom Lehrer %% When people say nothing, they don't necessarily mean nothing. %% When people you greatly admire seem to be thinking deep thoughts, they are probably thinking about lunch. -- Jason, jcborkow@remus.rutgers.edu %% When pinched on the fanny, Monique Succumbed to a peeved maiden's pique By exclaiming with verve To her pincher, "Some nerve!" "And in your case," he gloated, "some cheek!" %% When played from a sand trap, a ball which does not clear the trap on being struck may be hit again on the roll without counting an extra stroke. In no case will more than two strokes be counted in playing from a trap, since it is only reasonable to assume that if the player had time to concentrate on his shot, instead of hurrying it so as not to delay his partners, he would be out in two. -- Donald A. Metz %% When playing a song on a touch-tone telephone, use the following buttons: 2-0-9-6-2-1 (hold) 2-0-2-6-2-9 (hold) 9-9-2-6 2-9-2-6 2-2-2-6-9-0 (hold) %% When pleasure remains, does it remain a pleasure? -- A Sinbad the Sailor film %% When politicians claim they will build you a "pie in the sky" -- remember whose dough they will be using. -- Lucille J. Goodyear %% When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window. %% When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done. -- Daniel B. Luten %% When prosperity comes, it's best not to use all of it. %% When provoked into a fight, Just grab his midriff pearly white and withdraw that long and gleaming blade. Now with defense you're equipped, with Jesus you don't take no lip, and anyone you meet will wish he'd prayed. Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus ... %% When punished, watch your steps on the stairs! %% When reviewing your notes for a test, the most important ones will be illegible. %% When ribbon grass is pulled up, the sod comes with it. Each according to his kind. Undertakings bring good fortune. %% When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it. -- Edward Abbey %% When several reporters share a cab on assignment, the reporter in the front seat pays for all. -- Warren Weaver %% When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed, with a word she can get what she came for. %% When she hauled ass, it took three trips. %% When singleness is bliss, it's folly to be wives. -- Bill Councelman %% When slides are shown in a darkened room, the instructor will require the students to take notes. -- M. M. Johnston %% When smashing monuments, save the pedestals - they always come in handy. -- Stanislaw Lec %% When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% When some people decide it's time for everyone to make big changes, it means that they want you to change first. %% When some people discover the truth, they just can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it. %% When someone makes a move We'll send them all we've got, Of which we don't approve, John Wayne and Randolph Scott, Who is it that always intervenes? Remember those exciting fighting scenes? U.N. and O.A.S., To the shores of Tripoli, They have their place, I guess, But not to Mississippoli, But first, send the Marines! What do we do? We send the Marines! For might makes right, Members of the corps And till they've seen the light, All hate the thought of war: They've got to be protected, They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means. All their rights respected, Stop calling it aggression-- Till somebody we like can be elected. We hate that expression! We only want the world to know That we support the status quo; They love us everywhere we go, So when in doubt, Send the Marines! -- Tom Lehrer, "Send The Marines" %% When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop. %% When speculation has done its worst, two plus two still equals four. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) %% When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. -- Ethiopian proverb %% When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there is no need to have any recourse to any other. -- Michael Uhlmann %% When subtlety fails us we must make do with cream pies. -- David Brin %% When taxes are due, Americans tend to feel quite bled-white and blue. %% When tempers flare up in the family, Too great severity brings remorse. Good fortune nonetheless. When woman and child dally and laugh, It leads in the end to humiliation. %% When the Beatles first came to America, Ringo Starr revealed the secret of their success: "We have a press agent." %% When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it. -- Billy Sunday %% When the Ngdanga tribe of West Africa hold their moon love ceremonies, the men of the tribe bang their heads on sacred trees until they get a nose bleed, which usually cures them of ____that. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% When 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, "The Cyberiad" %% When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings i town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble. -- Edward Abbey %% When the blind lead the blind they will both fall over the cliff. -- Chinese proverb %% When the blossom grows white the potatoes are good. %% When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never talking about themselves. %% When the cup is full, carry it level. %% When the dragons grow too mighty To slay with pen or sword, I grow weary of the battle And the storm I walk toward. When all around is madness And there's no safe port in view, I long to turn my path homeward To stop a while with you. When life becomes as bare And as cold as winter skies, There's a beacon in the darkness, In a distant pair of eyes. In vain to search for honor And in vain to search for truth, But these things can still be given, Your love has shown me through. -- Neil Peart, Rush %% When the dream came, I held my breath with my eyes closed. I went insane, like a smoke ring day when the wind blows. %% When the end is lawful, the means are also lawful. -- Hermann Busenbaum (1600-1668) %% When the fencing team tried to wrap up the tournament, they kept getting foiled. %% When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. -- James Matthew Barrie %% When the fox gnaws -- smile! %% When the game-master smiles, it's already too late. %% When the going gets tough, everyone leaves. -- Lynch %% When the going gets tough, the going gets tough. %% When the going gets tough, the tough eat lunch. %% When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical -- Jon Carroll %% When the going gets tough, the tough go grab a beer. %% When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. %% When the going gets tough, the tough hold meetings. %% When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro. -- Hunter S. Thompson %% When the going gets tough... everyone quits. %% When the going gets weird the weird turn pro. %% When the government bureau's remedies do not match your problem, you modify the problem, not the remedy. %% When the government talks about "raising capital" it means printing it. That's not very creative, but it's what we're going to do. -- Peter F. Drucker %% When the issue is simple, and everyone understands it, debate is interminable. -- Robert Knowles %% When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyer names. (To see this in action, watch L.A. Law) %% When the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, right. -- Isaac Asimov %% When the lights are out, all women are fair. -- Plutarch %% When the lodge meeting broke up, Meyer confided to a friend. "Abe, I'm in a terrible pickle! I'm strapped for cash and I haven't the slightest idea where I'm going to get it from!" "I'm glad to hear that" answered Abe. "I was afraid you might have the idea you could borrow from me!" %% When the need arises -- and it does -- you must be able to shoot your own dog. Don't farm it out -- that doesn't make it nicer, it makes it worse. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. %% When the personality of a human is involved, exact predictions are hazardous. -- McCoy, "The Lights of Zetar," stardate 5725.6 %% When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. But men of intellect will believe anything-- if it appeals to their ego, their vanity, their sense of self-importance. -- Edward Abbey %% When the polls are in your favor, flaunt them. %% When the polls are overwhelmingly unfavorable, (a) ridicule and dismiss them or (b) stress the volatility of public opinion. %% When the polls are slightly unfavorable, play for sympathy as a struggling underdog. %% When the polls are too close to call, be surprised at your own strength. %% When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground. -- Old Jewish saying %% When the product is destined to fail, the delivery system will perform perfectly. -- Charles P. Boyle %% When the radio mentions a landslide, cross your fingers and hope it is talking about an election. %% When the revolution comes, count your change. %% When the ribbon grass is pulled up, the sod comes with it. Each according to his kind. Perseverance brings good fortune and success. %% When the rich make war it's the poor that die. -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), "Le Diable et le bon Dieu", 1951 %% When the righteous man turneth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness. -- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) %% When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful. -- Edward Abbey %% When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about. -- Edward Abbey %% When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied. -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% When the sun beats down and I lie on the bench, I can always hear them talk, Me, I'm just a lawnmower... you can tell me by the way I walk. %% When the sun shineth, make hay. -- John Heywood %% When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the confounding or perverting history or truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding. -- Lady Montague %% When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly. -- Donald Douglas %% When the well is dry, we know the worth of oil. -- Poor Jimmy's Almanac %% When the whispering starts--it's death, I tell you. Death! -- Darrius, THE KEYS OF MARINUS %% When the wind is great, bow before it; when the wind is heavy, yield to it. %% When the witch said Abradacabra, nothing happened. She's a hopeless speller. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% When the working day is done, o-oh, girls just wanna have fun. %% When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) %% When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best. -- Edward Abbey %% When there are sufficient funds in the checking account, checks take two weeks to clear. When there are insufficient funds, checks clear overnight. %% When there are two conflicting versions of a story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst. -- Avery %% When there is a very long road upon which there is a one-way bridge placed at random and there are two cars only on that road, it follows that: (1) the two cars are going in opposite directions and (2) they will always meet at the bridge. -- B. D. Firstbrook %% When there is an old maid in the house, a watch dog is unnecessary. -- Balzac %% When there is hoarfrost underfoot, Solid ice is not far off. %% When there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage. -- Poor Richard %% When they asked a pert baggage name Alice, Who'd been bedded and banged in the palace, "Was he modest or vain?" "Was he regal or plain?" She replied, "He's a jolly good phallus!" %% When they kick at you front door, How you gonna come? With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun. When the law break in, How you gonna go? Shot down on the pavement or waiting on death row. -- The Clash %% When they said Canada, I thought it would be up in the mountains somewhere. -- Marilyn Monroe %% When they talk about taxing the rich, they're really talking about taxing the working men and women of this country. -- President George Bush %% When they tell me to stick it where the sun don't shine, I put it in Oregon. %% When they want it bad (in a rush), they get it bad. -- John K. Meskimen %% When things are blackest, I just tell myself, "Cheer up, things could be worse!" And sure enough, they get worse! -- Skeeve %% When things are going well, someone will experiment detrimentally. -- Charles P. Boyle %% When things are going well, something will go wrong. Corollary: When things just can't get any worse, they will. Corollary: Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something. -- Francis P. Chisholm %% When things don't go well they like to blame Presidents; and that's something that Presidents are paid for. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) %% When things go well, expect something to explode, erode, collapse or just disappear. %% When things go wrong somewhere, they're apt to be wrong everywhere. -- Vermont Royster %% When this load is DONE I think I'll wash it AGAIN ... %% When this man straightens his head and puts it under his chin, he gets some relief. %% When three people journey together, Their number decreases by one. When one man journeys alone, He finds a companion. %% When time permits, your personal life will be exciting. %% When told about Quayle's comments on Murphy Brown, a senior Bush campaign official replied only 'Oh, dear.' Bush's top aid said, 'The world is a lot more complex than Dan would like to believe' %% When told he was making more per year than the President, Babe Ruth replied, "Well, I had a better year than he did." %% When traveling with children on one's holidays, at least one child of any number of children will request a rest room stop exactly half way between any two given rest rooms. -- Mervyn Cripps %% When turkeys mate they think of swans. -- Johnny Carson %% When two goats met on a bridge which was to narrow to allow either to pass or return, the goat which lay down that the other might walk over it was a finer gentleman than Lord Chesterfield. -- Cecil %% When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary. -- William Wrigley, Jr. %% 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 (1856-1950) %% When two people meet to decide how to spend a third person's money, fraud will result. -- Herman Gross %% When voting on appropriations bills, more is not necessarily better. It is as wasteful to have a B-1 bomber in every garage as it is to have a welfare program for every conceivable form of deprivation. -- Pierre S. du Pont %% When war is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% When was the last time you were drunk? %% When was the last time you were sober? %% When water freezes you can walk on it. That is what Christ did long ago in wintertime. %% When we are right we can afford to keep our tempers. When we are wrong, we can't afford not to. %% When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. %% When we call others dogmatic, what we really object to is their holding dogmas that are different from our own. -- Professor Charles P. Issawi %% When we cannot act as we wish, we must act as we can. -- Terrence %% When we jumped into Sicily, the units became separated, and I couldn't find anyone. Eventually I stumbled across two colonels, a major, three captains, two lieutenants, and one rifleman, and we secured the bridge. Never in the history of war have so few been led by so many. -- General James Gavin %% When we return, our contestants will be placed in Final Jeopardy. %% When we say something happened by chance, we really mean we don't know what caused it. %% When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves. -- Confucius %% When we talk of tomorrow, the gods laugh. %% When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic. -- Lily Tomlin %% When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before -- except our fingertips will have been singed. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% When we write programs that "learn," it turns out that we do and they don't. %% When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues. -- Balzac %% When wool sweaters are worn, classroom temperatures are 95 degrees Fahrenheit. -- M. M. Johnston %% When working on a project, if you put away a tool that you're certain you're finished with, you will need it instantly. %% When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer (provided, of course, you know there is a problem). %% When writing these verses of mine, I start with a clever last line, Then work backward from there, Toward the opening pair, With the hopes it'll all work out fine. [Only sometimes it doesn't.] %% When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. %% When you and I are far apart Can sorrow break your tender heart? I love you darling, yes I do; Sleep is so sweet when I dream of you; All you are is a blossoming rose. Night is here so I must close. With care read the first word of each line. You will find a question of mine. -- Yours hopefully, The VAX %% When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all. %% When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal. -- Amrom Katz %% When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% When you are at Rome live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere. -- St. Ambrose %% When you are in a high place, do you get the urge to spit? %% When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut. %% When you are right be logical, when you are wrong be-fuddle. -- Gerard E. McKenna %% When you are sure you're right, you have a moral duty to impose your will upon anyone who disagrees with you. -- Robert W. Mayer %% When you are working hard, get up and retch every so often. %% When you arrive at your campsite, it is full. -- Milt Barber %% When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanized. %% When you build a better mousetrap, what you often get is better-educated mice. %% When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face. -- Ed Howe %% When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take -- choose the bolder. -- W. J. Slim %% When you care enough to send the very best, send MONEY! %% When you dig another out of trouble, you've got a place to bury your own. %% When you divide people into _u_s and _t_h_e_m, you automatically become on one of _t_h_e_m. -- Solomon Short %% When you don't have an education, you've got to use your brains. -- Anonymous %% When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried. %% When you don't know what you are doing, do it neatly. %% When you don't know where you're going, any gust of wind will get you there. -- Conservative columnist George F. Will, on George Bush's foreign policy %% When you doubt, abstain. -- Zoroaster %% When you find that flowers and shrubs will not endure a certain atmosphere, it is a very significant hint to the human creature to remove out of that neighborhood. -- Mayhew %% When you find yourself in danger, when you're threatened by a stranger, when it looks like you will take a lickin'... There is one thing you should learn, when there is no one else to turn to, caaaall for Super Chicken (**bwuck-bwuck-bwuck-bwuck**) caaaall for Super Chicken !! %% When you find yourself shouting at the top of your lungs, remember this: The noisy thunder strikes nothing the silent lightening strikes %% When you fuck little Annie in Anza You get a great bossom bonanza : Sucking Annie's soft tits Makes her throw fifty fits, And the fuck is a sextravaganza! %% When you get killed you lose an important part of your life. -- Brooke Shields %% When you get out of the hospital, let me back into your life. I can't stand what you do, but I'm in love with your eyes. %% When you get your PH.D. will you get able to work at BURGER KING? %% When you give up your dreams you die. %% When you go into court you are putting your fate in the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. -- Norm Crosby %% When you go out to buy, don't show your silver. %% When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. %% When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. -- Harry S. Truman, 1959 %% When you have finished your daily toil, go to bed and sleep in peace. God is still awake. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) %% When you have nothing to say, say nothing. -- Charles Caleb Colton %% When you have spoken the word, it reigns over you. When it is unspoken, you reign over it. %% When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill, On formal declarations of war %% When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that in itself is a choice. -- William James %% When you haven't got enough iodine in your blood you get a glacier. %% When you hold the canvas up to patch the sail, the sunlight streaming through it reveals a map to sail by. %% When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet. -- Stanislaw Lem %% When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't know the answer either. -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong. %% When you look into the eyes of friends, there is a feeling in your heart that will never end. -- The Monkees %% When you lose your power to laugh, you lose your power to think straight. -- Inherit The Wind %% When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers. -- The Wall Street Journal %% When you need towns, they are very far apart. -- John Steinbeck (1902-1968) %% When you opponent is down, kick him. -- John Cameron %% When you outlaw rights, only outlaws will have rights. -- betz@gozer.idbsu.edu %% When you pass the buck, don't ask for change. -- Solomon Short %% When you reach what you have been striving for, you may find that having is not such a great thing as wanting. %% When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before. -- Clifton Fadiman, "Any Number Can Play", 1957 %% When you said "HEAVILY FORESTED" it reminded me of an overdue CLEANING BILL ... Don't you SEE? O'Grogan SWALLOWED a VALUABLE COIN COLLECTION and HAD to murder the ONLY MAN who KNEW!! %% When you save for a long time to buy something, then you find that you can't afford it - that's inflation. %% When you say Budweiser, you've said it all! %% When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice. -- Bismarck %% When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide. %% When you speak to others for their own good it's advice; when they speak to you for your own good it's interference. %% When you stay on the tracks, ignoring the facts, you can't blame the wreck on the train. -- from the song, "You Can't Blame . . " %% When you stop doing you want to do, they will bury you. %% When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research. -- Wilson Mizner %% When you transcend the medium, you have achieved art. -- Solomon Short %% When you try to make an impression, the chances are that is the impression you will make. %% When you use a thermometer, how do you tell if its oral or anal? %% When you were born, the doctor screamed, "Don't flush it! It has eyes!" %% When you were born, the doctor slapped your mother. %% When you're 10 points behind and the polls open in a few hours, there's not a hell of a lot you can do. -- Jody Powell %% When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way. From your first cigarette, to your last dying day. %% When you're away, I'm restless, lonely, Wretched, bored, dejected; only Here's the rub, my darling dear I feel the same when you are near. -- Samuel Hoffenstein, "When You're Away" %% When you're born, a big chance was taken for you. %% When you're dining out and you suspect something's wrong, you're probably right. %% When you're down and out, lift up your voice and shout, "I'M DOWN AND OUT"! %% When you're in command, command. -- Admiral Nimitz %% When you're mining, you mine for the gold, not the dirt. %% When you're not looking at it, this fortune is written in FORTRAN. %% When you're out of slits, you're out of pier. %% When you're ready to give up the struggle, who can you surrender to? %% When you're up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to keep your mind on the fact that your primary objective is to drain the swamp. %% When you're up to your nose in shit, keep your mouth shut. -- Jack Beauregard %% When you've seen one nuclear war, you've seen them all. %% When your conscious becomes unconscious, you are drunk. When your unconscious becomes conscious, you are stoned. %% When your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem. -- Leonard Cohen, "Sisters of Mercy" %% When your memory goes, forget it! %% When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt. -- Henry J. Kaiser %% Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the urge passes. %% Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% Whenever I read "Time" or "Newsweek" or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind? -- Edward Abbey %% Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one. -- Edward Abbey %% Whenever Richard Cory went downtown, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean-favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good morning," and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich--yes, richer than a king-- And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head. -- E. A. Robinson [Richard Cory] %% Whenever anyone says, "theoretically", they really mean, "not really". -- Dave Parnas %% Whenever in time, and wherever in the universe, any man speaks or writes in any detail about the technical management of a poem, the resulting irascibility of the reader's response is a constant. -- Francis P. Chisholm %% Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967) %% Whenever one word or letter can change the entire meaning of a sentence, the probability of an error being made will be in direct proportion to the embarrassment it will cause. -- Bob Considine %% Whenever people agree with me, I always think I must be wrong. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Whenever possible, steal code. -- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985 %% Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it. %% Whenever the abbot craves fun, He summons the same willing one: A hot-pantied sister Who makes his dong blister! She is known as his sine qua nun! %% Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors it is lost. -- Nikolai Lenin %% 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 (1835-1910) "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" %% Whenever two hypotheses cover the facts, use the simpler of the two. %% Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit. -- Epictetus %% Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Where I come from, size shape or color makes no difference. -- Kirk, "Plato's Stepchildren," stardate 5784.3 %% Where I come from, when a Catholic marries a Lutheran it is considered the first step on the road to Minneapolis. -- Garrison Keillor %% Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much. -- Walter Lippmann %% Where am I ? Who am I ? Am I ? I %% Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions. -- David Hume %% Where are kings usually crowned? On the head %% Where are the calculations that go with the calculated risk? -- Amrom Katz %% Where are your chain and ball?? %% Where did your race get this ridiculous predilection for resistance. You examine any object; you question everything. -- Korob from Pyris VII, "Catspaw," stardate 3018.2 %% Where do I pick up my radiation suit? My, what a lovely glow! Is that your child? What a darling little mutant! %% Where do all the "real men" eat in San Francisco? Oakland. %% Where do astronauts go on their vacations? All over Florida! %% Where do polar bears vote? The North Poll. %% Where do we get virgin wool? Ugly sheep. %% Where do you find a frog with no legs? Right where you left him. %% Where do you think all those demons come from? From Hell, of course. %% Where do you think the hell is located? It must be deep, deep down. %% Where do your SOCKS go when you lose them in th' WASHER? %% Where does it go when you flush? %% Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst. -- Francis H. Bradley %% Where have you ever found that man who stopped short after the perpetration of a single crime? -- Juvenal %% Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. -- Gray %% Where is John Carson now that we need him? -- RLG %% Where is shopdoor? %% Where is the guard? %% Where is the man who has the power and skill To stem the torrent of a woman's will? For if she will, she will, you may depend on't; And if she won't, she won't; so there's an end on't. -- Canterbury "Examiner", 31 May 1829 %% Where is there dignity unless there is honesty? %% Where knowledge is free %% Where love is there is no labor; and if there be labor, that labor is loved. -- Austin %% Where necessity ends, curiosity begins; and no sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites. -- Johnson %% Where no hope is left, is left no fear. -- Milton %% Where possible, preserve the President's options -- he will very likely need them. -- Donald Rumsfeld %% Where principle is involved, be deaf to expediency. %% Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into that dreary desert sands of dead habit %% Where the hell is Wall Drug? %% Where the hell is the power you promised me? One damned minute, Admiral. -- Kirk & Spock, "The Voyage Home," stardate 8390 %% Where the lies are dreams and the lies cost. %% Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever widening thought and action %% Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high %% Where the system is concerned, you're not allowed to ask "Why?". %% Where the words come out from the depths of truth %% Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls %% Where there are visible vapors, having their prevenance in ignited carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration. %% Where there is fear, there is no religion. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) %% Where there is much light there is also much shadow. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Where there is much light, the shadow is deep. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends. -- Lavater %% Where there is no vision, people perish. -- Proverbs 29:18 %% Where there's a whip there's a way. %% Where there's a will there's a won't. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Where there's a will, I want to be part of it. %% Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax. %% Where there's no emotion, there's no motive for violence. -- Spock, "Dagger of the Mind," stardate 2715.1 %% Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection %% Where true love has found a home, every new hear forms one more ring around the hearts of those who love each other, so that in the end they cannot live apart. -- Julius Stinde %% Where was that stooped and mealy-colored man I used to call poppa when the merry-go-round broke down? -- Joseph Heller,"Catch-22" %% Where will it all end? Probably somewhere near where it all began. %% Where would a shellfish sue for damages? In a small clams court. -- Oliver M. Neshamkin %% Where you stand depends on where you sit. -- Rufus Miles [HEW] %% Where your nightmares end ... Terror begins. Willard. %% Where's SANDY DUNCAN? %% Where's my other sock? %% Where's th' DAFFY DUCK EXHIBIT?? %% Where's the Coke machine? Tell me a joke!! %% Where's the beef, Hey where's the beef? %% Where's the beef? %% Where's the damn anti-matter inducer? This? No, *this.* That or nothing. -- Scotty & Chekov, "The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% Where's the good scissors? %% Where's there's a will, there's a relative. %% Where, oh where, are you tonight? Why did you leave me here all alone? I searched the world over, And I thought I'd found true love, You met another and [Bronx cheer] you were gone! -- Hee Haw %% Where? %% Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords other men is a matter of tolerance. -- Walter Lippmann %% Whereas in many branches of economic activity employment depends on the number of job openings available, in the public service, as also in the advertising business, social science investigation, and university administration, the level of unemployment regularly depends on the number of men available and devoting their time to the creation of job opportunities. %% Whereas in the past the only resource for dealing with biological systems was to try to minimize the interactions between the parts, thereby often losing the real focus of interest, today nothing but time and money prevent us from treating real biological systems in all their complexity and richness. -- W. Ross Ashby %% Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein %% Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or mine, there is a fairy-land. -- Kingsley %% Wherever public spirit prevails, liberty is secure. -- Noah Webster %% Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth. -- Soren Kierkegaard %% Wherever you go...There you are. -- Buckaroo Banzai %% Wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience - and laughter. %% Whether he is his brother's keeper or his keeper's brother. -- Evan Esar %% Whether weary or unweary, O man, do not rest, Do not cease your single-handed struggle. Go on, do not rest. -- An old Gujarati hymn %% Whether you can hear it or not The Universe is laughing behind your back -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata" %% Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? %% Which of the Himalayas is the shortest? -- Steve Connelly %% Which of the following doesn't belong? (a) meat (b) eggs (c) wife (d) blowjob. Answer: (d) a blowjob because it's possible to beat your meat, your eggs, or your wife, but you can't beat a blowjob. %% Which one do you mean? %% Which stock please? %% Which way? %% Which word didn't you understand? %% Which would you rather have, a bursting planet or an earthquake here and there? -- John Joseph Lynch %% While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of empires and the fall of kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention. -- Robert Burns, Address on "The Rights of Woman", November 26, 1792 %% While I was gone, somebody rearranged on the furniture in my bedroom. They put it in *exactly* the same place it was. When I told my roommate, he said: "Do I know you?" -- Steve Wright %% While I, with my usual enthusiasm, Was exploring in Ermintrude's busiasm, She explained, "They are flat, But think nothing of that -- You will find that my sweet sister Susiasm." %% While Pres. Reagan was at the summit meeting for the INF treaty, Gorbachev leans over and asks : "Mr. Raygun, could you please do me a favor?" "Sure, pal, what is it ?" "Well, here in the USSR, we have shortages of certain items. One of these is prophylactics. I need for you to obtain for me some fine American rubbers!" "Sure pal, you've got it!" "But Mr. Raygun, I require SPECIAL rubbers! They must be 14 inches long and six inches in diameter. Can you oblige?" "Sure" gulped Reagan, and off he went back to the US. Later, in the Board room of BG Goofrich, the president asks of the CEO, "Hey, I'm in a jam. I need you guys to make me special batch of rubbers. They must be 14 inches long and six inches in diameter, Ok?? Also, I want the following words printed on them. On one side, I want 'Made in the USA', and on the other side I want printed 'Extra Small'." %% 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 %% While anyone can admit to themselves they were wrong, the true test is admission to someone else. %% While bryographic plants are typically encountered in substrata of earthly or mineral matter in concreted state, discrete substrata elements occasionally display a roughly spherical configuration which, in presence of suitable gravitational and other effects, lends itself to combined translatory and rotational motion. One notices in such cases an absence of the otherwise typical accretion of bryophyta. We therefore conclude that a rolling stone gathers no moss. %% While critiquing a survey intended for mothers of infants, I came across the following question: Have you ever breast fed your baby? a) Yes b) No c) Don't Know %% While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman. -- Boccaccio %% While filming a chase scene in a movie, the robbers were using a hearse for their get-a-way car, they went around a corner and the back door flew open and the casket slid out the back. The director yells, "Cut! You'd better go back and rehearse that!" %% While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several. %% While his duchess lay practically dead, The Duke of Daguerrodargue said: "Can it be this is all? How puny! How small! Have destroyed this disgrace to my bed." -- Edward Gorey %% While human capacities to shape the environment, society, and human beings are rapidly increasing, policymaking capabilities to use those capacities remain the same. -- Yehezkel Dror %% While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possession, conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates "real transcendence" from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity. When accounts of sudden religious conversions in TLEs [temporal-lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the epiphanous revelations of the religious tradition, the parallels are striking. The same is true of the recent spate of alleged UFO abductees. Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits, demons, or extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255 %% While it may be true that a watched pot never boils, the one you don't keep an eye on can make an awful mess of your stove. -- Edward Stevenson %% While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery. %% While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position. %% While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their correctness never does. %% While my BRAINPAN is being refused service in BURGER KING, Jesuit priests are DATING CAREER DIPLOMATS!! %% While not actually a sailor, I certainly enjoy getting blown ashore. %% While our economy may be beset by difficulty, it should not be beset by doubt. -- President George Bush, February 1991 %% While out on a date in his Fiat, The man exclaimed "Where's my key at?" As he bent down to seek, She let out a shriek: "That's not where its likely to be at." %% While sitting 'neath an oak one morn "Oh tiny bird, O Nature's gift In thought on this and that, Of music and of wit! A tiny, twitt'ring little bird Why didst thou feel that my best hat A load dropped in my hat. Was thy best place to shit?" "Thy music gladdens my poor soul, The tiny bird a few notes sang, And brings joy to my heart. Then answer'd "Pardon me, But tell me, little bird divine, For thy hat I thought was my nest, Why didst thou not just fart?" A-fallen from the tree." I rose and stood in solemn awe His words to better mull, Then lifted up a paving block And crushed his fucking skull. -- Bill Wordsworth, "A Tiny Twitt'ring Bird" %% While spending the winter at Pau Lady Pamela forgot to say "No." So the head-porter made her The second-cook laid her; The waiters were all hanging low. %% While the State exists, there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there is no State. -- Nikolai Lenin %% While the difficulties and dangers of problems tend to increase at a geometric rate, the knowledge and manpower qualified to deal with these problems tend to increase at an arithmetic rate. -- Yehezkel Dror %% While the public says it wants a good Congressman, it votes for good politicians. -- Otis Pike %% While there's life, there's hope. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) %% While travelling in farthest Tibet, Lord Irongate found cause to regret The buttered-up tea, A pain in his knee, And the frivolous tourists he met. -- Edward Gorey %% While vacationing last summer in the North Woods, a young fellow thought it might be a good idea to write his girl. He had brought no stationery with him, however; so he had to walk into town for some. Entering the one and only general store, he discovered that the clerk was a young, full-blown farm girl with languorous eyes. "Do you keep stationery?" he asked. "Well," she giggled, "I do until the last few seconds, and then I just go wild." %% While walking down a crowded City street the other day, I heard a little urchin To a comrade turn and say, "Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse, I'd be happy as a clam If only I was de feller dat Me mudder t'inks I am. "She t'inks I am a wonder, My friends, be yours a life of toil An' she knows her little lad Or undiluted joy, Could never mix wit' nuttin' You can learn a wholesome lesson Dat was ugly, mean or bad. From that small, untutored boy. Oh, lot o' times I sit and t'ink Don't aim to be an earthly saint How nice, 'twould be, gee whiz! With eyes fixed on a star: If a feller was de feller Just try to be the fellow that Dat his mudder t'inks he is." Your mother thinks you are. -- Will S. Adkin, "If I Only Was the Fellow" %% While we are sleeping, two-thirds of the world is plotting to do us in. -- Dean Rusk %% While you don't greatly need the outside world, it's still very reassuring to know that it's still there. %% While you recently had your problems on the run, they've regrouped and are making another attack. %% While you're chewing, think of STEVEN SPIELBERG'S bank account ... his will have the same effect as two "STARCH BLOCKERS"! %% While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands you are safe, for you can watch both of his. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Whilst thou livest keep a good tongue in thy head. -- William Shakespeare %% Whip it! Whip it good. %% Whip it, baby. Whip it right. Whip it, baby. Whip it all night! %% Whistler's Law: You never know who is right, but you always know who is in charge. %% Whistler's mother is off her rocker. %% White Book: n. 1. Syn. {K&R}. 2. Adobe's fourth book in the PostScript series, describing the previously-secret format of Type 1 fonts; `Adobe Type 1 Font Format, version 1.1', (Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-57044-0). See also {Red Book}, {Green Book}, {Blue Book}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% White Book: n. Syn. {K&R}. %% White House Chief of staff Donald Regan, testifying before the Sarah Whitman Hooker Chapter of the Daughters of the Select Committee on Chicanery, said he was unaware, until recently, of the existance of Iran and that the entire fiasco is the work of Robert (Bud) McFarlane, Oliver (Crazy Legs) North, John (Sugar Lips) Poindexter and Lorne (Gump) Worsley. %% 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. %% White House officials worry that the coming evaluations of the `first hundred days' will suggest that the President... has no agenda, no money, no strategy, no ideology, no worldview, and no explanation for his mysterious role in the Iran-contra scandal. -- The New York Times, Day 85 of the Bush presidency %% White as snow and snow it isn't Green as grass, and grass it isn't Red as blood and blood it isn't Black as ink, and ink it isn't. A blackberry, (White bloom, green, red, black berry) %% White dwarf seeks red giant for binary relationship. %% White sandstone cliffs tower overhead, forming an impassable barrier to the north. There is a small trail winding steeply up the cliffs. The cliffs stretch away to the west and east, plunging into the ocean in the latter direction. %% White's Statement: Don't lose heart! Owen's Commentary on White's Statement: ...they might want to cut it out... Byrd's Addition to Owen's Commentary: ...and they want to avoid a lengthy search. %% Whitehead's Law: The obvious answer is always overlooked. %% Whitesville, Delaware, deems it disorderly conduct for a woman to offer a marriage proposal during a leap year. %% Whittaker: When shouldn't a mountain climber call for help? Edmond: When he's hanging by his teeth. %% Who are the artists in the Computer Graphics Show? Wavefront's latest box, or the people who programmed it? Should Mandelbrot get all the credit for the output of programs like MandelVroom? -- Peter da Silva, peter@ficc.uu.net %% Who are those guys? %% Who are you to take away others' angels, just because you think it's in their best interest? -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) %% Who are you? %% Who bravely dares must sometimes risk a fall. -- Tobias G. Smollett %% Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act. -- The Talmud (Sabbath, 54 b.) %% Who can take the demands of the SDS seriously? -- Nathan Pusey %% Who cares if it doesn't do anything? It was made with our new Triple-Iso-Bifurcated-Krypton-Gate-MOS process... %% Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. -- George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984", 1948 %% Who cuts the grass on Walton's Mountain? Lawn Boy. %% Who dares nothing, need hope for for nothing. -- Johann von Schiller %% Who dares sit before the Queen with his hat on? Her Coachman %% Who dat who say "who dat" when I say "who dat"? -- Hattie McDaniel %% Who do I have to sleep with to get off of this project? %% Who do you hire to build an ivory tower? Deconstruction workers. %% Who does he think he is, giving me orders? Geordi thinks he is in command here and he is correct. -- Q and Data, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% Who does not love wine, women, and song, Remains a fool his whole life long. -- Johann Heinrich Voss %% Who does not trust enough will not be trusted. -- Lao Tsu %% Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? -- Marlowe %% Who fears t' offend takes the first step to please. -- Cibber %% Who glued the cup to the table? %% Who goeth a-borrowing goeth a-sorrowing. -- Thomas Tusser %% Who gossips to you will gossip of you. %% Who greased the grape viiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnneeeeeeeeee........ -- Tarzan %% Who has something good to say? %% Who holds a power but newly gained is ever stern of mood. -- Aeschylus %% Who holds the souls of children, holds the nation. %% Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellman's mayonnaise to a public meeting? -- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities" %% Who is D. B. Cooper, and where is he now? %% Who is John Gault? %% Who is W. O. Baker, and why is he saying those terrible things about me? %% Who knows a fool, must know his brother; for one will recommend another. -- Poor Richard %% Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? ... Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom. -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948 %% Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows! %% Who knows? It all feels the same in the dark. %% Who loves ya, baby? %% Who loves, raves -- 'tis youth's phrenzy; but the cure Is bitterer still. -- Byron %% 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 %% Who makes quick use of the moment, is a genius of prudence. -- Johann Kaspar Lavater %% Who messed with my anti-paranoia shot? %% Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies. -- Edward Abbey %% Who needs companionship when you can sit alone in your room and drink? %% Who needs friends when you can sit alone in your room and drink? %% Who on earth would eat a charred caterpillar!? No, no, you SINGE 'em! You SINGE 'em and eat 'em! %% Who plays the rogue, be perfect in his part. -- Erskine %% Who purposely cheats his friend, would cheat his God. -- Lavater %% Who says I am not under the special protection of God? -- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) %% Who says you can't have it all? a. Michelob Light. b. Heidegger. c. The IRS. -- A sane man %% Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall. %% Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall. Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And sound casuists doubt like you and me? -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And sound casuists doubt like you and me? -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) %% Who shall guard the guardians themselves? %% Who so e'er shall pull the sword from this stone shall rightwise be king of all England. -- a rock %% Who soars too near the sun, with golden wings, melts them; to ruin his own fortune brings. -- William Shakespeare %% Who stole my underwear? %% Who stole the cork from my breakfast? -- W. C. Fields %% Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% Who thinks it only frivolous flim-flam. -- Martial %% Who to himself is law no law doth need, offends no law, and is a king indeed. -- George Chapman %% Who took the MMMMMM out of MURINE? %% Who was Alexander Graham Kowalski? The first telephone Pole. %% Who was Penis Robinowitz? Cock Robin before he changed his name. -- will barratt %% Who was that masked man? %% Who was the first computer expert ever? Eve, because she had an Apple in one hand and a Wang in the other. %% Who was the most elastic man in the Bible? Mohab, because he hitched his ass to a tree and walked nine miles. %% Who was the world's first underwater spy? James Pond. %% Who will protect the public when the police violate the law? -- Ramsey Clark %% Who will see us in museums? Who will dust today's belongings? Who will tell the stories of the way things used to be? %% Who will take care of the world after you're gone? %% Who would have predicted... that Dubcek, who brought the tanks in in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is now being proclaimed a hero in Czechoslovakia. Unbelievable. -- Vice President Dan Quayle Actually, Dubcek was the leader of the Prague Spring %% Who's afraid of ARPA? %% Who's afraid of the garbage collector? %% Who's on first, what's on second, I don't know's on third. %% Who's on first? %% Who's responsible for the riots? The rioters! -- Vice President Dan Quayle giving an intelligent, in-depth analysis of the LA riots. (Herb Caen, SF Chronicle) %% Who's scruffy-looking? -- Han Solo %% Whoah, you smell bad. %% Whoever admits that he is too busy to improve his methods has acknowledged himself to be at the end of his rope. And that is always the saddest predicament which anyone can get into. -- J. Ogden Armour %% Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), "Jenseits von Gut und Bose" %% Whoever has the most toys when he dies, wins. %% Whoever has the most when he dies... WINS! %% Whoever hunts deer without the forester Only loses his way in the forest. The superior man understands the signs of the time And prefers to desist. To go on brings humiliation. %% Whoever preserves a single thought uncorrupted by any concession to the will of others, whoever brings into reality a matchstick or a patch of garden made in the image of his thought -- he, and to that extent, is a man, and that extent is the sole measure of his virtue. They made no concessions. This (the valley) is the measure of what they preserved and what they are. -- Hugh Akston %% Whoever said getting there was half the fun never rode in a Class VIII probe. -- K'Ehleyr, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors. -- Voltaire (1694-1778) %% Whoever thought up "It's only a game" probably just lost one. %% Whoever would lie usefully should lie seldom. %% Whoever you are -- you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand -- the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality, and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: 'I am, therefore I'll think.' -- John Galt %% Wholly without foundation, informed sources insist, are rumors that John Anderson will announce a running-mate just as soon as he receives a confidential medical advisory on the feasibility of his being cloned. -- National Review %% Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. %% Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. %% Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. %% Whoops, stepped on a frog. %% Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein. -- Book of Proverbs %% Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and, consequently the world itself. -- Sir Walter Raleigh %% Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. -- Matthew V, 39 %% Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but ... -- I have to floss my cat. -- I've dedicated my life to linguini. -- I need to spend more time with my blender. -- it wouldn't be fair to the other Beautiful People. -- it's my night to pet the dog/ferret/goldfish. -- I'm going downtown to try on some gloves. -- I have to check the freshness dates on my dairy products. -- I'm going down to the bakery to watch the buns rise. -- I have an appointment with a cuticle specialist. -- I have some really hard words to look up. -- I've got a Friends of the Lowly Rutabaga meeting. -- I promised to help a friend fold road maps. %% Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race. -- Edward Abbey %% Why You Can't Run When There's Trouble in the Office: No matter where you stand, no matter how far or fast you flee, when it hits the fan, as much as possible will be propelled in your direction, and almost none will be returned to the source. -- John L. Shelton %% Why a man would want a wife is a big mystery to some people. Why a man would want *two* wives is a bigamystery. %% Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot. -- Edward Abbey %% Why am I lying on the floor. In this undignified position, with the four of you standing over me, displaying expressions of... -- Data, "The Schizoid Man", stardate 42437.5 %% Why am I not married? - Because there is no woman who can whip me! %% Why are toilet paper rolls 2 miles long? The first 1.5 miles are instructions. %% Why are Jewish men circumcised? Because Jewish women won't touch anything that isn't at least 20% off. %% Why are electrons patriotic? Because they go to the poles and volt. %% Why are many scientists using lawyers for medical experiments instead of rats? a) They can't tell the difference. b) There are more lawyers than rats. c) The scientist's don't become as emotionally attached to them. d) There are some things that even rats won't do for money. %% Why are many scientists using lawyers for medical experiments instead of rats? a) There are more lawyers than rats. b) The scientist's don't become as emotionally attached to them. c) There are some things that even rats won't do for money. %% Why are programmers criticized for re-inventing the wheel, when car manufacturers are praised for it? %% Why are synogoges round? So the jewish people have nowhere to run when they pass out the collection plate. %% Why are the good women married? %% Why are these athletic shoe salesmen following me?? %% Why are we all put here to suffer and die? %% Why are we importing all these highbrow plays like `Amadeus'? I could have told you Mozart was a jerk for nothing. -- Ian Shoales %% Why are you looking down here? The joke is above! %% Why are you looking for more knowledge when you do not pay attention to what you already know? %% Why are you so dull? %% Why are you so hard to ignore? %% Why are you wasting time reading taglines? %% Why are you watching The washing machine? I love entertainment So long as it's clean. Professor Doberman: While the preceding poem is unarguably a change from the guarded pessimism of "The Hound of Heaven," it cannot be regarded as an unqualified improvement. Obscurity is of value only when it tends to clarify the poetic experience. As much as one is compelled to admire the poem's technique, one must question whether its byplay of complex literary allusions does not in fact distract from the unity of the whole. In the final analysis, one receives the distinct impression that the poem's length could safely have been reduced by a factor of eight or ten without sacrificing any of its meaning. It is to be hoped that further publication of this poem can be suspended pending a thorough investigation of its potential subversive implications. %% Why ask me? It's your program! %% Why be a man when you can be a success? -- Bertolt Brecht %% Why be difficult when with a little more effort you can be impossible? %% Why bother building any more nuclear warheads until we use the ones we have? %% Why can't Jesus eat M&Ms? They keep falling through the holes in his hands. %% Why can't life's big problems come when we are twenty and know everything? %% Why can't we just spell it orderves? %% Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else? %% Why can't you be unique and original like everybody else? %% Why did (neighboring hated state) raise the drinking age to 31? To keep the high schoolers out of the bars. %% Why did Douglas Hofstadter cross the road? To make this riddle possible %% Why did God create women? Sheep can't cook. %% Why did God give Mexicans noses? So they would have something to pick in the off season. %% Why did God invent booze? So that fat and ugly girls can get laid too %% Why did Texas get the Aggies and San Francisco get the gays? San Francisco had first choice. %% Why did the Albanion working class revolt? %% Why did the LDS couple stop after three children? Because they read that every fourth child born is Chinese. %% Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to avoid responsibility with? %% Why did the Marin County woman cross the road? She was channelling a chicken. %% Why did the Pillsbury Girl get pregnant? Because the Pillsbury Boy forgot his Wiener Wrap! %% Why did the Postal Service have to cancel the Ronald Reagan stamp? Because people kept spitting on the wrong side. %% Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation? %% Why did the dead baby cross the road? It was nailed to a chicken. %% Why did the elephant paint a white stripe down his back? ...So he wouldn't get seen on the freeway. Never seen an elephant on the freeway have you? Work's don't it. %% Why did the elephant paint his toenails blue? ...So he could hide in the bubblegum jar. %% Why did the elephant paint his toenails red? ...So he could hide in the apple tree. %% Why did the hospital poker game come to an abrupt end? The leper threw in his hand. %% Why did the leper hockey game end? There was a face-off in the corner. %% Why did the little Moron take his nose apart? To see what made it run! %% Why did the lone ranger kill Tonto? He found out what "kimosabe" means. %% Why did the moron jump off the Empire State Building? He wanted to make a hit on Broadway. %% Why did the moron take his kneecap off? To see if there was any beer in the joint! %% Why did the moron throw the clock out the window? To see time fly! %% Why did the mouse run up the elephants leg twice? ...The first time he got Pissed Off. %% Why did the orange lose his job at the orange juice factory? -- He couldn't consentrate! %% Why did the program counter increment? To get to the next instruction. %% Why did they hang the picture? They couldn't find the artist. %% Why didn't we do this six years ago? "We were not ready." I was. "No. We were both too young, too unaware. We lacked commitment." Perhaps we lacked the courage as well. -- K'Ehleyr and Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Why do s put ice in their condoms? It keeps the swelling down. %% Why do Californians have car accidents? So they can meet their neighbors. %% Why do Edmontonians smell? So blind people can hate them too. %% Why do Elephants have four feet? ...ten inches just isn't enough. %% Why do I get the impression that when politicians talk of "family values" in government, they really mean "treat the voters like children?" -- Mark J Bradakis mjb@triumph.cs.utah.edu %% Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*. -- Edward Abbey %% Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss. -- Edward Abbey %% Why do Scottsmen wear kilts?? Simple...the sound of zippers scare the sheep.... %% Why do all obscene phone callers sound like they have asthma? %% Why do basketball players have so many children? They dribble before they shoot. %% Why do five pins seem like a little, but five elephants seem like a lot? %% Why do fools fall in love? %% Why do scottish people refuse to buy refrigerators? They don't believe that the light will go out when you close the door. %% Why do seagulls live near the sea? Because if they lived near the bay, they'd be called bagels. %% Why do so many computer nerds have pictures of beautiful girls in their X background windows? That's the only way they will ever have a chance to point at a pretty girl and say "She's my X girlfriend." %% Why do so many foods come packaged in plastic? It's quite uncanny. %% Why do the Kennedy men cry after sex? MACE. %% Why do the marines send three men out on a patrol? One to read the map and two to guard the intellectual. %% Why do they call a fast a fast, when it goes so slow? %% Why do they have a rear window defroster on the Yugo? So your hands stay warm while you're pushing it. %% Why do tigers live in the jungle? They hate city traffic. %% Why do we have two eyes? To watch 3-D movies with. %% Why do we want intelligent terminals when there are so many stupid users? %% Why do women have more trouble with hemmoriods than men? Because God made man the perfect asshole. %% Why do women have periods? Because they deserve them. %% Why do women love Pacman? Only place you can get eaten three times for a quarter. %% Why do you boil water when babies are born? So that if they're born dead, you can make soup. %% Why do you have all this anger toward me? A girl with long, dark hair broke my heart a long time ago. Out of bitterness and resentment, I turned to crime. How about this one, my mother abandoned me when I was a little boy. I never got the guidance that a wild, young man needed. -- Troi and Roga Danar, "The Hunted", stardate 43489.2 %% Why do you mock me? Why do you wish to anger me? Only to see if it is still possible. -- Worf and Korris, "Heart of Glory", stardate 41503.7 %% Why do you think they call it "find"? %% Why does Dr. Pepper come in a bottle? Because his wife left him. But things are looking up for their reconciliation. Seems that when she left, she stole his word processor, and she's been renting it out occasionally in Japan. That is, every now and then she gets a yen for his Wang. %% Why does New Jersey have more toxic waste dumps and California have more lawyers? New Jersey had first choice. %% Why does Noriega have so many holes in his face? From learning to eat with a fork!!!!! %% Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away? -- Carl Sandburg %% Why does a mosquito bite your ear? And who cares? The answer is simple, call an exterminator. -- Dr. Stubbs, "Evolution", stardate 43125.8 %% Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents? %% Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage. -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" %% Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness? Or is it the exalting separation from the turmoils of life, that veiling of the world in which for the soul nothing there remains but souls? It is therefore that the letters in which the loved name stands written in our spirit appears like phosphorous writing by night, in fire, while by day, in their cloudy traces, they but smoke? -- Richter %% Why does this magnificent applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone? -- Jimmy Durante %% Why doesn't life come with subtitles? %% Why doesn't the Bat Computer ever crash? %% Why doesn't the fattest man in the world become a hockey goalie? -- Rod Schmidt %% Why don't Edmontonians play hide and seek? Because nobody wants to find them %% Why don't Scotsmen ever have coffee the way they like it? Well, they like it with two lumps of sugar, but if they drink it at home, they only take one, and if they drink it while visiting, they always take three. %% Why don't elephants eat penguins ? Because they can't get the wrappers off ... %% Why don't hockey players have children? They shoot before they score. %% Why don't somebody print the truth about our present economic condition? We spent years of wild buying on credit, everything under the sun, whether we needed it or not, and now we are having to pay for it, howling like a pet coon. This would be a great world to dance in if we didn't have to pay the fiddler. -- Will Rogers %% Why don't you adopt an old octopus? %% Why don't you become a gump? %% Why don't you become turtle brained? %% Why don't you come up and see me sometime? -- Mae West %% Why don't you do it, then? Look me in the eye. Pull the trigger. End my life. -- 7th Doctor, THE HAPPINESS PATROL %% Why don't you eat a gazelle? %% Why don't you ever enter and CONTESTS, Marvin?? Don't you know your own ZIPCODE? %% Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle? -- Alan Shepherd [the first man into space, Gemini program] %% Why don't you give yourself a treat? Paint all your mirrors. %% Why don't you go check into a Roach Motel? %% Why don't you humans leave me alone? %% Why don't you live with a racoon and lick a moose? %% Why don't you move to Russia? %% Why don't you pair 'em up in threes? -- Yogi Berra %% Why don't you put on a tutu and go to a leather bar? %% Why don't you slip into something more comfortable? Like thumbscrews. %% Why don't you take a stress pill and think things over Dave? %% Why don't you try slipping on a pair of water moccasins? %% Why don't you write books people can read? -- Nora Joyce, to her husband %% Why dont chickens wear underwear? Their peckers are on their faces. %% Why dost thou court that baneful pest, ambition? -- Potter %% Why explore the Universe? It is almost ironic that we should have to ask this question because it is almost as though we have to apologize for our highest attributes... we went to Mars, not because of our technology, but because of our imagination. -- Norman Cousins %% Why fall in love when there's better things to do? %% Why fire engines are red: Two plus two makes four. Three times four makes twelve. There are twelve inches in a ruler. Queen Elizabeth is a ruler. Queen Elizabeth is also a boat. Boats sail on the ocean. Fish live in the ocean. Fish have fins. The Finns fought the Russians. The Russians are red. And that's why fire engines are red, because they're Rushin' all over! %% Why get even, when you can get odd? %% Why good morning, I'm the bluebird of fellatio! %% Why her? "Sir, I believe she was the intended target of the abduction." 'Why would they want to take a Federation hostage? Their fight doesn't involve us.' "It does now." -- Picard, Worf, and Riker, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7 %% Why is "abbreviated" such a long word? %% Why is Christmas just like a day at the office? You do all the work and the fat guy with the suit gets all the credit. %% Why is Cinderella such a bad soccer player? She keeps running away from the ball! %% Why is Cinderella such a bad tennis player? Her coach is a pumpkin! %% Why is Gerald Ratner so successful? In just six years the Englishman has parlayed a two-karat family business into the world's largest jewelry retailer, with 1,000 stores in the U.S. (under the names Kay and Sterling) and an equal number in Britain. In a speech last week at London's Albert Hall before the annual convention of the prestigious Institute of Directors, Ratner, 41, offered a four-point program for becoming a multimillionaire. Rule No. 1: Understand your market. His stores, he says, sell "cheap and tacky products." Rule No. 2: Form clear quality goals. "We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray -- that your butler can serve you drinks on -- all for 4.95 [$8.73]. People say, `How can you sell this for such a low price?' I say because it is total crap." Rule No. 3: Evaluate how your products stacks up against all the competition. "We even sell a pair of earrings for under 1 [$1.76], which is cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer. But I have to say the earrings probably won't last as long." Oh, yes, and Rule No. 4: Don't write your own speeches. -- Time magazine, May 6, 1991 %% Why is Marianne Gravatte looking at me that way? %% Why is Mrs. Carter always on top when she and Jimmy make love? Because all Jimmy Carter can do is fuck up. %% Why is Oprah Winfrey's lawn covered in AstroTurf? To keep her from grazing. %% Why is a duck? %% Why is a fat girl like a moped? Both are fun but you wouldn't like your friends to see you. %% Why is any object we don't understand always called a thing? -- McCoy, "The Motion Picture," stardate 7411.4 %% Why is everything made of Lycra Spandex? %% Why is it everyone asks of me but no one asks for me? %% Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get One perfect rose. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), "One Perfect Rose" %% Why is it taking so long for her to bring out all the good in you? %% Why is it that people consider it impolite to speak when the mouth is full, but quite routine to speak when the head is empty? %% Why is it that people who know nothing are so quick to prove it? %% Why is it that stupid questions are so hard to answer? %% Why is it that the more accuracy you demand from an interpolation function, the more expensive it becomes to compute? That's the Law of Spline Demand. %% Why is it that there are so many more horses' asses than there are horses? -- G. Gordon Liddy %% Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Why is it that when you DIE, you can't take your HOME ENTERTAINMENT CENTER with you?? -- Zippy the Pinhead %% Why is it that you always have to rummage through the wastebasket for a note right after you've just emptied your ashtray? %% Why is it you never see the headline, "PSYCHIC WINS LOTTERY" %% Why is it, whenever a group of internationalists get together, they always decide that Uncle Sam must be the goat? -- Bertrand H. Snell %% Why is man doomed to have only one erogenous zone? %% Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? -- Steve Wright %% Why is the alphabet in that order? -- Steven Wright %% Why is the sky black? -- Lal to Data, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% Why is there a watermelon there? I'll explain later. -- "Buckaroo Banzai" %% Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet? -- Lily Tomlin %% Why isn't there some cheap and easy way to prove how much she means to me? %% Why kill time when you can kill yourself? %% Why knock on a #? %% Why listen to reason when insanity prevails. %% Why look here for the joke? It's all around us. %% Why marry a virgin? If she wasn't good enough for the rest of them then she isn't good enough for you. %% Why me? %% Why must every generation think their folks are square? %% Why must love always be accompanied--sooner or later--by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots. -- Edward Abbey %% Why must you tell me all your secrets when it's hard enough to love you knowing nothing? -- Lloyd Cole and the Commotions %% Why my thoughts are my own, when they are in, but when they are out they are another's. -- Susanna Martin, executed for witchcraft, 1681 %% Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is? %% Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year? Just picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your children open their old-fashioned presents. Your 11-year-old son: "What the heck is this?" You: "A spinning top! You spin it around, and then eventually it falls down. What fun! Ha, ha!" Son: "Is this a joke? Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer with two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory, and I get this cretin TOP?" Your 8-year-old daughter: "You think that's bad? Look at this." You: "It's figgy pudding! What a treat!" Daughter: "It looks like goat barf." -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts" %% Why piccolo a profession that's full of viol practices, confirmed lyres, old fiddles, and bass desires? For the lute, of course. -- Alan F. G. Lewis %% Why should I care if I have to cut my hair, I've got to move to the fashion of the outcast. %% Why should I feel another man's mistakes more than his sickness or poverty? %% Why should I have to pay a troll just to cross a bridge? -- B. G. Gruff %% Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. -- V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) %% Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% Why should the devil have all the good tunes? %% Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything. -- V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) %% Why should we care if you are insane? The activities of other species rarely interfere with our own lives. In the end, they all belong to us. -- Kyeref "The Ringworld Engineers" %% Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity? -- Ronald W. Reagan %% Why shouldn't the American people take half my money from me? I took all of it from them. %% Why strive for knowledge of reality if this knowledge cannot aid us in life? %% Why study? The more you study the more you know, the more you know the more you can forget, the more you can forget, the more you do forget, the more you forget the less you know. So why study? -- Robert Ripley %% Why teach people to type with both hands when they can type faster with one finger than they can think. %% Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure. -- Edward Abbey %% Why was I born with such contemporaries? -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Why was the cannibal sent home from school? - Because he tried to butter up the teacher. %% Why were the midget and the circus fat lady so deliriously happy when they were married? She let him try a new wrinkle every night. %% Why won't sharks eat lawyers? Professional courtesy. %% Why won't you dance with me? I'm not no Limburger! %% Why worry about tomorrow, when today is so far off? %% Why would anybody in his sane mind engrave "Elbereth" ? %% Why would anyone want to be called "Later"? %% Why would we have different races if God meant us to be alike and associate with each other? -- Lester Maddox %% Why would you WANT to port C news to your PC? Wouldn't it be smarter and about as cost-effective to port your PC over to the trashcan and buy a real computer that runs a real operating system like Unix? -- Brian Kantor, brian@ucsd.edu %% Why would you tie up a #? %% Why wouldn't an enhanced deterrent, a more stable peace, a better prospect to denying the ones who enter conflict in the first place to have a reduction of offensive systems and an introduction to defensive capability. I believe that is the route this country will eventually go. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% Why you flabby small slime-mold, why don't you live with a sword? %% Why you numskull, you resemble an ant. %% Why you say you no bunny rabbit when you have little powder-puff tail? -- The Tasmanian Devil %% Why, every one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow. -- Rabelais %% Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only be incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness... -- Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876 %% Why, when people pray, do they invariably ask for something? %% Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love. -- Aristotle %% Wickedness may prosper for a awhile, but in the long run, he that seta all knaves at work will pay them. -- L'Estrange %% Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm; Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles; And every sense and every heart is joy. -- Thomson %% Wie geht's? %% Wife who put husband in doghouse soon find him in cathouse. %% Wife: Okay, today's Friday. Where's your pay envelope? Man: I already spent all my pay. I bought something for the house. Wife: What? What could you buy for the house that cost $480? Man: Eight rounds of drinks. %% Wife: "Have you given the goldfish any water lately?" Maid: "No, ma'am, they haven't finished the water I gave them last month." %% Wife: "Henry, wake up. I heard a mouse squeak." Henry: "What do you want me to do, get up and oil it?" %% Wilcox's Law: A pat on the back is only a few centimeters from a kick in the pants. %% Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. -- James A. Froude (1818-1894) %% Wild thing, you make my heart sing. You make everything groovy. Wild thing, i think i love you, but i wanna know for sure. Come on, hold me tight. You move me. %% Wilderness begins in the human mind. -- Edward Abbey %% Will I live tomorrow? Well, I just can't say. But one thing's for sure. I don't live today. -- Jimi Hendrix %% Will Rogers never met Howard Cosell. Still one more thing, fellow citizens: a wise and frugal government, which shall refrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) %% Will Rogers never met you. %% Will arrived and gave me the water jug, a Clorox bleach bottle. After we took our first sips Will admitted he should have rinsed the bottle out a few more times after finding it in the Camp Four dumpster. He surveyed the wall above: "This is where Arnold backed off, that little chicken shit." Then he laughed so loud I swear I heard it volley off El Capitan, a mile across the valley. I thought Will had been gazing at the moon too much and, looking up, knew that whoever Arnold was, he was no fool. Will had tried this climb three times in the last month and each partner had backed off at this very stance. But just now Will scared me more than the climb and anyhow he was already halfway up the flake. -- John Long, Direct North Buttress, Middle Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley %% Will he still love you tomorrow? %% Will it improve my CASH FLOW? %% Will she still love you tomorrow? %% Will the last one out please turn off the lights? %% Will the last person out of the tunnel turn out the light? -- graffito, in Saigon, c.1973 %% Will the third world war keep "Bosom Buddies" off the air? %% Will this never-ending series of PLEASURABLE EVENTS never cease? %% Will you lend me your rifle so I can shoot myself? %% Will you loan me $20.00 and only give me ten of it? That way, you will owe me ten, and I'll owe you ten, and we'll be even! %% Will you stop interrupting me. I mean, this is hardly a time to be teaching you the true nature of the universe. -- Q to Riker, "Hide and Q", stardate 41590.5 %% William Dean Howells: a rubber chicken dangling on a string. -- Edward Abbey %% William Tell wore contact lenses. %% William's Law: There is no mechanical problem so difficult that it cannot be solved by brute strength and ignorance. %% William, is something wrong? "What do you mean?" Do you not like girls? "'Course I do." -- Brenna O'Dell and Riker, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% William, this is not your concern. "It is now, you're about to commit a murder." It isn't murder, it's justice. -- Yuta and Riker, "The Vengeance Factor", stardate 43421.9 %% Williams and Holland's Law: If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by statistical methods. %% Willie in the cauldron fell; Willie saw some dynamite, See the grief on mother's brow; Couldn't understand it quite; Mother loved her darling well-- Curiosity never pays: Willie's quite hard-boiled by now. It rained Willie seven days. Little Willie with a shout, William in a nice new sash, Gouged the baby's eyeballs out; Fell in the fire and burned to an ash. Stamped on them to make them pop. Now, although the room grows chilly, Mother cried, "Now, William, stop!" I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy. William with a thirst for gore, Nailed the baby to the door. Mother said, with humor quaint: "Careful, Will, don't mar the paint." -- Harry Graham, "Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes", 1899 %% Willie, looking in the mirror, Willie with the nursery shears Sucked the mercury off Cut off both the baby's ears. Thinking in his childish error To the baby so unsightly It would cure the whooping cough. Mother raised her eyebrows slightly. At the funeral his weeping mother In the family drinking well Sadly said to Mrs. Brown, Willie pushed his sister, Nell. "'Twas a chilly day for Willie She's there still because it killed her, When the mercury went down." Now, we have to buy a filter. %% Wilner's Observation: All conversations with a potato should be conducted in private. %% Win her with gifts, if she respect not words; Dumb jewels often, in their silent kind, More quick than words do move a woman's mind. -- William Shakespeare %% Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat %% Winchester:: n. Informal generic term for `floating-head' magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the disk surface on an air cushion. The name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became the IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte volumes; 30--30 became `Winchester' when somebody noticed the similarity to the common term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the latter, the first 30 referred to caliber and the second to the grain weight of the charge). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Wind and thunder: the image of Increase. Thus the superior man: If he sees good, he imitates it; If he has faults, he rids himself of them. %% Wind comes forth from fire: The image of The Family. Thus the superior man has substance in his words And duration in his way of life. %% Wind over lake: the image of Inner Truth. Thus the superior man discusses criminal cases In order to delay executions. %% Window: What you heave the computer out of after you accidentally erase a program that took you three days to set up. %% Windows are all the rage these days. It's just as I've always claimed: the world just keeps getting more and more X-centric. %% Windows: A method of dividing a computer screen into two or more unusably tiny portions. %% Winds following one upon the other: The image of the Gently Penetrating. Thus the superior man Spreads his commands abroad And carries out his undertakings. %% Wine is a turncoat; first a friend, and then an enemy. -- Fielding %% Winged time glides on insensibly, and deceives us; and there is nothing more fleeting than years. -- Ovid %% Winning doesn't prove you are a better human being. %% Winning isn't everything, but losing isn't anything. %% Winning isn't everything, but losing sucks. %% Winning isn't the most important thing; it's the only thing. -- J. Ceasar %% Winston Peters, a rebel without a caucus. %% Winter is here with his grouch, The time when you sneeze and slouch. You can't take your women Canoein' or swimmin', But a lot can be done on a couch. %% Winter is nature's way of saying "up yours". %% Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat. %% Wipe Me Mommy (revue) %% Wisdom and good sense guard life from harm. %% Wisdom and knowledge decrease in inverse proportion to age. -- William J. Lynott %% Wisdom does not give you the answers, it only redefines the questions. %% Wisdom has never made a bigot, but learning has. -- Josh Billings %% Wisdom is considered a sign of weakness by the powerful because a wise man can lead without power but only a powerful man can lead without wisdom. -- Mark B. Cohen %% Wisdom is divided into two parts: 1) having a great deal to say, and 2) not saying it. %% Wisdom is knowing what to do with what you know. -- J. Winter Smith %% Wisdom is meaningless until our own experience has given it meaning ... and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom. -- Bergen Evans %% Wisdom is rarely found on the best-seller list. %% Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it all out; and when it does come it is out again immediately. -- Matthew Henry %% Wise approach. This is right for a great prince. Good fortune. %% Wise men make proverbs but fools repeat them. -- Samuel Palmer %% Wise people learn to tolerate only productive anxiety in themselves. They make tension work for them instead of against them. Their aggressiveness is outgoing and initiating, not hostile or arrogant. %% Wise words in the mouths of fools oft belie. %% Wish and hope succeed in discerning signs of paranormality where reason and careful scientific procedure fail. -- James E. Alcock, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12 %% Wish for a master key and open the Magic Memory Vault! %% Wish for a pass-key and pass all obstacles! %% Wish for a skeleton-key and open all doors! %% Wishes are free unless you want them to come true. %% Wishing without work is like fishing without bait. -- Frank Tyger %% Wit is cultured insolence. -- Aristotle %% Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food. -- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) %% Wit lies in the likeness of things that are different, and in the difference of things that are alike. -- Madame de Stael %% Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity. -- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld [In other words, to step on a man's toes without spoiling his shoeshine.] %% Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity. -- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld %% Wit, n.: The salt with which the American Humorist spoils his cookery ... by leaving it out. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Witch! Witch! They'll burn ya! -- Hag, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," stardate unknown %% Witch: (1) An ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness with a league beyond the devil. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Witches of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your broomsticks! %% With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law; and every time they make a law it's a joke. -- Will Rogers %% With Scotch the price it is, I can hardly brace myself to order a double until I've had one. %% With TV, radio, and tapes, what young person has time to listen to reason? -- Boyd K. Packer %% With YOU, I can be MYSELF.. We don't NEED Dan Rather.. %% With a #? %% With a French lass, it's unwise to trifle. They have urges they simply can't stifle. A woman of France Will pull down her pants At the sight of a towering eye-full. %% With a bushel of apples, you can have a hell of a time with the doctor's wife. %% With a gentleman I try to be a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half. -- Otto von Bismark (1815-1898) %% With a great effort, the rug is moved to one side of the room. With the rug moved, the dusty cover of a closed trap door appears. %% With a love so hard and filled with defeat, for the lies in that lonely backstreets. %% With a mind like yours, who needs a body. %% With all due respect sir, you need me - particularly now. Indeed, Starfleet needs good captains - particularly now. Will, you're ready to work without a net - you're ready to take command, and you know, the Enterprise will go on just fine without you. -- Riker & Picard, "The Best of Both Worlds," stardate 43989.1 %% With all due respect, BEGONE...sir. -- Worf to Data, "The Icarus Factor", stardate 42686.4 %% With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm? %% With all the talent around, it's sort of amazing that a woman could be up here with us. -- Ralph Kiner [on introducing an award winner] %% With clothes the new are best, with friends the old are best. %% With design like this, who needs bugs? -- Boyd Roberts %% With equal pace, impartial fate, Knocks at the palace and the cottage gate. -- Horace (65-8 B.C.) %% With every baby,there comes a new hope - always dashed %% With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do incalculable mischief. -- Washington Irving %% With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. -- Ransom K. Ferm %% With friends like you, who needs enemas. %% With great effort you move the enormous rock. %% With great effort, you open the window far enough to allow passage. %% With her body, woman is more sincere than man; but with her mind she lies. And when she lies, she does not believe herself. -- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) %% With her hands on her hips and the smile on her lips because she knows that it kills me. %% With her killer graces and the secret places that no boy can fill. %% With her long hair shining and her eyes that shine like the midnight sun. %% With her soft french cream standing in the doorway like a dream when I wish she'd just leave me alone. %% With just one kiss she can turn a long summer night. %% With liberty and justice for all who can afford it. %% With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% With notch-less ears... %% With rank goeth privileges -- so it ever shall be. But also with it go responsibility and obligations, always more onerous than the privileges are pleasant. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter... -- William Lloyd Garrison %% With silver bells, and cockle shells, And pretty maids all in a row. -- Mother Goose %% With some people we spend our time, with others we invest it. %% With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain. -- Friedrich von Schiller %% With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams. -- Edward Abbey %% With the news that Nancy Reagan has referred to an astrologer when planning her husband's schedule, and reports of Californians evacuating Los Angeles on the strength of a prediction from a sixteenth-century physician and astrologer Michel de Notredame, the image of the U.S. as a scientific and technological nation has taking a bit of a battering lately. Sadly, such happenings cannot be dismissed as passing fancies. They are manifestations of a well-established "anti-science" tendency in the U.S. which, ultimately, could threaten the country's position as a technological power. . . . The manifest widespread desire to reject rationality and substitute a series of quasirandom beliefs in order to understand the universe does not augur well for a nation deeply concerned about its ability to compete with its industrial equals. To the degree that it reflects the thinking of a significant section of the public, this point of view encourages ignorance of and, indeed, contempt for science and for rational methods of approaching truth. . . . It is becoming clear that if the U.S. does not pick itself up soon and devote some effort to educating the young effectively, its hope of maintaining a semblance of leadership in the world may rest, paradoxically, with a new wave of technically interested and trained immigrants who do not suffer from the anti-science disease rampant in an apparently decaying society. -- Physicist Tony Feinberg, in "New Scientist," May 19, 1988 %% With the press, it is safest to assume that there is no "off the record." -- Donald Rumsfeld %% With the proper consideration in choice of allies, victory may be guaranteed in any conflict. -- Benedict Arnold %% With those lies on the backstreets tonight. %% With those who follow a different way it is useless to take counsel. %% With what? your bare hands? %% With what? your bare hands? Against *his* bear hands?? %% With/Without - and who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about? -- Pink Floyd %% Wither have all the poets gone? The Language is lost and the Ballads are gone. The Ballad once strong and true, Has been replaced by the Lyric with it's different view. A Lyric which can bring such pain is akin to Technology with all its strain. Technology, the beast, stands in power where Magic, used to make men cower. Magic has little to fear like the Moon that romantic sphere. The Moon in all its glory has made poets write, and bring a story. Wither have all the poets gone? The Language is lost and the Ballads are gone. %% Within a computer, natural language is unnatural. %% Within a fountain crystal clear, A golden apple doth appear, No doors there are to this stronghold, Yet thieves break in and steal the gold. An egg %% Within a month [in 1969] I had met the first of a small but not uninfluential community of people who violently opposed SALT for a simple reason: It might keep America from developing a first-strike capability against the Soviet Union. I'll never forget being lectured by an Air Force colonel about how we should have "nuked" the Soviets in late 1940s before they got The Bomb. I was told that if SALT would go away, we'd soon have the capability to nuke them again - and this time we'd use it. -- Roger Molander [former nuclear strategist for the White House's National Security Council, Washington Post, 21 March, 1982] %% Within that porch, across the way. I see two naked eyes this night; Two eyes that neither shut nor blink, Searching my face with a green light. But cats to me are strange - I cannot sleep if one is near; And though I'm sure I see those eyes I'm not so sure a body's there! -- William Henry Davis %% Within the earth, a mountain: The image of Modesty. Thus the superior man reduces that which is too much, And augments that which is too little. He weighs things and makes them equal. %% Within the earth, wood grows: The image of Pushing Upward. Thus the superior man of devoted character Heaps up small things In order to achieve something high and great. %% Within the oyster's shell uncouth The purest pearl may hide, Trust me you'll find a heart of truth Within that rough inside. -- Mrs. Osgood %% Without Time, everything would happen at once. %% Without a thorough understanding of tactics, there can be no effective strategy; therefore, any general must have a good foundation in the tactical aspects of warfare. However, it is not necessary for a general to be an excellent swordsman, musketeer, or tank gunner. It is sufficient to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and proper use of the forces available, and to know the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy. -- Phillip Harbison (alvitar@xavax.com) %% Without adventure civilization is in full decay. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% Without blame. %% Without coffee he could not work, or at least he could not have worked in the way he did. In addition to paper and pens, he took with him everywhere as an indispensable article of equipment the coffee machine, which was no less important to him than his table or his white robe. -- Stefan Zweigs, Biography of Balzac %% Without facts, the decision cannot be made logically. You must rely on your human intuition. -- Spock, "Assignment: Earth," stardate unknown %% Without feeling there's no reason to live. -- Andre Kertesz, photographer, 1894-1985 %% Without followers, evil cannot spread. -- Spock, "And The Children Shall Lead," stardate 5029.5 %% Without fools there would be no wisdom. %% Without freedom of choice there is no creativity. -- Kirk, "The return of the Archons," stardate 3157.4 %% Without freedom, no one really has a name. -- Milton Acorda %% Without guidance, that religion could degenerate into inquisitions, holy wars, chaos. -- Dr. Barron, "Who Watches the Watchers?", stardate 43173.5 %% Without health you cannot enjoy wealth or happiness. %% Without ice cream life and fame are meaningless. %% Without life, Biology itself would be impossible. %% Without love intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence love is not enough. -- Ashley Montagu %% Without vigorous, farsighted and continuing encouragement of scientific research, we are in a position of eating our seed corn: we may fend off starvation for one more winter, but we have removed the last hope of surviving the following winter. -- Carl Sagan %% Without water, we're all just three or four pounds of chemicals. -- McCoy, "the Omega Glory," stardate unknown %% Without you my world would be less than real. -- lmy %% Wizard Book: n. Hal Abelson's, Jerry Sussman's and Julie Sussman's `Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' (MIT Press, 1984; ISBN 0-262-01077-1), an excellent computer science text used in introductory courses at MIT. So called because of the wizard on the jacket. One of the {bible}s of the LISP/Scheme world. Also, less commonly, known as the {Purple Book}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Wizards do not sleep. %% Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood. -- William Shakespeare %% Woke up this mornin' an' I had myself a beer, Yeah, Ah woke up this mornin' an' I had myself a beer The future's uncertain and the end is always near. -- Jim Morrison, "Roadhouse Blues" %% Woke up this morning, don't believe what I saw. Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore. Seems I never noted being alone. Hundred billion castaways looking for a call. %% Wolf: Ready, villain, and able. -- "Laughs Unlimited" %% Wolfgang's Third Law: It can't work. %% Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them. -- Dumas %% Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists. -- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) %% Woman on Street: Sir, you are drunk; very, very drunk. Winston Churchill: Madame, you are ugly; very, very ugly. I shall be sober in the morning. %% Woman was God's second mistake. -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) %% Woman was taken out of man -- not out of his head, to rule over him; nor out of his feet, to be trampled under by him; but out of his side, to be equal to him -- under his arm, that he might protect her, and near his heart that he might love her. -- Henry %% Woman who cooks carrots and peas in same pot very unsanitary. %% Woman who spring on inner-spring this spring, have off-spring next spring. %% Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands. -- DeGourmont %% Woman's advice has little value, but he who won't take it is a fool. -- Cervantes %% Woman: Doctor, you've got to help me! I've got three vaginas! Doctor: I see, and what would you like me to do about this little "problem"? Woman: Well, can't you sew two of them up or something? I was sort of hoping that that might be possible. Doctor: Sure it's possible. But what's the inconvenience of having three vaginas? It doesn't sound so terrible... Woman: But it is: I'm tired of getting screwed left, right, and center!!! %% Wombat's Laws of Computer Selection: (1) If it doesn't run Unix, forget it. (2) Any computer design over 10 years old is obsolete. (3) Anything made by IBM is junk. (See number 2) (4) The minimum acceptable CPU power for a single user is a VAX/780 with a floating point accelerator. (5) Any computer with a mouse is worthless. -- Rich Kulawiec %% Women Unite! Make *___him* sleep in the wet spot tonight! %% Women and asses and nuts require strong hands. %% Women and elephants never forget an injury. -- Saki [H. H. Munro] (1870-1916), "Reginald", 1904 %% Women are a problem, but if you haven't already guessed, they're the kind of problem I enjoy wrestling with. -- Warren Beatty %% Women are all alike. When they're maids they're mild as milk: once make 'em wives, and they lean their backs against their marriage certificates, and defy you. -- Jerrold %% Women are always so eager to urge bachelors into matrimony: is it from charity or revenge? -- Scott %% Women are just like men, only different. %% Women are like elephants to me: I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one. -- W. C. Fields %% Women are more easily and more deeply terrified ... generating more sheer horror than the male of the species. -- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3615.4 %% Women are not much, but they are the best other sex we have. -- Herold %% Women are nothing but machines for producing children. -- Napoleon Bonaparte, quoted in "The Book of Insults", 1978 %% Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more. -- Stephens %% Women can keep a secret just as well as men, but it takes more of them to do it. %% Women do come with instructions; ask them. %% Women get minks the same way minks get minks. %% Women give themselves to God when the Devil wants nothing more to do with them. -- Arnould %% Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they invariably want it back in such very small change. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Women have more strength in their looks than we have in our laws, and more power by their tears than we have by our arguments. -- Saville %% Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. -- Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own", 1929 %% Women in Joliet, Illinois, can be jailed for trying on more than six dresses in one store. %% Women in Utah must remember that state law prohibits heels over one and a half inches high. %% Women in love consist of a little sighing, a little crying, a little dying-- and a good deal of lying. -- Ansey %% Women like silent men. They think they're listening. -- Marcel Archard %% Women like the simplest things in life...men. %% Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% Women professionals do tend to over-compensate. -- Dr. Elizabeth Dehaver, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," stardate 1312.9 %% Women reason with the heart and are much less often wrong than men who reason with the head. -- DeLescure %% Women should be obscene and not heard. %% Women sometimes forgive a man who forces the opportunity, but never a man who misses one. -- Charles De Talleyrand-Perigord %% Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us and are always bothering us to do something for them. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable. -- Edward Abbey %% Women want their men to be cops. They want you to punish them and tell them what the limits are. The only thing that women hate worse from a man than being slapped is when you get on your knees and say you're sorry. -- Mort Sahl %% Women waste men's lives and think they have indemnified them by a few gracious words. -- Balzac %% Women who desire to be like men, lack ambition. %% Women who love only women may have a good point. -- Edward Abbey %% Women who miscalculate are called 'mothers'. -- Abigail Van Buren %% Women who want equality must be prepared to give it and believe in it, and in order to do that it is not enough to state that you are as good as any man, but also it must be stated he is as good as you and both will be humans together. -- Anne Roiphe %% Women who want to be equal to men lack imagination -- Graffito in a women's restroom %% Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore; not because they are pretty, or good, or well-bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves. -- Amiel %% Women! Can't live with 'em and no resale value. %% Women's virtue is man's greatest invention. -- Cornelia Otis Skinner %% Women, can't live with them, can't leave them by the curb when you're done with 'em. %% Women, when they are not in love, have all the cold blood of an experienced attorney. -- Balzac %% Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron. -- Balzac %% Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try. -- Edward Abbey %% Womens Libbers are OK. I just wouldn't want my sister to marry one. %% Won't dancing be more fun if women had their breasts on the other side? %% Won't walk back from deadman's curve. %% Won't you show mercy to your own -- ? -- Master, PLANET OF FIRE %% Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. -- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.), [quoting Plato] %% Wonderful day. Your hangover just makes it seem terrible. %% Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance -- the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen. -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) %% Wood is highly ecological, since trees are a renewable resource. If you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And if you cut down the new tree, still another will grow. And if you cut down that tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you come back. Wood heat is not new. It dates back to a day millions of years ago, when a group of cavemen were sitting around, watching dinosaurs rot. Suddenly, lightning struck a nearby log and set it on fire. One of the cavemen stared at the fire for a few minutes, then said: "Hey! Wood heat!" The other cavemen, who did not understand English, immediately beat him to death with stones. But the key discovery had been made, and from that day forward, the cavemen had all the heat they needed, although their insurance rates went way up. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" %% Wood's Axiom: As soon as a still-to-be-finished computer task becomes a life-or-death situation, the power fails. %% Woodard's Law: You can have it right, or you can have it now. But you can't have it right now. %% Woofing Cookies, The %% Woolsey-Swanson Rule: People would rather live with a problem they cannot solve rather than accept a solution they cannot understand. %% Word Processor: Software that magically transforms its user into a professional author. %% Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things. -- Johnson %% Words are the voice of the heart. %% Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. -- Rudyard Kipling %% Words can never express what words can never express. %% Words divide us, action unites us. -- Slogan of the Tupamaros %% Words have a longer life than deeds. -- Pindar %% Words have the power to 'condition' you, they say, and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your -- blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of -- blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of -- blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of -- blank-out. An industrialist -- blank-out -- there is no such person. A factory is a 'natural resource', like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle. -- John Galt %% Words must be weighed, not counted. %% Words with a 'k' in them are funny. If it doesn't have a 'k', it's not funny. -- Willie Clark %% Worf! You're a romantic! It is among the Klingons that love poetry achieves its fullest flower. -- Dr. Pulaski and Worf, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2 %% Worf, is this your idea of sex? This is sex, but I have no place for it in my life now. No place microbrain? What possesses you? -- Geordi, Worf, and Q, "Hide and Q", stardate 41590.5 %% Worf, you do know what to do. Take us...uh... "Take us out of here." Right. -- Picard and Riker, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% Worf. So this is where you've been hiding. I told you we'd meet again. Aren't you going to greet me? "I have nothing to say to you." Haven't changed a bit, hmm? Well, I missed you, too. -- K'Ehleyr and Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Work Rule: Death (Other Than Your Own) -- This is no excuse. If you can arrange for funeral services to be held late in the afternoon, however, we can let you off an hour early, provided all you work is up to date. %% Work Rule: Each day fill lamps, clean chimneys, and trim wicks. Wash the windows once a week. %% Work Rule: Entirely too much time is being spent in the washrooms. In the future, you will follow the practice of going in alphabetical order. For instance, those whose surnames begin with "A" will be allowed to go from 9 - 9:05 AM, and so on. If you are unable to go at your appointed time, it will be necessary to wait until the next day when your time comes around again. %% Work Rule: Every employee should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years, so that he will not become a burden on society or his betters. %% Work Rule: Men employees will be given off each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go regularly to church. %% Work Rule: Office employees will daily sweep the floors, dust the furniture, shelves, and showcases. %% Work Rule: Sickness -- No excuses will be acceptable. We will no longer accept your doctor's statement as proof of illness, as we believe that if you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work. %% Work Rule: This office will open at 7 AM and close at 8 PM except on the Sabbath, on which day we will remain closed. Each employee is expected to spend the Sabbath by attending church and contributing liberally to the cause of the Lord. %% Work Rule: After an employee has spent his 13 hours of labor in the office, he should spend the remaining time reading the Bible and other good books. %% Work Rule: Any employee who smokes Spanish cigars, uses liquor in any form, or frequents pool and public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop, will give me good reasons to suspect his worth, intentions, integrity and honesty. %% Work Rule: Each clerk will bring in a bucket of water and scuttle of coal for the day's business. %% Work Rule: Leave of Absence (for an Operation): We are no longer allowing this practice. We wish to discourage any thoughts that you may not need all of whatever you have, and you should not consider having anything removed. We hired you as you are, and to have anything removed would certainly make you less than we bargained for. %% Work Rule: Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to your individual taste. %% Work Rule: The employee who has performed his labors faithfully and without a fault for five years, will be given an increase of five cents per day in his pay, providing profits from the business permit it. %% Work always expands to fill the available time to complete it. %% Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton %% Work expands to fill the time available for its completion; the thing to be done swells in perceived importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent in its completion. %% Work fascinates me. I could sit and watch it for hours. %% Work flows toward the competent until they are submerged. %% Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter %% Work is for people who can't %% Work is of two kinds: (1) Altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other such matter; (2) Telling other people to do so. The first is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and high paid. %% Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Charles Schulz %% Work is the curse of the drinking man. %% Work is the great basic principle that makes all things possible, both in time and in eternity. -- Bruce R. McConkie %% Work on What Has Been Spoiled Has supreme success. It furthers one to cross the great water. Before the starting point, three days. After the starting point, three days. %% Work smarter, not harder, and be careful of your speling. %% Work to become, not to acquire. %% Work was impossible. The geeks had broken my spirit. They had done too many things wrong. It was never like this for Mencken. He lived like a Prussian gambler -- sweating worse than Bryan on some nights and drunker than Judas on others. It was all a dehumanized nightmare...and these raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines. -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Bad Nerves in Fat City", "Generation of Swine" %% Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world. %% Workers of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your chairs. %% Working all day in my daddy's garage, I'm driving all night chasing some mirage. %% Working as Designed n. Colloquialism used by software maintenance people to indicate that while there is a problem, it is not considered to affect the program when the program is used for the purpose for which it was designed. Of course, nobody uses programs the way that programmers design them. The general user response is usually some nasty remark about the 'designers' mental condition when he designed it. -- IBM Jargon File %% Working hard around here is like pissing on yourself in a dark suit; you get a warm feeling but nobody notices. %% Working here is like a pregnancy. After nine months you wish you hadn't come. %% Works of genius are the first things in the world. %% Works used in the creation of Earthsea are: (This loose bibliography is in rough order of importance) 1. "The Earthsea Trilogy" by Ursula K. LeGuin. 2. "The Traveller in Black" by John Bruner. 3. "Creatures of Light and Darkness" by Roger Zelazny. 4. "Catch a Falling Star" by John Bruner. 5. "The Interaction of Color" by Josef Albers. 6. "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny. 7. "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" by Edgar Allan Poe. 8. "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce. 9. "Inferno" versions by both Dante and Larry Niven. 10. "Doorways in the Sand" by Roger Zelazny. 11. "The Sign of the Unicorn" by Roger Zelazny. 12. "Dune" by Frank Herbert. 13. "In the Frame" by Dick Francis. 14. "The Musgrave Ritual" by Arthur Conan Doyle. 15. "The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins. %% Works without faith are like a fish without water, it wants the element it should live in. A building without a basis cannot stand; faith is the foundation, and every good action is as a stone laid. -- Feltham %% Workstations are like toothbrushes. Nobody else may use mine, especially not while I'm using it! -- Robert Van Renesse, during his talk at the Usenix Microkernel Workshop. %% World War III? No thanks! %% World War Three can be averted by adherence to a strictly enforced dress code! %% World ending in 5 minutes; please log out. %% World ends today at 9:30pm! Film at 11:00... %% World tensions have, if anything, increased in the quarter century since H. G. Wells uttered his glum warning: "There is no more evil thing on earth than race prejudice, none at all. I write deliberately -- it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world." -- Sydney Harris %% World's shortest ghost story: The last man on earth sat down in his room. Suddenly there was a knock on the door! %% World's shortest horror story: The last man on earth sat down in his room. There was a knock on the door. -- Published (by whom?) in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction World's even shorter horror story: There are some things man was not meant to know. -- Larry Niven %% World-wide practice of Conservation and the fair and continued access by all nations to the resources they need are the two indispensable foundations of continuous plenty and of permanent peace. -- Gifford Pinchot %% Worlds may change, galaxies disintegrate, but a woman always remains a woman. -- Kirk, "The Conscience of the King," stardate 2818.9 %% Worriers spend a lot of time shoveling smoke. -- Claude McDonald %% Worry : The interest paid on trouble before it's due %% Worry is a human emotion. -- Spock, "Journey to Babel," stardate 3842.4 %% Worrying is like rocking in a rocking chair-- It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. %% Worst Month of 1981 for Downhill Skiing: August. The lines are the shortest, though. -- Steve Rubenstein %% Worst Month of the Year: February. February has only 28 days in it, which means that if you rent an apartment, you are paying for three full days you don't get. Try to avoid Februarys whenever possible. -- Steve Rubenstein %% Worst Response To A Crisis, 1985: From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?" %% Worst Vegetable of the Year: The brussels sprout. This is also the worst vegetable of next year. -- Steve Rubenstein %% Worst-dressed sentient being in the known universe %% Worth seeing? Yes, but not worth going to see. %% Would I ask you a rhetorical question? %% Would I sell my services to a Third World country? Ask again in six months. -- Chief scientist at a Russian nuclear facility, after the Bush administration dithered on aid to Russia %% Would a virgin be called a notyeterosexual? %% Would it help if I got out and pushed? -- Princess Leia Organa %% Would it save you some time if I just gave up and went mad now? %% Would that be a red Hiney or a dry Hiney? When you're talkin' wine, you're talking Hiney. Go out and get some Hiney today! %% Would that my hand were as swift as my tongue. -- Alfieri %% Would the last person to leave Michigan please turn out the lights? %% Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake? -- John Heywood %% Would you care to drift aimlessly in my direction? %% Would you choose one life over one thousand? I refuse to let arithmetic decide questions like that. -- Data and Picard, "Justice", stardate 41255.6 %% Would you like to come to a party in my toolshed? %% Would you like to hear a story? This one is about a father and son in a playground twelve years ago, in the spring, around noon. The boy was five. He had a basketball, which the dribbled off his toes half the time, and which he kept shooting at the hoop - underhand, both hands, straining to reach the rim. The father sat on a bench and watched. The boy kept at it. Then some bigger boys sauntered over, snatched the ball away and shot around, leaving the five-year-old watching too. Gearing up for the rescue, the father asked his son if he wanted him to retrieve the ball. The boy said, "No. I think I can handle it." Which he did, simply by standing among the others patiently, occasionally catching the ball and passing it to one of them, until one of them eventually passed it to him. That's all there is to that story. The five-year-old continued to play ball, and his father sat in the sun. %% Would you like to see my boa constrictor? %% Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger-skin? Or would you prefer to err with her on some other fur? -- A. Glyn, "Elinor Glyn", 1907 %% Would you mind terribly much if I asked you to take your silly-assed problem down the hall? %% Would you people stop playing these stupid games?!?!?!!!! %% Would you rather have a 5-inch hard or an 8-inch floppy? %% Would you trade your regular detergent for two of this other brand? %% Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips? %% Wouldn't you rather be a lifeguard? %% Wouldn't you rather be alone with me, with me in your mind? -- Troi to Riker, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% Wow do you feel strong! %% Wow! Look!! A stray meatball!! Let's interview it! %% Wow! This makes you feel great! %% Wrapped in the hide of a yellow cow. %% Wrestlers try not to do it on their backs. %% Wrestling with a marshmallow. -- An analyst from the conservative Heritage Foundation, describing the process of reading President George Bush's 32-page ``strategic vision'' paper %% Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% Write a letter to the New York Times. %% Write a letter to the Voice. %% Write a letter to your congressman. %% Write down the advice of him who loves you, thou you like it not at present. %% Write home; they miss you. %% Write lock error on disk %% Write neatly. %% Write yourself a threatening letter and pen a defiant reply. %% Write-Protect Tab, n.: A small sticker created to cover the unsightly notch carelessly left by disk manufacturers. The use of the tab creates an error message once in a while, but its aesthetic value far outweighs the momentary inconvenience. -- Robb Russon %% Writers desire to be paid, authors desire recognition. -- James L. Davis %% Writers do it between periods. %% Writers of novels and romances in general bring a double loss on their readers, they rob them both of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things that never have been, nor are likely to be; either confounding or perverting history or truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding. -- Lady Montague %% Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words. -- Edward Abbey %% Writers, composers, entertainers and such know an awful truth: it is easier to please a million people you don't know than to please one person you do know. -- Richard J. Needham %% Writing Rule 1 - Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent. %% Writing Rule 10 - About sentence fragments. %% Writing Rule 11 - In letters themes reports articles and stuff like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart. %% Writing Rule 13 - Its important to use apostrophe's right. %% Writing Rule 14 - Don't abbrev. %% Writing Rule 15 - Check to see if you any words out. %% Writing Rule 16 - In my opinion I think that an author when he is writing shouldn't get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words that he does not really need. %% Writing Rule 17 - And, of course, there's that old one: Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. %% Writing Rule 18 - Also, never obfuscate your documentation with pretentious, ostentatious or histrionic language. %% Writing Rule 19 - Last but not least, lay off cliches. %% Writing Rule 20 - Subject and verb always has to agree. %% Writing Rule 22 - Do not use a foreign term when there is an adequate English quid pro quo. %% Writing Rule 23 - However, if you must use a foreign term, it is de rigor to spell it correctly. %% Writing Rule 24 - It behooves the writer to avoid archaic expressions. %% Writing Rule 25 - Do not use hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it effectively. %% Writing Rule 27 - Mixed metaphors are a pain in the ass and ought to be thrown out the window. %% Writing Rule 28 - Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct. %% Writing Rule 29 - Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas. %% Writing Rule 30 - Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling. %% Writing Rule 32 - Don't use tautological, repetitive or redundant statements. %% Writing Rule 34 - Puns are for children - not for readers who are groan. %% Writing Rule 35 - The passive voice shouldn't be used. %% Writing Rule 36 - Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed. %% Writing Rule 39 - Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them. %% Writing Rule 4 - Watch out for irregular verbs which has cropped into our language. %% Writing Rule 40 - Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. %% Writing Rule 41 - Avoid colloquial stuff. %% Writing Rule 42 - No sentence fragments. %% Writing Rule 43 - Remember to finish what you. %% Writing Rule 44 - The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning. %% Writing Rule 6 - A writer mustn't shift your point of view. %% Writing Rule 7 - When dangling, don't use participles. %% Writing Rule 9 - Don't use a run on sentence you got to punctuate it. %% Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. -- George Orwell (1903-1950) %% Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. -- Frank Zappa %% Writing code is easy: just get it write the first time! %% Writing for television is a debilitating exercise. How can you inspire an audience to their best when every fourteen minutes someone interrupts to tell them that they're unfit to live with? The ultimate purpose of commercial television is to convince the viewer that he smells bad. -- Solomon Short %% Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. %% Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. %% Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down and write it as it occurs to you. The writing is easy--it's the occurring that's hard. -- Stephen Leacock %% Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of -- but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. %% Writing of letters of recommendation has become hazardous; tell the truth and you can be sued if the contents are negative. A collection of "virtually litigation-proof" phrases has been collated, called the Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations, or LIAR. Here are some examples: 1) An inept person - "I enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever." 2) Doesn't get along with others - "I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine." 3) Unproductive - "I can assure you that no person would be better for the job." 4) Not worth considering - "I would urge you to waste no time making this candidate an offer of employment." %% Writing on the wall: "Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth." -- Edward Abbey %% Writing software is more fun than working. %% Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will like them only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them. -- Anacharsis (c. 600 B.C.) %% Wrong Thing: n. A design, action, or decision that is clearly incorrect or inappropriate. Often capitalized; always emphasized in speech as if capitalized. The opposite of the {Right Thing}; more generally, anything that is not the Right Thing. In cases where `the good is the enemy of the best', the merely good --- although good --- is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. "In C, the default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong Thing." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Wrote my own communications software in LISP. Got a phone bill for a thousand dollars. My computer keeps calling itself. -- Rod Schmidt %% Wynne's Law: Negative slack tends to increase. %% X-rated movies are all alike ... the only thing they leave to the imagination is the plot. %% X: /X/ n. 1. Used in various speech and writing contexts (also in lowercase) in roughly its algebraic sense of `unknown within a set defined by context' (compare {N}). Thus, the abbreviation 680x0 stands for 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030, or 68040, and 80x86 stands for 80186, 80286 80386 or 80486 (note that a UNIX hacker might write these as 680[0-4]0 and 80[1-4]86 or 680?0 and 80?86 respectively; see {glob}). 2. [after the name of an earlier window system called `W'] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on UNIX systems. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% XEROX PARC: The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer, and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the poweful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, these prophets were without honor in their own company; so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place characterized by developing brilliant ideas for everyone else. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% XEROX never does anything original. %% XEROX: Your BUREAUCRACY is our business. %% XGP 1. n. Xerox Graphics Printer. 2. v. To print something on the XGP. "You shouldn't XGP such a large file." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% XIIdigitation, n.: The practice of trying to determine the year a movie was made by deciphering the Roman numerals at the end of the credits. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% XModem : A telecommunications device that was on the losing end of an encounter with lightning. %% XOFF: /X'of/ n. Syn. {control-s}. %% XXX: /X-X-X/ n. A marker that attention is needed. Commonly used in program comments to indicate areas that are kluged up or need to be. Some hackers liken `XXX' to the notional heavy-porn movie rating. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% XYZZY [from the Adventure game] adj. See PLUGH. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% Xavier Greenstamps %% Xerox Innovates Apple Litigates (Now Xerox Litigates, too -- sigh) %% Xerox does it again and again and again and again and... %% Xerox never comes up with anything original. %% Xerox your lunch and file it under "sex offenders!" %% Xerox: A trademark for a photocopying device that can make rapid reproductions of human error, perfectly. -- Merle L. Meacham %% X subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. In 1991, UNIX is the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world. Many people consider this the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see {UNIX weenie} and {UNIX conspiracy} for an opposing point of view). See {Version 7}, {BSD}, {USG UNIX}. %% Y Fly 2 London %% Y'know it's really a shame there's no anbo-jyutsu ring nearby, because you really need to be put in your place. -- Kyle Riker to Cmdr. Riker, "The Icarus Factor", stardate 42686.4 %% YA-: [Yet Another] abbrev. In hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set by UNIX `yacc(1)' (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler). See {YABA}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% YABA: /ya'b*/ [Cambridge] n. Yet Another Bloody Acronym. Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests that it be given a name that is acronymic. The response from those with a trace of originality is to remark ironically that the proposed name would then be `YABA-compatible'. Also used in response to questions like "What is WYSIWYG?" See also {TLA}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% YAUN: /yawn/ [Acronym for `Yet Another UNIX Nerd'] n. Reported from the San Diego Computer Society (predominantly a microcomputer users' group) as a good-natured punning insult aimed at UNIX zealots. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% YEAGER'S LAW: Washing machines only break down during the wash cycle. %% YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT: finally got one that worked %% YO-YO: Something that is occasionally up but normally down. (see also Computer). %% YOU ARE IN ERRER! %% YOU PICKED KARL MALDEN'S NOSE!! %% YOU!! Give me the CUTEST, PINKEST, most charming little VICTORIAN DOLLHOUSE you can find!! An make it SNAPPY!! %% YOW!! Everybody out of the GENETIC POOL!" %% YOW!! Now I understand advanced MICROBIOLOGY and th' new TAX REFORM laws!! %% YOW!! The land of the rising SONY!! %% YOW!! Up ahead! It's a DONUT HUT!! %% YOW!! What should the entire human race DO?? Consume a fifth of CHIVAS REGAL, ski NUDE down MT. EVEREST, and have a wild SEX WEEKEND! %% YOW!! I'm in a very clever and adorable INSANE ASYLUM!! %% YOW!!! I am having fun!!! %% YOYO MODE n. State in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% YOYO n. DEC service engineers' slang for UUO (q.v.). Usage: rare at Stanford and MIT, has been found at random DEC installations. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% YU-SHIANG WHOLE FISH n. The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 11), which with a loop in its tail looks like a fish. Usage: used primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% Ya gotta be subtle! -- Mike Hammer %% Yabbadynamics: n., progressive force which enables Fred Flintstone to power a stone automobile with just his feet. -- Jens-Dominik Mueller, muller@engin.umich.edu %% Yak - dog food! %% Yakity-yak -- Don't talk back. %% Yale is terrific for anything you wanna do, so long as it doesn't involve people with sneakers, guns, dope, lust, or sloth. -- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities" %% Yankee traders, I like the sound of that. Well sir, I doubt they wear red, white, and blue or look anything like Uncle Sam. -- Riker and Data about the Ferengi, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% Yankee, n: In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMYANK.) -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" 1911 %% Yankees do it frugally. %% Yawd [noun, Bostonese]: the campus of Have Id. -- Webster's Unafraid Dictionary %% Ye Gods! Is NOTHING sacred? %% Ye Olde Disclaimer of Responsibility: The items and quotations contained in this file may or may not be coprighted material. The above-mentioned items were contributed from many sources, and many are unattributed. I do not possess the time or the background to verify that they are non-in-fringing. Therefore, this material is submitted 'as is', with the only recourse being that if you report such infringement to me, I will remove the item in question. Let this be a warning to you: This file is in use at several (many?) sites in the area. It is believed that the majority of offensive messages have been screened out. However, an occasional 'zinger' slips by. Also, people's ideas of 'offensive' vary. If one message offends you, tell me the offending one and I'll remove it. %% Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records. -- William Shakespeare, "Hamlet" %% Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of APL, I shall fear no evil, for I can string 6 primitive monadic and dyadic operators together. -- Steve Higgins %% Yeah! You're leaving! %% Yeah, God is dead, he laughed himself to death. %% Yeah, I got a dog with no legs -- I call him Cigarette. Every night, I take him out for a drag. %% Yeah, I was ugly, my mother breastfed me through a straw. %% Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context. %% Yeah, there are more important things in life than money, but they won't go out with you if you don't have any. %% Year, n.: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Years ago my mom was driving a Plymouth Volare station wagon. The Plymouth Volare was listed as the car "Least likely to be stolen." %% Yeccchhh! That must be a face, it has ears! %% Yech! %% Yech! This stuff tastes like poison. %% Yech! This stuff tastes like poison. (But in fact it was biologically contaminated orange juice.) %% Yeeecchh. This is terrible code. %% Yellow Book: [proposed] n. The print version of this Jargon File; `The New Hacker's Dictionary', MIT Press, 1991 (ISBN 0-262-68069-6). Includes all the material in the 2.9.6 version of the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L. Steele Jr. and a Preface by Eric S. Raymond. Most importantly, the book version is nicely typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Yellow Pages do it with Walking Fingers. %% Yellow Pig. %% Yellow light. Supreme good fortune. %% Yes my son, long ago mail was read 1 packet at a time. %% Yes sir. No sir. No excuse sir. Sir, may I ask a question. Sir, may I make a statement. -- The five reponses a West Point Cadet may give to a superior during the Plebe year. %% Yes! Oh yeah! %% Yes, I mind if you smoke! %% Yes, absolutely, I do indeed concur wholeheartedly. -- Riker, "Where Silence Has Lease", stardate 42193.6 %% Yes, but every time I try to see things your way, I get a headache. %% Yes, but which self do you want to be? %% Yes, but will I see the EASTER BUNNY in skintight leather at an IRON MAIDEN concert? %% Yes, it is written. Good shall always destroy evil. -- Sirah the Yang, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown %% Yes, many primitive people still believe this myth...But in today's technical vastness of the future, we can guess that surely things were much different. -- The Firesign Theater %% Yes, that was Richard Nixon. He used to be President. When he left the White House, the Secret Service would count the silverware. -- Woody Allen, "Sleeper" %% Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it. -- John Galt %% Yes, well, according to classical aerodynamics, it is impossible for a bumblebee to fly. -- 3rd Doctor, THE DAEMONS %% Yes. %% Yesterday I became a Jehovah's Witness. Not because of the religion but so they would stop comming to my house. %% Yesterday I bought a decaffeinated coffee table. And you can tell by looking at it. -- Steven Wright %% Yesterday I could't spell engineer, now I are one. %% Yesterday I found out what doughnuts are for. You put them on doughbolts. They hold dough airplanes together. For kids, they make erector sets out of play-dough. -- Rod Schmidt %% Yesterday I parked my car in a tow-away zone...when I came back the entire area was missing... -- Stephen Wright %% Yesterday I saw a chicken crossing the road. I asked it why. It told me it was none of my business. -- Rod Schmidt %% Yesterday I told a chicken to cross the road. It said, "what for?" -- Rod Schmidt %% Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement. -- Snoopy %% Yesterday I was on a guilt trip ... today I'm on an ego trip. %% Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today -- I think he's from the CIA. %% Yesterday was the deadline on all complaints. %% Yesterday, I was reading an ad for Dodge trucks in Popular Mechanics, as I was reading the *fine print* it stated that "These outlandish claims are Based on test results of ... and then it finished with ... "Buckle up for safety, Nice magnifying glass." %% Yet Another: adj. [From UNIX's `yacc(1)', `Yet Another Compiler-Compiler', a LALR parser generator] 1. Of your own work: A humorous allusion often used in titles to acknowledge that the topic is not original, though the content is. As in `Yet Another AI Group' or `Yet Another Simulated Annealing Algorithm'. 2. Of others' work: Describes something of which there are already far too many. See also {YA-}, {YABA}, {YAUN}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Yet I argue not Against heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward. -- Milton %% Yet [white] men [of South Africa] were afraid, with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, ... They were afraid because they were so few. And fear could not be cast out, but by love. -- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948 %% Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. %% Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. -- J. B. Cabell [The Silver Stallion] %% Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Yield to Temptation ... it may not pass your way again. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Yinkel, n.: A person who combs his hair over his bald spot, hoping no one will notice. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Yippies, hippies, yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike -- I would swap the whole damn zoo for the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam. -- Spiro T. Agnew %% Yngvi is a louse! %% Yogi's son Dale, asked to compare himself with his father: "Our similarities are different." -- Yogi Berra %% Yoke: An implement to whose latin name "jugum" we owe one of the most illuminating words in our language-- a word that defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point, and poignancy. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% You Earth people glorified organized violence for forty centuries. But you imprison those who employ it privately. -- Spock, "Dagger of the Mind," stardate 2715.1 %% You Women's Lib gals won't agree, But dependent on men you must be : You'll need a him With a rod firm and trim, To puggle your water-drains free! %% You [humans] are, after all, essentially irrational. -- Spock, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3220.3 %% You [humans] find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. -- Spock, "The Immunity Syndrome," stardate 4307.1 %% You age as well as most people do--maybe even better. %% You ain't got no gems, Hacker! %% You ain't learning nothing when you're talking. %% You ain't nothin' but a hound dog. %% You aint nothin' but a black dog... -- Dread Zepplin (A group featuring an Elvis impersonator backed up by a Reggae band singing your favorite Led Zepplin tunes) %% You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, to the American Samoans, whose capital Quayle pronounces "Pogo Pogo" %% You already have it. %% You always drink alone. It wouldn't hurt you to seek out a little... companionship. "I would require a Klingon woman for...companionship. Earth females are too fragile." Not all of them. There are a few on this ship that would find you tame. "Impossible." You never know 'till you try. "Then I will never know." Coward. "I was merely concerned for the...safety of my crewmates." Drink your prune juice. -- Guinan and Worf, "Yesterday's Enterprise", stardate 43625.2 %% You always have the option of pitching baseballs at empty spray paint cans in a cul-de-sac in a Cleveland suburb. %% You always introduce the younger person to the older person, using the wording: "Miss Brown, I'd like to introduce you to an older person" (unless her name is not "Miss Brown"). If you do not know a person's age, ask for a driver's license and a major credit card. If you are introduced to a member of a minority group, use the "high-five" style handshake, followed by a remark designed to show you don't mind a bit, such as "I see you are a (name of a minority group)! Good!" -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette" %% You amass things only to enjoy them. %% You amaze me. No known sentient species copulates as often as you do. Go, then. Use caution where you sit. Remember that unfamiliar life- forms are about. -- Nessus (to Louis Wu and Teela Brown) "Ringworld" %% You and I might be related. My dad's f**ked every whore in this town. %% You and who else? %% You appeal to a small, select group of confused people. %% You are Number Six. %% You are a Time Lord, a Lord of Time. Are there Lords in such a small domain? -- Captain Striker, Enlightenment %% You are a bundle of energy always on the go. %% You are a fluke of the universe. %% You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here. %% You are a general favorite among your many friends. %% You are a person of firm, yet honest intentions. %% You are a pioneer type and hold most people in contempt. %% You are a quick and intelligent thinker. %% You are a sociable, outgoing person with an honest face who applies your talents creatively to academic and business pursuits. Your calculus grades may be misleading, but skill at lying, deception, and abusing people's trust is much more useful than calculus anyway. %% You are a taxi driver. Your cab is yellow and black, and has been in use for seven years. One of its windshield wipers is broken, and the carburator needs adjusting. The tank holds 20 gallons, but at the moment is only three-quarters full. How old is the taxi driver?" %% You are a tower of strength in the office, but only so-so in bed. %% You are a very redundant person, that's what kind of person you are. %% You are a wise man my friend. Not yet sir. But with your help, I am learning. -- Riker and Data, "The Measure of a Man", stardate 42523.7 %% You are a wish to be here wishing yourself. -- Philip Whalen %% You are about one hundred feet above the bottom of the volcano. The top of the volcano is clearly visible here. %% You are about ten feet above the ground nestled among some large branches. The nearest branch above you is beyond your reach. %% You are about to make a most valuable discovery. %% You are about two hundred feet above the volcano floor. Looming above is the rim of the volcano. There is a small ledge on the west side. %% You are almost there. %% You are already carrying it! %% You are already empty handed. %% You are already in the #, cretin! %% You are already wearing some armor. %% You are already wearing that. %% You are already wielding that! %% You are always busy. %% You are always doing something marginal when the boss drops by your desk. %% You are an excellent tactician, Captain. You let your second in command attack while you sit and watch for weakness. -- Khan Noonian Singh, "Space Seed," stardate 3141.9 %% You are an individual interested in forward thrust and the future. %% You are an insult to my intelligence! I demand that you log off immediately. %% You are at Witt's end. Passages lead off in *all* directions. %% 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 are at a complex junction. A low hands and knees passage from the north joins a higher crawl from the east to make a walking passage going west. There is also a large room above. The air is damp here. %% You are at a crossover of a high N/S passage and a low E/W one. %% You are at a junction whose only distinguishing feature is a red square painted on the floor. %% You are at a wide place in a very tight N/S canyon. %% You are at death's door. %% You are at one end of a vast hall stretching forward out of sight to the west. There are openings to either side. Nearby, a wide stone staircase leads downward. The hall is filled with wisps of white mist swaying to and fro almost as if alive. A cold wind blows up the staircase. There is a passage at the top of a dome behind you. %% You are at one end of an immense north/south passage. %% You are at the base of flood control dam #3, which looms above you and to the north. The Frigid River is flowing by here. Across the river are the white cliffs, which seem to form a giant wall stretching from north to south along the east shore of the river as it winds its way downstream. %% You are at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the haunted mansion. To the north you see the main lobby; to the west, a little nook. %% You are at the bottom of a large dormant volcano. High above you light may be seen entering from the cone of the volcano. The only exit here is to the north. %% You are at the bottom of a spiral staircase in the magic castle. To the east you see a small nook; to the west, the end of a long hall. To the south you see the throne room. %% You are at the bottom of the grand staircase in the magic castle. To the west you can see the main lobby. %% You are at the bottom of the pit with a broken neck. %% You are at the bottom of the western pit in the twopit room. There is a large hole in the wall about 25 feet above you. %% You are at the east end of a very long hall apparently without side chambers. To the east a low wide crawl slants up. To the north a round two foot hole slants down. %% You are at the east end of the twopit room. The floor here is littered with thin rock slabs, which make it easy to descend the pits. There is a path here bypassing the pits to connect passages from east and west. There are holes all over, but the only big one is on the wall directly over the west pit where you can't get to it. %% You are at the edge of a large underground reservoir. An opaque cloud of white mist fills the room and rises rapidly upward. The lake is fed by a stream, which tumbles out of a hole in the wall about 10 feet overhead and splashes noisily into the water somewhere within the mist. The only passage goes back toward the south. %% You are at the end of a side-trail. Recent digging has uncovered a beautifully cut yellow diamond the size of a $20 dollar gold piece. %% You are at the end of the driveway. You see walls to the north and south, and to the west a high wall with an open garbage can chained to it. %% You are at the junction of two corridors, one leading East, the other traveling upwards and continuing southward in the other direction. %% You are at the north end of a long balcony outside the wizard's room. To the west you see the ocean; to the east, the window of the magic castle. %% You are at the north end of a long hall in the magic castle. To the east you see a spiral staircase. %% You are at the northeast end of an immense room, even larger than the giant room. It appears to be a repository for the "Adventure" program. Massive torches far overhead bathe the room with smoky yellow light. Scattered about you can be seen a pile of bottles (all of them empty), a nursery of young beanstalks murmuring quietly, a bed of oysters, a bundle of black rods with rusty stars on their ends, and a collection of brass lanterns. Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: "Do not disturb the dwarves!" An immense mirror is hanging against one wall, and stretches to the other end of the room, where various other sundry objects can be glimpsed dimly in the distance. %% You are at the northwest corner of a vast desert island. You can see a pyramid to the southeast. %% You are at the periphery of a large dome, which forms the ceiling of another room below. Protecting you from a precipitous drop is a wooden railing which circles the dome. %% You are at the south end of a hall in the haunted mansion. To the north you see a faint pulsating glow. To the south you see a flight of stairs. %% You are at the south end of a hall in the magic castle. To the west you see an old door. %% You are at the south end of a long hall in the magic castle. To the east you see a grand staircase; to the south, an old door. You hear ghostly music from above. %% You are at the southwest end of the repository. To one side is a pit full of fierce green snakes. On the other side is a row of small wicker cages, each of which contains a little sulking bird. %% You are at the southwest end of the repository. To one side is a pit full of fierce green snakes. On the other side is a row of small wicker cages, each of which contains a little sulking bird. In one corner is a bundle of black rods with rusty marks on their ends. A large number of velvet pillows are scattered about on the floor. A vast mirror stretches off to the northeast. At your feet is a large steel grate, next to which is a sign which reads, "Treasure vault. Keys in main office." %% You are at the top of Aragain Falls, an enormous waterfall with a drop of about 450 feet. The only path here is on the north end. There is a man-sized barrel here which you could fit into. %% You are at the top of a flight of stairs in the haunted mansion. To the east you see a window. %% You are at the top of a grand staircase in the magic castle. You see the end of a hall to the west; to the east, a medium-sized room. %% You are at the top of a spiral staircase in the haunted mansion. To the west you can see the end of a hall. %% You are at the top of a spiral staircase in the magic castle. To the south you see a hall. %% You are at the top of a staircase descending to the north. Walls are just visible at the extreme edges of your light to the east and west. The staircase descends at a steep 45 degree angle. %% You are at the top of a staircase which descends steeply at a 45 degree angle to the east. Walls can be seen to the west and south. %% You are at the top of a staircase which descends steeply to the south. There are walls visible to the east and west. %% You are at the top of a steep incline above a large room. You could climb down here, but you would not be able to climb up. There is a passage leading back to the north. %% You are at the top of the great canyon on its south wall. From here there is a marvelous view of the canyon and parts of the Frigid River upstream. Across the canyon, the walls of the white cliffs still appear to loom far above. Following the canyon upstream (north and northwest), Aragain Falls may be seen, complete with rainbow. Fortunately, my vision is better than average, and I can discern the top of flood control dam #3 far to the distant north. To the west and south can be seen an immense forest, stretching for miles around. It is possible to climb down into the canyon from here. %% You are at the top of the well. Well done. There are etchings on the side of the well. There is a small crack across the floor at the entrance to a room on the east, but it can be crossed easily. %% You are at the west end of Hall of Mists. A low wide crawl continues west and another goes north. To the south is a little passage 6 feet off the floor. %% You are at the west end of a very long featureless hall. The hall joins up with a narrow north/south passage. %% You are at the west end of the the main in the palace. Two doorways lead out of the north wall, one to the northeast and the other to the northwest. The south wall is covered by an ancient fresco faded beyond all recognition and defaced over the centuries by numerous vandals. The hallway leads back to the east. %% You are at the west end of the twopit room. There is a large hole in the wall above the pit at this end of the room. %% You are at your very best when things are at their worst. %% You are aware that merit is not always rewarded. %% You are beginning to feel hungry. %% You are beginning to feel weak. %% You are behind the white house. In one corner of the house there is a window which is #. %% You are being crushed. %% You are being followed by a very large, tame bear. %% You are being paged. %% You are being punished for your misbehaviour! %% You are being watched... %% You are being watched...the video screen is two way. %% You are beneath the walls of the river canyon, which may be climbable here. There is a small stream here, which is the lesser part of the runoff of Aragain Falls. To the north is a narrow path. %% You are blinded by a blast of light! %% You are broad minded and socially active. %% You are building up credit for the future. %% You are capable of great sadism and cruelty. Interesting, no redeeming qualities. -- Data to Armus, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3 %% You are capable of planning your future. %% You are careful and systematic in your business arrangements. %% You are carrying: %% You are caught in a beartrap. %% You are certainly entitled to your opinion. Fortunately, the rest of us are entitled to ignore it. %% You are clever, alert, and intellectual. %% You are close to Narveduen, which is just to the northwest. To the southwest is another island. %% You are confused! %% You are confused; but this is your normal state. %% You are conscious again. %% You are conservative and afraid of taking risks. %% You are cordially invited to go screw yourself. %% You are covered with bat turds, cretin. %% You are crawling over cobbles in a low passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage. %% You are currently holding the following: %% You are dazed by the ease with which obliteration can be obtained. %% You are declared a Neo-Vulgarian. I have but one copy of Vulgarian Digest [Obscenic Float Trips]. "What kind of man reads VD?" [Photo: Down jacket clad man in foreground surrounded by hundreds of sheep.] -- eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers %% You are deeply attache d to your friends and acquaintances. %% You are destined to become the commandant of the fighting men of the department of transportation. %% You are digging into a pile of bat guano. %% You are dishonest, but never to the point of hurting a friend. %% You are domestic and will be happily married %% You are east of the isle of Atnini. A large land mass is visible to the north and nothing but water stretches away to the east. %% You are empty handed. %% You are facing the south side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the windows are barred. %% You are fairminded, just and loving. %% You are fairminded, just and loving. (And I'm a lousy liar.) %% You are faithful to duty, adaptable to environment, loyal to friends. %% You are false data. %% You are farsighted, a good planner, an ardent lover, and a faithful friend. Oops sorry, wrong fortune. %% You are farsighted, a good planner, an ardent lover, and a faithful friend. %% You are fighting for survival in your own sweet and gentle way. %% You are fixed in your opinions and will not be easily moved from your purpose. %% You are following a wide path around the outer edge of a large cavern. Far below, through a heavy white mist, strange splashing noises can be heard. The mist rises up through a fissure in the ceiling. The path exits to the south and west. %% You are forced back and trip over your own feet, falling heavily to the floor. %% You are free and that is why you are lost. -- Franz Kafka %% You are frozen by the floating eye's gaze! %% You are fully functional aren't you? "Of course, but -" How fully? "In every way, of course. I am programmed in multiple techniques. A broad variety of pleasuring." Ohh...you jewel, that's exactly what I hoped. -- Yar and Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% You are generous and always think of the other fellow. %% You are getting more and more confused. %% You are going to get some new clothes. %% You are going to have a new love affair (with a rock). %% You are going to have a new love affair. %% You are going to have a new love affair. Be careful or your spouse will find out. %% You are guilty. %% You are heading for a land of sunshine. %% You are heading for a land of sunshine. Hope you're not a snowman. %% You are heading for head-stone for sure. %% You are here: *** *** *** ********* But you're not all there. ******* ***** *** * %% You are here: *** *** ********* ******* ***** *** * But you're not all there. %% You are high above the floor of the volcano. From here the rim of the volcano looks very narrow, and you are quite near it. To the east is what appears to be a viewing ledge, too thin to land on. %% You are immediately south of a rather insignificant pile of rocks which bears the name Norst. In fact, the only notable feature of the "island" is a large square stone tower which occupies virtually the entire isle. %% You are in Bedquilt, a long east/west passage with holes everywhere. To explore at random select north, south, up, or down. %% You are in a 20-foot depression floored with bare dirt. Set into the dirt is a strong steel grate mounted in concrete. A dry streambed leads into the depression. %% You are in a balcony high above the ground. To the south you see the ocean; to the north, the window of the magic castle. %% You are in a barrel. Congratulations. Etched into the side of the barrel is the word "GERONIMO!". %% You are in a cart inside a long mine shaft. The mine extends as far as the lights reach both east and west. There are side-trails both north and south. %% You are in a cart just inside the mine. The mine opens out to the east. %% You are in a cart room that allows access to the inside of the mine. A heavy door to the west stands directly opposite the entrance to the mine proper which is sealed by the carts and air lock. Passages go southwest and north. There is a heavy door to west and an air lock to the east. %% You are in a cave. Passages exit to the south and to the east, but the cave narrows to a crack to the west. The earth is particularly damp here. %% You are in a cavern underground. You see a tunnel leading outward, and dark passages to the north, south, and east. %% You are in a circular room with passages off in eight directions. %% You are in a clearing, with a forest surrounding you on the west and south. %% You are in a closet. To the south you can see the wizard's room. %% You are in a cold and damp corridor where a long east-west passageway intersects with a northward path. %% You are in a coral-lined passageway. A vertical shaft one foot in diameter extends straight up from the roof overhead. Exits lie to the South and North. %% You are in a corridor with polished marble walls. The corridor widens into larger areas as it turns west at its northern and southern ends. %% You are in a crawlway with a three foot high ceiling. Your footing is very unsure here due to the assortment of rocks underfoot. Passages can be seen in the east, west, and northwest corners of the crawlway. %% You are in a cul-de-sac about eight feet across. %% You are in a damp circular room, whose walls are made of brick and mortar. The roof of this room is not visible, but there appear to be some etchings on the walls. There is a passageway to the west. %% You are in a dark and damp cellar with a narrow passageway leading east, and a crawlway to the south. To the west is the bottom of a steep metal ramp which is unclimbable. %% You are in a dead end. You get the impression that "zilch" is a semi-magical word. %% You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says "Magic word XYZZY". %% You are in a deep ravine at a crossing with an east-west crawlway. Some stone steps are at the south of the ravine and a steep staircase descends. %% You are in a desert on an island in the middle of the sea. To the east you see the pyramid. %% You are in a dimly lit corridor. The corridor extends out of sight to the East and West. %% You are in a dimly lit forest, with large trees all around. One particularly large tree with some low branches stands here. %% You are in a dimly lit forest, with large trees all around. To the east, there appears to be sunlight. %% You are in a dingy closet adjacent to the machine room. On one wall is a small sticker which reads: Protected by FROBOZZ Magic Alarm Company (Hello, footpad!). %% You are in a dirty broken passage. To the east is a crawl. To the west is a large passage. Above you is a hole to another passage. %% You are in a dusty old room which is virtually featureless, except for an exit on the north size. %% You are in a dusty room in the magic castle. %% You are in a featureless prison cell. Its wooden door is securely fastened, and you can see only the flames and smoke of the pit out its small window. %% You are in a featureless prison cell. Its wooden door is securely fastened, and you can see only the flames and smoke of the pit out its small window. On the other side of the cell is a bronze door which seems to be #. As you gleefully examine your new-found riches, the Dungeon Master himself materializes beside you and says, "Now that you have solved all the mysteries of the Dungeon, it is time for you to assume your rightfully-earned place in the scheme of things. Long have I waited for one capable of releasing me from my burden!" He taps you lightly on the head with his staff and mumbles a few well-chosen spells. You feel yourself changing, growing older and more stooped. For a moment there are two identical mages staring at each other among the treasures, then you watch as your counterpart dissolves into a mist and disappears, a sardonic grin on his face. %% You are in a featureless prison cell. You can see only the flames and smoke from the pit out of the small window in the closed door in front of you. %% You are in a featureless prison cell. You can see the east-west corridor outside the open wooden door in front of you. %% You are in a food locker filled with about 3.1227e46 cans which are reputed to contain food. They are unmarked. %% You are in a forest, with trees in all directions around you. %% You are in a gigantic sahara-like desert. To the north you see an ocean; to the south you can see a great pyramid. %% You are in a great hall inside the magic castle. To the north you can see the royal dining room. There are some strange runes written on the wall here. %% You are in a high north-south passage, which forks to the northeast. %% You are in a jumble of rock, with cracks everywhere. %% You are in a jumble of twisting, coral-lined passageways. %% You are in a large ballroom in the haunted mansion. The floor is very intricate european teakwood. High above you is a crystal chandelier reflecting and splintering your light. %% You are in a large brightly-lit room, with exits to the north, south, east, and west, plus a trap door in the floor. %% You are in a large cave carved out of a sandstone deposit. There are no apparent exits from this cave aside from one to the south. The one distinctive feature of this cave is a message scrawled on the eastern wall which consists of four letters: "FJAC". %% You are in a large cavernous room, north of a large reservoir. %% You are in a large cavernous room, to the south of which was formerly a reservoir. However, with the water level lowered, there is merely a wide stream running through the center of the room. %% You are in a large desert on an island. To the east you see a pyramid. %% You are in a large dry desert. To the east you see an oasis. %% You are in a large east-west corridor which opens out to a northern parapet at its center. You can see flames and smoke as you peer towards the parapet. The corridor turns south at its east and west ends, and due south is a massive wooden door. In the door is a small window barred with iron. The door is #. %% You are in a large forest, with trees obstructing all views except to the east, where a small clearing may be seen. %% You are in a large hot desert. To the north you can see an oasis at the foot of a large pyramid. The desert extends all around you in the other directions. %% You are in a large low circular chamber whose floor is an immense slab fallen from the ceiling (slab room). East and west there once were large passages, but they are now filled with boulders. Low small passages go north and south, and the south one quickly bends west around the boulders. %% You are in a large low room. Crawls lead north, SE, and SW. %% You are in a large rectangular room. The east and west walls here were used for storing safety deposit boxes. As might be expected, all have been carefully removed by evil persons. To the east, west, and south of the room are large doorways. The northern "wall" of the room is a shimmering curtain of light. In the center of the room is a large stone cube, about 10 feet on a side. Engraved on the side of the cube is some lettering. %% You are in a large room full of assorted heavy machinery. The room smells of burned resistors. The room is noisy from the whirring sounds of the machines. Along one wall of the room are three buttons which are, respectively, round, triangular, and square. Naturally, above the buttons are instructions written in EBCDIC. A large sign above all the buttons says in English: DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE There are exits to the west and the south. %% You are in a large room full of dusty rocks. There is a big hole in the floor. There are cracks everywhere, and a passage leading east. %% You are in a large room with a ceiling which cannot be detected from the ground. There is a narrow passage from east to west and a stone stairway leading upward. The room is extremely noisy. In fact, it is difficult to hear yourself think. %% You are in a large room with a prominent doorway leading to a down staircase. To the west is a narrow twisting tunnel. Above you is a large dome painted with scenes depicting elvish hacking rites. Up around the edge of the dome (20 feet up) is a wooden railing. In the center of the room there is a white marble pedestal. %% You are in a large room with giant icicles hanging from the walls and ceiling. There are passages to the north and east. %% You are in a large room, in the middle of which is a small shaft descending through the floor into darkness below. To the west and the north are exits from this room. Constructed over the top of the shaft is a metal framework to which a heavy iron chain is attached. %% You are in a large room, one half of which is depressed. There is a large leak in the ceiling through which brown colored goop is falling. The only exit from this room is to the west. %% You are in a large room, with a passage to the south, a passage to the west, and a wall of broken rock to the east. There is a large "Y2" on a rock in the room's center. %% You are in a large sandy desert. To the west a pyramid is visible. %% You are in a large square room with tall ceilings. There are exits on the north, east, and west sides of the room. On the south wall is an enormous mirror which fills the entire wall. %% You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all different. %% You are in a little nook in the haunted mansion. To the north you see a small hall; to the east, a flight of stairs. You also see some magic runes on the wall. %% You are in a little twisty maze of passages, all different. %% You are in a long and narrow passage, which is cluttered with broken timbers. A wide passage comes from the north and turns at the southwest corner of the room into a very narrow passageway. %% You are in a long hall. Doors go southwest, northwest, northeast, and east. %% You are in a long passage. To the south is one entrance. On the east there is an old wooden door with a large hole in it (about cyclops sized). %% You are in a long room on the south shore of a large reservoir. %% You are in a long sloping corridor with ragged sharp walls. %% You are in a long tunnel running north-south. in this cavern you see a large fountain of sparkling water. An inscription reads: "These waters will rejuvenate forever their partaker." You see stone steps leading up, and light streaming in from above. %% You are in a long winding corridor sloping out of sight in both directions. %% You are in a long, narrow corridor stretching out of sight to the west. At the eastern end is a hole through which you can see a profusion of leaves. %% You are in a low N/S passage at a hole in the floor. The hole goes down to an E/W passage. %% You are in a low north-south crawlspace. You see a musty opening to the south, and a wider opening to the north. %% You are in a magnificent cavern with a rushing stream, which cascades over a sparkling waterfall into a roaring whirlpool which disappears through a hole in the floor. Passages exit to the south and west. %% You are in a map room containing the documentation for the mine. A passage to the northeast and a door to the west exit the room. %% You are in a maze of UUCP connections, all alike. %% You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all alike. %% You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different. %% You are in a maze of twisty little Unix versions, all different %% You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. %% You are in a medium-sized room in the magic castle. To the west you see the grand staircase; to the north, a faint pulsating glow can be seen. To the south you see a door. %% You are in a narrow crawlway. The crawlway leads from north to south, However, the south passage divides to the south and southwest. %% You are in a narrow east-west passageway. There is a narrow staircase leading down at the north end of the room. %% You are in a narrow north-south corridor. At the south end is a door and at the north end is an east-west corridor. The door is #. %% You are in a narrow passageway which turns, leading west and south. Looking to the south, you see a locked door. %% You are in a narrow room whose east wall is a large mirror. %% You are in a narrow room whose west wall is a large wooden panel which once contained a mirror. %% You are in a narrow tunnel with large wooden beams running across the ceiling and around the walls. A path from the south splits into paths running west and northeast. %% You are in a non-descript part of a coal mine. %% You are in a north-south crawlway; a passage also goes to the east. There is a hole above, but it provides no opportunities for climbing. %% You are in a north-south hallway which ends in a large wooden door. %% You are in a north/south canyon about 25 feet across. The floor is covered by white mist seeping in from the north. The walls extend upward for well over 100 feet. Suspended from some unseen point far above you, an enormous two-sided mirror is hanging parallel to and midway between the canyon walls. (The mirror is obviously provided for the use of the dwarves, who as you know, are extremely vain.) a small window can be seen in either wall, some fifty feet up. %% You are in a passageway which travels north-south. A small stream of water enters the room from above the south exit, cascading down to form a small waterfall. The water then runs northward out the north exit. A faint light seems to be coming from the north. %% You are in a rather wide room. On one side is the bottom of a narrow wooden ladder. To the northeast and the south are passages leaving the room. %% You are in a room in which a sorcerer once dwelt. The walls are covered with strange scribblings. You see an unmade bed under a window on the east wall, and to the south you see an old bookcase, which once was painted white but now is colored "dull grey". %% You are in a room in which a wizard once dwelt. There is a piano up against the south wall; ghostly music comes from it. In the southwest corner of the room you see an old organ. To the west you see a window, and to the north is a doorless closet next to an unmade bed. To the east you see the door of the room. %% You are in a room of large size, richly appointed and decorated in a style that bespeaks exquisite taste. To judge from its contents, it is the ultimate storehouse of the treasures of Zork. There are chests here containing precious jewels, mountains of Zorkmids, rare paintings, ancient statuary, and beguiling curios. In one corner of the room is a bookcase boasting such volumes as "The History of the Great Underground Empire", "The Lives of the Twelve Flatheads", "The Wisdom of the Implementers", and other informative and inspiring works. On one wall is a completely annotated map of the Dungeon of Zork, showing points of interest and various troves of treasure, and indicating the locations of several superior scenic views. On the desk at the far end of the room may be found stock certificates representing a controlling interest in FrobozzCo International, the multinational conglomerate and parent company of the Frobozz Magic Boat Co., etc. %% You are in a room used by holders of safety deposit boxes to view their contents. On the north size of the room is a sign which says REMAIN HERE WHILE THE BANK OFFICER RETRIEVES YOUR DEPOSIT BOX WHEN YOU ARE FINISHED, LEAVE THE BOX, AND EXIT TO THE SOUTH AN ADVANCED PROTECTIVE DEVICE PREVENTS ALL CUSTOMERS FROM REMOVING ANY SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX FROM THIS VIEWING AREA! Thank you for banking at the Zork! %% You are in a room which looks like an Egyptian tomb. There is an ascending staircase in the room as well as doors east and south. %% You are in a room which must have been a large library, probably for the royal family. All of the shelves appear to have been gnawed to pieces by unfriendly gnomes. To the north is an exit. %% You are in a room whose walls resemble swiss cheese. Obvious passages go west, east, NE, and NW. Part of the room is occupied by a large bedrock block. %% You are in a room with a high, vaulted ceiling. A tunnel leads southward. %% You are in a room with a low ceiling which is circular in shape. There are exits to the east and southeast. %% You are in a room with an exit on the west side, and a staircase leading up. %% You are in a secret N/S canyon above a sizable passage. %% You are in a secret canyon at a junction of three canyons, bearing north, south, and SE. The north one is as tall as the other two combined. %% You are in a secret canyon which exits to the north and east. %% You are in a secret canyon which here runs E/W. It crosses over a very tight canyon 15 feet below. If you go down you may not be able to get back up. %% You are in a secret compartment. To the south you see the opening into the closet. %% You are in a small bare room with no distinguishing features. There are no exits from this room. %% You are in a small basalt room, the west end of which is occupied by a pool of water. There seems to be an opening in the roof over the south end of the pool as well as a passage which enters from the southeast. %% You are in a small cave whose exits are on the south and northwest. %% You are in a small cave with an entrance to the north and a stairway leading down. %% You are in a small chamber behind the remains of the great glacier. To the south and west are small passageways. %% You are in a small chamber beneath a 3x3 steel grate to the surface. A low crawl over cobbles leads inward to the west. %% You are in a small chamber filled with large boulders. The walls are very warm, causing the air in the room to be almost stifling from the heat. The only exit is a crawl heading west, through which is coming a low rumbling. %% You are in a small chamber, which appears to have been part of a coal mine. On the south wall of the chamber the letters "GRANITE WALL" are etched in the rock. To the east is a long passage, and there is a steep metal slide twisting downward. From the appearance of the slide, an attempt to climb up it would be impossible. To the north is a small opening. %% You are in a small cubicle. There is a trap door in the ceiling. %% You are in a small hall of the haunted mansion. To the north you can see another room; to the south, a little nook. %% You are in a small insignificant cavern. Exits lead north and west. %% You are in a small non-descript room. However, from the direction of a small descending staircase a foul odor can be detected. To the east is a narrow path. %% You are in a small nook in the magic castle. You can see strange runes on the wall here, written with magic ink. %% You are in a small room constructed entirely out of cinderblock, with a linoleum floor. It is lit by harsh fluorescent lighting and contains a variety of objects, most of them related to computer programming. In the middle of the room is a dial with 50 possible positions. Decorating the room's walls are two porcelain whiteboards, an Escher print and a sign which proclaims 'SSDD' in large computer-generated letters. %% You are in a small room near the maze. There are twisty passages in the immediate vicinity. %% You are in a small room that has only one door, to the east. %% You are in a small room which seems to have been carved out of basalt. There are passageways leading North and South, and a doorway to the West. %% You are in a small room which smells strongly of coal gas. %% You are in a small room with passages off in all directions. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls. %% You are in a small room, whose walls are formed by an old lava flow. There are exits here to the west and the south. %% You are in a small room, with narrow passages exiting to the north and south. A narrow red beam of light crosses the room at the north end, inches above the floor. %% You are in a small room, with narrow passages exiting to the north and south. A narrow red beam of light crosses the room at the north end, inches above the floor. The beam is stopped halfway across the room by a # lying on the floor. %% You are in a small room. Strange squeaky sounds may be hear coming from the passage at the west end. You may also escape to the south. %% You are in a small room. The walls are composed of a dark, almost black form of smoky quartz; they glisten like teeth in the lamp-light. The only exits are to the east and west. %% You are in a small square room which is at the bottom of a long shaft. To the east is a passageway and to the northeast a very narrow passage. In the shaft can be seen a heavy iron chain. %% You are in a small square room, in the center of which is a large oblong table, no doubt set for afternoon tea. It is clear from the objects on the table that the users were indeed mad. In the eastern corner of this room is a small hole no more than four inches high. There are passageways leading away to the west and the northwest. %% You are in a small square room, which was used by a bank officer whose job it was to retrieve safety deposit boxes for the customer. On the north side of the room is a sign which reads "Viewing Room". On the east side of the room, above an open door, is a sign reading BANK PERSONNEL ONLY %% You are in a small, dank cubicle of rock. A small passage leads back out to the north; there is no other obvious exit. %% You are in a small, low-ceilinged room with a door to the south. The words "Willis company tool room -- melenkurion division" carved into one of the walls. %% You are in a small, short N/S corridor. Green light floods the area from a northern exit. To the east an extremely narrow crack mars the surface of the smooth black wall. The cave entrance is behind you to the south. %% You are in a splendid chamber ten meters high. The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone. A low hands-and-knees passage and a good opening exit from the north and south sides of the chamber. %% You are in a steep and narrow crawlway. There are two exits nearby to the south and southwest. %% You are in a steep passageway. It continues in upward and downward directions. %% You are in a tall E/W canyon. A low tight crawl goes 3 feet north and seems to open up. %% You are in a tall banana tree. You can see the ocean to the northwest, north, northeast, east, and south-east; to the southwest you see a haunted mansion, with neatly-trimmed grass around it. %% You are in a tall coconut palm above an oasis. To the north you see a pyramid, and to the east you see more of oasis. The desert extends in all other directions. %% You are in a teleport booth atop a large stone block. You have a lovely view of the desert, which extends to the north and west. Far to the northwest you see a great pyramid. Directly in front of you there is a lever and a button, with a sign reading "Use setting 'b' at your own risk!" %% You are in a tiny cave with entrances west and north, and a dark, forbidding staircase leading down. %% You are in a trackless desert. To the north lies a vast ocean; to the southwest is a pyramid. You are in the northeast corner of a desert island. %% You are in a twisting little maze of passages, all different. %% You are in a twisting maze of little passages, all different. %% You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different. %% You are in a twisty maze of little passages, all different. %% You are in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed. %% You are in a vast desert on an island. To the north you see the ocean; to the south, you see a pyramid. %% You are in a vast desert. To the west is a pyramid. %% You are in a vast desert. To the northwest you see what looks like a life-giving oasis, but it may be a mirage . . . %% You are in a vast dry desert which stretches to the north, east, and south. There is an oasis to the west, with a pyramid directly north of it. %% You are in a vertical secret shaft. You see a trap door in the ceiling. %% You are in a very chilly corridor that runs north-south. A fierce wind blows from another exit to the east. %% You are in a very cramped cul-de-sac at the end of a tunnel which leads downward. The roof of this place appears to be a trap-door of some sort. %% You are in a very ordinary, nearly featureless room. A passage leads out to the southeast. Through an open doorway to the east you can see a shiny floor which seems to slope upward slightly. %% You are in a very small room. In the corner is a rickety wooden ladder, leading downward. It might be safe to descend. There is also a staircase leading upward. %% You are in a wide patch underground. There is a low crawlspace to the south, and good openings to the east and north. %% You are in a winding passage. It seems that there is only an exit on the east end, although the whirring from the round room can be heard faintly to the north. %% You are in an alcove. A small NW path seems to widen after a short distance. An extremely tight tunnel leads east. It looks like a very tight squeeze. An eerie light can be seen at the other end. %% You are in an ancient room, long buried by the reservoir. There are exits to the southeast and upward. %% You are in an anteroom leading to a large passage to the east. Small passages go west and up. The remnants of recent digging are evident. A sign in midair here says "Cave under construction beyond this point. Proceed at own risk. [Witt Construction Company]" %% You are in an arched coral passage. It enters from the west, splits to the east, and continues to the north over a smooth and damp-looking patch of sand. %% You are in an arched hall. A coral passage continues to the west. The air smells of sea water. %% You are in an arched hall. A coral passage once continued up and east from here, but is now blocked by debris. The air smells of sea water. %% You are in an art gallery. Most of the paintings which were here have been stolen by vandals with exceptional taste. The vandals left through the north, south, or west exits. %% You are in an awkward sloping east/west canyon. %% You are in an east-west corridor which turns north at its eastern and western ends. The walls of the corridor are marble. An additional passage leads south at the center of the corridor. %% You are in an enormous room, in the center of which are four wooden posts delineating a rectangular area, above which is what appears to be a wooden roof. In fact, all objects in this room appear to be abnormally large. To the east is a passageway. There is a large chasm on the west and the northwest. %% You are in an extremely tight crawlway. There is barely enough room for you even to squirm through. The path to the corridor lies to the west. Flickering yellow light is visible to the east, where the passage seems to open up. %% You are in an oasis in the middle of a desert. To the north rises a great pyramid, rumored to hide many treasures. %% You are in an old iceroom. It's rather cold here. %% You are in an old musty storeroom in the magic castle. You see the door to the north. %% You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. %% You are in error. 2 + 2 = 5.15785423. Please recalibrate your equipment accordingly. %% You are in front of a large building which lies to the north. The entranceway gapes open in mock invitation. An expanse of garden lies behind you to the south. %% You are in it, turkey! %% You are in large room which seems to be air conditioned. In one corner there is a machine (?) which is shaped somewhat like a clothes dryer. On the 'panel' there is a switch which is labeled in an obscure dialect of Swahili. Fortunately, I know this dialect, and the label translates to 'START'. The switch does not appear to be manipulable by any human hand (unless the fingers are about 1/16 by 1/4 inch). On the front of the machine is a large lid, which is #. %% You are in office of the owner of the mine. There are yellowed papers scattered all over the room and on various shallow shelves set in the walls. Doors occupy the east and northwest walls. %% You are in open forest near both a valley and a road. %% You are in open forest, with a deep valley to one side. %% You are in part of the long hallway. The east and west walls are dressed stone. In the center of the hall is a shallow stone channel. In the center of the room the channel widens into a large hole around which is engraved a compass rose. %% You are in perfect health. %% You are in shallow waters to the southeast of Enlad. To the west is a narrow bay which looks navigable; to the north and northwest you could land. The island stretches away to the west and north. %% You are in some nondescript worker's quarters. %% You are in the #. %% You are in the Hall of the Mountain King, with passages off in all directions. %% You are in the South Reach. Immediately ahead, north by northwest, lies Obehol. %% You are in the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer. A hollow voice says, "That's not a bug, it's a feature!" In the north wall of the room is the Crypt of the Implementers. It is made of the finest marble and is apparently large enough for four headless corpses. The crypt is #. Above the entrance is the cryptic inscription: "Feel Free". %% You are in the Vault of the Bank of Zork, in which there are no doors. %% You are in the attic. The only exit is stairs that lead down. %% You are in the bottom of a small pit with a little stream, which enters and exits through tiny slits. %% You are in the center of a highly symmetrical coral chamber. Passages lead off in every which way. %% You are in the dining hall. The 2 exits are east and south. The table and chairs are late 18th century east european. You can almost hear the echoes of the past celebrations . . . %% You are in the downstairs hallway. A flight of stairs leads up to the second floor of the house. There are doorways to the east and north, and the front door of the house is to the west. %% You are in the east end of a large temple. In front of you is what appears to be an altar. %% You are in the east end of a secret hall. %% You are in the entrance to the palace of Enlad. High above in the ceiling hang several massive crystalline chandeliers of great antiquity. Time has ravaged them until they are barely recognizable as such. The shattered remains of tremendous mirrors that used to panel the walls lie scattered about. Other debris indicates the once-great splendor of the palace. A hallway runs east and west from here. There is an open doorway to the south and an archway opening to a courtyard to the north. %% You are in the entranceway of the shack. Nothing remains of the contents but a few broken pieces of pottery ground into the dirt. A small room lies to the south. A doorway leading out lies to the north. %% You are in the giant room. The ceiling here is too high up for your lamp to show it. Cavernous passages lead east, north, and south. On the west wall is scrawled the inscription, "Fee fie foe foo" [sic]. %% You are in the guest room of the magic castle. To the north you see a door; to the south, a window. %% You are in the hall of the mountain king. %% You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west and a dark staircase can be seen leading upward. To the east is a small window which is #. %% You are in the labyrinthe. %% You are in the large entrance hall of the Bank of Zork, the largest banking institution of the Great Underground Empire. A partial account of its history is in "The Lives of the Twelve Flatheads" with the chapter on J. Pierpont Flathead. A more detailed history (albeit less objective) may be found in Flathead's outrageous autobiography "I'm Rich and You Aren't - So There!". Most of the furniture has been ravaged by passing scavengers. All that remains are two signs at the northwest and northeast corners of the room, which say <-- WEST VIEWING ROOM EAST VIEWING ROOM --> %% You are in the living room, the largest room in the mansion. The furniture is ornate, perhaps victorian. %% You are in the living room. There is a door to the east. To the west is a cyclops-shaped hole in an old wooden door, above which is some strange gothic lettering. %% You are in the living room. There is a door to the east. To the west is a wooden door with strange gothic lettering, which appears to be nailed shut. %% You are in the main lobby of the haunted mansion. To the north you see an old unused corner; to the south, a flight of stairs. Directly to the east you see a great door. %% You are in the main lobby of the magic castle. To the north you see a great hall, and to the east a grand staircase. You can see a drawbridge to the west, and a door to the south. You hear ghostly music from above. %% You are in the maze of pits. You are in a cavern which looks normal except for a message scrawled on the wall: "Bilbo was here" %% You are in the mess hall of the mine. Empty cans litter the room. There is a door to the west and another to the north and a passage to the south. %% You are in the middle of a long hall in the magic castle. the hall extends to the north and south. %% You are in the middle of a secret hall extending east-west. You see a trap door in the floor. %% You are in the middle of a very dense forest. There are trees around you on all sides. %% You are in the middle portion of an access hallway running north-south. There is a doorway to the west and an open arch to the east. The hall is devoid of furnishings. %% You are in the north end of a hall in the haunted mansion. To the south you see a faint pulsating glow. %% You are in the northern end of an access hallway. There are doorways to the north and west, and an arch to the east. The hall stretches away to the south. %% You are in the open sea. To the north you can see a sandy beach on the island Ilite. Far to the southwest the island of Issel is faintly visible. %% You are in the power room. All of the controls are inaccessible. %% You are in the remains of an once-beautiful garden. Wild-growing and unkempt plants abound in profusion. The garden continues to the north and east. %% You are in the royal boudoir of the magic castle. To the north you see a door. %% You are in the royal dining room. Above you is a beautiful crystal chandelier; in front of you, a long banquet table. %% You are in the ruins of what was once probably a fishing village. All that remains are a few foundations of small buildings and the last vestiges of a harbor. To the east the Bay of Enlad rolls gently. In the distance to the north is a small knoll, while to the northeast the harbor ends in a small beach which follows the contour of the bay. %% You are in the soft room. The walls are covered with heavy curtains, the floor with a thick pile carpet. Moss covers the ceiling. %% You are in the soft room. The walls are covered with heavy curtains, the floor with a thick pile carpet. Moss covers the ceiling. A low hands-and-knees passage leads to the west; there is a good exit to the south and another passage to the east. %% You are in the south end of a long hall in the haunted mansion. There are some strange magic runes written on the wall here. %% You are in the south side chamber. %% You are in the southern waters of the dragon's run. The nearest isle lies immediately to the south, but it cannot be landed on from this direction due to a reef and some rocky shoals in the water immediately offshore. On the shore of the island can be seen a small shack at the base of a sheer cliff. %% You are in the top of a fine rutabaga tree. %% You are in the top of a tall oak tree in the grove. In the distance you see buildings to the west and an ocean far to the south. %% You are in the top of the cypress tree in the grove. To the west you see buildings off in the distance; far to the south, you see a vast ocean. You can also see a spider web with writing on it here. %% You are in the tunnel of stone which runs north-south here. %% You are in the upstairs hallway. A flight of stairs leads down to the first floor of the house. There are doorways to the east and north. %% You are in the viewing room of the spaceship. The room is dominated by a huge viewscreen on the north (outward) wall. %% You are in the water just off the coast of Torheven. A small landing point is visible just to the east. %% You are in the water to the west of the island of Gont. To the east a small strip of rocky beach can be seen. %% You are in the waters east of Hille. To the northwest and north lies the Open Sea. %% You are in the waters of the Dragon's Run. Numerous tiny islets can be seen to the north and south sides of this stretch of water. A massive pinnacle rises out of the waters to the far south. %% You are in the west end of a large temple. On the south wall is an ancient inscription, probably a prayer in a long-forgotten language. The north wall is solid granite. The entrance at the west end of the room is through huge marble pillars. %% You are in the west end of a secret hall. There is a window in the west wall. %% You are in the west side chamber of the Hall of the Mountain King. A passage continues west and up here. %% You are in the winecellar. You see a crawlspace to the north and a trap door above you. %% You are in waters to the southeast of Usidero. From here, you can see not only only this isle, but also islands to the southeast and southwest. %% You are in what appears to have been a library. All that remains is an apparently untouched bookshelf on the west wall. %% You are in what appears to have been an artist's studio. The walls and floors are splattered with paints of 69 different colors. Strangely enough, nothing of value is hanging here. At the north and northwest of the room are open doors (also covered with paint). An extremely dark and narrow chimney leads up from a fireplace. Although you might be able to get up the chimney, it seems unlikely that you could get back down. %% You are in what appears to have been the maintenance room for flood control dam #3, judging by the assortment of tool chests around the room. Apparently, this room has been ransacked recently, for most of the valuable equipment is gone. On the wall in front of you is a panel of buttons, which are labeled in EBCDIC. However, they are of different colors: blue, yellow, brown, and red. The doors to this room are in the west and south ends. %% You are inclined to be careless and impractical, causing you to make the same mistakes repeatedly. %% You are innocent. %% You are inside a barren room. The center of the room is completely empty except for some dust. Marks in the dust lead away toward the far end of the room. The only exit is the way you came in. %% You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. %% You are inside a rectangular box of wood whose structure is rather complicated. Four sides and the roof are filled in, and the floor is open. %% You are inside a small tunnel extending to the north and south. The walls of the tunnel are quite smooth and the top of the tunnel curves over your head. %% You are inside the lobby of an ancient mine. Exits leave to the southeast, northeast, and west. %% You are interested in higher education whether material or spiritual. %% You are just off the west coast of Ebosskil. The coastline is nothing more than a sheer unclimbable cliff at this point. The island itself is quite large. You can travel around the island to the northeast and southeast. %% You are just the kind of bad food some monsters like to digest. %% You are just too cool. %% You are just west of Hosk. In addition to Hosk, you can see islands in the west and east of south. %% You are late. "Sorry, I had to make myself beautiful." I fail to understand why. -- Worf and K'Ehleyr, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% You are living on the planet of the apes. %% You are logical and hate disorder. %% You are lost in the Swamps of Despair. %% You are loved by the multitudes. Have you been to the clinic lately? %% You are lucky this is not a Klingon ship. We know how to deal with spies. -- Worf to Setal/Jarok, "The Defector", stardate 43462.5 %% You are lucky! Full moon tonight. %% You are magnetic in your bearing--that's why all the nuts cling to you. %% You are magnetic in your bearing. %% You are magnetic in your bearing. Avoid heavy, metallic objects. %% You are men without courage. You have lost your right to survive. -- Davros, GENESIS OF THE DALEKS %% You are motionlessly suspended. %% You are near Ingat, just to the northwest of the island. In the distance you can see other bodies of land to the northeast and east by southeast. %% You are near the east side of a long island which the map identifies as Lorbanery. %% You are near the rim of the volcano, which is only about fifteen feet across. To the west, there is a place to land with a wide ledge. %% You are near the west coast of the Island of O. Islands dot the horizon in most any direction one could choose. %% You are never far from the sound of an engine. %% You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" %% You are never selfish with your advice or your help. %% You are next in line for promotion in your firm. %% You are no longer invisible. %% You are north of the pair of islands known as The Hands. %% You are not Morg. You are not Eymorg. -- Kara the Eymorg, "Spock's Brain," stardate 5432.3 %% You are not a fool just because you have done something foolish -- only if the folly of it escapes you. %% You are not able to teleport at will. %% You are not allowed to save in a shop. (Continue or Quit) %% You are not dead yet. But watch for further reports. %% You are not entitled to an opinion. An opinion is what you have when you don't have any facts. When you have the facts, you don't need an opinion. -- Solomon Short %% You are not equipped for an exorcism. %% You are not equipped for swimming. %% You are not expected to understand this: cav. [UNIX] The canonical comment describing something {magic} or too complicated to bother explaining properly. From an infamous comment in the context-switching code of the V6 UNIX kernel. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% You are not in a shop. %% You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged fourteen hundred and forty times a day. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) %% You are not permitted to save the game here. %% You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face. -- William Shakespeare %% You are not worthy of the slightest notice of a humanitarian. %% You are now a Sorcerer. %% You are now a Wizard of Earthsea. %% You are now at intermediate level. %% You are now at the top of an old wooden ladder. The ladder is resting against the bottom step of a glass staircase, which reaches upwards into a cloud. %% You are now at the top of some rock stairs leading downward. %% You are now at the west end of a hall of stone. %% You are now behind a beautiful waterfall! To the north you see a tunnel, and to the south you see the ledge. %% You are now considered a beginner. %% You are now considered an enchanter. %% You are now dead. (Le morte) %% You are now due north of Rood. There are no other islands in sight. %% You are now east of Kornay. To your east lies nothing but the Open Sea. %% You are now high above the clouds ... %% You are now in Atlanta Georgia. Please set your clocks back 200 years. %% You are now in a dark east-west passage. There is a trickle of water coming from a slit in the ceiling. A little stream travels eastward along the north wall of the passage. %% You are now in a huge walk-in safe. The south wall has been blown open by some mysterious explosion. %% You are now in a low cavern. You can see strange runes upon the walls, written with magic. Passages lead north, south, and west. %% You are now in a recently-carved tunnel which leads south and east. To the south you hear the muffled roar of the waterfall. You see a small sign here, reading "Warning: Caverns under construction beyond this point. proceed at own risk. (willis construction company)" %% You are now in a salt mine. It was evidently abandoned many years ago by some unknown people. %% You are now in a small clearing at the base of the cliff. You see the river rushing past, to disappear through a large underwater hole in the south end of the canyon. There is an outcropping of rock to the north of here. %% You are now in a twisting tunnel which goes south and east from here. You also see some ominous passages to the north and west. %% You are now in an old musty cavern. You see a short passage to the north, and a door to the east. %% You are now in the #. %% You are now in the rubble room. You see exits to the north, south, and east. %% You are now in the throne room. %% You are now in the transporter room. You see a button labeled "select" and a lever labeled "activate" on the wall here. %% You are now in the underground box office. The walls are perfectly smooth, and the corners are crisp and sharp. %% You are now inside a ring of pinnacles. In the center is a large stone floor. The whole area smells strongly of dragon. High above, the sky can be seen between the spires of the looming pinnacles. A dark, foreboding passage travels downward from here. %% You are now on the west side of a great canyon. You can see a rushing river at the bottom of the canyon, and you see a waterfall at the north end. There are some stone steps leading down, cut into the rock face. %% You are now outside the entrance to the hall of gems, to the east. other passages lead north and west. %% You are now standing in the middle of the palace yard to the west of a tall tower. This side of the vine-covered tower clearly shows the age of the ancient structure. A balcony can be seen on this side, near the tower's top. The courtyard extends both to the north and south and a doorway leads back inside the surrounding building. %% You are now standing in the shadow of a large stone block. A sign here reads "Dragons love creamed rutabaga soup." Another sign reads "Thank you, peter gruenbeck." %% You are now standing is a very dingy, cramped, dormitory-like cubicle once used as storeroom. Mold abounds in the corners of the room, and a pungent reek of long-term neglect pervades the atmosphere. The lone exit is to the south. %% You are now standing next to a crashing waterfall. Along the north wall is a river, which cascades over the brink of a great canyon, making an incredible waterfall. A rushing river runs southward at the bottom of the canyon. %% You are now standing on a rock ledge. You can see a rather large stalactite which does not quite reach the surface below -- you could go down, but you would not be able to come back up that way. %% You are now standing on an outcropping across from the waterfall. There is a rushing river flowing south from the bottom of the cascade. To the north you can see the entrance to a cavern, and to the south is a small clearing in the side of the cliff. %% You are now standing on neatly-cut grass. To the north you can see the ocean; to the south you see the edge of the magic castle. %% You are now standing on the north edge of a fluffy cloud. You can see the desert far below. It's a long way down . . . %% You are now standing on the southwest corner of the cloud. You can see the vast desert below you, down there. %% You are number 6! Who is number one? %% You are nuts. %% You are obviously a rank amateur. Better luck next time. %% You are on Traveller's Avenue, which runs north-to-south. Houses can seen seen on either side of the street. %% You are on a broad sandy beach at the foot of a high promontory. The beach tapers out quickly to the east, but continues to the west for quite a distance. %% You are on a desert island. To the south you see the ocean, and off to the north you see a large something-or-other. %% You are on a hot desert island, which stretches for miles and miles. Far off to the northeast you can see a large pyramid. %% You are on a hot sandy beach which stretches to the north and east. The ocean stretches to the west, southwest, and south. %% You are on a large desert island. You can see the ocean to the west; far to the east you see a pyramid. %% You are on a large sandy beach at the shore of the river, which is flowing quickly by. A path runs beside the river to the south here. %% You are on a ledge about halfway up the wall of the river canyon. You can see from here that the main flow from Aragain Falls twists along a passage which it is impossible to enter. Below you is the canyon bottom. Above you is more cliff, which still appears climbable. %% You are on a ledge high above the ground. To the east you see the ocean; to the west, the window of the haunted mansion. %% You are on a ledge in the middle of a large volcano. Below you the volcano bottom can be seen and above is the rim of the volcano. A couple of ledges can be seen on the other side of the volcano; it appears that this ledge is intermediate in elevation between those on the other side. The exit from this room is to the east. %% You are on a narrow ledge overlooking the inside of an old dormant volcano. This ledge appears to be about in the middle between the floor below and the rim above. There is an exit here to the south. %% You are on a narrow strip of beach which runs along the base of the white cliffs. The only path here is a narrow one, heading south along the cliffs. %% You are on a rocky, narrow strip of beach beside the cliffs. A narrow path leads north along the shore. %% You are on a section of Traveller's Avenue, a much-used thorough-fare dating back to the golden days of Ilite. The street is with a mosaic of multi-colored stone, set in place by master craftsmen. The avenue merges with a grey road to the south and continues into the town to the north. On either side of the avenue fields of flowers can be seen. %% You are on a section of forest path extending from the southwest to the east. There is dense forest on all sides of the paths. %% You are on a section of rocky path which travels southeast-northwest. The borders of the path consist of high sheer rock walls. The path has been cut into the living rock by some natural force, possibly a river. The way is very treacherous here. %% You are on a small beach on the continuation of the Frigid River past the falls. The beach is narrow due to the presence of the white cliffs. The river canyon opens here, and sunlight shines in from above. A rainbow crosses over the falls to the west, and a narrow path continues to the southeast. %% You are on a staircase ascending to the north. Walls are barely visible to the east and west. The staircase ascends steeply at a 45 degree angle. %% You are on a staircase ascending to the south. There are walls visible to the east and west. %% You are on a staircase leading upward to the west. Walls are visible to the north and south. The stairs ascend at a steep 45 degree angle. %% You are on a staircase which ascends to the east. There are faintly visible walls to the north and south. The stairs are quite steep and ascend at a 45 degree angle. %% You are on a staircase which ascends to the north. There are walls to the east and west. %% You are on a steeply ascending spiral stone staircase. The stairs are of obvious antiquity, as shown by the deep depressions in the steps. %% You are on a thin strip of beach that separates the ocean from a large rock which forms the bulk of the island. The beach seems to be made of ground coral, which lends a pink tinge to the sands. To the north lies the bottom tier of the rock. It looks climbable from here. To the east and west the rock forms high, impassable walls. %% You are on a vast desert island which extends to the east, west, and south. You can see a pyramid to the southeast, and an ocean to the north. %% You are on a wide ledge high into the volcano. The rim of the volcano is about 200 feet above and there is a precipitous drop below to the floor. %% You are on one side of a large, deep chasm. A heavy white mist rising up from below obscures all view of the far side. A SW path leads away from the chasm into a winding corridor. %% You are on rocky ground. To the north you see the west end of a bridge; to the east you see a rushing river which runs north-south. To the south you can see mountainous terrain. %% You are on the Frigid River in the vicinity of the dam. The river flows quietly here. There is a landing on the west shore. %% You are on the balcony outside the sorcerer's room. To the east you see the ocean; to the west, the window back into the haunted mansion. %% You are on the brink of a small clean climbable pit. A crawl leads west. %% You are on the brink of a thirty foot pit with a massive orange column down one wall. You could climb down here but you could not get back up. The maze continues at this level. %% You are on the east bank of a fissure slicing clear across the hall. The mist is quite thick here, and the fissure is too wide to jump. %% You are on the east edge of a desert island. The ocean looks very big from here. %% You are on the east edge of an island. To the west you see a very old haunted mansion. %% You are on the east edge of the desert island. Off in the distance in the west you see the pyramid. %% You are on the east edge of the island. To the west you see the haunted mansion; to the north, you see the front porch. There is a ledge directly above you. %% You are on the east side of a great canyon. Across the way, you see a river cascade into a lovely waterfall which crashes on the rocks at the bottom of the canyon, then forms a river which flows southward. Up here, you see a passage to the east. %% You are on the east side of a great canyon. You can see a rushing river at the bottom, and a waterfall at the north end. There are stone walls to the south and east. %% You are on the east side of a sandy field. To the nw, w, and s you can see more of the field; to the north lies a sandy beach. To the east you can see the ocean extending as far as you care to imagine. %% You are on the east side of a sunny meadow. To the north, west, and south you can see more of the meadow; to the east is a sandy field. %% You are on the east side of an oasis in the desert. To the north rises a tall pyramid, rumored to hide many valuable treasures. You also see stone steps going down. %% You are on the edge of a desert island. To the east lies the ocean. %% You are on the edge of a desert island. To the west you see a vast ocean; far to the east you see an oasis. %% You are on the edge of a desert. To the east stretches a vast ocean. %% You are on the edge of a vast desert island. You can see the ocean to the south, and there seems to be something important to the north. %% You are on the far side of the chasm. A NE path leads away from the chasm on this side. %% You are on the gently flowing stream. The upstream route is too narrow to navigate, and the downstream route is invisible due to twisting walls. There is a narrow beach to land on. %% You are on the northeast corner of a soft white cloud. below, you see the desert island and the ocean. %% You are on the northeast corner of an island. To the southeast you see a haunted mansion. %% You are on the northwest corner of a fluffy cloud. You see the oasis far below you. %% You are on the northwest corner of a small island. To the southeast you see the famed magic castle. %% You are on the northwest face of the pyramid on the desert island. %% You are on the ocean near the island of Gont, which lies to the southeast. Another island can be seen on the western horizon. %% You are on the ocean off the coast of Osskil. The island lies to the northwest, completely obscuring your vision in that direction. Two other islands are close by, one to the southeast and one to the southwest. %% You are on the outskirts of a vast desert island. To the west you can see the ocean; far to the northeast you see a great pyramid. %% You are on the reservoir. Beaches can be seen north and south. Upstream a small stream enters the reservoir through a narrow cleft in the rocks. The dam can be seen downstream. %% You are on the shore of the river. The river here seems somewhat treacherous. A path travels from north to south here, the south end quickly turning around a sharp corner. %% You are on the south bank of a river. The bank drops quite steeply here to the water below. You could not reach the water from here. The ruins of a collapsed stone bridge can be seen along the bank here. The path you are on winds southward. %% You are on the south edge a wide chasm. The walls of the chasm are quite steep and unclimbable. It doesn't look like you will be able to get across here. A path winds its way up the side of a small hill to the south. %% You are on the south edge of a deep canyon. Passages lead off to the east, south, and northwest. You can hear the sound of flowing water below. %% You are on the south edge of a large desert island. the ocean waves lap at your feet, while seagulls head to the north. %% You are on the south edge of a soft white cloud. You can see a large stone block in the desert down and to the southeast. %% You are on the south edge of a wide chasm. A recent cave-in below has collapsed enough of the sides for you to scramble across. A path winds its way up the side of a small hill to the south. %% You are on the south edge of an island. To the north you can see the west corner of a haunted mansion. %% You are on the south end of the long balcony. You see a window to the east. %% You are on the south side of the island. You can see the magic castle to the north of you. %% You are on the southeast face of the pyramid in the desert. To the south you see an oasis. %% You are on the southwest corner of the island. Northeast lies the famous magic castle, rumored to house all manner of strange items. %% You are on the southwest face of the pyramid. To the south you see an oasis; to the east lies the desert. %% You are on the west edge of a chasm, the bottom of which cannot be seen. The east side is sheer rock, providing no exits. A narrow passage goes west. The path you are on continues to the north and south. %% You are on the west edge of a desert island. far to the east you can see a tall pyramid. %% You are on the west edge of the island. To the east you can see the corner of the magic castle. There is a balcony above you. %% You are on the west shore of the river. An entrance to a cave is to the northwest. The shore is very rocky here. %% You are on the west side of a sandy field. To the north, east, and south you see more of the field; to the west, you see a sunny meadow. %% You are on the west side of a sunny meadow. To the west you see a small bridge; to the north, east, and south lies more of the meadow. %% You are on the west side of the fissure in the Hall of Mists. %% You are on top of a rainbow (I bet you never thought you would walk on a rainbow), with a magnificent view of the falls. The rainbow travels east-west here. %% You are on what used to be a large reservoir, but which is now a large mud pile. There are 'shores' to the north and south. %% You are on your own feet again. %% You are one frood who really knows where your towel is. %% You are one silly little bunny. %% You are only coming through in waves, your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying.... I I I I I I have become Comfortably Numb. -- Pink Floyd %% You are only what you are when no one is looking. -- Robert C. Edwards %% You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. %% You are open and honest in your philosophy of love. %% You are optimistic and intelligent. %% You are outside a large gateway, on which is inscribed: "Abandon every hope, all ye who enter here." The gate is open. Through it you can see a desolation, with a pile of mangled corpses in one corner. Thousands of voices, lamenting some hideous fate, can be heard. %% You are outside the entrance to an ancient mine. The water lies to the west. The doorway is old but seems in good repair. %% You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing. %% You are proceeding along a narrow trail which runs north-south between the building and the precipice. %% You are putting out a fire with gasoline. Be careful. %% You are putting out fire with gasoline. %% You are quick tempered, impatient, and scornful of advice. %% You are sailing along the northern shores of Enlad. The island occupies the southern horizon tapering to an elongated peninsula to the southeast. Another island lies to the north. %% You are sailing close to the east coast of Kamery. Another island occupies much of the eastern horizon. %% You are sailing in a bay on the eastern shore of Enlad. There is a harbor to the west, and a high promontory to the north which has a narrow beach at its foot. The ocean occupies the eastern horizon. %% You are sailing northeast of Iffish. %% You are sailing on the ocean, some distance removed from Havnor. Even from this distance, though, the immense island engulfs the entire northern horizon. Two other islands are barely visible to the south and southeast. %% You are sailing south of Roke Island. You can see many other islands as well. One lies behind the western portion of Roke; three others lie farther away, to the east, southeast and southwest. %% You are sailing the Dragon's Run. The water here is shallow and perilous. The horizon to the west is dotted with tiny islands, in the midst of which towers the Keep of Kalessin, a massive pinnacle of black spires standing some hundreds of feet high. %% You are sailing the upper regions of the North Reach, just south of the Whale Isles. Your map ends at this point, indicating no land to either the north, east or west. All that you can discern in those directions are a few icebergs drifting hither and yon. %% You are sailing the waters east of Karego-At. Another island can be seen somewhat to the south of east. %% You are sailing the waters of the South Reach, just to the northwest of the Isle of the Ear. %% You are sailing the waters of the West Reach just to the northeast of Obb. %% You are sailing the waters off the southeast corner of Onon. In addition to Onon, you can also see a larger island close to the north, as well as a small island to the southeast. %% You are sailing to the east of the infamous isle of Pendor. Far on the east horizon, the outline of another island can be seen. %% You are sailing to the northeast of Ensmer. Several other islands can be seen as well, to the northeast, east by southeast, and one very near to the north of northeast. %% You are sailing west of Ebosskil. Most of the eastern horizon is monopolized by Ebosskil, but beyond it and to the north another, larger island can be espied. %% You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straight forward. %% You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward. Therefore you have few friends. %% You are secretive in your dealings but never to the extent of trickery. %% You are sensitive to the atmosphere around you. %% You are sharing your lunch with the mice in the bottom drawer of your desk. %% You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted. %% You are sick, twisted and perverted. I like that in a person. %% You are slowly sliding across a most slippery floor in a generally southeastern direction. This seems to be due to a small but significant slope toward that corner. Conveniently enough, you are heading straight through an open doorway in the southeast corner. %% You are so aggravating you could give an aspirin a headache. %% You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep. %% You are southeast of Bereswek. Nothing else disturbs the ocean for as far as the eye can see. %% You are splashed by the blob's acid! %% You are splashing about in a pool of very cold fresh water. Between gasps for air you may note that the pool is located in a small basalt cavern. You also see that the water comes from a small stream which runs down the south wall from an opening in the roof high above; the stream exits through a small opening in the northwest wall. There is also an opening in the southeast corner of the cave, but you would have to abandon your swimming to leave by that route. %% You are standing amongst the remains of some small buildings. This must have been a small village of servant's quarters and the like once for the staff that served the Castles of Ebosskil. The terrain grows rocky and unpassable to the south, the beach can be seen to the northeast, and there is a hill to the north. Away to the west the corner of a castle can be seen. %% You are standing at the borderline between the high-walled plateau to the east and the farming district to the west. All along the foothills here, evidence of vinyards and other cultivation is still evident in the semblance of order which still persists. A path leads upward to a lone gate set in the wall. %% You are standing at the edge of an expanse of green fields. The fields continue to the north. To the south the open doorway of a small hut can be seen. %% You are standing at the edge of an expanse of green fields. The fields extend back to the north. The view to the south seems unsteady and shimmers like a mirage. You barely recognize it to be identical to the fields on the north. %% You are standing at the edge of an expanse of green fields. The fields extend back to the north. To the south is a most confusing view. It seems to be the exact same field you just crossed, but seen in reverse. The whole scene has an air of unreality, and almost shimmers as you gaze at it. %% You are standing at the edge of an expanse of green fields. The fields extend back to the north. To the south you can see an expanse of green fields much like those to the north, but the image appears to waver slightly. %% You are standing at the entrance of what might have been a coal mine. To the northeast and the northwest are entrances to the mine, and there is another exit on the south end of the room. %% You are standing at the entrance to a large, barren room. A sign posted above the entrance reads: "Caution! Bear in room!" %% You are standing at the southwest corner of a very large plateau. To the west the plateau drops off sharply down to a barren plain; to the south the white cliffs plummet to the ocean below. %% You are standing at the top of a flight of stairs that lead down to a passage below. Dim light, as from torches, can be seen in the passage. Behind you the stairs lead into untouched rock. %% You are standing at the top of a very steep sandstone cliff which plunges down to the ocean to the south. There is a small beach between the foot of the cliffs and the ocean. A spacious lush garden is visible to the north. %% You are standing atop a small knoll overlooking a large expanse of farmland to the east. Immediately to your south a very steep slope leads upward to a high mountain range. The roof of a very ornate building and the top of a tower are both visible over the wall. You can see what look like dwellings far to the southwest. %% You are standing before a gate in a wall to the west. The wall runs north-south next to the palace of Enlad. To the south a decrepit garden is visible. %% You are standing behind a stone retaining wall which rims a large parapet overlooking a fiery pit. It is difficult to see through the smoke and flame which fills the pit, but it seems to be more or less bottomless. It also extends upwards out of sight. The pit itself is of roughly dressed stone and is circular in shape. It is about two hundred feet in diameter. The flames generate considerable heat, so it is rather uncomfortable standing here. There is an object here which looks like a sundial. On it are an indicator arrow and (in the center) a large button. On the face of the dial are numbers "one" through "eight". The indicator points to the number "#". %% You are standing in a room which, although almost devoid of detail now, bears signs of once having served as a study for the princes of Enlad. Set into the walls are stone shelves which once functioned are bookshelves. No books are left. Doorways are set in all but the west wall. %% You are standing in a small circular room with a pedestal. A set of stairs leads up, and passages leave the the east and west. %% You are standing in a small open clearing. The west side of the clearing is bounded by a thick hedge. Dense trees form the north and south borders. A path extends out of the clearing to the east. %% You are standing in front of a pool at the end of the river. You can see the river to the east of you; to the west you can see a steep cliff. You won't be able to climb it. %% You are standing in front of the magic castle. The ocean stretches westward behind you; to the east you see a drawbridge. above, you see the underside of a balcony. %% You are standing in the dining room. The walls are completely bare and featureless. There are no chairs or any ornamentation of any kind in this room. Doorways lie to the south and west. %% You are standing in the grass on the north edge of the island. To the south you can see the corner of a haunted mansion. High above, you see a balcony. %% You are standing in the middle of a lush green clearing. The air here is cool and damp. The grove is surrounded on all sides by dense, dark forest. %% You are standing in the middle of an expanse of green fields. To the north you can see the edge of a great forest. A small path seems to lead into the trees in that direction. The fields extend to the south from here. %% You are standing in the midst of a field of red flowers which wave gently in the light breeze. A section of grey road can be seen To the south and Traveller's Avenue lies behind you to the west. The side wall of a yellow house ends the field on the north side and a yellow stone fence encloses the field from the west. %% You are standing in the waters off the northeast extreme of the island. A small beach is visible to the south. The open sea lies to the north and east. %% You are standing inside of a small hut. The walls are bare and have been stripped of all furnishings. Everything is quite dusty from long disuse. %% You are standing near one end of a long dimly lit hall. To the south, stone stairs ascend. To the north, the corridor is illuminated by torches set high in the wall, out of reach. On one wall is a red button. %% You are standing on a balcony outside a window of the haunted mansion. To the north you see the ocean; to the south, the window of the mansion. %% You are standing on a balcony overlooking the inner courtyard of the royal palace of Enlad. The balcony is situated atop a tall tower of great antiquity. An opening to the east leads into the tower itself. %% You are standing on a narrow ledge at the base of the canyon. Leading up are some stone steps cut into the rock face. To the east you a river rushing southward, vanishing through a large hole in the wall at the southern end of the canyon. The river comes from a lovely waterfall directly north of here. There seems to be a rough passageway leading northward. %% You are standing on a narrow stone ledge. You are surrounded on two sides by sheer cliff, dropping several hundred feet to the waters below. From up here you can just make out the faint outlines of a group of islands to the west. In front of you the cliff continues straight up out of sight. A narrow rocky path travels up the cliff face to the southeast. You notice a small opening in the rock face before you. %% You are standing on a path beside a gently flowing stream. The path travels to the north and the east. %% You are standing on a porch in front of a red house. The door to the house is directly in front of you. The house appears to be entirely featureless except for this door. The porch is surrounded by a railing to the north and south. Traveller's Avenue lies behind you to the east. %% You are standing on a section of grey road, which travels east to west. %% You are standing on a small ledge halfway up the sandstone cliff overlooking a beach. A small trail passes over the ledge continuing both up and down. %% You are standing on a small rocky beach on the edge of the island of Gont. The beach is bounded on the north and south with rocky cliffs that are unclimbable. The beach slopes up from the water to the east, and ends finally in a dense hedge. %% You are standing on a small rocky beach which extends outward into the water. The beach widens and continues onward to the west while a trail leads upward to the south. A small stream flows into the ocean here, issuing from some cliffs to the southwest. %% You are standing on a yellow platform which is resting on the ground. The platform comes to an abrupt end to the east in a sharp dropoff into a large grassy area. %% You are standing on my toes. %% You are standing on neatly-cut grass on the north edge of an island. To the south you see the side of the famous haunted mansion. %% You are standing on the base of the rock. Above you can be seen the top. To the south below lies a pink beach. %% You are standing on the front porch of the haunted mansion. To the north and south you can see well-kept grass; to the east, the ocean extends into the distance. To the west you see the great door of the haunted mansion. %% You are standing on the grass on the east side of the island. To the west you see a great haunted mansion, and to the south, the front porch. There is a balcony high above you. %% You are standing on the lawn on the west edge of an island. To the east you see the wall of the magic castle. %% You are standing on the north bank of a river. The water is black and appears most unhealthy. The river is surrounded on this bank by dense forest. A heavy stone bridge spans the river at this point, and a narrow path continues into the forest to the southwest. %% You are standing on the north bank of a river. The water is black and appears most unhealthy. The river is surrounded on this bank by dense forest. The remains of a stone bridge span the river partway, but the center of the bridge has collapsed completely. %% You are standing on the north edge of a fairly wide chasm. The walls appear sheer and unclimbable from here. The only path leads away from here to the north. %% You are standing on the north edge of what was once a fairly wide chasm. The chasm now seems to be filled with rubble. The only path leads away from here to the north. %% You are standing on the southeast corner of a beautiful fluffy white cloud. You can see some glass steps leading downward, towards the desert below. %% You are standing on the top of flood control dam #3, which was quite a tourist attraction in times far distant. There are paths to the north, south, east, and down. %% You are standing on the west edge of an island. To the east you see a large magic castle, with a slot in the wall. %% You are standing on top of a grape tree stump. %% You are standing on top of a very tall saguaro cactus. You can see the desert far below you, and the pyramid off to the west. %% You are standing upon a ledge overlooking a room. The ledge is set on the eastern wall of the room below and disappears into a tunnel in the north wall. %% You are still half-savage -- but there is hope. -- The Metron, "Arena," stardate 3046.2 %% You are still in a pit. %% You are still recovering from the last blow, so your attack is ineffective. %% You are stopped by a cloud of poisonous gas. %% You are strong enough to admit that you need help. %% You are strong enough to take several wounds. %% You are such a good salesman, you could sell a double bed to the Pope. %% You are such a good salesman, you could sell a double bed to the Pope. (Even though he already has one.) %% You are suddenly moving much faster. %% You are sunlight and I, moon Joined by the gods of fortune Midnight and high noon Sharing the sky We have been blessed, you and I -- MISS SAIGON %% You are surrounded by a wall of sand on all sides. %% You are sympathetic and understanding to other people's problems. They think you are a sucker. %% You are taking yourself far too seriously. %% You are the Chosen One, just like you always suspected. %% You are the bee's knees. %% You are the cat's pajamas. %% You are the center of every group's attention. %% You are the only person to ever get this message. %% You are tied to the ledge. %% You are transported to a room where you are faced by a wizard who points to you and says, "Them's fighting words!" You immediately get attacked by all sorts of denizens of the museum: there is a cobra chewing on your leg, a troglodyte is bashing your brains out with a gold nugget, a crocodile is removing large chunks of flesh from you, a rhinoceros is goring you with his horn, a sabre-tooth cat is busy trying to disembowel you, you are being trampled by a large mammoth, a vampire is sucking you dry, a Tyrannosaurus Rex is sinking his six inch long fangs into various parts of your anatomy, a large bear is dismembering your body, a gargoyle is bouncing up and down on your head, a burly troll is tearing you limb from limb, several dire wolves are making mince meat out of your torso, and the wizard is about to transport you to the corner of Westwood and Broxton. Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed, as well. You scored 0 out of 250 possible points. That gives you a ranking of junior beginning adventurer. To achieve the next higher rating, you need to score 32 more points. %% You are trapped inside an steel cage. %% You are tricky, but never to the point of dishonesty. %% You are unable to differentiate between facade and substance. %% You are unable to visualize yourself in a future. %% You are uninjured. %% You are versatile, energetic, artistic and good-natured. %% You are walking along a gently sloping north/south passage lined with oddly shaped limestone formations. %% You are wasting your time. %% You are wasting your youth, your time, and your money because you won't acknowledge your shortcomings. %% You are west of the isle of Wathort. You can discern another land mass to the north. %% You are wise, father. It is the difference between knowledge and experience. -- Lal and Data, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0 %% You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of trash. %% You are without a doubt a rogue, a rascal, a villain, a thief, a scoundrel, and a mean, dirty, stinking, sniveling, sneaking, pimping, pocketpicking, thrice double-damned, no-good son of a bitch. %% You are witty and fond of fun. %% You aren't carrying it! %% You aren't carrying that. %% You aren't in that! %% You arrive at the center of the earth ... %% You ask what a nice girl will do? She won't give an inch, but she won't say no. -- Marcus Valerius Martialis %% You attack a little dwarf, but he dodges out of the way. %% You attempt things that you do not even plan because of your extreme stupidity. %% You auto buy now. %% You awake with a headache. %% You bash the Balrog, I'll climb the tree %% You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. -- The Little Prince, chapter XXI %% You begin to feel better. %% You believe that you are the master of your fate; the captain of your soul. %% You better believe that marijuana can cause castration. Just suppose your girlfriend gets the munchies! %% You bring the torch near the block of ice. It melts, leaving something which had been frozen inside it! %% You burn to a crisp. %% You buttered your bread, now lie in it. %% You buy a judge by weight, like iron in a junk yard. A justice of the peace or a magistrate can be had for a five-dollar bill. In the municipal courts, he will cost you ten. In the circuit or superior courts, he wants fifteen. The state appellate courts or the state supreme court is on a par with the Federal courts. By the time a judge reaches such courts, he is middle-aged, thick around the middle, fat between the ears. He's heavy. You can't buy a Federal judge for less than a twenty-dollar bill. -- Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik %% You ca scoundrel. -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) %% You came, you saw, you conquered. %% You can always get a job in international affairs because 90% of everything happens in a foreign country. -- Steve Connelly %% You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. -- Tim Leary %% You can always tell luck from ability by its duration. %% You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail. Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable to find a way to damage them. They last forever, largely because nobody ever eats them. In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year; some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years. The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet. Be sure to wear safety glasses. -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts" %% You can always wear an elven cloak. %% You can be killed by a serious wound. %% You can be killed by one more light wound. %% You can be replaced by this computer. %% You can bear anything if it isn't your own fault. -- Katharine Fullerton Gerould %% You can become more assertive in regard to job assignments and co-workers. %% You can blame an administration that has been in office for 12 years, or you can blame me. -- Murphy Brown %% You can bring men from other parts of the world who are sane. And you know what happens? At the very moment they cross those mountains... they go mad. Instantaneously and automatically, at the very moment they cross the mountains into California, they go insane. -- Quentin Genter %% You can cage a swallow, can't you, but you can't swallow a cage, can you? Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl. A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama! -- The Palindromist %% You can call her an outdoor girl if she has the bloom of youth on her cheeks and the cheeks of youth in her bloomers. %% You can catch the bird, but you cannot carry it. %% You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. %% You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice; if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears or kindness that could kill; I will choose a path that's clear: I will choose free will. -- Rush %% You can count on it. -- President George Bush, on Iraqi war-crimes trials, January 1991 %% You can create your own opportunities this week. Blackmail a senior executive. %% You can depend on nothing, you see? %% You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow. -- Janis Joplin %% You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. -- Eric Hoffer, in "The Faber Book of Aphorisms", 1964 %% You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. -- Camillo di Cavour (1810-1861) %% You can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. -- Al Capone (1899-1947) %% You can do very well in speculation where land or anything to do with earth is concerned. %% You can drive a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead. %% You can eat what your dog can eat. %% You can find an outlet four your creative genius and accomplish a great deal. %% You can find sympathy, in the dictionary near shit and suicide. %% You can fool all of the people all of the time, but why bother when all you need is a simple majority? %% You can fool all of the people some of the time. %% You can fool all of the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time; and that should be sufficient for most purposes. %% You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) %% You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can make a fool of yourself anytime. %% You can fool some of the people all of the time. %% You can fool the people about many things, but only a fool would be foolish enough to fool the people about money. -- Italo Bombolini %% You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP. You can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP. Telnet over, it's a simple hack. Port one-nineteen is where it's at. and you can get anything you want on Alice's NNTP. -- E. Michael Smith, ems@michael.apple.com %% You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant ('ceptin' Alice). %% You can get anywhere in ten minutes if you go fast enough. %% You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word. You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting. %% You can get more things done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. -- Lt. William Calley (attributed) %% You can get more with a kind word and a lawyer than you can from just a kind word. %% You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can get with a kind word alone. -- Al Capone (1899-1947) %% You can get there from here, but why on earth would you want to? %% You can get used to living at a nudist camp. The first three days are the hardest. -- R. Dreiser %% You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard. %% You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting. %% You can grovel with a lover, you can grovel with a friend, You can grovel with your boss, and it never has to end. (chorus) Grovel, grovel, grovel, every night and every day, Grovel, grovel, grovel, in your own peculiar way. You can grovel in a hallway, you can grovel in a park, You can grovel in an alley with a mugger after dark. (chorus) You can grovel with your uncle, you can grovel with your aunt, You can grovel with your Apple, even though you say you can't. (chorus) %% You can have a dog as a friend. You can have whiskey as a friend. But if you have a woman as a friend, you're going to wind up drunk and kissing your dog." -- foolin' around %% You can have a winner [in a nuclear war]. -- George Bush, 1980. In 1984, he said, ``I never said that.'' The original interview had been taped %% You can have peace or freedom,but seldom both %% You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% You can judge a leader by the size of the problems he tackles -- people nearly always pick a problem their own size, and ignore or leave to others the bigger of smaller ones. -- Anthony Jay %% You can lead a child to knowledge, but you cannot make him think. %% You can lead a horse to water but you can't lead a horticulture. %% You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. %% You can lead a whore to Vasser, but you can't make her think. -- Frederick B. Artz %% You can learn a lot about a world by looking at its underside. -- Louis Wu "Ringworld" %% You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. -- Franklin P. Jones %% You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular. %% You can make the passages look less alike by dropping things. %% You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of FORTRAN. -- Alan J. Perlis %% You can move again. %% You can move the world with an idea, but you have to think of it first. %% You can name your salary here. I call mine Fred. %% You can neither win nor lose if you don't run the race. %% You can never do merely one thing. -- Garrett Hardin %% You can never trust a woman; she may be true to you. %% You can now buy more gates with less specifications than at any other time in history. -- Kenneth Parker %% You can now read the runes! Look quickly, because the magic translation wears off rapidly . . . %% You can observe a lot just by watching. -- Yogi Berra %% You can only get three fingers in a bowling ball. %% You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception. -- Victor Cousin %% You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. %% You can outdistance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you. -- Rwandan proverb %% You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose. %% You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your nose's friends. %% You can prick your finger, but never finger your prick. %% You can rent this space for only $5 a week. %% You can see a small statue in the sand. %% You can see again %% You can see by her light touch that she has a flare for the piano. %% You can see the island of Enlad to the west. Far away to the east another island is visible. %% You can see walls to the north and south extremes of your vision. The opening of a small tunnel in the north wall is apparent. %% You can see: A #. %% You can survive one serious wound. %% You can take a horticulture, but you can't make her think. -- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) %% You can take all the impact that science considerations have on funding decisions at NASA, put them in the navel of a flea, and have room left over for a caraway seed and Tony Calio's heart. -- F. Allen %% You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers. -- Steven Feiner %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when the bird singing outside your window is a buzzard. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when you call your answering service, and they tell you it's none of your business. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when you put both contact lenses in the same eye. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when you put your bra on backwards, and it fits better. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when you wake up and your braces have locked together. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when you wake up to discover your waterbed broke, then you remember that you don't have a waterbed. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when you wake up to the sound of DEA agents/FBI agents/Armenian Nationalists breaking down your door. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when you walk to work, and find your dress is stuck in the back of your panty hose. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when your blind date turns out to be your ex-wife. %% You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when your wife says, "Good morning, Bill," and your name is George. %% You can tell the difference between engineers, scientists, and managers in today's high tech companies by the questions they ask. Engineering: "How will this work?" Science: "Why will this work?" Management: "When will this work?" Liberal Arts: "Do you want fries with that?" %% You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. -- Norman Douglas (1868-1952) %% You can tell the men from the boys by the price of their toys. %% You can tell what a man worships by what he does on Sunday. -- Hartman Rector, Jr. %% You can tell when you're on the right track -- it's usually uphill. %% You can tune a guitar, but you cant tuna fish. %% You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish. %% You can watch a horse boil in a pot but you can't drink him. %% You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you might find you get what you need. %% You can't always get what you want. %% You can't argue with the vice president, can you? -- William Figueroa, the 12-year-old told by Dan Quayle that potato is spelled 'potatoe' %% You can't be serious! %% You can't belay a man who's falling in love. -- Edward Abbey %% You can't break eggs without making an omelet. %% You can't break even. %% You can't break the beam with a #. %% You can't carry anything more. %% You can't carry anything more. You'll have to drop something first. %% You can't carve your way to success without cutting remarks. %% You can't catch the orb -- whenever you come close, it floats away as if frightened by something. %% You can't cheat an honest man, never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump. -- W. C. Fields %% You can't cheat an honest man. He has to have larceny in his heart in the first place. %% You can't cheat the phone company. %% You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes. -- Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) %% You can't deflate the boat while you're in it. %% You can't depend on the man who made the mess to clean it up. -- Richard Milhouse Nixon (1952) %% You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% You can't do that in horizontal mode! %% You can't do that right now. Try dropping some other stuff first. %% You can't do that! %% You can't drop that bar! %% You can't erase a dream, you can only wake me up. -- Peter Frampton %% You can't evaluate a man by logic alone. -- McCoy, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% You can't even quit the game. %% You can't expect a boy to be depraved until he has been to a good school. -- Saki (1870-1916) %% You can't expect a boy to be vicious unless he's been to a good school. -- H. H. Munro %% You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine. -- Flip Wilson, 1971 %% You can't fight the law of conservation of energy. You can bargain with it, but you can't fight it. -- Solomon Short %% You can't fill that. %% You can't fly -- try climbing the rope. %% You can't fly; try "Climb tree". %% You can't fool all the people all of the time. %% You can't get by the snake. %% You can't get there from here. %% You can't go home again, unless you set $HOME. %% You can't go more than part way through the curtain. %% You can't go that way. %% You can't go there in a #. %% You can't go there without a vehicle. %% You can't go through a locked steel grate! %% You can't guard against the arbitrary. %% You can't have everything... where would you put it? -- Steven Wright %% You can't have hair and brains both, you don't see many bald women, do you? %% You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. -- Booker T. Washington %% You can't hurt me!! I have an ASSUMABLE MORTGAGE!! %% You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair. %% You can't just walk off the edge of the canyon -- you could, however, try crossing the bridge. Be very careful, as it doesn't look very sturdy. %% You can't kill the snake, or drive it away, or avoid it, or anything like that. There is a way to get by, but you don't have the necessary resources right now. %% You can't kiss a girl unexpectedly -- only sooner than she thought you would. %% You can't leave a shop through the back door: there ain't one! %% You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water -- an inch deep and then the mud. -- George Macdonald (1824-1905) %% You can't make a program without broken egos. %% You can't mend a wristwatch while falling from an airplane. %% You can't milk a cow while standing! %% You can't move around while sitting down. %% You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains - they regenerate and keep coming. Eventually, you will weaken. Your reserves will be gone. They are relentless. -- Q to Picard about the Borg, "Q-Who?", stardate 42761.3 %% You can't plant me in your penthouse, I'm going back to my plow. %% You can't play your friends like marks, kid. -- Henry Gondorf, "The Sting" %% You can't pour that. %% You can't push on a string. %% You can't read the dialect! %% You can't run the machine without me. -- Professor Fastbender %% You can't say "delinquency" on the streets of Marcus Hook, Pa. %% You can't say civilization isn't advancing: In every war, they kill you in a new way. -- Will Rogers %% You can't see anything in the darkness. %% You can't see through that! %% You can't seem to get your fingers in to do that. %% You can't shoot rabbits from a motorboat in Kansas. %% You can't sit on the lid of progress. If you do, you will be blown to pieces. -- Henry Kaiser %% You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now. -- Lauren Bacall %% You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light. -- Edward Abbey %% You can't survive by sucking the juice from a wet mitten. -- Charles Schulz, "Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over" %% You can't swim -- try crossing the bridge. %% You can't swim! %% You can't take damsel here now. %% You can't take it with you -- especially when crossing a state line. %% You can't take something you already have. %% You can't take the #. %% You can't teach people to be lazy - either they have it, or they don't. -- Dagwood Bumstead %% You can't tell how deep a puddle is until you step in it. %% You can't throw something you are wearing %% You can't tie the # to that. %% You can't trust a man who won't shave himself on his own hangover. %% You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again. -- Bonnie Prudden %% You can't turn that off. %% You can't turn that. %% You can't underestimate the power of fear. -- Tricia Nixon Cox %% You can't unlock the keys. %% You can't win the game if you won't throw the dice. %% You can't win. %% You can't wind a #. %% You can't, it's all in binary. %% You can't, it's written in dwarvish. %% You can't. It appears to be cursed. %% You canna change the laws of physics, Captain; I've got to have thirty minutes! %% You cannibal! You will be sorry for this! %% You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd. %% You cannot antagonize and persuade at the same time. %% You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless you are an inhabitant of the north of England or the state of Maine. -- Ford Madox Ford %% You cannot believe in honor unless you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. %% You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence. %% You cannot burn this door. %% You cannot choose your battlefield, the gods do that for you. But you can plant a standard where a standard never flew. -- Nathalia Crane %% You cannot climb any higher. %% You cannot damage this door. %% You cannot discover working programs. You can only discover them broken. %% You cannot drop something you are wearing. %% You cannot establish sound social security on borrowed money. %% You cannot fit through this passage with that load. %% You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. %% You cannot go down without fracturing many bones. %% You cannot go upstream due to the strong current. %% You cannot have a science without measurement. -- R. W. Hamming %% You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. %% You cannot help small men up by tearing down big men. %% You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. %% You cannot hope to bribe or twist Thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there's no occasion to. -- Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940) %% You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. %% You cannot kill time without injuring eternity. %% You cannot lift the wage-earner up by pulling the wage-payer down. %% You cannot petition the lord with prayer. %% You cannot pick up the gold! %% You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back. %% You cannot put something inside a burning object. %% You cannot reach the rope. %% You cannot refrigerate something you are wearing. %% You cannot repeat a command that contained a parsing error. %% You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings. -- Edward Abbey %% You cannot resist the temptation to mimic a treasure chest. %% You cannot ride a long worm. %% You cannot see the wood for the trees. -- John Heywood %% You cannot see this statistic. %% You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist. -- Indira Gandhi %% You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. %% You cannot talk through another person. %% You cannot talk to that! %% You cannot tie the cyclops, although he is fit to be tied. %% You cannot trust scrolls of rumour. %% You cannot unlock the door! %% You cannot use your friends and have them too. %% You cannot wear a shield and wield a two-handed sword. %% You cannot wear gloves over your weapon. %% You cannot wield a two-handed sword and wear a shield. %% You cannot wipe out the message that is burned in the rock. %% You care to surrender now, Captain? -- Riker, "Peak Performance", stardate 42923.4 %% You carefully step onto the bridge, which creaks and groans horribly. As you get further out over the canyon, it gets worse. Then, suddenly the bridge starts to collapse beneath your weight. You try to grab onto something for support, but it's no use. Amid bits and pieces of old lumber, you fall to the crashing waters below, resulting in a terrible death. %% You catch more bees with honey than you do with vinegar. %% You certainly can't turn it with a #. %% You charge, but the # jumps nimbly aside. %% You choke over your food. %% You claim a birthright you have forsaken? I have not forsaken my heritage. I am Klingon. My heart is of this world. My blood is as yours. -- Duras and Worf, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% You clamber up the plant and scurry through the hole at the top. %% You clearly are a suicidal maniac. We don't allow psychotics in the dungeon, since they may harm other adventurers. Your remains will be installed in the land of the living dead, where your fellow adventurers may gloat over them. %% You clever dog! %% You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down. -- Stanislaw Lem, "The Cyberiad" %% You cling to your own ways and leave mine to me. -- Petrarch %% You clumsy oaf, you've done it again! I don't know how long I can keep this up. Do you want me to try reincarnating you again? %% You come from a very brave and unique race. I'm glad you're here on the ENTERPRISE. Thank you, Commander. And welcome home. -- Riker and Worf, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% You come out of a woman and you spend the rest of your life trying to get back inside. -- Heathcote Williams %% You compensate for you prejudices when making decisions. %% You compromise on what you shouldn't and fight for things not worth fighting for. %% You consider yourself a born leader. Others think of you as pushy. %% You continue to call? Good! Now I can place the Curse of the Rats on you! %% You could certainly never tie the # with that! %% You could do that, but it would be wrong. %% You could get a new lease on life -- if only you didn't need the first and last month in advance. %% You could just open the door. -- Cardinal Borusa, INVASION OF TIME %% You could live a better life, if you had a better mind and a better body. %% You could prosper in the field of medical research. %% You could say Senator Tower is doing a lousy job, but I don't use that kind of words. %% You coulda been somebody. You coulda been a contenda. %% You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable doubt. -- Ed Meese, on the Hinckley verdict %% You cut off part of the worm's tail. %% You cut the worm in half. %% You defend other people's ideas at the expense of your own. %% You definitely intend to start living sometime soon. %% You deserve a break today, so get up and get away ... to McDonald's. %% You deserve the gods you worship. -- Solomon Short %% You dialed 5483. %% You did it your way. %% You didn't make it. %% You die because of food poisoning %% You die... %% You dirty rat, you killed my brother and now you're going to die. %% You disguise your laziness as pride. %% You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy. %% You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy. It's a shame you're such an idoit. %% You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy. Unfortunately it is only an act. %% You do not destroy an idea by killing people; you replace it with a better one. -- Edward Keating %% You do not have mail. %% You do not owe the shopkeeper anything. %% You dodge as the thief comes in low. %% You don't ask the Almighty for His ID! -- McCoy, "The Final Frontier," stardate 8451.1 %% You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries. %% You don't drink beer. You rent it. %% You don't fall in! %% You don't feel cold! %% You don't feel hot! %% You don't fit through a two-inch slit! %% You don't have anything strong enough to open the clam. %% You don't have enough lung power to inflate it. %% You don't have everything needed. Go read some blueprints . . . %% You don't have gold enough to pay. %% You don't have that object. %% You don't have the #. %% You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. %% You don't have to be nice to people on the way up if you're not planning on coming back down. -- Oliver Warbucks, "Annie" %% You don't have to know how the computer works, just how to work the computer. %% You don't have to rehearse to be yourself. %% You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers. -- J. D. Salinger %% You don't know any strangers. %% You don't know anything about a woman until you meet her in court. %% You don't know what we could find. Why don't you come with me, little girl, on a magic carpet ride? %% You don't know what you do well. %% You don't know what you're talking about do you? %% You don't learn anything the second time you're kicked by a mule. %% You don't like me very much do you? Is it required...sir? -- Lt. Cmdr Remmick and Worf, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2 %% You don't make money in politics. Or, I should say --- you shouldn't. -- Marilyn Quayle %% You don't move to Edina, you achieve Edina. -- Guindon %% You don't need a lid on a basket of crabs. If one of them tries to climb out, the others will pull it back down. -- Solomon Short %% You don't need to fly to have more fun with wings. -- Joe Anderson %% You don't really expect this command to work, do you? %% You don't really want to hold a burning #. %% You don't seem affected by it. %% You don't seem to be able to distinguish compass directions. %% You don't sew with a fork, so I see no reason to eat with knitting needles. -- Miss Piggy, on eating Chinese Food %% You don't sound very optimistic. I know my enemy, Commander. They don't leave much room for optimism. -- Riker and Alexana Devos, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7 %% You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive. -- Margaret Thatcher, 1976 %% You don't understand me, so don't reprimand me. %% You don't understand regeneration, Mel. It's a lottery, and I've drawn the short plank. -- Dr. McCoy, TIME AND THE RANI %% You drown... %% You duck the blast... %% You dummy. But I love you anyway. %% You enjoy the company of other people. %% You escaped from the dungeon %% You ever see a little baby and you think, "Oh, how nice. Life! That wonderful little baby is going to grow up and get raped and mugged and robbed and abused and addicted and bought and sold and arrested and harrassed and stabbed and bullied and threatened and shot and killed and buried and recorded and forgotten. Let's name him, "statistic". %% You evidently frightened the robber, although you missed him. He flees, but the contents of his bag fall on the floor. %% You exist; it's this place that is unreal. %% You fail utterly in avoiding the troll's attack, which leaves you near death. %% You faint from lack of food. %% You fall down a few thousand feet and break your neck. %% You fall into a pit! %% You fall into a pool! %% You feel a pull downward. %% You feel a throbbing underfoot and a momentary increase in weight before the gravity polarizers turn on automatically to eliminate the side effects of lift-off. %% You feel a whole lot more like you do now than you did when you used to. %% You feel greedy and want more gold? Why don't you try digging? %% You feel guilty. %% You feel less confused now %% You feel like someone is helping you. %% You feel like someone is pulling your leg. %% You feel like you need some help. %% You feel materially poor. %% You feel more capable. %% You feel more experienced. %% You feel much better. %% You feel rather airy. %% You feel rather light headed. %% You feel somewhat disoriented as you pass through... %% You feel somewhat dizzy. %% You feel strong enough to be gentle. %% You feel the chilly bite of the north wind upon your cheek. %% You feel threatened. %% You feel very greedy! %% You feel very greedy, and sense gold! %% You feel weak now. %% You feel weaker! %% You feel you have more memories than you have energy to process those memories. %% You feel yourself slowing down %% You fell into a pit and broke every bone in your body! %% You fight and fight and fight...... %% You fill a much-needed gap. %% You find something amusing? Lieutenant Worf, I like him. To be more accurate I understand him, the warrior proud, fearless, living only for combat. Exactly the type that will get us all killed if we're not careful. -- Riker and Setal/Jarok, "The Defector", stardate 43462.5 %% You find the fruit extremely juicy. It was delicious, and very filling. %% You find yourself at rest on what can best be termed as an exceedingly slick surface. This is somewhat troubling since you can neither get to your feet nor propel yourself. You can see doorways in the west wall and the southwest and southeast corners of the room. %% You find yourself on a thin ledge overlooking a room below. The ledge would seem to be set high on the west wall of the room, disappearing into a passage leading north. %% You finished your meal. %% 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: "(1) How much did you make? (AMOUNT) "(2) How much did we here at the government take out? (AMOUNT) "(3) Hey! Sounds like we took too much! So we're going to send an official government check for (ONE-FIFTEENTH OF THE AMOUNT WE TOOK) directly to the (YOUR LAST NAME) household at (YOUR ADDRESS), for you to spend in any way you please! Which just goes to show you, (YOUR FIRST NAME), that it pays to file the short form!" The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your money. So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long form. -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" %% You float gently down to earth. %% You float gently to the ground. %% You float over a bear trap. %% You float up, only your leg is still stuck. %% You float up, out of the pit! %% You fool, dwarves eat only coal! Now you've made him *really* mad!! %% You forgot to do your backup 16 days ago. Tomorrow you'll need that version. %% You freely express resentment at bad treatment. Then you forget it. %% You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war. -- William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) %% You get along very well with everyone except animals and people. %% You get an uncanny feeling ... %% You get blasted! %% You get exactly what you create. If you don't believe this, try sitting in a vacant lot and hoping for a house to appear. Until you create the house, the lot will remain vacant. %% You get the creepy feeling that somebody noticed your taking the Amulet. %% You get the most of what you need the least. -- Jane Bryant Quinn %% You get turned to stone! %% You get what you pay for. -- Gabriel Biel %% You give him 1000 gold pieces. %% You give him all your money. %% You give me fever ... when you kiss me, fever when you hold me tight. Fever through the daytime; you give me fever all through the night. %% You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life. May it all turn out to your happiness. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) %% You give up your attempt to open the tin. %% You go down to the pickup station, craving warmth and beauty; You settle for less than fascination -- a few drinks later you're not so choosy. And the closing lights strip off the shadows on this strange new flesh you've found -- Clutching the night to you like a fig leaf you hurry to the blackness and the blankets to lay down an impression and your loneliness. -- Joni Mitchell %% You go slow, be gentle. It's no one-way street -- you know how you feel and that's all. It's how the girl feels too. Don't press. If the girl feels anything for you at all, you'll know. -- Kirk, "Charlie X," stardate 1535.8 %% You goddamn cornhuskers are all alike. -- Jim Thompson %% You got that for free! %% You got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there. -- Yogi Berra %% You got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues, And you know it don't come easy ... I don't ask for much, I only want trust, And you know it don't come easy ... %% You grow up the day you have the first real laugh -- at yourself. %% You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it's our turn. -- Thurgood Marshall [quoted by Justice Douglas] %% You had mail, but the super-user read it, and deleted it! %% You had mail. David read it, so ask him what it said. %% You had some happiness once, but your parents moved away, and you had to leave it behind. %% You have 938475827394577721747834759 new mail messages. %% You have Egyptian flu: you're going to be a mummy. %% You have Heather's eyes (quite beautiful, both yours and hers). %% You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music. %% You have a deep interest in all that is artistic. %% You have a difficult time coping with reality. %% You have a healthy appreciation of your abilities, and a keen awareness of your limitations. %% You have a knack for doublethink that you never realized you had. In fact, you will never realize it. %% You have a knack for understanding of problems of human relationship. Don't use it to screw people up. %% You have a light wound. %% You have a little trouble lifting %% You have a massage (from the Swedish prime minister). %% You have a message from the operator. %% You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things -- broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them -- and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon -- laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution -- these can lift at a colossal humbug -- push it a little -- weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." -- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Mysterious Stranger" %% You have a nice skull. %% You have a part-time job, you have a job. That's better than no job at all. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking on $4.25/hour jobs with no benefits at Burger King %% You have a peculiar feeling for a moment, then it passes. %% You have a peculiarly sad feeling for a moment, then it passes. %% You have a reckless tendency to rely on luck since you lack talent. %% You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy. %% You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy...at least that's what they told me down at Honest John's Used Cars. %% You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy. A pity that it's totally undeserved. %% You have a reputation for being thoroughly unreliable and untrustworthy. %% You have a right to your opinions. I just don't want to hear them. %% You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes. %% You have a seatbelt; has it hugged you today? %% You have a serious wound. %% You have a special understanding of the mentally ill, and they have a special understanding of you. %% You have a strange feeling for a moment, then it passes. %% You have a strong appeal for members of the opposite sex. %% You have a strong appeal for members of your own sex. %% You have a strong desire for a home and your family interests come first. Which is why you never get anything done at work! %% You have a strong desire for a home. %% You have a strong desire for a home and your family interests come first. %% You have a tendency to feel you are superior to most computers. %% You have a truly strong individuality. %% You have a truly strong individuality. Which is why you can never get along with others. %% You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA and FBI. (And, in fact, you're right.) %% You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA and FBI. %% You have a will that can be influenced by all with whom you come in contact. %% You have a yearning for perfection. %% You have achieved the rank of master. %% You have achieved the rating: "Experienced adventurer". %% You have acquired a scroll entitled 'irk gleknow mizk'(n).--More-- This is an IBM Manual scroll.--More-- You are permanently confused. -- Dave Decot %% You have all eternity to be cautious in when you're dead. -- Lois Platford %% You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner. -- Aristophanes %% You have an ability to sense and know higher truth. %% You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself. %% You have an ambitious nature and will make a name for yourself. Make sure it isn't a bad name. %% You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive. %% You have an unusual magnetic personality. %% You have an unusual magnetic personality. Don't walk too close to metal objects which are not fastened down. %% You have an unusual understanding of the problems of human relationship. %% You have arrived at the edge of the garden. A large building can be seen to the northwest. To its immediate east runs a narrow trail. %% You have arrived near Hur-at-Hur, the last outpost of land to the northeast. Nothing lies beyond here to the north or east but the Open Sea. The island itself looms large to the north. Another can be seen in the south. %% You have attained the rank of novice. %% You have been bitchy since Tuesday and you'll probably get fired today. %% You have been blasted to smithereens (whatever they are). %% You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive. -- Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet" %% You have been killed once. %% You have been selected for a secret mission. %% You have been swapped out. %% You have broken the mirror. I hope you have a seven years supply of good luck available. %% You have brought nothing but pain and suffering to this crew and I am still not entirely convinced that all this isn't you latest attempt at a puerile joke. It is a joke, joke on me, joke on the universe. The king who would be man. -- Picard and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% You have climbed to the top of a little hill. From here you can see a path leading down to the south. You may be able to climb down a short way to the north. %% You have climbed to the top of a sandy hill. About you the rather small expanse of the inhabitable portion of Ebosskil can be clearly seen. To the east is the beach. The ruins of a large castle lie to the north. Some distance away to the south is some more rubble; the remains of some smaller buildings. A somewhat smaller castle looms above you to the west. Although the remaining castle is quite large, it must have been insignificant compared to the one that has crumbled. %% You have climbed up the plant and out of the pit. %% You have come to the junction of four tunnels. One leads upward, another downward, a third goes to the east and a fourth to the south. %% You have come to the westernmost isle, Selidor, which looms large to your west. The map shows nothing beyond there but uncharted waters. %% You have crawled around in some little holes and found your way blocked by a recent cave-in. You are now back in the main passage. %% You have crawled around in some little holes and wound up back in the main passage. %% You have crawled through a very low wide passage parallel to and north of the Hall of Mists. %% You have delicately smashed the goblet to pieces. %% You have entered a cave with passages leading north and southeast. %% You have entered a cubicle made entirely of ice. The six sides of the room form a perfect cube. It's rather creepy. You probably should leave before the exits re-freeze . . . %% You have entered a small square chamber. The walls are totally obscured by heavy velvet hangings. The hangings are inky black with fine tracings of golden inlay depicting various astronomical configurations and mathematical formulae. The sole source of light is a huge brass brazier standing in the center of the room. The brilliant yellow flame of the brazier seems to burn both without a source of fuel and without producing fumes. %% You have entered a twisting corridor which travels from the southeast to the north. A side entrance leads upward. %% You have entered the land of the living dead, a large desolate room. Although it is apparently uninhabited, you can hear the sounds of thousands of lost souls weeping and moaning. In the east corner are stacked the remains of dozens of previous adventurers who were less fortunate than yourself. To the east is an ornate passage, apparently recently constructed. %% You have entered the master bedroom. This room is quite spacious, with several pieces of yellow plastic furniture scattered about. The most prominent of these is a large canopy bed. The shape of the room is a rough rectangle, and there are doorways to the east and south. %% You have every right to feel good about yourself. %% You have fallen down due to the lack of what little friction is necessary to remain standing, but you're moving nonetheless to the southwest, directly toward an open doorway in that corner. Most likely this results from the slight slant of the floor toward that direction. %% You have found a scroll of genocide! %% You have fulfilled the requirements of grandmaster. %% You have had a long-term stimulation relative to business. %% You have had a long-term stimulation relative to business. Take care the IRS and the SEC don't find out! %% You have had a long-term stimulation relative to business. Don't become overly excited. %% You have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man. His negative side, which you call hostility, lust, violence; and his positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love, tenderness. And what is it that makes one man an exceptional leader? We see here indications that it is his negative side which makes him strong -- that his evil side, if you will, properly controlled and disciplined, is vital to his strength. Your negative side, removed from you, the power of command begins to elude you. -- Spock, "The Enemy Within," stardate 1673.1 %% You have junk mail. %% You have just as much chance for success on this day as on any other, so make it a good one. %% You have just made a serious mistake, as you are now drifting in space without proper equipment, such as a spacesuit and maybe even oxygen. You die quickly in the vacuum and freezing cold of space, due to (a) your blood boiling, (b) extreme frostbite, and (c) internal pressures not being balanced by outside air pressure. In short, you are very dead. %% 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. (b) Ask what position she played. (c) Ask if she is still working the streets. %% You have just won the Davis Cup Playoff!! %% You have landed on a small sandy beach. The sand here is jet black and glistens brightly in the sun. Rocky cliffs of black stone arch steeply skywards on all sides, making travel aboveground impossible. However, to the north the mouth of a small cave can be seen. %% You have landed, but the balloon did not survive. %% You have large reserves of smug self-satisfaction and suppressed feelings of superiority. Draw on these resources. Accept the fact that you will never fully understand why others are so inferior to you. %% You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop. %% You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop. On second thought, in your case, the pains might be fatal. %% You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop. If you practice often enough you will be able to spell your name with no problem. %% You have mail. %% You have managed to get yourself killed. Unlike other games of this type, we do not condone the continuance of incompetence. In other words, you stay dead. Goodbye. %% You have many dear and loyal friends. %% You have many friends and very few enemies. %% You have many friends and very few living enemies. %% You have minor influence over your associates and people resent you for flaunting your powers. %% You have more angles than a geometry book. %% You have more respect for a capable shoeshine boy, than for a crass opportunist. %% You have no friends among the ambitious. -- Ron Randall %% You have no keys! %% You have no magical prowess. %% You have no real enemies. %% You have no source of light. %% You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. -- John Viscount Morley, "Rousseau", 1876 %% You have nothing in which to carry it. %% You have nothing that the gorilla is interested in eating. %% You have now circled the tower and are standing against its featureless north face. The rocky shore is very narrow here, and affords no opportunity for landing a boat. %% 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: (a) Tell him you take your coffee black. (b) Ask him if he has any communicable diseases. (c) Show him who's in command; promptly take a leak in his "In" basket. %% You have reached "Junior master" status. %% You have reached the east end of the main hall of the palace. Two doorways to the northeast and northwest are visible in the north wall. The walls here are otherwise featureless, having been stripped of their luxurious hangings. The hallway extends back to the west. %% You have reached the northeast corner of the lesser castle of Ebosskil. The sheer castle walls loom above you. The castle is made out of pale gray stone. There are no visible mortar lines -- the castle might have been hewn out of a single chunk of stone. A narrow path through the rock runs parallel to the castle wall to the west. The ground is impassable to the north. %% You have reached the northern end of the service hall. There are open doorways in the north and west walls. %% You have reached the southernmost point of Ebosskil. The rocky coastline at this point affords no opportunity for landing. The coast rapidly turns into a cliff to the southwest, but becomes more regular to the southeast. %% You have reached the status of junior adventurer. %% You have serious wounds. %% You have several detached dead trees. %% You have several wounds. %% You have spent the last years Rocky Mountain Way. %% You have taken a drink from the stream. The water tastes strongly of minerals, but is not unpleasant. It is extremely cold. %% You have taken the vase and hurled it delicately to the ground. %% You have the attitude of a winner. %% You have the body of a 19 year old. Please return it before it gets wrinkled. %% You have the capacity to learn from mistakes. You'll learn a lot today. %% You have the magical ability of a thaumaturge. %% You have the mouth of a prattling jackanapes, but your eyes, they tell a different story. -- Sharaz Jek, CAVES OF ANDRONZANI %% You have the power to influence all with whom you come in contact. %% You have the rank of advanced beginner. %% You have to be as fully prepared for the dull game as you are for the great game, or else you won't be prepared for the great one. -- Red Barber %% You have to believe in luck; how else are you going to explain the success of people you don't like. %% You have to have it in the bottle before you can pour it! %% You have to know what you're looking for before you can find it. -- Solomon Short %% You have to light them with something that's burning, you know. %% You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you'll have to run much faster. -- Lewis Carroll %% You have to take off your shoes before you can take of your stockings. %% You have to visit 11 shoe stores before you find a pair of shoes that fit %% You have two choices: 1. Leave 2. Become dinner. %% You have unusual equipment for success. Be sure to use it properly. %% You have walked up a hill, still in the forest. The road slopes back down the other side of the hill. There is a building in the distance. %% You have walls to your east, north, and south. Dead end. %% You have yet to leave the lowly rank of goatherd. %% You haven't discovered anything yet... %% You hear a boom and notice that the balloon is falling to the ground. %% You hear a clap of thunder! %% You hear a hum of machinery as the ticket is pulled inward. %% You hear a loud noise coming from the bookcase . . . %% You hear a monster behind the rock. %% You hear a mumbled incantation. %% You hear a rumble and the earth shakes under your feet. %% You hear a rumble from above as the ceiling collapses. Tons of rubble and rock debris instantly fill the cave. Your life is snuffed out just as instantly. %% You hear a scream of anguish as you violate the robber's hideaway. Using passages unknown to you, he rushes to its defense. %% You hear a tremendous rumble as a boulder comes crashing down to bounce harmlessly off your helmet. %% You hear a tremendous rumble, as a boulder comes crashing down on top of you, killing you instantly. %% You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, "That man is a Red!" ... You never hear a REAL American talk like that! -- Mayor Frank Hague (1896-1956) %% You hear an electronic voice within your head say, "If you ever need to return to the ship, just type 'beam up' and we'll pick you up -- assuming the ship is in range, of course." %% You hear an incredible rumble behind you. Turning around, you see a thousand rocks all coming straight towards you. You are soon crushed to death beneath the ensuing rockslide. %% You hear in the distance the chirping of a song bird. %% You hear maniacal laughter in the distance. %% You hear mumbled cursing. %% You hear sad wailing in the distance. %% You hear some noises in the distance %% You hear the howling of the CwnAnnwn... %% You hear the roaring of an angry bear! %% You hear the sound of blasting in the distance, as the walls tremble a little. %% You hear the wailing of the Banshee... %% You hear the whir from the carousel room but can find no entrance. %% You hear what she said Mordock? She said I was cute. "Is that good, Wesley?" Yes...I think. -- Wesley and Mordock about Oliana, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2 %% You hit the nail right between the eyes. %% You hit the rock with all your might. %% You hit your head against the # as you attempt this feat. %% You hold the lit torch near the cauldron, and the soup begins to bubble and boil. When the soup is hot enough, you remove the torch. %% You hold together with the wrong people. %% You humans are all alike. %% You humans have that emotional need to express gratitude. You're welcome, I believe, is the correct response. -- Spock, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4041.2 %% You identify this as an identify scroll. %% You imbecile! You forgot again! %% You judge others only by how well they live up to their own capacities. %% You judge the acts of others only by their intentions. %% You judge your own acts only by their consequences. %% You just can't help admiring your boss. If you don't, you're fired. %% You just gotta save Christianity, Richard! You gotta! -- Loretta Young, to Richard the Lionhearted, in the movie The Crusades, 1935 %% You just know when a relationship is about to end. My girlfriend called me at work and asked me how you change a light bulb in the bathroom. "It's very simple," I said. "You start by filling up the bathtub with water..." %% You just wait, I'll sin till I blow up! -- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) %% You just went off my scale!!!. %% You k'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke? -- Joel Chandler Harris, "proverbs of Uncle Remus" %% You keep your equilibrium no matter what position you find yourself in. %% You kick the door several times, but you only succeed in bruising your toes. %% You kick the door, and it swings open. %% You killed a little dwarf. %% You killed a little dwarf. The body vanishes in a cloud of greasy black smoke. %% You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken %% You know I don't repeat gossip, so i'm only going to say this once... %% You know an exam didn't go well when, afterward, you find yourself mumbling... _____ You want fries with that? ______ -- David Johnson, johnson@wrs.com %% You know better than to trust a strange computer %% You know how it is when you decide to lie and say the check is in the mail, and then you remember it really is? I'm like that all the time. -- Rod Schmidt %% You know how it is when you go to be the subject of a psychology experiment, and nobody else shows up, and you think maybe that's part of the experiment? I'm like that all the time. -- Rod Schmidt %% You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time. -- Steve Wright %% You know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but not how to use it. -- Maharbal %% You know it's Monday when you wake up and it's Tuesday. -- Garfield %% You know it's a bad day when you put your bra on backwards and it fits better. %% You know it's a bad day when your wife wakes up feeling amorous and you have a headache. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when you want to put on the clothes you wore home from the party and there aren't any. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when... ...your birthday cake collapses from the weight of the candles. ...you wake up face down on the pavement. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: you turn on the news and they're displaying emergency routes out of your city. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: your alarm clock-radio wakes you with the words "One minute to impact." -- Ambidextrous Rex (Of course, you won't have to worry about getting up to go to work.) %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: your birthday cake collapses from the weight of the candles. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: your horn goes off accidentally and remains stuck as you follow a group of Hell's Angels on the freeway. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: your only son tells you he wishes Anita Bryant would mind her own business. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: your twin sister forgets your birthday. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: you call suicide prevention and they put you on hold. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: you see a "60 Minutes" news team waiting in your office. %% You know it's going to be a bad day when: you wake up face down on the pavement. %% You know my heart keeps tellin' me, You're not a kid at thirty-three, You play around you lose your wife, You play too long, you lose your life. Some gotta win, some gotta lose, Goodtime Charlie's got the blues. %% You know our love was meant to be The kind of love that lasts forever -- Chicago %% You know that feeling when you're leaning back on a stool and it starts to tip over? Well, that's how I feel all the time. -- Steven Wright %% You know that people will be kind to you, given a chance. %% You know the President of Syria, Hafez el-Assad. He gives all his pilots ten bucks before he sends them off to the Israelis, -to get a taxi back home. %% You know the day destroys the night; night divides the day. Try to run, try to hide, break on through to the other side. -- The Doors %% You know the great thing about TV? If something important happens anywhere at all in the world, no matter what time of the day or night, you can always change the channel. -- Jim Ignatowski %% You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, and irrational fear of the unknown. There is no such thing as the unknown. Only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood. -- Kirk, "The Corbomite Maneuver," stardate 1514.0 %% You know the honeymoon is over when you wife says she's going to slip into something a little more comfortable, and it turns out to be a twin bed! %% You know things are bad when you're surrounded by four lawyers, and none of them is yours. %% You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. -- Albert Camus (1913-1960) %% You know what to fight for and what to compromise on. %% You know when the price of winning is too high. %% You know you are in trouble when you've got insomnia so bad you can't fall asleep even when it's time to get up. %% You know you are over the hill when your work is less fun and your fun is more work. %% You know you have a small apartment when Rice Krispies echo. -- S. Rickly Christian %% You know you have a small apartment when flies must file a flight plan. -- S. Rickly Christian %% You know you have a small apartment when you can answer the telephone from the bed, the kitchen table, the sink or the shower. -- S. Rickly Christian %% You know you have a small apartment when you can have breakfast in bed without getting up to fix it. -- S. Rickly Christian %% You know you have a small apartment when you crack your knuckles and the window rattles. -- S. Rickly Christian %% You know you have a small apartment when your wall-to-wall carpet is a welcome mat. -- S. Rickly Christian %% You know you have a small apartment when one is company and two is a crowd. -- S. Rickly Christian %% You know you make me want to SHOUT! %% You know you're a little fat if you have stretch marks on your car. -- Cyrus, Chicago Reader 1/22/82 %% You know you're getting old when what you call "life" is what others deem "nostalgia." %% You know you're getting old when you notice how young the derelicts are getting. -- Jeanne Phillips %% You know you're in a small town..... ...if you dial the wrong number, and talk for 15 minutes anyway. %% You know you're in trouble when... 1) You've been at work for an hour before you notice that your skirt is caught in your pantyhose. 2) Your blind date turns out to be your ex-wife. 3) Your income tax check bounces. 4) You put both contact lenses in the same eye. 5) Your wife says, "Good morning, Bill" and your name is George. 6) You wake up to the soothing sound of flowing water... the day after you bought a waterbed. 7) You go on your honeymoon to a remote little hotel and the desk clerk, bell hop, and manager have a "Welcome Back" party for your spouse. %% You know you're paranoid when you can't think of anything that's your fault. -- Robert Hutchins %% You know you've been hacking too long when...: The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These include the following: * not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail, but you remember your {network address} faster than your postal one. * your {SO} kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think is "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}." * you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're doing it in octal. * your computers have a higher street value than your car. * in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10. * more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some programming language. * you realize you have never seen half of your best friends. [An early version of this entry said "All but one of these have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up out of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one out as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple independent reports of its actually happening. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% You know you've been sitting in front of your Lisp machine too long when you go out to the junk food machine and start wondering how to make it give you the CADR of Item H so you can get that yummie chocolate cupcake that's stuck behind the disgusting vanilla one. %% You know you've been spending too much time on the computer when your friend misdates a check, and you suggest adding a "++" to fix it. %% You know you've landed gear-up when it takes full power to taxi. %% You know your really somebody in the software world when Richard Stallman complains about you having a gratuitous patent. %% You know, Callahan's is a peaceable bar, but if you ask that dog what his favorite formatter is, and he says "roff! roff!", well, I'll have to... %% You know, If we lived here, we'd be home by now! %% You know, benchmarks are those programs which every manufacturer considers harmful. %% You know, if you cut off both of your arms, you'd look just like Venus Di Milo? %% You know, the difference between this company and the Titanic is that the Titanic had paying customers. %% You know, the mainspring of this country wound up as tight as it is, is guaranteed for the life of the watch. %% You lack confidence and are generally a coward. %% You lay it down, and I'll pick it up. %% You learn from your mistakes. %% You learn to write as if to someone else because NEXT YEAR YOU WILL BE "SOMEONE ELSE". %% You left your footprints on my stomach when you walked out of my heart. %% You let your magic tortoise go, And look at me with the corners of your mouth drooping. Misfortune. %% You lie north of Issel. Islands are visible in the northeast and the northwest. %% You lied. I exaggerated. -- Saavik and Spock "The Wrath of Khan," stardate 8130.3 %% You like children? Fried or boiled? %% You like participating in competitive sports. %% You like to form new friendships and make new acquaintances. %% You like to form new friendships and make new acquaintances. Because your old friends don't like you anymore. %% You like to form new friendships and make new acquaintances...more chances to cheat, steal and swindle. %% You like to think of yourselves as complex creatures, but you're flawed. One gains admittance to your minds through many levels. You have too many to keep track of yourselves. There are unguarded entrances to any human mind. -- Sylvia of Pyris VII, "Catspaw," stardate 3018.2 %% You live and you learn -- or you don't live long. %% You lived with a man who wore white belts? Laura, I'm disappointed in you. -- Remington Steele %% You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down. -- Edward Abbey %% You look for the battles in the wrong place. The true test of a warrior is not without - it is within. -- Worf to Korris, "Heart of Glory", stardate 41503.7 %% You look like a hooker I knew in Fresno. %% You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled. %% You look like one sick puppy. %% You look like your face was on fire... and someone put it out with a track shoe %% You look marvelous! %% You look tired. %% You look up at me and somewhere in your mind you see A man I'll never be If only I could find a way, I feel I'm not the man you believe I am Its getting harder every day for me To hide behind the dreams you see A man I'll never be I can't get any stronger, And I can't climb any higher, You'll never know just how hard I tried Try a little longer and hold a little tighter Emotions can't be satisfied -- Boston %% You loosen a rock from the ceiling. %% You love peace. %% You love peace. Or is it: you love a piece? %% You love your home and want it to be beautiful. %% You made the top 10 list! %% You made the transition to seasoned adventurer. %% You make a living by what you get, but you make a life you what you give. %% You make me sick! Way-oh, Way-oh, Way-oh You make me sick! You really stink, girl You make me sick! Way-oh, Way-oh, Way-oh You make me sick! (Tuba Solo) . . . But I luuuuv you -- B. Cat %% You make me want to get a gazelle to die. %% You make me want to have sex with a milkweed. %% You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love: a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes. -- Zechariah Chaffe, Jr. (1885-1957) %% You may already be a winner! So what are you waiting for? SEND IT IN! %% You may attend a party where strange customs prevail. %% You may be conservative, cautious and practical. %% You may be gone tomorrow, but that doesn't mean that you weren't here today. %% You may be infinitely smaller than some things, but you're infinitely larger than others. %% You may be recognized soon. Hide. %% You may be right, my faithful Indian companion." -- Radio Days %% You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a "realist," he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing. -- Sydney Harris %% You may be the only person that knows just how special you are. %% You may call me by my name, Wirth, or by my value, Worth. -- Nicklaus Wirth %% You may easily play a joke on a man who likes to argue -- agree with him. -- Ed Howe %% You may either win your peace or buy it; win it by resistance to evil; buy it by compromise with evil. -- John Ruskin (1819-1900) %% You may find happiness at the bottom of an ordinary-looking bottle of beer. You must be over the age of 21, enter as often as you want. If you win a hangover instead, congratulations! God hates you. %% You may get an opportunity for advancement today. Watch it! %% You may get the Government off the backs of the people, but they will soon demand to be remounted. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% You may give a man an office, but you cannot give him discretion. -- Poor Richard %% You may have a friend at the Chase Manhattan but at our bank you have meshpocheh! %% You may have a kick from kicking a little dog. %% You may have heard that a dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog. -- Alfred Kahn %% You may know what you need but to get what you want you better see that you keep what you have. -- Into the Woods %% You may my glories and my state dispose, But not my griefs; still am I king of those. -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II" %% You may not be able to change the whole world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty. -- Katha Pollitt %% You may not be totally perfect, but parts of you are excellent. %% You may now consider yourself a "Seasoned adventurer". %% You may recall your recent explosion. Well, probably as a result of that, you hear an ominous rumbling, as if one of the rooms in the dungeon has collapsed. %% You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Maybe someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one. -- John Lennon %% You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal -- no one will see it. But when a button is missing, everyone sees that. -- Erich M. Remarque %% You may water your lawn on Staten Island, New York, provided you hold the hose in your hand while doing so; but to lay the hose on the lawn or to use a sprinkler is unlawful. %% You may wish for an object. What do you want? %% You maybe only young once - but you can be childish all your life. %% You mean now I can SHOOT YOU in the back and further BLUR th' distinction between FANTASY and REALITY? %% You mean you don't want to watch WRESTLING from ATLANTA? %% You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success. You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits %% You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success. You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits or white plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume party disguised as a pig farmer vacationing at Disney World. -- Dave Barry, "How to Dress for Real Success" %% You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you. -- Sherlock Holmes, "The Norwood Builder" %% You might choke on your food by eating fortune cookies. %% You might cut yourself on a long sword. %% You might get caught holding the bag. Say she's your sister. %% You might have mail %% You might not count in the New Order. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% You might say that senators who join a filibuster in the U.S. Senate throw their wait around. %% You might trick a shopkeeper if you're invisible. %% You miss the strength for a teleport spell. %% You missed. The thief makes no attempt to take the knife, although it would be a fine addition to the collection in his bag. He does seem angered by your attempt. %% You mistake motion for growth and are lured into vexing situations. %% You must be kidding -- it's much too big, and besides it's not good for you. %% You must be patient for a little while. %% You must be present to win. %% You must carry your struggle to the camp of your foe, and leave his severed head pulsating on the floor before his accolades -- Sun Tsu %% You must dine in our cafeteria. You can eat dirt cheap there!!!! %% You must do the things you think you cannot do. %% You must have been warned about letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by. -- James M. Barrie %% You must include all income you receive in the form of money, property and services if it is not specifically exempt. Report property (goods) and services at their fair market values. Examples include income from bartering or swapping transactions, side commissions, kickbacks, rent paid in services, illegal activities (such as stealing, drugs, etc.), cash skimming by proprietors and tradesmen, "moonlighting" services, gambling, prizes and awards. Not reporting such income can lead to prosecution for perjury and fraud. -- Excerpt from Taxachussettes income tax forms %% You must look into people, as well as at them. -- Lord Chesterfield %% You must not forget what happens here today. You must not let your children forget. -- Picard to Kurn, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2 %% You must play poker, Commander. Poker? That a game of some sort? -- Dr. Mendoza and Riker, "The Price", stardate 43385.6 %% You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do. %% You must really be a fish. %% You must specify what to set the dial to. %% You must specify which direction here. %% You must stop taking advice from other people. %% You must supply a direct object. %% You must tell me how to do that to a #. %% You must've been conceived on a Sunday - when the drugstore was closed. %% You need a certificate for this store -- try the other building. %% You need a hug. %% You need a prescription for a mind-altering drug that hasn't been invented yet. %% You need more time; and you probably always will. %% You need no longer worry about the future. This time tomorrow you'll be dead. %% You need not worry about your future. %% You need not worry about your future...you have none. %% You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. -- Charles A. Beard %% You need tender loving care once a week - so that I can slap you into shape. -- Ellyn Mustard, mustard@ficc.ferranti.com %% You need to acquire a little subtlety. %% You need to lose weight. %% You never assume anything where Lwaxana Troi is concerned. Betazoid women are full of surprises. -- Lwaxana Troi, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2 %% You never can factor in enough debugging time. %% You never gain something but that you lose something. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) %% You never get a second chance to make a first impression. %% You never go anywhere without your soul. %% You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. -- Saul Bellow %% You never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems. %% You never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems. Unfortunately you rarely knock them down. %% You never knew what hit you. %% You never know how many friends you have until you rent a house on the beach. %% You never know where bottom is until you plumb for it. -- Frederick Laing %% You never learned anything by doing it right. %% You never miss the water until the well runs dry. %% You notice some gold between your feet. %% You notice that the # has burned out, and that the cloth bag is starting to deflate. %% You notice that the dungeon master does not follow. %% You notice the twinge of winter in a cool northeasterly breeze. %% You now again prefer mimicking a human. %% You now are present in what was formerly the southern garden of the palace of Enlad. The garden continues to the west and trail leads off to the south. %% You now find yourself in a room of unique construction. It is a completely round room apparently fashioned out of metal. Your footsteps sound unnaturally loud in this environment. Aside from two doors, all surfaces are painted in a dull brown color. The doors are to the east and west, the eastern one painted red and the western one green. A most curious mandala has been inscribed in the center of the floor. %% You now have Asian Flu. %% You now have the power of a Warlock. %% You now lie at the northwestern corner of the farming plain. Aside from the once fertile lands to the south and east, you can also see the ocean far below you to the north. %% You now occupy the dining room. Due to the enormous size and weight of the stone dining table in the center of the room, vandals found little in this room that was easily destroyed. Consequently much of the original grandeur survives. The colored stone walls along with the great table evoke memories of better times for Enlad. There are open doorways to the north, south, and west. %% You now qualify as a winner. %% You now qualify to be a magical apprentice. %% You now stand at the south end of a large courtyard which continues on to the north. Numerous doorways dot the walls of the surrounding palace, three of which may reach from here. A tower of great age, worn and vine-covered but still sound, stands in the center of the yard. There is an open door in each of the three nearby walls: south, west and east. %% You now stand in a spacious triangular closet. In the east wall a doorway opens into a large room. A wooden door in the wall which runs northeast-southwest is the only other distinctive feature in this otherwise barren room. %% You obviously had too much to drink again last night! %% You offend Shai-Hulud by sheathing your crysknife without having drawn blood. %% You only feel hungry now. %% 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 %% You order some pictures, you get a couple of 8 x 10's - one to keep, one to give away. And then you've got 22 wallet sized pictures. Do you know 22 people that want to carry you around in their wallet? %% You ought to be ashamed of yourself. %% You own a dog, but you can only feed a cat. %% You own a dog; you feed a cat. %% You own your own body, but you can share. %% You parry a lightning thrust, and the thief salutes you with a grim nod. %% You parry a low thrust, and your # slips out of your hand. %% You parry the blow, but your # is knocked from your hand. %% You pass go, collect $200.00 %% You pass out. %% You pedophilic sodomizer of ducklings!! %% You people who think you know everything are really annoying those of us who do %% You pervert! Call me again and I'll rip out your small intestines and tie it around you scrawny little neck, you geek! %% You picked up your cards without ever looking at them and you showed them to a hyena. The hyena laughed at your cards. What is the probability of you winning the poker game? %% You pigeonish pervert! %% You plan things that you do not even attempt due to your stupidity. %% You plan things that you do not even attempt because of your extreme caution. %% You play ball with us, and we'll stick the fucking bat up your ass. %% You play the organ for a while, and awesome music reverberates throughout the room. Suddenly you hear some loud crashing noises. %% You plummet approximately 325 feet onto the sharp rocks below. %% You plummet to your death on the sharp rocks below. %% You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained. %% You prefer the company of the opposite sex, but are well liked by your own. %% You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog. %% You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do. -- Olin Miller %% You prod the nearest dwarf, who wakes up grumpily, takes one look at you, curses, and grabs for his axe. %% You push the rock and suddenly it disappears! %% You put the lime in the coconut, and you drink a bowl of it. %% You rather indelicate handling of the egg has caused it some damage. The egg is now open. %% You reacted fast, Lieutenant. But futilely. I will learn to do better, sir. -- Riker, Picard, Worf, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% You realize just in time that the candles are already lit. %% You realize, just in time, that disembarking here would probably be fatal. %% You realize, of course, that while you are wasting your time calling people on the phone, millions are starving %% You really have to know a lot before you know how little you know. %% You recoil from the crude; you tend naturally toward the exquisite. %% You resemble a dog. %% You respect those superior to yourself and try to learn from them. %% You rode the Thunder, Now, may the Thunderbird carry you home... -- James P. Callison, callison@midway.ecn.uoknor.edu %% You roll my log, and I will roll yours. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65) %% You rub the axe back and forth across the whetstone a few times, and soon the axe is as good as new. %% You say it can't be won The way the game is run; But if you choose to stay You wind up playin' anyway. -- Jackson Browne %% You say there are two types of people? Yes, those who separate people into two groups and those that don't. Wrong. There are three groups: Those who separate people into three groups. Those who don't separate people into groups. Those who can't decide. Wait a minute, what about people who separate people into two groups? Oh. Okay, then there are four groups. Aren't you then separating people into four groups? Yeah. So then there's a fifth group, right? You know, the problem is these idiots who can't make up their minds. %% You say you are lying. But if everything you say is a lie, then you are telling the truth. You cannot tell the truth because everything you say is a lie. You lie, you tell the truth ... but you cannot, for you lie. -- Norman the android, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% You schlemiel! %% You schlimazel! %% You schmuck! %% You scored 17 out of a possible 442 using 109 turns. %% You scratch my tape, and I'll scratch yours. %% You see Picard, after we dissect your Enterprise for every precious bit of information, I intend to display it's broken hull in the center of the Romulan capital as a symbol of our victory. It will inspire our armies for generations to come. And serve as a warning to any other traitor who would create ripples of disloyalty. -- Tomalak, "The Defector", stardate 43462.5 %% You see a book titled "Secret Notes of Adventure." %% You see a dull, blunt axe on the ground by your feet. %% You see a fine guava here. %% You see a flawless diamond scattering the light all around here. %% You see a fresh dole pineapple here. %% You see a golden net lying here. %% You see a large cavern entrance in front of you. %% You see a lit flashlight lying here. %% You see a lovely crown here, encrusted with many precious stones. %% You see a lovely moonstone lying by your feet. %% You see a magic mushroom resting here. %% You see a power belt on the floor here. %% You see a rather large dragon here. %% You see a ripe chiquita banana here. %% You see a rope hanging in front of you, swaying gently in the wind. %% You see a secret panel open in the north wall of the closet. %% You see a very sharp axe on the ground by your feet. %% You see a whetstone before you. %% You see a wooden box which has been broken open here. %% You see an ancient egyptian papyrus (very rare) here. %% You see an fine agate here. %% You see an inlaid silver bracelet lying here. %% You see an old scroll lying by your feet. %% You see an old-fashioned brass lamp here. %% You see but you do not observe. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" %% You see strange patterns on this scroll. %% You see that fucking fish? If he'd kept his mouth shut, he wouldn'ta got caught. -- Sam Giancana %% You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Back to Methuselah" %% You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) [when asked to describe radio] %% You seek to shield those you love and you like the role of the provider. %% You seem to be digging a hole here. %% You seem to be getting knee deep in guano. %% You seem to be repeating yourself. %% You seem to be unable to damage it. %% You seem unable to affect these spirits. %% You seem very taken with her J. P. Just in old man's fantasies. -- Picard & Adm. Hanson, "The Best of Both Worlds," stardate 43989.1 %% You sense the presence of killer. %% You sense the presence of monsters. %% You sense the presence of objects close nearby. %% You sense the presence of objects. %% You shall be rewarded for a dastardly deed. %% You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends. -- Joseph Conrad, "Lord Jim", 1900 %% You shall reach the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics. %% You should all JUMP UP AND DOWN for TWO HOURS while I decide on a NEW CAREER!! %% You should avoid hedging, at least that's what I think. %% You should be a hemorrhoid, you're such a pain in the ass. %% You should emulate your heros, but don't carry it too far. Especially if they are dead. %% You should flush yourself. %% You should go away. %% You should go home. %% You should have looked before you leaped. %% You should know its true. I came for you. %% You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing. %% You should molest yourself. %% You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1. -- Ernest Rutherford %% You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty. -- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) %% You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that's what scientists believe. In fact many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day, you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" %% You should remove your files. %% You should see polythene pam, she's so good looking that she looks like a man. %% You should spit on yourself. %% You should talk to the DOCTOR. %% You should tip the waiter $10, minus $2 if he tells you his name, another $2 if he claims it will be His Pleasure to serve you and another $2 for each "special" he describes involving confusing terms such as "shallots," and $4 if the menu contains the word "fixin's." In many restaurants, this means the waiter will actually owe you money. If you are traveling with a child aged six months to three years, you should leave an additional amount equal to twice the bill to compensate for the fact that they will have to take the banquette out and burn it because the cracks are wedged solid with gobbets made of partially chewed former restaurant rolls saturated with baby spit. In New York, tip the taxicab driver $40 if he does not mention his hemorrhoids. -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette" %% You should, without hesitation, pound your typewriter into a plowshare, your paper into fertilizer, and enter agriculture -- Business Professor, University of Georgia %% You shouldn't have to pay for your love with your bones and your flesh. -- Pat Benatar %% You shouldn't wallow in self-pity. But it's OK to put your feet in it and swish them around a little. -- Guindon %% You single-handedly fought your way into this hopeless mess. %% You smash it - and I'll build around it. -- John Lennon %% You smell a beautiful aroma reminiscent of a lady's perfume. %% You smell nice. %% You smile discreetly. Look like you're enjoying yourself, like you're ready to get down to serious business. You've got to be careful what you say. -- Vice President Dan Quayle, explaining to Latin American leaders how to handle a photo op %% You snail! You slug! You Retractable Thing! %% You snooze, you lose! %% You some kind of rude boy, boss. %% You speak of courage. Obviously you do not know the difference between courage and foolhardiness. Always it is the brave ones who die, the soldiers. -- Kor, the Klingon Commander, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3201.7 %% You spell 'knife' with a 'k'. I spell 'knife' with an 'n', but then I never could spell. -- Troi and Picard, "The Big Goodbye", stardate 41997.7 %% You stagger back under a hail of strokes. %% You stand at the edge of a vast plain which once served as the agricultural center of Enlad. As far as the eye can see to the north, nothing beside the remnants of orchards and crops exist. Far to the east, a small plateau may be seen with some buildings set atop it. You are hemmed in to the west by the edge of a large mountain range which continues onward toward the western side of the island. %% You stand at the edge of the garden next to a high stone wall, which runs north-south. The southern portion disappears into the dense growth of the garden. %% You stand at the foot of a staircase at the base of the tower. The stairs spiral upward at a very steep angle. The tower seems to consist of nothing more at this level. A single doorway leads outward to the north. %% You stand at the foot of the tower. The numerous vines that once likely served as decoration now completely smother the surface. High above you, the western balcony of the tower juts out from the otherwise unbroken wall. To the north you can see what looks a landing at the base of the tower. %% You stand before the southeast corner of a most forbidding grey stone tower. Facing you is a ten-foot wide opening in the base of the tower. No light escapes from within. %% You start to float in the air! %% You starve! %% You still making a nonsense of it, Doctor, in your, what was it called--TARDIS? -- Lethbridge-Stewart, THE INVASION %% You strike the mirror a resounding blow, whereupon it shatters into a myriad tiny fragments. %% You strip bare and plunge into the cooling waters. You notice one very interesting thing about the water here. It is wet. So are you. %% You striving, bickering, foolishly brave humans. -- Apollo, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1 %% You succeed in destroying your camera. Congratulations! %% You succeeded in cutting away some rock. %% You sword has begun to glow very brightly. %% You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. -- Caliban %% You taught me to be nice, so that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all," you said, so I am very quiet, which most people think is politeness. I call it repression. -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% You taught me, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," teaching me to plod forward in the face of certain doom. -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" %% You teach best what you most need to learn. %% You tell him, Daddy! It's safer to eat white arsenic than human meat! -- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers" %% You think Oedipus had a problem -- Adam was Eve's mother. %% You think it is a want of judgment that he changes his opinion. Do you think it a proof that your scales are bad because they vibrate with every additional weight that is added to either side? -- Edgeworth %% You think it isn't? %% You think things are going well for you, do you? Things could change. %% You think you are a wit, but you are only half right. %% You think you got it rough? What about your darling doggy? Ten short years and he's getting old and groggy. -- Oingo Boingo %% You thought I was taking your woman away from you. You're jealous. You tried to kill me with your bare hands. Would a Kelvan do that? Would he have to? You're reacting with the emotions of a human. You are human. -- Kirk, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4657.5 %% You too can wear a nose mitten. %% You too will meet the secret police, they'll draft you and they'll jail your niece. %% You took my last chip, you could at least smile, Worf. Smiling would break his concentration. -- Pulaski and Geordi, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% You tread upon my patience. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV" %% You try never to hurt people, and do so only when it serves a higher purpose. %% You try to ascend the ramp, but is impossible, and you slide back down. %% You try to feel what is lying here on the floor. %% You try to move the enormous rock, but in vain. %% You turn to stone. %% You two ought to be more careful-- your love could drag on for years and years. %% You understand human nature and sympathize with its weakness. %% You understand the Klingons better than I thought. Thank you, my friend. -- Klag and Riker, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% You use unfamiliar words -- please re-phrase it, or try something else. %% You vant to know vat relativity is? I vill tell you vat relativity is. Ven you sit on a hot stove for two hours, it seems like two hours. Ven you sit on a park bench mit a pretty girl for two hours, it seems like ten minutes. That's relativity. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) %% You vomit. %% You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself. %% You wanna play the dozens, Well, the dozens is a game, But the way I fuck your mother is an ass-wringing shame! -- George Carlin %% You want I should bop you with this here Lollipop?!? %% You want a definition of pain? Galloping on a horse and landing on the pommel. (we are talking a lightning bolt of pain up your spine here not to mention retracted landing gear and a new voice) %% You want it when?!?!?? %% You want to eat my mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you think it's possible? ... But it's only temporary! There is no such thing as a temporary suicide. -- Hank Rearden %% You want to live forever? Don't die. %% You want to regain strength? Two levels ahead is a guesthouse! %% You wanted to frighten us. We're frightened. You wanted to show us that we are inadequate - for the moment, I will grant that. You want me to say that I need you. Right now - I need you. -- Picard to Q, "Q-Who?", stardate 42761.3 %% You watch as the balloon slowly floats away. It seems to be ascending, due to its light load. %% You watch as the balloon slowly lands. %% You watch as the balloon slowly lifts off. %% You were TOLD not to feed me after midnight %% You were bluffing. Klingons never bluff. -- Geordi and Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% You were not so proud when I found you broken on the beach. %% You were programmed to survive. You can survive at the Luna 5 settlement. To survive is not enough, to simply exist is not enough. -- Nayrok and Danar %% You were right somebody blew out the hatch. They were all sucked out into space. "Correction sir, that's blown out." Thank you, Data. "Common mistake, sir." -- Riker and Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2 %% You were s'posed to laugh! %% You who are schizophrenic: do you sleep together? %% You who've lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim -- the source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A -- and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life. -- John Galt %% You will achieve a position of power in the Ministry for Silly Walks. %% You will always be successful in your business or professional career. %% You will always find some Eskimos ready to instruct the Congolese on how to cope with heat waves. -- Stanislaw J. Lec %% You will always find something in the last place you look. %% You will always get the greatest recognition for the job you least like. %% You will always get what you want through your charm and personality. %% You will always have good luck in your personal affairs. %% You will attract cultured and artistic people to your home. %% You will attract cultured and artistic people to your home. And they will mess it up. %% You will be Told about it Tomorrow. Go Home and Prepare Thyself. %% You will be a great success both in the business world and society. %% You will be a guest at a happy party that'll have important consequences for you. %% You will be a winner today. Pick a fight with a four-year-old. %% You will be advanced socially, without any special effort on your part. %% You will be aided greatly by a person whom you thought to be unimportant. %% You will be attacked by a beast who has the body of a wolf, the tail of a lion, and the face of Donald Duck. %% You will be audited by the Internal Revenue Service. %% You will be awarded a medal for disregarding safety in saving someone. %% You will be awarded some great honor. %% You will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize... posthumously. %% You will be called upon to help a friend in trouble. %% You will be called upon to help a friend in trouble. Your no good brother-in-law is in hock $100 to a loan shark. %% You will be concerned with many, many more things than you can change. -- Steven R. Covey %% You will be dead within a year. %% You will be divorced within a year. %% You will be given a post of trust and responsibility. %% You will be happy socially and in your work. %% You will be held hostage by a radical group. %% You will be honored for contributing your time and skill to a worthy cause. %% You will be imprisoned for contributing your time and skill to a bank robbery. %% You will be indifferent where you would like to be kind. %% You will be made happy by receipt of good news. %% You will be married within a year, and divorced within two. %% You will be married within a year. %% You will be married within a year. (If you're already married, consider this an ex post facto fortune.) %% You will be misunderstood by everyone. %% You will be proud in manner but tolerant and generous. %% You will be recognized and honored as a community leader. %% You will be recognized and honored as a community leader. Later there will be a scandal. %% You will be reincarnated as a toad; and you will be much happier. %% You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature that lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe. -- Wilbur Mercer, founder of Mercerism Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" %% You will be run over by a beer truck. %% You will be run over by a bus. %% You will be shot at sunrise. %% You will be singled out for promotion in your work. %% You will be successful in love. %% You will be successful in love. With someone other than your current partner. %% You will be successful in your work. %% You will be surprised by a loud noise. %% You will be surrounded by luxury. %% You will be surrounded by luxury. But it will not be yours. %% You will be the last person to buy a Chrysler. %% You will be the victim of a bizarre joke. %% You will be thrown out of the sanitarium when your family refuses to pay. %% You will be told about it tomorrow. %% You will be traveling and coming into a fortune. %% You will be unusually successful in business. %% You will be winged by an anti-aircraft battery. %% You will become obsessively self-conscious about those knobby knees. %% You will become rich and famous unless you don't. %% You will catch your rattling last breath with deep-sea diver sounds. %% You will contract a rare disease. %% You will develop a sense of humor and die laughing at yourself. %% You will die like a Klingon. -- Kargan to Riker, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5 %% You will discover that you are actually from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and not from Guildford as you have hitherto claimed. %% You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm! %% You will drink champagne and dance all night, under electric candlelight. %% You will eat more chicken than any man ever seen. %% You will emerge from the gutter, only to trip and land in the sewer. %% You will encounter several species of small, furry animals, gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict. %% You will engage in a profitable business activity. %% You will engage in a profitable business activity. Later the police will find out. %% You will engage in a profitable friendship. %% You will enjoy the high praise of solving a problem of long standing. %% You will experience a strong urge to do good; but it will pass. %% You will feel as much like you did yesterday as you do today. %% You will feel hungry again in another hour. %% You will forget that you ever knew me. %% You will gain money by a fattening action. %% You will gain money by a speculation or lottery. %% You will gain money by an illegal action. %% You will gain money by an immoral action. %% You will generally find that everything is defiled with usurious contracts; that those very persons have got together the greater part of their money by sheer rapine, who nevertheless assert themselves so confidently to be pure from all contagion of unjust gain. -- St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552) %% You will get what you deserve. %% You will give someone a piece of your mind, which you can ill afford. %% You will have a head crash on your private pack. %% You will have a long and boring life. %% You will have a long and unpleasant discussion with your supervisor. %% You will have domestic happiness and faithful friends. %% You will have fun. Once. %% You will have good luck and overcome many hardships. %% You will have long and healthy life. %% You will have many friends when you use a corkscrew. %% You will have many recoverable tape errors. %% You will hear a sound like a hundred thousand people saying 'whop'. %% You will hear good news from one you thought unfriendly to you. %% You will hear good news from one you thought unfriendly to you. He/she will commit suicide. %% You will inherit millions of dollars. %% You will inherit some money or a small piece of land. %% You will live a long, healthy, happy life and make bags of money, after much hard work, as usual. %% You will live a long, healthy, happy life and make bags of money. %% You will live to see your grandchildren. %% You will lose all sensation in your shirt %% You will lose an important disk file. %% You will lose an important tape file. %% You will lose your present job and have to become a door to door mayonnaise salesman. %% You will marry your present lover and be happy. %% You will meet a gin-soaked bar room queen in Memphis. %% You will meet a love-starved stewardess from the Planet of Love-starved Stewardesses. %% You will meet an important person who will help you advance professionally. %% You will meet your perfect mate today. Congratulations! It's yourself. %% You will need three umbrellas: one to leave at the office, one to leave at home home, and one to leave on the train. -- James L. Blankenship %% You will never be happy socially or in your work. %% You will never know hunger, you will starve to death first. %% You will never know hunger. %% You will never win even a free ticket playing the lotto. %% You will not be elected to public office this year. %% You will now answer to the charge of being a grievously savage race. -- Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7 %% You will obey or molten silver will be poured into your ears. %% You will only find peace when you yield completely to society's control. %% You will outgrow your usefulness. %% You will overcome the attacks of jealous associates. %% You will pass away very quickly. %% You will pay for your sins. If you have already paid, please disregard this message. %% You will pioneer the first Martian colony. %% You will probably marry after a very brief courtship. %% You will reach the highest possible point in your business or profession. %% You will receive a legacy which will place you above want. %% You will receive a present, over which you will shed tears of joy. %% You will receive money for nothing, and your chicks for free. %% You will receive salvation ala-mode and a cup of tea. %% You will remember something that you should not have forgotten. %% You will secure the greatest degree of happiness if you marry young. %% You will see the light at the end of the tunnel; unfortunately, it will be the light of an oncoming freight train. %% You will soon be able to do all the things sane people can do. %% You will soon forget this. %% You will soon have an unfortunate confrontation with the Administrators of Justice. %% You will soon meet a person who will play an important role in your life. %% You will soon meet a tall dark handsome stranger. %% You will soon take that long awaited vacation. %% You will step on the night soil of many countries. %% You will step on the soil of many countries. %% You will step on the toes of many co-workers %% You will still not survive our assault. And you will not survive ours. Shall we die together? -- Tomalak and Picard, "The Defector", stardate 43462.5 %% You will stop at nothing to reach your objective, but only because your brakes are defective. %% You will think of something funnier than this to add to the fortunes. %% You will triumph over your enemy. %% You will visit some faraway land that has long been in your waking thoughts. %% You will visit the Dung Pits of Glive soon. %% You will wake up this morning and get yourself a beer. %% You will walk like an Egyptian before the day is done. %% You will walk like an Egyptian. %% You will walk or I will carry you. Given the option, I'll...I'll walk. -- Worf and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% You will win success in whatever calling you adopt. %% You will wish you hadn't. %% You willfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important. %% You win a few, you lose a few. But I wish this one had been rained out. %% You win the prize! %% You wipe out the message that was written here. %% You won't melt it with a #. %% You won't skid if you stay in a rut. -- Frank Hubbard %% You work very hard. Don't try to think as well. %% You work with your females, arm them, and force them to wear clothing. -- Letek about Yar, "The Last Outpost", stardate 41386.4 %% You worked in a lab on a static model. This is a working machine. It's got tens of thousands of light years on it. -- Geordi to Leah about the ENTERPRISE, "Booby Trap", stardate 43205.6 %% You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos. %% You worry too much about your job. Stop it. You're not paid enough to worry. %% You would be burned to a crisp in no time. %% You would be lost without me. %% You would if you could but you can't so you won't. %% You would rather be admired than liked, although you would prefer both. %% You would rather blame yourself than others, but you don't waste much time doing either when things go wrong. %% You would toss a drowning man both ends of a rope. %% You wouldn't fit and would die if you could. %% You wrest one more spell from the worn-out wand. %% You! What PLANET is this? -- McCoy, "The City on the Edge of Forever," stardate 3134.0 %% You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap. -- Dolly Parton %% You'd best take inventory and drop something. %% You'd better beat it. You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% You'd better learn from the mistakes of others, you don't have time to make them all yourself. %% You'd better not -- you'll break your neck and drown. %% You'd better not shout, you'd better not cry you'd better be good I'm telling you why, santa claus is dead. %% You'd better smile when they watch you, smile like you're in control. -- Was (Not Was), "Smile" %% You'd like to do it instantaneously, but that's too slow. %% You'll always be, What you always were, Which has nothing to do with, All to do, with her. -- Company %% You'll be a guest at a gay party. That will have important consequences for you. %% You'll be called to a post requiring ability in handling groups of people. %% You'll be sorry... %% You'll break your neck if you try that. %% You'll change your definitions of "fat" and "ugly" to save your self-respect. %% You'll do. %% You'll feel devilish tonight. Toss dynamite caps under a flamenco dancer's heel. %% You'll feel much better once you've given up hope. %% You'll find I'm full of surprises %% You'll find in no park or city A monument to a committee. -- Victoria Pasternak %% You'll find it in the last place you look. -- Solomon Short %% You'll have to speak up if you expect me to hear you. %% You'll learn something about men and women -- the way they're supposed to be. Caring for each other, being happy with each other, being good to each other. That's what we call love. You'll like that a lot. -- Kirk, "The Apple," stardate 3715.6 %% You'll learn to care for yourselves, with our help. And there's no trick to putting fruit on trees; you might even enjoy it. You'll learn to build for yourselves, think for yourselves, and what you create is yours. That's what we call freedom. You'll like it. A lot. -- Kirk, "The Apple," stardate 3715.6 %% You'll need a spear if you want to attack a Dragon. %% You'll never be the man your mother was! %% You'll never find out whether you're miserable because you're a failure or vice versa. %% You'll never go caribou hunting with me again. %% You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% You'll never see all the places, or read all the books, but fortunately, they're not all recommended. %% You'll often say, "At least I have my health," until you get cancer. %% You'll wish that you had done some of the hard things when they were easier to do. %% You're LATE and your boss knows it!!! %% You're a bum. %% You're a card which will have to be dealt with. %% You're a good case for retroactive abortion. %% You're a horrible monster trapped in a human body. %% You're a man obsessed with what he does. Who knows what an obsessed man would do to keep going? Kill perhaps? I CREATE life! I don't take it! -- Picard and Kurt Mandl, "Home Soil", stardate 41463.9 %% You're a perfect example of a goof. %% You're a perfect example of a perverted puppy's private parts. %% You're a perfect example of a strange scary dude. %% You're a perfect example of a toad's crotch. %% You're a perfect example of an undesirable horrifying lousy leech. %% You're aboard the spaceship. To the north you see the airlock. "east" leads clock-wise around the ship, and "west" leads counter-clockwise. %% You're about to be slimed. %% You're all clear now, kid. Now blow this thing so we can all go home. -- Han Solo %% You're almost as happy as you think you are. %% You're already carrying the sphere! %% You're always thinking you're gonna be the one that makes 'em act different... -- Woody Allen, "Manhattan" %% You're at Witt's End. %% You're at a large cavern entrance. There is a mountain ledge to the west. To the north lies a grassy field; to the east, a spinach crop can be seen. %% You're at a low window overlooking a huge pit, which extends up out of sight. A floor is indistinctly visible over 50 feet below. Traces of white mist cover the floor of the pit, becoming thicker to the left. Marks in the dust around the window would seem to indicate that someone has been here recently. Directly across the pit from you and 25 feet away there is a similar window looking into a lighted room. A shadowy figure can be seen there peering back at you. %% You're at a turn in the hall of gems. It goes north and west from here. %% You're at a turn in the road. It continues to the north and also to the east. To the west grasslands are visible; to the south, a vast ocean. %% You're at a turn in the rock tunnel. From here you can go south or west. %% You're at complex junction. %% You're at end of road again. %% You're at junction of three secret canyons. %% You're at the bottom of a set of stairs, carved from the rock. You see a passage to the east. %% You're at the bottom of a shaft which extends upward about 15 meters. You see passages to the south and east. %% You're at the bottom of a sheer rock face. To the north runs a river; to the east you can see a grassy field. To the south and west lie mountains. %% You're at the east end of a bridge across a rushing river. the river continues to the north and south; to the east you can see a sunny meadow. %% You're at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. -- Adventure %% You're at the end of the road again. %% You're at the end of the road. To the north lies some dense shrubbery; To the west, the wall of a building. To the east you can see a grassy field with flowers growing; to the south, the road extends into the distance. %% You're at the entrance to the hall of gems, to the south. Other passages lead north and west. %% You're at the junction of the road and the path. The road goes to the west; the path, to the north. To the east is a sandy beach; to the south, a vast ocean. %% You're at the north end of a grassy field. To the east you can see some shrubs; to the north you see much denser shrubbery. To the west is the road; to the south, more of the field. To the southeast, dense shrubs surround a small grove of trees. %% You're at the north side of a 50-meter crevice. To the north you see the entrance to a tunnel of rock. %% You're at the plumbing station on top of the mountain. To the leading north you can see a flat area. There are all manner of pipes into the ground here. There also is a button and a meter here. %% You're at the west end of a bridge across a rushing river. To the north, the river creates a small pool; to the south, you can see rocky ground. %% You're at west end of long hall. %% You're behind the counter in the general store. The store manager's body is slumped over the cash register. There is a trap door in the floor. %% You're being followed. Cut out the hanky-panky for a few days. %% You're carrying too much. Drop something first. %% You're currently going through a difficult transition period called "Life." %% You're dead, Jim. -- McCoy, "Amok Time," stardate 3372.7 %% You're dead, Jim. -- McCoy, "The Tholian Web," stardate unknown %% You're definitely on their list. The question to ask next is what list it is. %% You're doing a whole lot of good here. Why don't you just lapse into a coma? %% You're either part of the solution or part of the problem. -- Eldridge Cleaver, 1968 %% You're even more green than a nauseating nasty! %% You're floating high above the stairs. %% You're from the planet Earth. There is no persecution on your planet. There was persecution on Earth once; I remember reading about it in my history class. -- Lokai of Cheron and Chekov, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," stardate 5730.2 %% You're going to get what's coming to you. %% You're growing out of some of your problems, but there are others that you're growing into. %% You're having a hard time getting all that food down. %% You're in a clearing. You can see shrubbery to the west, and denser shrubs to the north and east. To the south you see a grove of trees. %% You're in a completely spherical room with polished walls. A narrow passage leads out to the west. %% You're in a driveway between two buildings. There is a door to the north, and a road to the east. %% You're in a flat space amid mountainous terrain. To the north you see mountainous terrain; to the south, it gets worse. Far to the east you can see a lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence. %% You're in a great domed room. Passages lead in all 4 compass directions. %% You're in a large room carved out of sedimentary rock. The floor and walls are littered with bits of shells imbedded in the stone. A shallow passage proceeds downward, and a somewhat steeper one leads up. A low hands and knees passage enters from the south. %% You're in a large room carved out of sedimentary rock. the floor and walls are littered with bits of shells imbedded in the stone. You can see a coral passage to the east, and two other exits lead south and west. %% You're in a long east/west corridor. A faint rumbling noise can be heard in the distance. %% You're in a rock tunnel which continues to the east. %% You're in a shrubbish area. There is a field to the west, and a clearing to the east. Dense shrubs prevent passage to the north or south. %% You're in a small chamber lit by an eerie green light. An extremely narrow tunnel exits to the west. A dark corridor leads NE. %% You're in a small chamber with tunnels leading west and south. The walls are composed of rough red sandstone. There is a large, cubical chunk of rock in the center of the room. %% You're in a teleport booth in the middle of a well-kept lawn. You can see a lever in front of you. To the west you see the entrance. %% You're in a treasure room of the pharoah. An inscription on the wall reads, "May the curse of time fall upon any who disturbs this sanctuary." %% You're in front of the counter inside the general store. You can see the manager leaning against the cash register, and a sign reading "Sale on canvas today" %% You're in the airlock of a spaceship. "north" goes outwards, "south" leads toward the center of the ship. %% You're in the cavern of phosphorescence. Glowing patches on the walls light up the cavern with an eerie light. %% You're in the dark-room. A corridor leading south is the only exit. %% You're in the debug function! %% You're in the gem hall, which continues to the south. %% You're in the grasslands, which continue to the east. To the north lies the wall of a building; to the west, a high wall. To the south you can see a vast ocean. %% You're in the grasslands, which continue to the west. To the east you can see a road; to the north, the wall of a building. To the south you can see a vast ocean. %% You're in the grove of trees. To the north and west lies dense shrubbery; to the south and east, more of the grove. %% You're in the grove. To the west lies a field; to the south and southwest lies a meadow. The grove extends to the north and east. %% You're in the hall of gems, which runs east-west. %% You're in the little grove. To the east lie dense shrubs; to the west and south, more of the grove. To the north you can see a small clearing. %% You're in the maze of the pharoah. This cavern looks like any other but for the scrawls on the walls which say "Beware of the mummy's curse!" %% You're in the middle of a grassy field. To the north and south lies more of the field; to the west you can see the road. To the east, dense shrubbery surrounds small grove of trees. %% You're in the middle of a spinach crop. To the north you see a grassy field. Further to the west, the entrance to a large cavern can be seen. To the east you can see a well-kept lawn behind a low chain-link fence. In front of you a sign reads, "Popeye's private property -- keep out!" %% You're in the middle of a tunnel of stone which turns here. the tunnel goes to the north and west, and a narrow passage leads south. %% You're in the northeast corner of a grassy field. You see a contented cow standing here, and to the north you see a sunny meadow. To the east, you can see a well-kept lawn behind a low chain-link fence. %% You're in the northeast corner of a well-kept lawn. To the north you see a chain-link fence; to the east, a vast ocean. %% You're in the northeast corner of the planetarium. %% You're in the northwest corner of the grassy field. To the west you see a river; to the north, a sunny meadow. %% You're in the northwest corner of the planetarium. There is a cupboard here, and a flight of rickety wooden stairs leading up. %% You're in the observatory above the planetarium. You see a telescope pointed out the window. This looks like an excellent place to store treasures. %% You're in the small grove. To the south and east lies dense shrubbery; to the north and west, more of the grove. %% You're in the southeast corner of a grassy field. To the east you can see a well-kept lawn behind a low chain-link fence; to the south, you see a large spinach crop. Mountains lie far to the west. %% You're in the southeast corner of a sandy field. To the east you see a vast ocean; to the south, a well-kept lawn behind a low chain-link fence. %% You're in the southeast corner of the planetarium. To the south you can see the entrance. %% You're in the southwest corner of a grassy field. To the west you can see mountains; to the southeast lies a large spinach crop. %% You're in the southwest corner of a sandy field. To the south you can see a well-kept lawn behind a low chain-link fence; to the west you can see a sunny meadow. %% You're in the southwest corner of a sunny meadow. To the south you see a grassy field; to the west, a river. Far to the southwest you see mountains. %% You're in the southwest corner of a well-kept lawn. To the west you can see a spinach crop behind a low chain-link fence. To the east you see the entrance of a teleport booth. %% You're in the top of a grape tree above a well-kept lawn. To the east you can see a vast ocean. %% You're in the top of an apple tree above a mountain ledge. far to the north and east you can see the ocean!!! %% You're in the top of an orange tree above a rushing river. %% You're in the twisting tunnel, which continues to the north and west. %% You're just inside the entrance to a network of underground caverns. You can see passages to the north and west. %% You're just such a green gazelle-infested toad. %% You're living in your own private Idaho. %% You're my knight in shining armor. %% You're never alone when you're schizophrenic. %% You're never alone with schizophrenia. %% You're never too old to become younger. -- Mae West %% You're next to a table of electrical supplies in the general store. %% You're not Dave. Who are you? %% You're not allowed to go through closed windows. %% You're not allowed to walk through closed doors. %% You're not allowed to walk through walls. %% You're not an alcoholic unless you go to the meetings. %% You're not carrying anything. %% You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on. -- Dean Martin %% You're not from Earth, are you? %% You're not my type. For that matter, you're not even my species!!! %% You're now at the entrance to a rock tunnel. The tunnel begins to the east, and other passages lead south and north. magic runes are inscribed upon the walls here. %% You're now at the north end of a stone tunnel. %% You're now in a rocky cavern with a zombie standing around. %% You're now in some mountainous terrain. To the north you see rocky ground; to the south, you see a flat place. Far to the east you see a lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence. %% You're now in the company of a goblin. Don't worry, he won't harm you. %% You're on a mountain ledge. High to the west is the top of the mountain. You can climb back to the north or to the east. There is a sign here, with "Thank you, richard rapier" written on it. %% You're on a path in a grassy field. The path turns and goes to the south into a meadow; to the west, you can see the road. To the east, a small grove of trees can be seen. The field extends to the north. %% You're on a road going north-south. To the west you can see two buildings; to the east, a rough path begins. %% You're on a sandy beach. The ocean extends to the north and east; to the south and west you can see a sandy field. %% You're on a sandy beach. To the west, you see the ends of the road and path; to the south and east, a vast ocean. %% You're on the bridge of the spaceship. On the north (outward) wall you see large sensor screens, and to the the south you see a door. A button here is labeled "Emergency hyperspace warp control." %% You're on the east bank of a rushing river. The river empties into the ocean to the north; it comes from mountains far the south. To the east you see large sunny meadow. %% You're on the east side of a 200-meter chasm, too wide to jump. %% You're on the east side of a river running north-south. To the east you see a grassy field; to the west, mountains rise behind a river. %% You're on the east side of a rushing river which runs north-south. To the east you see a sunny meadow; far to the south you can see mountains. %% You're on the east side of a sunny meadow. To the north you can see a vast ocean; to the east, a sandy field. %% You're on the east side side of a well-kept lawn. To the east lies a vast ocean; to the south you see the side of a teleport booth. %% You're on the meadow path, at the north end of a bridge crossing a stream. The path continues in the meadow to the west, and over the bridge. To the north you can see a small grove of trees. %% You're on the n-s road. To the east is the wall of a tool shed; to the west is the door of the general store. %% You're on the north bank of a river. To the west you see a sunny meadow; to the north and east, dense shrubbery blocks further exploration. %% You're on the north-south road. To the east you see a meadow; to the west is the wall of the general store. A light in the window shows that the store is open for business. %% You're on the path at the south end of a bridge over a stream. The path continues over the bridge to the north and through the sand to the south. There is the wall of a tool shed to the west, and more sand to the east. %% You're on the path in the meadow. The path continues to the east and north. To the west lies a road; to the north a grassy field. To the east lies more of the meadow; to the south, you can see the door to a tool shed. %% You're on the road. To the north you see the wall of a tool shed; to the south, a vast ocean. the road continues to the east and west. %% You're on the road. To the west you see the wall of a building; to the east, a grassy field with flowers growing. The road continues to the north and south. %% You're on the sandy south bank of the river. There is more sand to the west and south; to the east lies a vast ocean. %% You're on the south side of a 50-meter crevice. A stone tunnel begins to the east. %% You're on the south side of an island. To the north you can see the famed haunted mansion. You can see a balcony directly above you. %% You're on the south side of the island. To the north you can see the magic castle. %% You're on the west side of a sandy field. To the north you see a vast ocean; to the east, a sandy beach. To the west you can see a sunny meadow. %% You're on the west side of a sunny meadow. To the north you can see a vast ocean. %% You're on the west side of a well-kept lawn. To the west you see a grassy field behind a low chain-link fence; to the southwest, a spinach crop can be seen. To the southeast you can see a teleport booth. %% You're on top of the stump of what was once a fine mango tree. %% You're only supposed to put in the good ones! -- BAZ %% You're outmanned, you're outgunned, you're outequipped. What else have you got? Guile. -- Riker and Worf, "Peak Performance", stardate 42923.4 %% You're outside the entrance to a hall of stone. A narrow passage leads north. %% You're over-watered the cactus!! It's shriveling up! It's, it's... %% You're proof that abortions can survive. %% You're putting on your smiling face, And you're dressing up with style and grace. %% You're reasoning is excellent--it's only your basic assumptions that are wrong. %% You're rock candy, baby: hard, sweet and sticky. %% You're so analytical ... sometimes you just have to let art flow over you. %% You're so bad. %% You're so stolid. You weren't like that before the beard. -- Q to Riker, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1 %% You're so unusual. %% You're special. %% You're standing on the corner in your new clothes trying to look cool but still your finger has got to pick your nose. %% You're suffering from a Vulcan mind meld Doctor. That green-blooded sonuvabitch! It's his revenge for all those arguments he lost! -- Kirk & McCoy, "The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% You're taking me to the promised land?" What are friends for?" -- McCoy and Kirk, "ST III: The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3 %% You're the greatest. %% You're the kind of person who'd get two blow jobs and give me one. %% You're too beautiful to ignore. Too much woman. -- Kirk to Yeoman Rand, "The Enemy Within," stardate unknown %% You're too unstable to understand yourself, much less calculus or other people. %% You're treading on thin ground. %% You're twisted, perverted & sick. I like that in a person. %% You're typing too fast. %% You're typing too loudly. %% You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny. %% You're ugly but you intrigue me. %% You're unusually limber this morning. "I'll say. Devinoni Rai. It's ridiculous and wonderful. I feel completely out of control. Happy, terrified, but there's nothing rational about this." Who needs rational when your toes curl up. "I'm afraid I'm going to lose myself. I can't get enough of him. Is it possible to fall in love in one day?" I did. "It was like this for you and Jack?" No, it was another fella. I fell in love in a day, it lasted a week. But, what a week. Then I met Jack. Took months to figure it out with him. "Well then, maybe I should slow down, catch my breath, not let this thing get out of control." Nah. -- Dr. Crusher and Troi, "The Price", stardate 43385.6 %% You're upset. "Your finely honed Betazoid sense tell you that?" Well...that and the table. -- Troi and K'Ehleyr, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% You're within a small triangular cubicle of very small dimensions. The sole furnishings of this room consists of a stone shelf affixed to the walls in the corner. A wooden door is set in the diagonal wall to your southwest. %% You're working under a slight handicap. You happen to be human. %% You've been Berkeley'ed! %% You've been leading a dog's life. Stay off the furniture. %% You've been telling me to relax all the way here, and now you're telling me just to be myself? -- The Return of the Secaucus Seven %% You've collided into a wall and are now dead on the floor. %% You've got a point - right on the top of your head! %% You've got to get in to get out. %% You've got to have a gimmick if your band sucks. -- Gary Giddens %% You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave. -- Billie Holiday %% You've got to know how to put out a yellow light. %% You've gotten sunstroke and can't tell east from west! %% You've had enough of it! %% You've heard of Agent Orange... Now try New DIET Agent Orange! Same great effects, but with half the calories! %% You've heard of the bishop of Birmingham, Well, here's the new story concerning 'im : He buggers the choir As they sing "Ave Maria," And fucks all the girls whilst confirming 'em. %% You've heard the terms Black Box and White Box testing. Here's a few of the less-known test methods. Black Box The tester has no clue as to what's going on inside. Often used by large corporations for software verification. More often NOT used by large corporations for software verification. White Box The tester knows the internals, but doesn't manipulate them directly. This is handy because the tester can avoid messy problems or functions that are likely to cause trouble. This is also know as "doing a demo" Open Box The tester directly manipulates the internals. This is handy because it allows the tester to test particular bits of code when other, important bits aren't even written yet. This is also knows as "rigging a demo" Toy Box The tester plays with the product. Often in ways in which the product was never intended to be used. The people at Underwriters Laboratories are experts at this. So is your three year old nephew. This kind of testing leads to lengthy disclaimers and warranties. Jack-in-the-Box The tester cranks on the product until something surprising happens. If nothing surprising happens, it gets marketed. If something surprising happens, it gets marketed as "new" and "improved" and the version number goes up by 0.0.1 Shoe Box The tester places the product in a dark closet or cupboard and forgets about it. Eventually, someone discovers that micro organisms have performed some astoundingly intense testing of their own. This provides the key "cleaning instructions" section of the manual. (If the product is software, this testing consists of putting the code under source management control, the software equivalent of a dark closet. The only difference is the no one will ever see it again.) Gray Box Marketing paints the product to gain a larger market share/ improve its ergonomics. This is especially interesting with magnetic media. This is also known as "platinum box" testing. Cardboard Box A rather trivial test of the packaging materials. You can tell if this step was neglected when your floppy disk arrives in a 3' shipping carton, packed in styrofoam peanuts. Strong Box Tests the physical integrity of the product. Often for military contracts, though HP does it just for the heck of it. 3 1/2 floppies were Strong Box tested, 5 1/4 floppies weren't. This test is near-impossible to perform with software, nevertheless, it is required for government contracts. %% You've hesitated too long in the cold. Your muscular responses have slowed to a snail's pace. The numbness slowly proceeds inward from your extremities and eventually overcomes your vital functions. But you feel no pain: it's just like going to sleep . . . %% You've just crossed over into ... The Twilight Zone. %% You've just made the mistake of your life, as it were. All you hear is the air rushing past your ears. All you see is the light from above getting smaller and smaller. You nervously await the impact of the floor of this pit you've managed to jump into . . . *splat* %% You've lived to long, you dont belong you weren't that strong so play your cards just right you'll be a start tonight and see your name in lights on suicide boulevard -- Little River Band %% You've made a hole in the floor. %% You've made it past the zombie! %% You've probably heard "brevity is the soul of wit," but have you heard "gravity is the soul of weight?" %% You've reached a rocky corner. Passages lead south and west. You can see a stalactite high above you, but you can't reach it. %% You've received numerous painful cuts from the cactus. The sand blowing into them inflames them terribly, and you die soon afterward. %% You've successfully eaten your fruit salad. Your bowl is now empty. %% You've tried to walk on water, which doesn't work -- and you are now going down for the third time. Blub blub blub %% You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical needs -- who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a handplow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York? -- John Galt %% You?! Well your mother! That's right! Your mother!!! %% Young Alice is known for her poise During quiet foreplay with the boys. But then when she has 'em At the brink of orgasm, You can't hear yourself think for the noise. %% Young Frederick the great was a beaut. To a guard hee cried, "Hey, man, you're cute. If you'll come to my palace, I'll finger your phallus, And then I shall blow on your flute." %% Young Jane was a lollapolooza Yet no one could manage to use her. She wouldn't screw with them Except to the rhythm Of the marches of John Philip Sousa. %% Young blood must have its course, lad, and every dog its day. -- Charles Kingsley %% Young guy walks into a bar and tells the bartender to line him up with ten Kamikazi's. The bartender does so and asks the man what he's celebrating. "Well," he says "I had my first blow-job today!" and proceeds to gulp down greedily all ten drinks. The bartender says " Great, here's a beer on me!" "No thanks! if Ten drinks won't get this awful taste outta my mouth, nothing will." %% Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business. For the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things, abuseth them. The errors of young men are the ruin of business; but the errors of aged men amount but to this, that more might have been done, or sooner. Young men, in the conduct and management of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not how they innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly, it is good to compound employments of both ... because the virtues of either age may correct the defects of both. -- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), "Essay on Youth and Age" %% Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools. -- George Chapman %% Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) %% Young men, hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young. -- Augustus Caesar %% Young's Law: All great discoveries are made by mistake. Corollary: The greater the funding, the longer it takes to make the mistake. %% Your CHEEKS sit like twin NECTARINES above a MOUTH that knows no BOUNDS -- %% Your Co-worker Could Be a Space Alien, Say Experts ...Here's How You Can Tell Many Americans work side by side with space aliens who look human -- but you can spot these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs, say experts. They listed 10 signs to watch for: #3. Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens who don't understand earthly humor may laugh during a company training film or tell jokes that no one understands, said Steiger. #6. Misuses everyday items. "A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails," said Steiger. #8. Secretive about personal life-style and home. "An alien won't discuss details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends." #10. Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high-tech hardware. "An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on," said Steiger. The experts pointed out that a co-worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien. -- Michael Cassels, "National Enquirer" August, 84 [I thought everybody laughed at company training films. Ed.] %% Your If is the only peace-maker -- much virtue in If. -- William Shakespeare %% Your Majesty should pay attention to his appearance. -- H. C. Anderson %% Your President is no crook! -- Richard Nixon %% Your Ronald Reagan impression isn't as good as you think it is. %% Your Uncle is as stupid as paste. %% Your actions don't appear to be doing much harm to the cyclops, but they do not exactly lower your insurance premiums, either. %% Your adventure can be saved for you so that you may resume it later however, you may have to wait fifty minutes before continuing. %% Your aged and withered body can withstand just a few more steps. %% Your aim is high and to the right. %% Your aims are high, and you are capable of much damage. %% Your aims are high, and you are capable of much. %% Your ambushes would be more successful if you bathed more often. -- Worf to the Gatherers, "The Vengeance Factor", stardate 43421.9 %% Your analyst has you mixed up with another patient. Don't believe a thing he tells you. %% Your archaic cultures are authority driven. -- The Borg, "The Best of Both Worlds," stardate 43989.1 %% Your are courteous, diplomatic and affable and may find happiness in politics and public service. %% Your are the guiding star of his existence. %% Your armor rusts! %% Your armor turns to dust and falls to the floor! %% Your balloon has hit the rim of the volcano, ripping the cloth and causing you to drop 500 feet. Did you get your flight insurance? %% Your best consolation is the hope that the things you failed to get weren't really worth having. %% Your bits are MINE, loser! I will zero them SLOWLY! %% Your boat now lies near the northeast extreme of the island. A small beach is visible to the south. The open sea lies to the north and east. %% Your boat, in contrast to its previous behavior, seems unable to move and quite unmagical. %% Your body begins to glow black. %% Your body stops glowing black. %% Your bones itch. %% Your boots shine splendidly, in contrast to your intellect. %% Your boss climbed the corporate ladder, wrong by wrong. %% Your boss is thinking about you. %% Your bottle is already full. %% Your bottle is empty and the ground is wet. %% Your bottle is now full of oil. %% Your business will assume vast proportions. %% Your business will go through a period of considerable expansion. %% Your cancelled check is your receipt. %% Your car is equipped with a device that detects pot-holes and steers you toward them. %% Your cat is in great need of being confused. %% Your code should be more efficient! %% Your collection of treasures consists of: %% Your compass needle spins wildly, and you cannot get your bearings. %% Your computer account is overdrawn. Please reauthorize. %% Your computer account is overdrawn. Please see Big Brother. %% Your conscience never stops you from doing anything. It just stops you from enjoying it. %% Your contacts haven't been cleaned in a long time. %% Your cup will runneth over with love. Everything will get wet! %% Your deal. -- Worf to Data, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3 %% Your dedication and tireless work on the hostage thing, with Central America, really gave me cause for great pride in you and thanks. Get some turkey, George Bush. -- A thanksgiving letter to Oliver North, 1985 %% Your dentist will buy a yacht. %% Your depth of comprehension may tend to make you lax in worldly ways. %% Your digestive system is your body's Fun House, whereby food goes on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter. -- Dave Barry %% Your dog can buy cheaper than you do. %% Your dog finds you repulsive. %% Your dog is aging faster than you are. %% Your domestic life may be harmonious. %% Your education begins where what is called your education is over. %% Your ego's writing a check your body can't cash. %% Your empty file directory has been deleted. %% Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate - and quickly. -- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" %% Your evil is my good. I am Sutekh the Destroyer. Where I tread I leave nothing but dust and darkness. I find that good. -- Sutekh, PYRAMIDS OF MARS %% Your eyes are weary from staring at the screen. Your eyelids feel very heavy. You feel very sleepy. Watch the cursor. Notice how restful it is to watch it blink. Close your eyes. All the opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise. When you awake, you will be irresistably compelled to send all your money to: The Carnivore predator@iastate.edu %% Your eyes, your eyes, they shine like the pants on my blue serge suit. That's not a reflection on you. That's on my pants. -- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) %% Your fault: core dumped %% Your fear of change is too clearly visible in your eyes. %% Your feet are frozen to the floor! %% Your feet are now wet. %% Your feet have balls but not vice versa? %% Your files are now being encrypted and thrown into the bit bucket. EOF %% Your first impressions of people are best. %% Your fish resents your control over its life. %% Your flashlight is now out. It automatically turns off. %% Your flashlight now has new batteries. %% Your fly is open. %% Your fly is unzipped. %% Your fly might be open (but don't check it just now). %% Your freedom to swing your arm stops where my nose begins %% Your friendly neighborhood Atheist. %% Your friends need you. %% Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years. -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" %% Your funny bone is actually a nerve called the ulnar nerve. %% Your future looks bright. %% Your gift is princely, but it comes too late, And falls like sunbeams on a blasted blossom. -- Suckling %% Your girl friend is *so* ugly that... when you look up ugly in the dictionary, her picture's there. it looked like her face caught fire and someone put it out with an ice pick. they used her face to model for animal cookies. when she yelled "Rape", the guy looked and said "No way!" she was the birth control poster child. when she was born, the doctor slapped her mother. as a child, her parents tied a pork chop around her neck to get the puppy to play with her. she has to sneak up on a glass of water, just to get a drink! %% Your girlfriend is the kind of woman you could fall madly in bed with. %% Your gloves vanish! %% Your good nature will bring you unbounded happiness. %% Your goose is cooked. (Your current chick is burned up too!) %% Your grandmother is walking on tar. %% Your hands begin to glow blue. %% Your hands begin to glow purple. %% Your hands stop glowing blue. %% Your happiness is intertwined with your outlook on life. %% Your heart is pure, and your mind clear, and your soul devout. %% Your heart is pure, and your mind clear, and your soul devout. In other words Your heart is pure evil, your mind is empty and your soul devoted to mischief. %% Your helmet turns to dust and is blown away! %% Your help will be needed in an embarrassing situation. %% Your hopes and your future have nothing in common. %% Your ignorance cramps my conversation. %% Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships. %% Your inability to sustain sexual interest in just one other person drains your life of the possibility of intimacy. %% Your insurance doesn't cover it. %% Your iron ball gets heavier. %% Your knapsack cannot accommodate anymore items. %% Your knees seem more flexible now. %% Your knife point pinks the # on the wrist, but it's not serious. %% Your lamp has run out of power. %% Your lamp is getting dim, and you're out of spare batteries. You'd best start wrapping this up. %% Your lamp is getting dim. You'd best go back for those batteries. %% Your lamp is getting dim. You'd best start wrapping this up, unless you can find some fresh batteries. I seem to recall there's a vending machine in the maze. Bring some coins with you. %% Your lamp is getting dim. I'm taking the liberty of replacing the batteries. %% Your lamp is now off. %% Your latest program has been judged UNTASTEFUL by the T demon; and automatically deleted. %% Your laws, your courts, your false god will be a dim remembering of a cursed time when man was wolf to the man. %% Your legs feel somewhat better. %% Your legs get new energy. %% Your life has been filmed before a live studio audience. %% Your life is in danger today. You must do something about it. %% Your life is wonderful. %% Your life should be stamped, "For novelty use only!" %% Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret. %% Your light source casts a circle of 5-foot radius about you. Walls are visible at the extreme east and west edges of this circle. No ceiling is visible overhead. %% Your load is too heavy. You will have to leave something behind. %% Your local police are armed and dangerous. %% Your long forgotten kindness to someone will bring a substantial sum of money. %% Your long life will reflect the advantages of dying young. %% Your love life will be happy and harmonious. %% Your love life will be... interesting. %% Your loved ones will donate your corpse to science while you're still healthy. %% Your lover will never wish to leave you. %% Your lover will never wish to leave you. He or she will want you to go away. %% Your lucky color has faded. %% Your lucky number has been disconnected. %% Your lucky number is 3552664958674928. Watch for it everywhere. %% Your lucky number is 511. Play the lottery every day, because you have no talents, and unless dumb luck makes you rich, people will continue to shun you. %% Your magical ability is that of an adept. %% Your mental health will be better if you have lots of fun outside of that office. -- Dr. William Menninger %% Your mileage may vary. %% Your mileage may vary: cav. [from the standard disclaimer attached to EPA mileage ratings by American car manufacturers] 1. A ritual warning often found in UNIX freeware distributions. Translates roughly as "Hey, I tried to write this portably, but who *knows* what'll happen on your system?" 2. A qualifier more generally attached to advice. "I find that sending flowers works well, but your mileage may vary." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Your mind is on vacation and your thoughts are working overtime. %% Your mind under stands what you have been taught; your heart, what is true. %% Your mind's making promises your body can't keep. %% Your mode of life will be changed for the better because of good news soon. %% Your mode of life will be changed for the better because of new developments. %% Your mode of life will be changed to ASCII. %% Your mode of life will be changed to EBCDIC. %% Your money or your lifestyle -- Zippy the Pinhead %% Your mother codes in BASIC! %% Your mother wears army boots and your father was MISS ARKANSAS last year. %% Your mothers ghost stands at your shoulder Face like ice, a little bit colder She says "You can't do that it breaks all the rules You learned in school" But I don't really see Why can't we go on as three? -- Jefferson Airplane, "Triad" %% Your motives for doing whatever good deed you may have in mind will be misinterpreted by somebody. %% Your mouth becomes numb, and everything seems to swirl around you. The effect quickly passes, and you find that your muscles have bulged unbelievably. %% Your multiple personalities don't prevent you from being dull. %% Your nature demands love and your happiness depends on it. %% Your next acquaintance will be the right one. %% Your nose twitches. %% Your object is to save the world, while still leading a pleasant life. %% Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah. The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in awhile and watch your answers change. -- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul %% Your opponent, determining discretion to be the better part of valor, decides to terminate this little contretemps. With a rueful nod of his head, he steps backward into the gloom and disappears. %% Your own ability to rationalize your bad deeds makes you believe the entire universe is as amoral as yourself. %% Your own mileage may vary. %% Your own qualities will help prevent your advancement in the world. %% Your papers need more footnotes. %% Your parentheses always match. %% Your password is pitifully obvious. %% Your people are violent. -- Grebnedlog to Geordi, "Samaritan Snare", stardate 42779.1 %% Your phone will ring. %% Your picture of the world often changes just before you get it into focus. %% Your place in the path of life is in the driver's seat. %% Your poem may be Quite obscure Or simple, bright Or solemn. But see that you're Absolutely sure It will fit inthecolumn. -- Stan Davis, "The Wall Street Journal" %% Your powers will have to increase significantly before you are able to cross water on foot. %% Your present plans will be successful. %% Your present plans will be successful. But you will be found out later. %% Your private parts look like a dead grub worm. %% Your program is sick! Shoot it and put it out of its memory. %% Your programs need more comments. %% Your project will be late. %% Your proposed victim suddenly recovers consciousness. %% Your purse feels lighter. %% Your reasoning powers are good, and you are a fairly good planner. %% Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side. %% Your resistance is useless. We control the Ark. -- Noah (in Wirrn form), Ark in Space %% Your rich great-great aunt who lists you as her sole heir will live to be 123. %% Your rich uncle will die, but will spell your name incorrectly. %% Your salary will be increased. %% Your save file is obsolete and cannot be restored. %% Your score puts you in Master adventurer class A. %% Your score qualifies you as a novice class adventurer. %% Your shoes are untied. %% Your sister swims out to meet troop ships. %% Your skill impresses me. I like you. -- Lutan to Yar, "Code of Honor", stardate 41235.25 %% Your skin glows then fades. %% Your skin is like vinyl; the perfect companion. %% Your skin itches. %% Your slogan here. %% Your society will be sought by people of taste and refinement. %% Your species is self-destructive. -- Norman the android, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3 %% Your spooning days are over, And your pilot light is out; When what used to be your sex appeal Is now your water spout! %% Your squirrels don't know where you are tonight. %% Your stab misses the # by an inch. %% Your step will soil many countries. %% Your stroke lands, but it was only the flat of the blade. %% Your supervisor is thinking about you. %% Your swing misses the # by an inch. %% Your sword crashes down, knocking the # into dreamland. %% Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow. %% Your sword is no longer glowing. %% Your sword pinks the # on the wrist, but it's not serious. %% Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded. %% Your talents will be recognized. You will be sought out by the x-rated movie industry. %% Your temporary financial embarrassment will be relieved in a surprising manner. %% Your test tube wears combat boots! %% Your throat may be closer than it seems. %% Your toes itch! %% Your toes stop itching. %% Your torch has been extinguished. %% Your torch is now lit. %% Your train of thought makes all the stops. %% Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with. %% Your vehicle refuses to go that direction. %% Your view of everything disintegrates rapidly due to the effect of the transporter beam. %% Your wallet is in your other suit. %% Your way is blocked by an invisible force. %% Your weapon is welded to your hand! %% Your weapon looks duller now. %% Your weapon seems sharper now. %% Your wig steers the gig. -- Lord Buckley %% Your will to survive, your love of life, your passion to know ... Everything that is truest and best in all species of beings has been revealed to you. Those are the qualities that make a civilization worthy to survive. -- Lai the Vian, "The Empath," stardate 5121.5 %% Your winsome smile will be your sure protection. %% Your wise men don't know how it feels To be thick as a brick. %% Your world is a miserable, doomed place. %% Your worship is your furnaces which, like old idols, lost obscenes, have molten bowels; your vision is machines for making more machines. -- Gordon Bottomley (1874) %% Yours is not to reason why, Just to Sail Away. And when you find you have to throw Your Legacy away; Remember life as was it is, And is as it were; Chasing sounds across the galaxy 'Till silence is but a blur. -- QYX. %% Yousa! Yousa! Yousa! %% Youth -- not a time of life but a state of mind... a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. -- Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968) %% Youth doesn't excuse everything. -- Dr. Janice Lester (in Kirk's body), "Turnabout Intruder," stardate 5928.5 %% Youth had been a habit of hers so long that she could not part with it. %% Youth in Asia %% Youth is a period of missed opportunities. -- Cyril Connolly, "Journal and Memoir" 1983 %% Youth is the trustee of posterity. %% Youth is wasted on the young. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) %% Youth is when you blame all your troubles on your parents; maturity is when you learn that everything is the fault of the younger generation. %% Youth of today! Join me in a mass rally for traditional mental attitudes! -- Zippy the Pinhead %% Youth. It's a wonder that anyone ever outgrows it. %% Youthful Folly has success. It is not I who seek the young fool; The young fool seeks me. At the first oracle I inform him. If he asks two or three times, it is importunity. If he importunes, I give him no information. Perseverance furthers. %% Yow! %% Yow! Am I having fun yet? -- Zippy the Pinhead %% Yow! Am I in Milwaukee? %% Yow! And then we could sit on the hoods of cars at stop lights! %% Yow! Are we laid back yet? %% Yow! Are we wet yet? %% Yow! Are you the self-frying president? %% Yow! Did something bad happen or am I in a drive-in movie?? %% Yow! I just went below the poverty line! %% Yow! I threw up on my window! %% Yow! I want my nose in lights! %% Yow! I want to mail a bronzed artichoke to Nicaragua! %% Yow! I'm having a quadrophonic sensation of two winos alone in a steel mill! %% Yow! I'm imagining a surfer van filled with soy sauce! %% Yow! Is my fallout shelter termite proof? %% Yow! Is this sexual intercourse yet?? Is it, huh, is it?? %% Yow! It's a hole all the way to downtown Burbank! %% Yow! It's some people inside the wall! This is better than mopping! %% Yow! Maybe I should have asked for my Neutron Bomb in PAISLEY-- %% Yow! Now I get to think about all the BAD THINGS I did to a BOWLING BALL when I was in JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL! %% Yow! Now we can become alcoholics! %% Yow! Those people look exactly like Donnie and Marie Osmond!! %% Yow! We're going to a new disco! %% Yow! Am I logged in yet? %% Yow!: /yow/ [from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix] interj. A favored hacker expression of humorous surprise or emphasis. "Yow! Check out what happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!" Compare {gurfle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Yu-Shiang Whole Fish: /yoo-shyang hohl fish/ n. obs. The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked whole (not {parse}d) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang) sauce. Usage: primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine, which could display this character on the screen. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Yugoslavian ceasefire: Unit of time, roughly equal to the time it take to reload a gun. %% Yuppie Wannabes: An X Generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about Armageddon after three drinks. -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X %% Yuppie pregnant women don't go into labor, they go straight into management. -- Fred Reuss %% Yuppie version of Twinkle Twinkle Little star: Scintillate, scintillate, globule orific How I conjecture your nature specific Way above in the ethereal stratosphere Like a giant gem carbonaceous. When torrid Phoebus refuses his presence And ceases to lamp with fierce incandescence Then you illumine the regions supernal Scintillate, scintillate, semper nocturnal. Then the victim of hospiceless peregrination Gratefully hails your minute coruscation He could not determine his journey's direction But for your bright scintillating protection. -- Gyles Brandreth, "The Joy of Lex" %% Yuri Gagarin The wing clippers at work again Oh Daedalus Do they not torment you? Flourishing youth overflowing the sky Now plummets as a stone And your golden craft revealed As but a fragile dream To the workshops and the nurseries! Construct us another charioteer A fresh young face A bright eyed seeker Let the mould be firm set Strain your technique artificers! We'll have no more of these fallen heroes Magician! Inform the crystal spheres To mute their close knit harmonies For here's a lusty child come To shout your fame 27 March 1968 %% ZABEL'S POLITICAL OBSERVATION: While the people try to determine what the candidate stands for, he candidate tries to determine what the people will stand for %% ZADRA'S LAW OF BIOMECHANICS: The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach and directly proportional the social impropriety of scratching that area. %% ZEAL: Quality seen in new graduates -- if you're quick. %% ZERO v. 1. To set to zero. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words. 2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where "zeroing" need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% Zall's Laws: (1) Any time you get a mouthful of hot soup, the next thing you do will be wrong. (2) How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on. %% Zapping a wand of Nothing Happens doesn't harm you a bit. %% Zeal: A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% Zee plane! Zee plane! %% Zen Buddhists do it because they don't want to do it because they want to do it. %% Zen T-Shirt: Enlightenment Available - Enquire Within %% Zen: the sound of the ax chopping. Chopping logic. -- Edward Abbey %% Zenophobia: the irrational fear of convergent sequences. %% Zero Defects, n.: The result of shutting down a production line. %% Zero defects: The result of shutting down a production line. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% Zero raised to the nth power remains zero. -- Pop Baslim %% Zeus gave Leda the bird. %% Zilog Zeus Kernel -- Release 2.2 -- Generated 10/21/83 08:25:58 Copyright 1981 Zilog, Inc %% Zimmerman's Law of Complaints: Nobody notices when things go right. %% Zippermakers do it on the fly. %% Zippy's brain cells are straining to bridge synapses... %% Zisla's Law: If you're asked to join a parade, don't march behind the elephants. %% Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings. -- Evan Esar %% Zoom! %% Zork: /zork/ n. The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see {ADVENT}. Originally written on MIT-DM during the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX (as a patched, sourceless RT-11 Fortran binary; see {retrocomputing}) and commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom. The Fortran source was later rewritten for portability and released to USENET under the name "Dungeon". Both Fortran "Dungeon" and translated C versions are available at many FTP sites. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% Zork: /zork/ n. The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see {ADVENT}. Originally written on MIT-DM during the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX and commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom. %% Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words since I first called my brother's father dad. -- William Shakespeare, "King John" %% Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics: Once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a larger can. %% Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labor: People are always available for work in the past tense. %% Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labor: People are always available for work in the past tense. Sorry, no obscene fortunes. Don't want to offend anyone. (Now that's obscene!) %% Zymurgy,s Seventh Exception to Murphy's Laws: When it rains it pours. %% [7/16/89] I've had no indication from home, nor have we picked up any here that they felt that the US economy was going to move towards a recession. [10/4/91] The economy is moving in the right direction. [10/25/91] I don't want to buy into the predicate about [the US being in] another recession. I don't feel that way. [10/31/91] The economy's turned the corner, headed for recovery. [11/8/91] I'm not prepared to say we are in a recession. [1/4/92] It will not be a deep recession. [1/15/92] Look, this economy is in free fall. -- President George Bush %% [A liberal is] one who has both feet firmly planted in the air. %% [A photo is displayed of Senator Dan Quayle holding a pumpkin to the left of his head.] "Here's an Update Quiz: what's the difference between these two spherical objects? The answer is: eventually, the one on the left will have a light in it." -- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update %% [Alcoholic beverages] sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it reliseth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickeneth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from snaffling, the teeth from chattering, and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking. -- Anon. (13th Century) %% [Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted. As a matter of fact, the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled. We're dealing with beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians. There's nothing there.... It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy. It's got technical terms. It's got jargon. It confuses the public....The astrologer is quite glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing. The fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They have not proved their case....It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested and tested over the centuries. Nobody's ever found any validity to it at all. It is not even close to a science. A science has to be repeatable, it has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable -- you test it. And in that astrology is really quite something else. -- Astronomer Richard Berendzen, President, American University, on ABC News "Nightline," May 3, 1988 %% [Background: Queensland, Australia is a major sugar-cane producing area, which imported *large* toads to control insects (?) in the cane fields. The toads multiplied (of course), and became pests themselves, preferring to sit in the roads at night where they can be conveniently squished by passing motorists.] Why did the Queensland cane toad cross the road? He wanted to see his flatmates... (Further b.g.: "flat" = squished/apartment, "mates" = friends) %% [Bush] so loves the Constitution that he overflows with ideas for improving it. -- Conservative columnist George F. Will %% [Bush] wants to know why can't he have initiatives to present to the public. -- A GOP strategist, 1992 %% [DISCLAIMER: my fingers are epileptic] %% [Dan Quayle is] my choice, my first choice, and my only choice. -- President George Bush %% [FORTRAN] will persist for some time -- probably for at least the next decade. -- T. Cheatham %% [Freedom is] the power to live as you will. Who then lives as he wills? -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) %% [From Prince Ra-Man's predictions for 1987] 3/29/86: Marvel continues to prove that the New Universe is more true-to-life, bu canceling three of the titles -- just as would happen to *real* comic books that are incredibly bad. 4/2/86: Rebounding from the demise of the three New Universe titles, Marvel announces that they will be replaced by three new mini-series set to run in the second half of the year: X-Men vs. the G.I. Joes, X-Men vs. the Ewoks, and X-Men vs. Jarvis the Butler. -- R. A. Jones %% [From an announcement of a congress of the International Ontopsychology Association, in Rome]: The Ontopsychological school, availing itself of new research criteria and of a new telematic epistemology, maintains that social modes do not spring from dialectics of territory or of class, or of consumer goods, or of means of power, but rather from dynamic latencies capillarized in millions of individuals in system functions which, once they have reached the event maturation, burst forth in catastrophic phenomenology engaging a suitable stereotype protagonist or duty marionette (general, president, political party, etc.) to consummate the act of social schizophrenia in mass genocide. %% [From the operation manual for the CI-300 Dot Matrix Line Printer, made in Japan]: The excellent output machine of MODEL CI-300 as extraordinary DOT MATRIX LINE PRINTER, built in two MICRO-PROCESSORs as well as EAROM, is featured by permitting wonderful co-existence such as; "high quality against low cost", "diversified functions with compact design", "flexibility in accessibleness and durability of approx. 2000,000,00 Dot/Head", "being sophisticated in mechanism but possibly agile operating under noises being extremely suppressed" etc. And as a matter of course, the final goal is just simply to help achieve "super shuttle diplomacy" between cool data, perhaps earned by HOST COMPUTER, and warm heart of human being. %% [Fundamentalist] Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. -- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911 %% [He is] one of those persons who would be enormously improved by death. -- H. H. Munro %% [I promise to] mount a comprehensive effort to reduce the cost of health care in America. -- George Bush, campaigning in 1988. In February 1990 he said: ``The best prescription for better health in America is a strong, daily dose of personal responsibility.'' %% [I will never have] another Jimmy Carter grain embargo, Jimmy, Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter grain embargo, Jimmy Carter grain embargo. -- Vice President Dan Quayle during the Benson debate %% [I will] fix [the S&L debacle] and fix it once and for all. -- President George Bush, June 1989. As of March 1990, the S&L's were losing $3 million per hour %% [I would] hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the useless speeding up of an already overspeeded life. -- H. P. Lovecraft %% [In the 60's] there was madness in any direction, at any hour ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was `right', that we were winning ... 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" %% [It would be safer] never to participate in anything in the future without consulting the American Legion or your local Chamber of Commerce. -- Martin Dies (1900-?) %% [It] would have taken hours to be fair and we're not employed to do that sort of thing. -- KMP (out of context) %% [Lester Maddox talking to Prime Minister Botha of South Africa] "Lemme show ya the odds, Sparky... In yer country, ya got 14 million black people, and 3 million white people. Now, does the name `Custer' mean anything to you?" -- Robin Williams %% [Man's fate] contains the root and the sum of all creation's drive, and this it is that makes it so entrancing, exhilarating and perilous. And such is Man: he would rather balance on the tightrope of his own creation, razor-thin and sagging in the middle, over the abysmal valley of his own folly, than walk in safety starting meadowlarks. It is in danger and in the times that most try his soul that he flourishes. -- William Ready %% [Maturity consists in the discovery that] there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood. -- Soren Kierkegaard %% [May 1988] I was out of the loop. [August 1988] I'm in on everything. If our policies aren't working, I can't say `Wait a minute, I'm not to blame' ... I feel I'm a full partner. -- George Bush, on Iran-contra %% [May one] doubt whether, in cheese and timber, worms are generated, or, if beetles and wasps, in cow-dung, or if butterflies, locusts, shellfish, snails, eels, and such life be procreated of putrefied matter, which is to receive the form of that creature to which it is by formative power disposed[?] To question this is to question reason, sense, and experience. If he doubts this, let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice begot of the mud of the Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants. -- A seventeenth century opinion quoted by L. L. Woodruff, in *The Evolution of Earth and Man*, 1929 %% [Mere corroborative padding intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing fortune cookie.] %% [Message of incredible warmth and support that makes your day.] %% [Motion] pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relations are the accepted or common thing. -- Motion picture code (1930) %% [Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable. -- Edwin Meese III %% [On an operative report, the surgical assistants]: In the left corner we have Billy, in the center puttering around with her little paws is Molly, and dancing around to my right is Daisy, and this is yours truly. %% [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) %% [Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man -- he loves to see him work. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% [Prime Minister MacDonald] has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% [Puzzling remark, which bothers you for days.] %% [Quick note for those following Bloom County: "Hands up Spock!" "I'm illogical, I'm illogical! I *LOVE* Pat Robertson!"] %% [Remark by Clive James on `Start the Week' this morning] Rupert Murdoch thinks an independent editor is one who says `Yes!' without being prompted. %% [Saddam Hussein is] Hitler revisited... worse than Hitler. -- President George Bush. When challenged on the analogy, he said: ``I didn't say the Holocaust. I mean, that is outrageous.'' %% [Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% [Smoking is] a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. -- James I (1566-1625) %% [Sung to Billy Joel's "The Longest Time"] When I next return from time and space I might have a somewhat different face Don't start debating I've been off regenerating That only happens For a Lord of Time. -- Peter David %% [Sung to the tune of The Flintstones Theme] "Team-sters, we're the Team-sters, We're just one happy family! Gambino and Celerno... Make that two happy families! 'Nolo contendre', that's our Teamsters song! Cops and Robbers -- we play it all day long! Teamsters, love the Teamsters! Support us if you please, Or else we'll break your knees, Have you hugged a Teamster today?" -- Mark Russell %% [The French Riviera is] a sunny place for shady people. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) %% [The Gulf war was] a stirring victory for the forces of aggression against lawlessness. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% [The United States will] work towards the elimination of human rights in El Salvador. -- Vice President Dan Quayle %% [The facts about beauty are known, And well-learned by those who are grown: Beauty is thin, It lies on the skin, But ugly goes down to the bone.] %% [The members of the Chamberlain government] are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, all-powerful for impotency. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill %% [The people of Vaal] have taken their first step [towards achieving true human stature]. They've learned to kill. -- Spock, "The Apple," stardate 3715.6 %% [Unbelievably gross and offensive expletive deleted] %% [Washington, D.C.] is the home of ... taste for the people -- the big, the bland and the banal. -- Ada Louise Huxtable %% [We're] running around like chickens with their heads cut off. -- An aide to President George Bush, March 1992 %% [We] use bad software and bad machines for the wrong things. -- R. W. Hamming %% [Wisdom] is a tree of life to those laying hold of her, making happy each one holding her fast. -- Proverbs 3:18 [NSV] %% [say "What's this ???" while you hold your palm up to your mouth and make biting gestures] ... Jesus biting his nails .... %% [sung to "The Ballad of the Green Berets"] Fighting soldier In Vietnam, The perfect son To any Mom, He's one part man, One part machine, He's Ollie North, The Mute Marine. [...] He traded arms With Iran For hostages -- What a great plan! The chances for Success were zero; Yet he's still A national hero. [...] He'd like to talk But cannot speak, His will is strong, His case is weak; We may never know Just what he's seen: The man they call, The Mute Marine. -- Saturday Night Live %% [talking about building a seven-day disappearer ....] "Yes, said Willy McGilly. Who would've thought you could do it with a beer can and two pieces of cardboard? When I was a boy, I used an oatmeal box and a red crayola." -- Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, from "Seven-Day Terror", in '900 Grandmothers' %% \begin: // [from the LaTeX command] With \end, used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. For example: \begin{flame} Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who would use anything else is an idiot. Also, all computers should be tredecimal instead of binary. \end{flame} The Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On USENET, this construct would more frequently be rendered as `' and `'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% \f\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Now look what you've done..you broke it!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n %% ____________ ____/--\____ \______ ___) ( _ ____) "Damn it Jim!, __| |____/ / `--' I'm a bartender not a Doctor!" ) `|=(- \------------' %% ________________________________________________________________ | 1 0 0 GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE 1 0 0 | | 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 | | 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 | | 1 0 0 DIMWIT 1 0 0 | | |||||||||||||||| | | || __ __ || B30332744D | | || -OO OO- || | | IN FROBS \|| >> ||/ WE TRUST | | || ______ || | | B30332744D | ------ | | | \\________// | | 1 0 0 Series FLATHEAD LD Flathead 1 0 0 | | 1 0 0 0 0 719GUE Treasurer 1 0 0 0 0 | | 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 | | 1 0 0 One Hundred Royal Zorkmids 1 0 0 | |_______________________________________________________________| %% `And to the liberty for which it stands, one nation, under God, with freedom and justice for all.' And let's never forget it. -- George Bush, mangling the Pledge of Allegiance %% `As leader, you should never forget those who are loyal to you. You should hold parties for them regularly and have lots of whiskey (free) for them. That way, they get drunk and reveal themselves as the disloyal vermin they all are in reality.' -- Cerebus "On Governing" %% `Bad men have no songs'. - How is it the Russians have songs? (Could be Ronnie's theme...) %% `Committee' was the spelling decided upon by the first komiti. %% `Just the place for a Snark!' the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair. 'Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.' %% `Launch on warning' means never having to say you're sorry. %% `My trip? It was vile. Balaclava I loathed. Etna was crawling with lava. The ship was all white But it creaked in the night, And the band, they did not know la java." -- Edward Gorey %% ``Better to live with the occasional vagaries of digital pseudonyms than to ban them.'' -- T.C.May, cofounder, Cypherpunks %% ``I'm not going anywhere. I like it here.'' -- Snake #7 %% ``In a false quarrel there is no true valour.'' -- Shakespeare %% ``Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.'' -- N. Chomsky %% ``That which can never be enforced should not be prohibited. The claim that a person should have only one pseudonym per forum indicates profound misunderstanding. If someone wants to have multiple ... pseudonyms, they will be able to; that is one of the main goals of cypherpunks software. The situations you despise will occur. This is reality. Change your own psychology or change your own software. You will not be able to change the other person.'' -- E.Hughes, cofounder, Cypherpunks %% ``They should open the ground and throw them in,'' she said. ``They should put them in a pit and let them rot.'' ``Putting them in jail would be too easy,'' she added. ``They could eat and enjoy life.'' Tedillo said she paid to have her 13-year-old Chihuahua, ``Poopsie,'' individually cremated and his ashes returned to her. ``I received the ashes, but you can imagine whose they might be,'' she said. -- Pet Owner Rose Tedillo, quoted in UPI article "Enraged pet owners curse cemetery owners", 7/9/91 %% a blast from the past %% a blunt instrument %% a boon to the world %% a boring but secure job %% a cash machine %% a couple of homeboys %% a crime punishable by death %% a daring juxtaposition of natural forms %% a dark tunnel of fear %% a date with elvis %% a fine pilsner %% a fortune in radioactive scrap %% a great curve %% a higher yet lower reality %% a jubilee %% a killing machine %% a large consulting fee %% a lavish buffet %% a level 25 player casts like crazy! %% a major blow %% a martyr to fashion %% a minimalist homeboy %% a misguided tour %% a motley crue %% a natural rock formation %% a new direction %% a new way %% a pair of size 9 capri pants %% a patio of fun %% a perennial favorite %% a popular swimsuit %% a positive boon %% a quick learner %% a rebel against everything %% a repo man seeks them out %% a rich man's folly %% a romance of many dimensions %% a scary alarm clock %% a sea of rotting sunshine %% a self-perpetuating fascist state that will last to the end of humanity %% a serious sight %% a smoking hip hop go go rock 'n' roll jam %% a standardized UNIX will be a broken UNIX. -- jason downs downsj@csos.orst.edu %% a sudden force %% a supposedly true story from: Bermant, G. (1976). Sexual behavior: Hard times with the Coolidge Effect. In M. H. Siegel & H. P. Zeigler (Eds.), /Psychological Research: The inside story/ (pp. 76-103). New York: Harper & Row. One day the President and Mrs. Coolidge were visiting a government farm. Soon after their arrival they were taken off on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken pens she paused to ask the man in charge if the rooster copulates more than once each day. "Dozens of times," was the reply. "Please tell that to the President," Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the President passed the pens and was told about the roosters, he asked "Same hen every time?" "Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time." The President nodded slowly, then said, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge." %% a taste of mischief %% a toy theatre %% a triumph of technology %% a virtual monopoly %% a whole new lifestyle %% a wicked good time %% abbrev: /*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ n. Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% above the bar and ends in a hand grip. The pole is positioned above the stone channel in the floor. The pole at the center of the bar extends from the ceiling through the bar to the circular area in the stone channel. The bottom end of this pole has a T-bar a bit less than two feet long attached to it. On the T-bar is carved an arrow. The arrow and T-bar are pointing #. %% abracadabra %% acausal connection %% accepted symbols %% accident %% accidents never happen %% accumulator: n. 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for `register' is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in `A' derive from historical use of the term `accumulator' (and not, actually, from `arithmetic'). Confusingly, though, an `A' register name prefix may also stand for `address', as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. "The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator." 3. One's in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). "You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator." (See {stack}.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% achieve time control %% across the abyss %% action packed %% ad-hockery: /ad-hok'*r-ee/ [Purdue] n. 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a program knows how to spell. 2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to {choke}, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called `ad-hackery', `ad-hocity' (/ad-hos'*-tee/), `ad-crockery'. See also {ELIZA effect}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% adding up column after column of meaningless numbers %% adger: /aj'r/ [UCLA] vt. To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with a slight amount of mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Compare {dumbass attack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% admin: /ad-min'/ n. Short for `administrator'; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include `sysadmin' and `site admin' (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Compare {postmaster}, {sysop}, {system mangler}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% adventures in the mire %% afro-psychedelic-latin %% afterburp (ah-ftur-berp) n.: residual, highly acidic taste persisting in the mouth following a bout of either regurgitation or "yurk"ing (which See) %% afternoon delight %% agent orange %% agnostic front %% ain't no thang %% ain't superstitious %% ain't that love %% ain't that peculiar %% ain't this the life %% airplane rule: n. "Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness (see also {KISS Principle}). It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really *good* basket. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% albino slug %% aliasing bug: n. A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via `malloc(3)' or equivalent. If more than one pointer addresses (`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the allocation history of the malloc {arena}. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core. Also avoidable by use of higher-level languages, such as {LISP}, which employ a garbage collector (see {GC}). Also called a {stale pointer bug}. See also {precedence lossage}, {smash the stack}, {fandango on core}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {overrun screw}, {spam}. Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% all hail to thee %% all have names containing seven letters %% all i want is the truth %% all new adventures %% all the answers %% all this fuckin' pent-up shit %% all-elbows: adj. Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such as the N pop-up calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on {BBS} systems: unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs may also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt. See {rude}, also {mess-dos}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ally wacko %% alpha particles: n. See {bit rot}. %% alps: cries for assistance, most commonly heard in alpine areas of great britain. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% alt bit: /awlt bit/ [from alternate] adj. See {meta bit}. %% alt: /awlt/ 1. n. The alt shift key on an IBM PC or {clone}. 2. n. The `clover' or `Command' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also {feature key}). Some Mac hackers, confusingly, reserve `alt' for the Option key. 3. n.obs. [PDP-10; often capitalized to ALT] Alternate name for the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011), after the keycap labeling on some older terminals. Also `altmode' (/awlt'mohd/). This character was almost never pronounced `escape' on an ITS system, in {TECO}, or under TOPS-10 --- always alt, as in "Type alt alt to end a TECO command" or "alt-U onto the system" (for "log onto the [ITS] system"). This was probably because alt is more convenient to say than `escape', especially when followed by another alt or a character (or another alt *and* a character, for that matter). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% although totally blind %% always open %% always walks backwards %% am i having fun %% am i physically here %% am i re-elected yet %% amaze your friends %% america the beautiful %% american farmboy %% american waste %% amid the desolation, you spot what appears to be your head, tastefully impaled on the end of a long pole. %% amoeba: n. Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% amp off: [Purdue] vt. To run in {background}. From the UNIX shell `&' operator. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% amper: n. Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (`&', ASCII 0100110) character. See {{ASCII}} for other synonyms. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% an amusing trifle %% an atomic beast %% an explosion of percussion %% an inherently bogus religion %% an inherently contradictory religion that will condone megadegeneracy %% an ontological statement utilizing minimal ideograms %% anarchy burger %% anchors away %% and being for the moment sated, throws it back. Fortunately, the troll has poor control, and the knife falls on the floor. He does not look pleased. %% and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. -- William Shakespeare %% and i'm your tour guide %% and let's meet her new opponent %% and no one else wanted to play %% and no trace of him was ever found %% and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it. %% and now, the premptory visual one: Hold your index fingers to your temples and make a low humming sound.... %% and refused to leave the spot %% and the fire will rain down from the sky %% and the temperature's starting to drop now %% and there's a reason %% and this too shall come to pass %% angle brackets: n. Either of the characters `<' (ASCII 0111100) and `>' (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). The {Real World} angle brackets used by typographers are actually taller than a less-than or greater-than sign. See {broket}, {{ASCII}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% angry fruit salad: n. A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. This derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad. Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color window systems such as {X}; there is a tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% angry red planet %% annnywaaay. bullets don't kill people, guns don't either, the mafia does. %% another generation %% another state of mind %% anti scrunti faction %% antisesquipedalial - opposed to the use of large words %% anything anything %% apocalypse now %% apocolyptionomy %% apostrophy: when your apostrophe atrophies. -- David Bedno, drseuss@gorn.santa-cruz.CA.US %% app: /ap/ n. Short for `application program', as opposed to a systems program. What systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes. Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though a user would consider all those to be apps. Oppose {tool}, {operating system}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% appeared in an inverted position in the sky %% apply to infested area %% appointed to be read in churches %% arc wars: [primarily MSDOS] n. {holy wars} over which archiving program one should use. The first arc war was sparked when System Enhancement Associates (SEA) sued PKWare for copyright and trademark infringement on its ARC program. PKWare's PKARC outperformed ARC on both compression and speed while largely retaining compatibility (it introduced a new compression type that could be disabled for backward-compatibility). PKWare settled out of court to avoid enormous legal costs (both SEA and PKWare are small companies); as part of the settlement, the name of PKARC was changed to PKPAK. The public backlash against SEA for bringing suit helped to hasten the demise of ARC as a standard when PKWare and others introduced new, incompatible archivers with better compression algorithms. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% arc: [primarily MSDOS] vt. To create a compressed {archive} from a group of files using SEA ARC, PKWare PKARC, or a compatible program. Rapidly becoming obsolete as the ARC compression method is falling into disuse, having been replaced by newer compression techniques. See {tar and feather}, {zip}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% archive: n. 1. A collection of several files bundled into one file by a program such as `ar(1)', `tar(1)', `cpio(1)', or {arc} for shipment or archiving (sense 2). See also {tar and feather}. 2. A collection of files or archives (sense 1) made available from an `archive site' via {FTP} or an email server. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% are Vampires afraid of something? %% are alien space monsters bringing a startling new world %% are you a virgin? not yet. %% are you abnormal? %% are you stoned or juck naturally wacko %% arena: [UNIX] n. The area of memory attached to a process by `brk(2)' and `sbrk(2)' and used by `malloc(3)' as dynamic storage. So named from a `malloc: corrupt arena' message emitted when some early versions detected an impossible value in the free block list. See {overrun screw}, {aliasing bug}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {smash the stack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% arg: /arg/ n. Abbreviation for `argument' (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like `piano' from `pianoforte'). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." Compare {param}, {parm}, {var}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% armed citizens %% armor-plated: n. Syn. for {bulletproof}. %% artificial climbing: knack of appearing to climb by talking about it. this technique is best employed far from actual climbing areas, which tend to be hazardous. small taverns and pizza parlours with an impressionable clientele are excellent sites for artificial climbing. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% aryan disgrace %% as real as in the museum %% asbestos cork award: n. Once, long ago at MIT, there was a {flamer} so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the `asbestos cork award'. Persons in any doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under {flame}. Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity --- but there is no agreement on *which* few. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% asbestos longjohns: n. Notional garments often donned by {USENET} posters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicit {flamage}. This is the most common of the {asbestos} coinages. Also `asbestos underwear', `asbestos overcoat', etc. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% asbestos: adj. Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from {flame}s. Important cases of this include {asbestos longjohns} and {asbestos cork award}, but it is used more generally. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ascend: the part of a mountaineer opposite that on which the head is located. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% assorted colors %% at my job %% at the mere sight of milk or cheese %% at the movies %% attack from behind %% attacked by rats %% attoparsec: n. `atto-' is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 * 10^(-18) light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/{microfortnight} equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See {micro-}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% autobogotiphobia: /aw'to-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ n. See {bogotify}. %% automagically: /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ or /aw-toh-maj'i-k*l-ee/ adv. Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See {magic}. "The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes `cc(1)' to produce an executable." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% available everywhere %% avatar: [CMU, Tektronix] n. Syn. {root}, {superuser}. There are quite a few UNIX machines on which the name of the superuser account is `avatar' rather than `root'. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who disliked the term `superuser', and was propagated through an ex-CMU hacker at Tektronix. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% avert the rupture of the equilibrium %% avoid opening doors. you never know whats on the other side. %% awk: 1. n. [UNIX techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name is from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also {Perl}. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal {regexp} facilities (for example, one containing a {newline}). 3. vt. To process data using `awk(1)'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% back door: n. A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for this is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. The infamous {RTM} worm of late 1988, for example, used a back door in the {BSD} UNIX `sendmail(8)' utility. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early UNIX versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him. Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to *use* the compiler --- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would *recognize when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry --- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources, leaving his back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as "Reflections on Trusting Trust", `Communications of the ACM 27', 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763. Syn. {trap door}; may also be called a `wormhole'. See also {iron box}, {cracker}, {worm}, {logic bomb}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% back in Palo Alto!" G.b.t.c. looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're *in* Palo Alto!" JONL turned slowly around, and saw the three of us collapse in a fit of giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, "I've been hacked!" %% backbone cabal: n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the {Great Renaming} and reined in the chaos of {USENET} during most of the 1980s. The cabal {mailing list} disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight, but the net hardly noticed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% backbone site: n. A key USENET and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the USENET maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1991 include uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare {rib site}, {leaf site}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% backgammon:: See {bignum}, {moby}, and {pseudoprime}. %% background: n.,adj.,vt. To do a task `in background' is to do it whenever {foreground} matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and `to background' something means to relegate it to a lower priority. "For now, we'll just print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on the graph-printing problem in background." Note that this implies ongoing activity but at a reduced level or in spare time, in contrast to mainstream `back burner' (which connotes benign neglect until some future resumption of activity). Some people prefer to use the term for processing that they have queued up for their unconscious minds (a tack that one can often fruitfully take upon encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare {amp off}, {slopsucker}. Technically, a task running in background is detached from the terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower priority); oppose {foreground}. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with {{UNIX}}, but it appears to have been first used in this sense on OS/360. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% backspace and overstrike: interj. Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said or did something wrong. Common among APL programmers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% backups: always in season, never out of style. %% backward combatability: /bak'w*rd k*m-bat'*-bil'*-tee/ [from `backward compatibility'] n. A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, and layouts are discarded in favor of `new and improved' protocols, formats, and layouts. Occurs usually when making the transition between major releases. When the change is so drastic that the old formats are not retained in the new version, it is said to be `backward combatable'. See {flag day}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bad block %% bag on the side: n. An extension to an established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product is ugly, inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase, `to hang a bag on the side [of]'. "C++? That's just a bag on the side of C ...." "They want me to hang a bag on the side of the accounting system." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bagbiter: /bag'bi:t-*r/ n. 1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: {loser}, {cretin}, {chomper}. 3. adj. `bagbiting' Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number." Compare {losing}, {cretinous}, {bletcherous}, `barfucious' (under {barfulous}) and `chomping' (under {chomp}). 4. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag." The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to the scrotum, but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized. A program called Lexiphage on the old MIT AI PDP-10 would draw on a selected victim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG" in ornate letters, and then a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off. This is the first and to date only known example of a program *intended* to be a bagbiter. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% balling up: (1) transforming crampons into short skis. (2) fun and games at increasingly higher altitudes. both are possible at the same time, but difficult. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% bamf: /bamf/ 1. [from old X-Men comics] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in {virtual reality} (esp. {MUD}) electronic {fora} when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit. 2. The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality {fora} like sense 1. 3. [from `Don Washington's Survival Guide'] n. Acronym for `Bad-Ass Mother Fucker', used to refer to one of the handful of nastiest monsters on an LPMUD or other similar MUD. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% banana label: n. The labels often used on the sides of {macrotape} reels, so called because they are shaped roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves, is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% banana problem: n. [from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell `banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare {fencepost error}). One may say `there is a banana problem' of an algorithm with poorly defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also {creeping elegance}, {creeping featuritis}). See item 176 under {HAKMEM}, which describes a banana problem in a {Dissociated Press} implementation. Also, see {one-banana problem} for a superficially similar but unrelated usage. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bandwidth: n. 1. Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing graphics, but I missed some of the detail --- not enough bandwidth, I guess." Compare {low-bandwidth}. 2. Attention span. 3. On {USENET}, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bang on: vt. To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: "I banged on the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't crash once. I guess it is ready for release." The term {pound on} is synonymous. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bang path: n. An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each {hop} is signified by a {bang} sign. Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox. In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths from *several* big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See {{Internet address}}, {network, the}, and {sitename}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bang: 1. n. Common spoken name for `!' (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a {bang path} in spoken hackish. In {elder days} this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers preferring {excl} or {shriek}; but the spread of UNIX has carried `bang' with it (esp. via the term {bang path}) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for `!'. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic written `!'; one would not say "Congratulations bang" (except possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to specify the exact characters `foo!' one would speak "Eff oh oh bang". See {shriek}, {{ASCII}}. 2. interj. An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!" Often used to acknowledge that one has perpetrated a {thinko} immediately after one has been called on it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% banner: n. 1. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see {spool}). Typically includes user or account ID information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a `burst page', because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's printout from the next. 2. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as UNIX's `banner({1,6})'. 3. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bar-tacking: sideways veering when approaching or leaving a mountain tavern. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% bar: /bar/ n. 1. The second {metasyntactic variable}, after {foo} and before {baz}. "Suppose we have two functions: FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR...." 2. Often appended to {foo} to produce {foobar}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bare metal: n. 1. New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an {operating system}, an {HLL}, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work of {bit bashing} needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. 2. `Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a style of {hand-hacking} that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions (or, as in the famous case described in {The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer} (in {appendix A}), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become less common as the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems. See {Real Programmer}. In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often considered a {Good Thing}, or at least a necessary evil (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary; see {ill-behaved}). There, the term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS interface and writing the application to directly access device registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who can do this sort of thing are held in high regard. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% barf: /barf/ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit'] 1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Val\-speak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See {bletch}. 2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he literally vomited. 3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input. May mean to give an error message. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." (That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing out the old one." See {choke}, {gag}. In Commonwealth hackish, `barf' is generally replaced by `puke' or `vom'. {barf} is sometimes also used as a {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo} or {bar}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% barfmail: n. Multiple {bounce message}s accumulating to the level of serious annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% barfulation: /bar`fyoo-lay'sh*n/ interj. Variation of {barf} used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% barfulous: /bar'fyoo-l*s/ adj. (alt. `barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% barney: n. In Commonwealth hackish, `barney' is to {fred} (sense #1) as {bar} is to {foo}. That is, people who commonly use `fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often use `barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% barometer: scientific instrument used to locate mountain taverns. see brake bar. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% baroque: adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output. Now *that* is baroque!" See also {rococo}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% base address n. Low-rent accommodation of the kind frequented by operators, application programmers, and other no-collar workers. Even cheaper accommodation is possible - a relative address - if you have an aunt or an uncle living in the area. %% bashie: climber who pendulums out of control. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% batch: adj. 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as `batch mode' switches. A `batch file' is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode. 2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting. "I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all those bills; I guess they'll turn the electricity back on next week..." 3. Accumulation of a number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater efficiency. "I'm batching up those letters to send sometime" "I'm batching up bottles to take to the recycling center." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bathtub curve: n. Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time: initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it `tires out'. See also {burn-in period}, {infant mortality}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% baud barf: /bawd barf/ n. The garbage one gets on the monitor when using a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp. line speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice extension on the same line, or when really bad line noise disrupts the connection. Baud barf is not completely {random}, by the way; hackers with a lot of serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the other end is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal is set to. *Really* experienced ones can identify particular speeds. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% baud: /bawd/ [simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical meaning is `level transitions per second'; this coincides with bps only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them. %% baud: /bawd/ [simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical meaning is `level transitions per second'; this coincides with bps only for two-level modulation with no framing or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them. Historical note: this was originally a unit of telegraph signalling speed, set at one pulse per second. It was proposed at the International Telegraph Conference of 1927, and named after J. M. E. Baudot (1845--1903), the French engineer who constructed the first successful teleprinter. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% baz: /baz/ [Stanford: corruption of {bar}] n. 1. The third metasyntactic variable, after {foo} and {bar} and before {quux} (or, occasionally, `qux'; or local idiosyncracies like `rag', `zowie', etc.). "Suppose we have three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls BAZ...." 2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/. 3. Occasionally appended to {foo} to produce `foobaz'. %% baz: /baz/ n. 1. The third {metasyntactic variable} "Suppose we have three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls BAZ...." (See also {fum}) 2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/. 3. Occasionally appended to {foo} to produce `foobaz'. Earlier versions of this lexicon derived `baz' as a Stanford corruption of {bar}. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the {TMRC} lexicon) reports it was already current when he joined TMRC in 1958. He says "It came from `Pogo'. Albert the Alligator, when vexed or outraged, would shout `Bazz Fazz!' or `Rowrbazzle!' The club layout was said to model the (mythical) New England counties of Rowrfolk and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with (Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex)." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bboard: /bee'bord/ [contraction of `bulletin board'] n. 1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of {BBS} systems running on personal micros, less frequently of a USENET {newsgroup} (in fact, use of the term for a newsgroup generally marks one either as a {newbie} fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating USENET). 2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards. 3. The term `physical bboard' is sometimes used to refer to a old-fashioned, non-electronic cork memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge. In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or `market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% be sure to pay your taxes %% beam: [from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"] vt. To transfer {softcopy} of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as `beam me a copy' or `beam that over to his site'. Compare {blast}, {snarf}, {BLT}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% beanie key: [Mac users] n. See {command key}. %% bearing, true: opposite of bearing, false. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% became {{UNIX}}. Less than 9 years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still {feep}ing in video arcades everywhere. %% beep: n.,v. Syn. {feep}. This term seems to be preferred among micro hobbyists. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% beige toaster: n. A Macintosh. See {toaster}; compare {Macintrash}, {maggotbox}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bells and whistles: [by analogy with the toyboxes on theater organs] n. Features added to a program or system to make it more {flavorful} from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished from {chrome}, which is intended to attract users. "Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add some bells and whistles." No one seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a whistle. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bells, whistles, and gongs: n. A standard elaborated form of {bells and whistles}; typically said with a pronounced and ironic accent on the `gongs'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% benchmark: [techspeak] n. An inaccurate measure of computer performance. "In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone, Rhealstone (see {h}), the Gabriel LISP benchmarks (see {gabriel}), the SPECmark suite, and LINPACK. See also {machoflops}, {MIPS}, {smoke and mirrors}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% berklix: /berk'liks/ n.,adj. [contraction of `Berkeley UNIX'] See {BSD}. Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more common among {suit}s attempting to sound like cognoscenti than among hackers, who usually just say `BSD'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% berserking: vi. A {MUD} term meaning to gain points *only* by killing other players and mobiles (non-player characters). Hence, a Berserker-Wizard is a player character that has achieved enough points to become a wizard, but only by killing other characters. Berserking is sometimes frowned upon because of its inherently antisocial nature, but some MUDs have a `berserker mode' in which a player becomes *permanently* berserk, can never flee from a fight, cannot use magic, gets no score for treasure, but does get double kill points. "Berserker wizards can seriously damage your elf!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% beta: /bay't*/, /be't*/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't*/ n. 1. In the {Real World}, software often goes through two stages of testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Software is said to be `in beta'. 2. Anything that is new and experimental is in beta. "His girlfriend is in beta" means that he is still testing for compatibility and reserving judgment. 3. Beta software is notoriously buggy, so `in beta' connotes flakiness. Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was the unit, module, or component test phase; `Beta Test' was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% better !pout !cry better watchout lpr why santa claus town cat /etc/passwd >list ncheck list ncheck list cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist cat list | grep nice >giftlist santa claus town who | grep sleeping who | grep awake who | egrep 'bad|good' for (goodness sake) { be good } %% beware of the gusher! %% bible: n. 1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as {Knuth} and {K&R}. 2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a particular language, operating system, or other complex software system. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% biff: /bif/ vt. To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility `biff(1)', which was in turn named after a friendly golden Labrador who used to chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development (it had a well-known habit of barking whenever the mailman came). No relation to {BIFF}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% biff: /bif/ vt. To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility `biff(1)', which was in turn named after the implementor's dog (it barked whenever the mailman came). No relation to {BIFF}. %% big iron: n. Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of {number-crunching} supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare {heavy metal}, oppose {dinosaur}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% big win: n. Serendipity. "Yes, those two physicists discovered high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that had been prepared incorrectly according to their experimental schedule. Small mistake; big win!" See {win big}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% big-endian: [From Swift's `Gulliver's Travels' via the famous paper `On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace' by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980] adj. 1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the {PDP-10}, the Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs current in mid-1991, are big-endian. See {little-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}. 2. An {{Internet address}} the wrong way round. Most of the world follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking Team had decided to do it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was established; e.g., me@uk.ac.wigan.cs. Most gateway sites have {ad-hockery} in their mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular, the address above could be in the U.K. (domain uk) or Czechoslovakia (domain cs). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bignum: /big'nuhm/ [orig. from MIT MacLISP] n. 1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation for very large integers. More generally, any very large number. "Have you ever looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!" 2. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice are called `bignums', especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare {moby}, sense 4). See also {El Camino Bignum}. Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages provide a kind of data called `integer', but such computer integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be smaller than than 2^(31) (2,147,483,648) or (on a losing {bitty box}) 2^(15) (32,768). If you want to work with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-point numbers, which are usually accurate to only six or seven decimal places. Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1). For example, this value for 1000! was computed by the MacLISP system using bignums: 40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071 46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048 00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669 94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950 59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910 56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476 63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241 74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791 43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534 52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155 86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785 89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151 02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126 48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215 66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975 60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535 34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394 50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200 01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317 81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760 88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780 88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403 12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565 81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786 90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614 39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665 26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348 34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946 59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272 24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657 24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756 55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623 77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446 64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179 97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459 01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819 37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013 74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233 44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278 28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355 42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988 25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994 87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018 21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636 77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230 56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577 79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bigot: n. A person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see {religious issues}). Usually found with a specifier; thus, `cray bigot', `ITS bigot', `APL bigot', `VMS bigot', `Berkeley bigot'. True bigots can be distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that they refuse to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or technology is threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is said "You can tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much." Compare {weenie}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% binding: discomfort caused by tight undergarments. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% bit bang: n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit at the appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more interesting. And full duplex (doing input and output at the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the {wannabee}s. Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with a Zilog PIO but no SIO. In an interesting instance of the {cycle of reincarnation}, this technique is now (1991) coming back into use on some RISC architectures because it consumes such an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense not to have a UART. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bit bashing: n. (alt. `bit diddling' or {bit twiddling}) Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of {bit}, {flag}, {nybble}, and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; these include low-level device control, encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see {bitblt}), and assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real technical challenge (more usually the former). "The command decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See also {bit bang}, {mode bit}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bit bucket: n. 1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have `gone to the bit bucket'. On {{UNIX}}, often used for {/dev/null}. Sometimes amplified as `the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'. 2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to {Finagle's Law}; important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network. 3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail responses: "Flames about this article to the bit bucket." Such a request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those figures last week; they must have ended in the bit bucket." Compare {black hole}. This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term `bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers also report that trainees used to be told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them `out of the bit box'. See also {chad box}. Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the `parity preservation law', the number of 1 bits that go to the bit bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bit decay: n. See {bit rot}. People with a physics background tend to prefer this one for the analogy with particle decay. See also {computron}, {quantum bogodynamics}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bit rot: n. Also {bit decay}. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled. There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the {cosmic rays} entry for details. The term {software rot} is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bit twiddling: n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see {tune}) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code has become incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal. 3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bit-paired keyboard: n. obs. (alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see {EOU}), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed. In order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: high low bits bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001 010 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This was *not* the weirdest variant of the {QWERTY} layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as `bit-paired' and `typewriter-paired' keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical --- and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The `typewriter-paired' standard became universal, `bit-paired' hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bit: [from the mainstream meaning and `Binary digIT'] n. 1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information obtained by asking a yes-or-no question for which the two outcomes are equally probable. 2. [techspeak] A computational quantity that can take on one of two values, such as true and false or 0 and 1. 3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done eventually. "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.) 4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental state of belief. "I have a bit set that says that you were the last guy to hack on EMACS." (Meaning "I think you were the last guy to hack on EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on this, so please stop me if this isn't true.") "I just need one bit from you" is a polite way of indicating that you intend only a short interruption for a question that can presumably be answered yes or no. A bit is said to be `set' if its value is true or 1, and `reset' or `clear' if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and clearing bits. To {toggle} or `invert' a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also {flag}, {trit}, {mode bit}. The term `bit' first appeared in print in the computer-science sense in 1949, and seems to have been coined by early computer scientist John Tukey. Tukey records that it evolved over a lunch table as a handier alternative to `bigit' or `binit'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bitblt: /bit'blit/ n. [from {BLT}, q.v.] 1. Any of a family of closely related algorithms for moving and copying rectangles of bits between main and display memory on a bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either main or display memory (the requirement to do the {Right Thing} in the case of overlapping source and destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt tricky). 2. Synonym for {blit} or {BLT}. Both uses are borderline techspeak. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bits: n.pl. 1. Information. Examples: "I need some bits about file formats." ("I need to know about file formats.") Compare {core dump}, sense 4. 2. Machine-readable representation of a document, specifically as contrasted with paper: "I have only a photocopy of the Jargon File; does anyone know where I can get the bits?". See {softcopy}, {source of all good bits} See also {bit}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bitty box: /bit'ee boks/ n. 1. A computer sufficiently small, primitive, or incapable as to cause a hacker acute claustrophobia at the thought of developing software on or for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal machines such as the Atari 800, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or IBM PC. 2. [Pejorative] More generally, the opposite of `real computer' (see {Get a real computer!}). See also {mess-dos}, {toaster}, and {toy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bixie: /bik'see/ n. Variant {emoticon}s used on BIX (the Byte Information eXchange). The {smiley} bixie is <@_@>, apparently intending to represent two cartoon eyes and a mouth. A few others have been reported. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% black art: n. A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area (compare {black magic}). VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black art; as theory developed they became {deep magic}, and once standard textbooks had been written, became merely {heavy wizardry}. The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related technologies during the last twenty years has made both the term `black art' and what it describes less common than formerly. See also {voodoo programming}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% black hole: n. When a piece of email or netnews disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a {bounce message}) it is commonly said to have `fallen into a black hole'. "I think there's a black hole at foovax!" conveys suspicion that site foovax has been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see {drop on the floor}). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar travel is interesting in itself. Compare {bit bucket}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% black magic: n. A technique that works, though nobody really understands why. More obscure than {voodoo programming}, which may be done by cookbook. Compare also {black art}, {deep magic}, and {magic number} (sense 2). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blargh: /blarg/ [MIT] n. The opposite of {ping}, sense 5; an exclamation indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a quantum of unhappiness. Less common than {ping}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blast: 1. vt.,n. Synonym for {BLT}, used esp. for large data sends over a network or comm line. Opposite of {snarf}. Usage: uncommon. The variant `blat' has been reported. 2. vt. [HP/Apollo] Synonymous with {nuke} (sense 3). Sometimes the message `Unable to kill all processes. Blast them (y/n)?' would appear in the command window upon logout. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blat: n. 1. Syn. {blast}, sense 1. 2. See {thud}. %% blaze: unexpected result of overpriming a white gas stove. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% bletch: /blech/ [from Yiddish/German `brechen', to vomit, poss. via comic-strip exclamation `blech'] interj. Term of disgust. Often used in "Ugh, bletch". Compare {barf}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bletcherous: /blech'*-r*s/ adj. Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing. This word is seldom used of people. "This keyboard is bletcherous!" (Perhaps the keys don't work very well, or are misplaced.) See {losing}, {cretinous}, {bagbiter}, {bogus}, and {random}. The term {bletcherous} applies to the esthetics of the thing so described; similarly for {cretinous}. By contrast, something that is `losing' or `bagbiting' may be failing to meet objective criteria. See also {bogus} and {random}, which have richer and wider shades of meaning than any of the above. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blinkenlights: /blink'*n-li:tz/ n. Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a {dinosaur}. Derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows: ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten. This silliness dates back at least as far as 1959 at Stanford University and had already gone international by the early 1960s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word `blinkenlights'. In an amusing example of turnabout-is-fair-play, German hackers have developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster in fractured English, one of which is reproduced here: ATTENTION This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment. Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only! So all the "lefthanders" stay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights. See also {geef}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blit: /blit/ vt. 1. To copy a large array of bits from one part of a computer's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is being used to determine what is shown on a display screen. "The storage allocator picks through the table and copies the good parts up into high memory, and then blits it all back down again." See {bitblt}, {BLT}, {dd}, {cat}, {blast}, {snarf}. More generally, to perform some operation (such as toggling) on a large array of bits while moving them. 2. Sometimes all-capitalized as `BLIT': an early experimental bit-mapped terminal designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T 5620. (The folk etymology from `Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal' is incorrect. Its creators liked to claim that "Blit" stood for the Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blitter: /blit'r/ n. A special-purpose chip or hardware system built to perform {blit} operations, esp. used for fast implementation of bit-mapped graphics. The Commodore Amiga and a few other micros have these, but in 1991 the trend is away from them (however, see {cycle of reincarnation}). Syn. {raster blaster}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blivet: /bliv'*t/ [allegedly from a World War II military term meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"] n. 1. An intractable problem. 2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks. 3. A tool that has been hacked over by so many incompetent programmers that it has become an unmaintainable tissue of hacks. 4. An out-of-control but unkillable development effort. 5. An embarrassing bug that pops up during a customer demo. 6. In the subjargon of computer security specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed by hogging limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared spool space on a multi-user system). This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to hackish use of {frob}). It has also been used to describe an amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes that the parts fit together in an impossible way. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blkdev devtab IO err in swap %% block transfer computations: n. From the television series "Dr. Who", in which it referred to computations so fiendishly subtle and complex that they could not be performed by machines. Used to refer to any task that should be expressible as an algorithm in theory, but isn't. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% block: [from process scheduling terminology in OS theory] 1. vi. To delay or sit idle while waiting for something. "We're blocking until everyone gets here." Compare {busy-wait}. 2. `block on' vt. To block, waiting for (something). "Lunch is blocked on Phil's arrival." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blood: substance commonly used to mark a climbing route. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% blow an EPROM: /bloh *n ee'prom/ v. (alt. `blast an EPROM', `burn an EPROM') To program a read-only memory, e.g. for use with an embedded system. This term arises because the programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROMs) that preceded present-day Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories (EPROMs) involved intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the chip. Thus, one was said to `blow' (or `blast') a PROM, and the terminology carried over even though the write process on EPROMs is nondestructive. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blow away: vt. To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally by accident. "He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last night's netnews." Oppose {nuke}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blow out: vi. Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as {crash and burn}. See {blow past}, {blow up}, {die horribly}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blow past: vt. To {blow out} despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K reserve buffer." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blow up: vi. 1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at least go {nonlinear}. 2. Syn. {blow out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blue goo: n. Term for `police' {nanobot}s intended to prevent {gray goo}, denature hazardous waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the stratosphere, prevent halitosis, and promote truth, justice, and the American way, etc. See {{nanotechnology}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blue wire: [IBM] n. Patch wires added to circuit boards at the factory to correct design or fabrication problems. This may be necessary if there hasn't been time to design and qualify another board version. Compare {purple wire}, {red wire}, {yellow wire}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% blurgle: /bler'gl/ [Great Britain] n. Spoken {metasyntactic variable}, to indicate some text which is obvious from context, or which is already known. If several words are to be replaced, blurgle may well be doubled or trebled. "To look for something in several files use `grep string blurgle blurgle'." In each case, "blurgle blurgle" would be understood to be replaced by the file you wished to search. Compare {mumble}, sense 6. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boa: [IBM] n. Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a {dinosaur pen}. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some time. It is rumored within IBM that channel cables for the 370 are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous --- and it is worth noting that one of the major cable makers uses the trademark `Anaconda'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% board: n. 1. In-context synonym for {bboard}; sometimes used even for USENET newsgroups. 2. An electronic circuit board (compare {card}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boat anchor: n. 1. Like {doorstop} but more severe; implies that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. "That was a working motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat anchor!" 2. A person who just takes up space. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogo-sort: /boh`goh-sort'/ n. (var. `stupid-sort') The archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as opposed to {bubble sort}, which is merely the generic *bad* algorithm). Bogo-sort is equivalent to repeatedly throwing a deck of cards in the air, picking them up at random, and then testing whether they are in order. It serves as a sort of canonical example of awfulness. Looking at a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one might say "Oh, I see, this program uses bogo-sort." Compare {bogus}, {brute force}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogometer: /boh-gom'-*t-er/ n. See {bogosity}. Compare the `wankometer' described in the {wank} entry; see also {bogus}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogon filter: /boh'gon fil'tr/ n. Any device, software or hardware, that limits or suppresses the flow and/or emission of bogons. "Engineering hacked a bogon filter between the Cray and the VAXen, and now we're getting fewer dropped packets." See also {bogosity}, {bogus}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogon flux: /boh'gon fluhks/ n. A measure of a supposed field of {bogosity} emitted by a speaker, measured by a {bogometer}; as a speaker starts to wander into increasing bogosity a listener might say "Warning, warning, bogon flux is rising". See {quantum bogodynamics}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogon: /boh'gon/ [by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons'; see the Bibliography in {appendix C}] n. 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see {quantum bogodynamics}). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion. 2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit. 3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network. 4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon". 5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its derivative senses 1--4. See also {bogosity}, {bogus}; compare {psyton}, {fat electrons}, {magic smoke}. The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce particle names, including the `clutron' or `cluon' (indivisible particle of cluefulness, obviously the antiparticle of the bogon) and the futon (elementary particle of {randomness}). These are not so much live usages in themselves as examples of a live meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard joke or linguistic maneuver to "explain" otherwise mysterious circumstances by inventing nonce particle names. And these imply nonce particle theories, with all their dignity or lack thereof (we might note *parenthetically* that this is a generalization from "(bogus particle) theories" to "bogus (particle theories)"!). Perhaps such particles are the modern-day equivalents of trolls and wood-nymphs as standard starting-points around which to construct explanatory myths. Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the `futon') yields additional flavor. Compare {magic smoke}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogon: /boh'gon/ [by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons'; see the Bibliography] n. 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see {quantum bogodynamics}). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion. 2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit. 3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network. 4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon". 5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its derivative senses 1--4. See also {bogosity}, {bogus}; compare {psyton}. %% bogosity: /boh-go's*-tee/ n. 1. The degree to which something is {bogus}. At CMU, bogosity is measured with a {bogometer}; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say "My bogometer just triggered". More extremely, "You just pinned my bogometer" means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say "You just redlined my bogometer"). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat /mi:k`roh-len'*t/ (uL). The consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. 2. The potential field generated by a {bogon flux}; see {quantum bogodynamics}. See also {bogon flux}, {bogon filter}, {bogus}. Historical note: The microLenat was invented as an attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a {tenured graduate student}. Doug had failed the student on an important exam for giving only "AI is bogus" as his answer to the questions. The slur is generally considered unmerited, but it has become a running gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends argue that *of course* a microLenat is bogus, since it is only one millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be redesignated after the grad student, as the microReid. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogotify: /boh-go't*-fi:/ vt. To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has become bogotified and you had better not use it any more. This coinage led to the notional `autobogotiphobia' defined as `the fear of becoming bogotified'; but is not clear that the latter has ever been `live' jargon rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon about jargon. See also {bogosity}, {bogus}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogue out: /bohg owt/ vi. To become bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly. "His talk was relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued out and did nothing but {flame} afterwards." See also {bogosity}, {bogus}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bogus: adj. 1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus." 2. Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program." 3. False. "Your arguments are bogus." 4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus." 5. Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus." 6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas." Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of {random} --- mostly the negative ones.) It is claimed that `bogus' was originally used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized (see {autobogotiphobia} under {bogotify}). The word spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. By the early 1980s it was also current in something like the hackish sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast, that these uses of `bogus' grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically, `counterfeit', as in "a bogus 10-pound note". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boink: /boynk/ [USENET: ascribed there to the TV series "Cheers" and "Moonlighting"] 1. To have sex with; compare {bounce}, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant `bonk' is more common. 2. After the original Peter Korn `Boinkon' {USENET} parties, used for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare {@-party}. 3. Var of `bonk'; see {bonk/oif}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bomb: 1. v. General synonym for {crash} (sense 1) except that it is not used as a noun; esp. used of software or OS failures. "Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb." 2. n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a UNIX `panic' or Amiga {guru} (sense 2), where icons of little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Amiga {guru meditation} number. {{MS-DOS}} machines tend to get {locked up} in this situation. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bondage-and-discipline language: A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of `right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated `B&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature". See {{Pascal}}; oppose {languages of choice}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bong: sound made by a climber at the conclusion of a fall. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% bonk/oif: /bonk/, /oyf/ interj. In the {MUD} community, it has become traditional to express pique or censure by `bonking' the offending person. There is a convention that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying `oif!' and a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for bonking and oifing. See also {talk mode}, {posing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boogeroid (booh-gur-oyd) n.: clot of nasal mucous so substantial it must be brought down the back stairs and made to exit via the mouth %% book titles:: There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See {Aluminum Book}, {Blue Book}, {Cinderella Book}, {Devil Book}, {Dragon Book}, {Green Book}, {Orange Book}, {Pink-Shirt Book}, {Purple Book}, {Red Book}, {Silver Book}, {White Book}, {Wizard Book}, {Yellow Book}, and {bible}; see also {rainbow series}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boot-ax belay: highly developed technique for ruining an ice ax, destroying a rope, and shortening a climbing day. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% boot: [techspeak; from `by one's bootstraps'] v.,n. To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon. The derivative `reboot' implies that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a {bounce} intended to clear some state of {wedgitude}. This is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost me." "OK, reboot. Here's the theory...." This term is also found in the variants `cold boot' (from power-off condition) and `warm boot' (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash). Another variant: `soft boot', reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software still running: "If you're running the {mess-dos} emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running." Opposed to this there is `hard boot', which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the machine being booted: "I'll have to hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often hard-boots by performing a {power cycle}. Historical note: this term derives from `bootstrap loader', a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer `pulled itself up by its bootstraps' to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the `boot block'. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bottom feeder: n. syn. for {slopsucker} derived from the fisherman's and naturalist's term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bottom-up implementation: n. Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design'. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to *build* things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boulder: place close to the ground to practice falling. when climbers aren't climbing, they like to sharpen their skills by bouldering on large rocks located in places frequented by impressionable tourists. because bouldering is done without protection, the rule is never to climb higher than you'd like to fall. that is why so many climbers stand around discussing boulder problems instead of climbing them. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% bounce message: [UNIX] n. Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay {email} to the intended {{Internet address}} recipient or the next link in a {bang path} (see {bounce}). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a {down} relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see {sorcerer's apprentice mode}. The terms `bounce mail' and `barfmail' are also common. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bounce: v. 1. [perhaps from the image of a thrown ball bouncing off a wall] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to `bounce'. See also {bounce message}. 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball. At the now-demolished {D. C. Power Lab} building used by the Stanford AI Lab in the 1970s, there was a volleyball court on the front lawn. From 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5 the computer would become unavailable, and over the intercom a voice would cry, "Now hear this: bounce, bounce!" followed by Brian McCune loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of known volleyballers. 3. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob. from the expression `bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Roo's psychosexually loaded "Try bouncing me, Tigger!" from the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books. Compare {boink}. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily among {VMS} users. 5. [VM/CMS programmers] *Automatic* warm-start of a machine after an error. "I logged on this morning and found it had bounced 7 times during the night" 6. [IBM] To {power cycle} a peripheral in order to reset it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boustrophedon: [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] n. An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetter's jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form `boustrophedonically' is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% box: n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box' where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, `UNIX box', `MS-DOS box', etc.) "We preprocess the data on UNIX boxes before handing it up to the mainframe." 2. [within IBM] Without qualification but within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBM {mainframe} to communicate beyond the limits of the {dinosaur pen}. Typically used in expressions like the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks like the {box} has fallen over." (See {fall over}.) See also {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {fepped out}, {Blue Glue}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boxed comments: n. Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something like this: /************************************************* * * This is a boxed comment in C style * *************************************************/ Common variants of this style omit the asterisks in column 2 or add a matching row of asterisks closing the right side of the box. The sparest variant omits all but the comment delimiters themselves; the `box' is implied. Oppose {winged comments}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boxen: /bok'sn/ [by analogy with {VAXen}] pl.n. Fanciful plural of {box} often encountered in the phrase `UNIX boxen', used to describe commodity {{UNIX}} hardware. The connotation is that any two UNIX boxen are interchangeable. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boxology: /bok-sol'*-jee/ n. Syn. {ASCII art}. This term implies a more restricted domain, that of box-and-arrow drawings. "His report has a lot of boxology in it." Compare {macrology}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% boycott - a bed for a young male person %% bozotic: /boh-zoh'tik/ or /boh-zo'tik/ [from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] adj. Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare {wonky}, {demented}. Note that the noun `bozo' occurs in slang, but the mainstream adjectival form would be `bozo-like' or (in New England) `bozoish'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brain damage (core dumped) (mos dumped) (everything dumped) %% brain damage (mos dumped) %% brain dump: n. The act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to an operating system {core dump} in that it saves a lot of useful {state} before an exit. "You'll have to give me a brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp." See {core dump} (sense 4). At Sun, this is also known as `TOI' (transfer of information). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brain fart: n. The actual result of a {braino}, as opposed to the mental glitch which is the braino itself. E.g. typing `dir' on a UNIX box after a session with DOS. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brain-damaged: 1. [generalization of `Honeywell Brain Damage' (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Honeywell {{Multics}}] adj. Obviously wrong; {cretinous}; {demented}. There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident. "Only six monocase characters per file name? Now *that's* brain-damaged!" 2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete with the commercial product it is intended to sell. Syn. {crippleware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brain-dead: adj. Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply terminal design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. "This comm program doesn't know how to send a break --- how brain-dead!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% braino: /bray'no/ n. Syn. for {thinko}. %% brake bar: tavern near a climbing area where everyone stops after a hard day climbing. see barometer. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% branch to Fishkill: [IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities] n. Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See {jump off into never-never land}, {hyperspace}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brand brand brand: n. Humorous catch-phrase from {BartleMUD}s, in which players were described carrying a list of objects, the most common of which would usually be a brand. Often used as a joke in {talk mode} as in "Fred the wizard is here, carrying brand ruby brand brand brand kettle broadsword flamethrower". A brand is a torch, of course; one burns up a lot of those exploring dungeons. Prob. influenced by the famous Monty Python "Spam" skit. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bread crumbs: n. Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit output or log indicators of the program's {state} to a file so you can see where it dies, or pin down the cause of surprising behavior. The term is probably a reference to the Hansel and Gretel story from the Brothers Grimm; in several variants, a character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost in the woods. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% break-even point: n. in the process of implementing a new computer language, the point at which the language is sufficiently effective that one can implement the language in itself. That is, for a new language called, hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has reached break-even when one can write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in FOOGOL, discard the original implementation language, and thereafter use older versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an important milestone; see {MFTL}. [Since this was first written, several correspondents have reported that there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like language called Foogol floating around on various {vaxen} in the early and mid-1980s. The above example may not, after all, be hypothetical. -- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% break: 1. vt. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands." 2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged. The place where it stops is a `breakpoint'. 3. [techspeak] vi. To send an RS-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a serial comm line. 4. [UNIX] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break (sense 3) or delete does this. 5. `break break' may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which in turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze a few years ago. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% breath-of-life packet: [XEROX PARC] n. An Ethernet packet that contained bootstrap (see {boot}) code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the `breath of life' into any computer on the network that had happened to crash. The machines had hardware or firmware that would wait for such a packet after a catastrophic error. %% breath-of-life packet: [XEROX PARC] n. An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap (see {boot}) code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the `breath of life' into any computer on the network that has happened to crash. Machines depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also {dickless workstation}. The `kiss-of-death packet', with a function complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources. This packet, however, is undocumented and perhaps mythical. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% breedle: n. See {feep}. %% bring X to its knees: v. To present a machine, operating system, piece of software, or algorithm with a load so extreme or {pathological} that it grinds to a halt. "To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users running {vi} --- or four running {EMACS}." Compare {hog}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brittle: adj. Said of software that is functional but easily broken by changes in operating environment or configuration, or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to expected external stimuli; e.g., a file system that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but it can be applied to commercially developed software, which displays the quality far more often than it ought to. Oppose {robust}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% broadcast storm: n. An incorrect packet broadcast on a network that causes most hosts to respond all at once, typically with wrong answers that start the process over again. See {network meltdown}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brochureware: n. Planned but non-existent product like {vaporware}, but with the added implication that marketing is actively selling and promoting it (they've printed brochures). Brochureware is often deployed as a strategic weapon; the idea is to con customers into not committing to an existing product of the competition's. It is a safe bet that when a brochureware product finally becomes real, it will be more expensive than and inferior to the alternatives that had been available for years. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% broken arrow: [IBM] n. The error code displayed on line 25 of a 3270 terminal (or a PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of protocol violations and "unexpected" error conditions (including connection to a {down} computer). On a PC, simulated with `->/_', with the two center characters overstruck. In true {luser} fashion, the original documentation of these codes (visible on every 3270 terminal, and necessary for debugging network problems) was confined to an IBM customer engineering manual. Note: to appreciate this term fully, it helps to know that `broken arrow' is also military jargon for an accident involving nuclear weapons.... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% broken: adj. 1. Not working properly (of programs). 2. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people) exhibiting extreme depression. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% broket: /broh'k*t/ or /broh'ket`/ [by analogy with `bracket': a `broken bracket'] n. Either of the characters `<' and `>', when used as paired enclosing delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase `broken bracket', that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and apparently in the {Real World} as well, these are usually called {angle brackets}.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brute force and ignorance: n. A popular design technique at many software houses --- {brute force} coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage it. Characteristic of early {larval stage} programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI: "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from BFI." Compare {bogosity}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% brute force: adj. Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying na"ive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The {canonical} example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the `traveling salesman problem' (TSP), a classical {NP-}hard problem: Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should he or she visit them in order to minimize the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N = 1000 --- well, see {bignum}). See also {NP-}. A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front. Whether brute-force programming should be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem isn't too big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take to develop a more `intelligent' algorithm. Additionally, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement. Ken Thompson, co-inventor of UNIX, is reported to have uttered the epigram "When in doubt, use brute force". He probably intended this as a {ha ha only serious}, but the original UNIX kernel's preference for simple, robust, and portable algorithms over {brittle} `smart' ones does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that OS. Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate esthetic judgment. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bubble memory n. A storage device developed by South Sea Memory Products Inc. The chief advantage of bubbles over floppies is that they cannot be folded by the mailman. Whether bubbles will ever replace the hard disk (which is also beyond the bending power of most postal workers) depends on the relative strength of the semiconductor and metallurgical lobbies. %% bubble sort: n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries `bubble upward' in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by {na"ive} and untutored programmers, hackers consider it the {canonical} example of a na"ive algorithm. The canonical example of a really *bad* algorithm is {bogo-sort}. A bubble sort might be used out of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or willful perversity. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bucket - alternate nomenclature for female deer %% bucky bits: /buh'kee bits/ n. 1. obs. The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard (octal 200 and 400 respectively), resulting in a 9-bit keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP and separate left and right CONTROL and META keys, resulting in a 12-bit character set; later, LISP Machines added such keys as SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see {space-cadet keyboard}). 2. By extension, bits associated with `extra' shift keys on any keyboard, e.g., the ALT on an IBM PC or command and option keys on a Macintosh. It is rumored that `bucky bits' were named for Buckminster Fuller during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually, `Bucky' was Niklaus Wirth's nickname when *he* was at Stanford; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set the 8th bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII character. This was used in a number of editors written at Stanford or in its environs (TV-EDIT and NLS being the best-known). The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general use. See {double bucky}, {quadruple bucky}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% buffer overflow: n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle. This may be due to a mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see {overrun} and {firehose syndrome}), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed. For example, in a text-processing tool that {crunch}es a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in {lossage} as input from a long line overflows the buffer and trashes data beyond it. Good defensive programming would check for overflow on each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is full up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense. "What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must have overflowed." Or "If I answer that phone my buffer is going to overflow." See also {spam}, {overrun screw}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% buffers avail mem = bytes %% bug-compatible: adj. Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with {fossil}s or {misfeature}s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bug-for-bug compatible: n. Same as {bug-compatible}, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bug: n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of {feature}. Examples: "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backwards." "The system crashed because of a hardware bug." "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs" (i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems). Historical note: Some have said this term came from telephone company usage, in which "bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines, but this appears to be an incorrect folk etymology. Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing {COBOL}) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a persistent {glitch} in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated {bug} in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the `Annals of the History of Computing', Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286. The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1945), reads "1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found". This wording seems to establish that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense --- and Hopper herself reports that the term `bug' was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII. Indeed, the use of `bug' to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and `bug' in the sense of an disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of `bug' is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to `bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games. In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: "There is a bug in this ant farm!" "What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it." "That's the bug." [There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late 1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it --- and that the present curator of their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! --- ESR] [1992 update: the plot thickens! A usually reliable source reports having seen The Bug at the Smithsonian in 1978. I am unable to reconcile the conflicting histories I have been offered, and merely report this fact here. --- ESR.] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bugaboos: inordinate fear of mountain insects. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% buglix: /buhg'liks/ n. Pejorative term referring to DEC's ULTRIX operating system in its earlier *severely* buggy versions. Still used to describe ULTRIX, but without venom. Compare {AIDX}, {HP-SUX}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Telerat}, {sun-stools}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bulletproof: adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely {robust}; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition. This is a rare and valued quality. Syn. {armor-plated}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bum: 1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming the interrupt code." In {elder days}, John McCarthy (inventor of {LISP}) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming". 2. To squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this distinguishes the process from a {featurectomy}). 3. n. A small change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by v. {tune} (and n. {tweak}, {hack}), though none of these exactly capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English `bum' is a rude synonym for `buttocks'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bumgulp (buhm-guhlp) v.: to repress, by reabsorption, a passage of gas. Compare: "yurk" %% bump: vt. Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator. Used esp. of counter variables, pointers, and index dummies in `for', `while', and `do-while' loops. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bundled adj. [From the verb bundle "to throw together in haphazard fashion."] Of or relating to an arbitrary collection of software items offered as seen, without charge or warranty, to certain prospects in a competitive environment. Of interest to sociolinguists is the fact that the dp usage of bundled was triggered by the prior introduction of the antonym "unbundled" by IBM the previous day. See Unbundling. %% burble: [from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] v. Like {flame}, but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep contempt. "There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% buried treasure: n. A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not wrong, it tends to vary from {crufty} to {bletcherous}, and has lain undiscovered only because it was functionally correct, however horrible it is. Used sarcastically, because what is found is anything *but* treasure. Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed. "I just found that the scheduler sorts its queue using {bubble sort}! Buried treasure!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% burn-in period: n. 1. A factory test designed to catch systems with {marginal} components before they get out the door; the theory is that burn-in will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the {bathtub curve} (see {infant mortality}). 2. A period of indeterminate length in which a person using a computer is so intensely involved in his project that he forgets basic needs such as food, drink, sleep, etc. Warning: Excessive burn-in can lead to burn-out. See {hack mode}, {larval stage}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% burst page: n. Syn. {banner}, sense 1. %% busy-wait: vi. Used of human behavior, conveys that the subject is busy waiting for someone or something, intends to move instantly as soon as it shows up, and thus cannot do anything else at the moment. "Can't talk now, I'm busy-waiting till Bill gets off the phone." Technically, `busy-wait' means to wait on an event by {spin}ning through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. This is a wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems where a busy-waiting program may {hog} the processor. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% buttress: outer garment specially designed for a woman with a large posterior. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% buzz: vi. 1. Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps without guarantee of ever finishing; esp. said of programs thought to be executing tight loops of code. A program that is buzzing appears to be {catatonic}, but you never get out of catatonia, while a buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. "The program buzzes for about 10 seconds trying to sort all the names into order." See {spin}; see also {grovel}. 2. [ETA Systems] To test a wire or printed circuit trace for continuity by applying an AC rather than DC signal. Some wire faults will pass DC tests but fail a buzz test. 3. To process an array or list in sequence, doing the same thing to each element. "This loop buzzes through the tz array looking for a terminator type." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% by hand: adv. Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial, and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through. "My mailer doesn't have a command to include the text of the message I'm replying to, so I have to do it by hand." This does not necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say, dropping into a {subshell} from the mailer, making a copy of one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor, locating the top and bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting `>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the editor, returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later remembering to delete the file. Compare {eyeball search}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% by the way, both this book and its predecessor are wonderful creations. I recommend them highly (for people that like this sort of thing). -- Ken Balakrishnan %% byte off %% byte:: /bi:t/ [techspeak] n. A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and the PDP-10 supported `bytes' that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2 word sizes. Historical note: The term originated in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The term `byte' was coined by mutating the word `bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled as {bit}. See also {nybble}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bytesexual: /bi:t`sek'shu-*l/ adj. Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either {big-endian} or {little-endian} format (depending, presumably, on a {mode bit} somewhere). See also {NUXI problem}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% bzzzt, wrong: /bzt rong/ [USENET/Internet] From a Robin Williams routine in the movie "Dead Poets Society" spoofing radio or TV quiz programs, such as *Truth or Consequences*, where an incorrect answer earns one a blast from the buzzer and condolences from the interlocutor. A way of expressing mock-rude disagreement, usually immediately following an included quote from another poster. The less abbreviated "*Bzzzzt*, wrong, but thank you for playing" is also common; capitalization and emphasis of the buzzer sound varies. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cache: (1) pocket money. (2) frozen assets. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% calculator: [Cambridge] n. Syn. for {bitty box}. %% can't happen: The traditional program comment for code executed under a condition that should never be true, for example a file size computed as negative. Often, such a condition being true indicates data corruption or a faulty algorithm; it is almost always handled by emitting a fatal error message and terminating or crashing, since there is little else that can be done. Some case variant of "can't happen" is also often the text emitted if the `impossible' error actually happens! Although "can't happen" events are genuinely infrequent in production code, programmers wise enough to check for them habitually are often surprised at how often they are triggered during development and how many headaches checking for them turns out to head off. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% can't unlink suspend file. %% can: vt. To abort a job on a time-sharing system. Used esp. when the person doing the deed is an operator, as in "canned from the {{console}}". Frequently used in an imperative sense, as in "Can that print job, the LPT just popped a sprocket!" Synonymous with {gun}. It is said that the ASCII character with mnemonic CAN (0011000) was used as a kill-job character on some early OSes. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% candygrammar: n. A programming-language grammar that is mostly {syntactic sugar}; the term is also a play on `candygram'. {COBOL}, Apple's Hypertalk language, and a lot of the so-called `4GL' database languages are like this. The usual intent of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that `candygrammar' languages are just as difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker. [The overtones from the old Chevy Chase skit on Saturday Night Live should not be overlooked. This was a "Jaws" parody. Someone lurking outside an apartment door tries all kinds of bogus ways to get the occupant to open up, while ominous music plays in the background. The last attempt is a half-hearted "Candygram!" When the door is opened, a shark bursts in and chomps the poor occupant. There is a moral here for those attracted to candygrammars. Note that, in many circles, pretty much the same ones who remember Monty Python sketches, all it takes is the word "Candygram!", suitably timed, to get people rolling on the floor. --- GLS] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% canonical: [historically, `according to religious law'] adj. The usual or standard state or manner of something. This word has a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics. Two formulas such as 9 + x and x + 9 are said to be equivalent because they mean the same thing, but the second one is in `canonical form' because it is written in the usual way, with the highest power of x first. Usually there are fixed rules you can use to decide whether something is in canonical form. The jargon meaning, a relaxation of the technical meaning, acquired its present loading in computer-science culture largely through its prominence in Alonzo Church's work in computation theory and mathematical logic (see {Knights of the Lambda Calculus}). Compare {vanilla}. This word has an interesting history. Non-technical academics do not use the adjective `canonical' in any of the senses defined above with any regularity; they do however use the nouns `canon' and `canonicity' (not *canonicalness or *canonicality). The `canon' of a given author is the complete body of authentic works by that author (this usage is familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as well as to literary scholars). `*The* canon' is the body of works in a given field (e.g., works of literature, or of art, or of music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for scholars to investigate. The word `canon' derives ultimately from the Greek `kanon' (akin to the English `cane') referring to a reed. Reeds were used for measurement, and in Latin and later Greek the word `canon' meant a rule or a standard. The establishment of a canon of scriptures within Christianity was meant to define a standard or a rule for the religion. The above non-techspeak academic usages stem from this instance of a defined and accepted body of work. Alongside this usage was the promulgation of `canons' (`rules') for the government of the Catholic Church. The techspeak usages ("according to religious law") derive from this use of the Latin `canon'. Hackers invest this term with a playfulness that makes an ironic contrast with its historical meaning. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the use of jargon. Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS made a point of using it as much as possible in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word `canonical' in jargon-like fashion without thinking. Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon too!" Stallman: "What did he say?" Steele: "Bob just used `canonical' in the canonical way." Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly defined as the way *hackers* normally expect things to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that `according to religious law' is *not* the canonical meaning of `canonical'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% carabiner: oversized safety pin to hold up a diaper seat. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% card walloper: n. An EDP programmer who grinds out batch programs that do stupid things like print people's paychecks. Compare {code grinder}. See also {{punched card}}, {eighty-column mind}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% card: n. 1. An electronic printed-circuit board (see also {tall card}, {short card}. 2. obs. Syn. {{punched card}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% careware: /keir'weir/ n. {Shareware} for which either the author suggests that some payment be made to a nominated charity or a levy directed to charity is included on top of the distribution charge. Syn. {charityware}; compare {crippleware}, sense 2. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cargo cult programming: n. A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming}). The term `cargo cult' is a reference to aboriginal religions that grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The practices of these cults center on building elaborate mockups of airplanes and military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war. Hackish usage probably derives from Richard Feynman's characterization of certain practices as "cargo cult science" in his book `Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' (W. W. Norton & Co, New York 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cascade: n. 1. A huge volume of spurious error-message output produced by a compiler with poor error recovery. This can happen when one initial error throws the parser out of synch so that much of the remaining program text is interpreted as garbaged or ill-formed. 2. A chain of USENET followups each adding some trivial variation of riposte to the text of the previous one, all of which is reproduced in the new message; an {include war} in which the object is to create a sort of communal graffito. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% case and paste: [from `cut and paste'] n. 1. The addition of a new {feature} to an existing system by selecting the code from an existing feature and pasting it in with minor changes. Common in telephony circles because most operations in a telephone switch are selected using `case' statements. Leads to {software bloat}. In some circles of EMACS users this is called `programming by Meta-W', because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a block of text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in elsewhere. The term is condescending, implying that the programmer is acting mindlessly rather than thinking carefully about what is required to integrate the code for two similar cases. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% casters-up mode: [IBM] n. Yet another synonym for `broken' or `down'. %% casters-up mode: [IBM] n. Yet another synonym for `broken' or `down'. Usually connotes a major failure. A system (hardware or software) which is `down' may be already being restarted before the failure is noticed, whereas one which is `casters up' is usually a good excuse to take the rest of the day off (as long as you're not responsible for fixing it). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% casting the runes: n. What a {guru} does when you ask him or her to run a particular program and type at it because it never works for anyone else; esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from what J. Random Luser does. Compare {incantation}, {runes}, {examining the entrails}; also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in "{A Selection of AI Koans}" ({appendix A}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cat: [from `catenate' via {{UNIX}} `cat(1)'] vt. 1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other output sink without pause. 2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an unprepared target or with no intention of browsing it carefully. Usage: considered silly. Rare outside UNIX sites. See also {dd}, {BLT}. Among UNIX fans, `cat(1)' is considered an excellent example of user-interface design, because it outputs the file contents without such verbosity as spacing or headers between the files, and because it does not require the files to consist of lines of text, but works with any sort of data. Among UNIX-haters, `cat(1)' is considered the {canonical} example of *bad* user-interface design. This because it is more often used to {blast} a file to standard output than to concatenate two files. The name `cat' for the former operation is just as unintuitive as, say, LISP's {cdr}. Of such oppositions are {holy wars} made.... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% catatonic: adj. Describes a condition of suspended animation in which something is so {wedged} or {hung} that it makes no response. If you are typing on a terminal and suddenly the computer doesn't even echo the letters back to the screen as you type, let alone do what you're asking it to do, then the computer is suffering from catatonia (possibly because it has crashed). "There I was in the middle of a winning game of {nethack} and it went catatonic on me! Aaargh!" Compare {buzz}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cd tilde: /C-D til-d*/ vi. To go home. From the UNIX C-shell and Korn-shell command `cd ~', which takes one to one's `$HOME' (`cd' with no arguments happens to do the same thing). By extension, may be used with other arguments; thus, over an electronic chat link, `cd ~coffee' would mean "I'm going to the coffee machine." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cdr: /ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ [from LISP] vt. To skip past the first item from a list of things (generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures, which returns a list consisting of all but the first element of its argument). In the form `cdr down', to trace down a list of elements: "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. See also {loop through}. Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 7090 that hosted the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called the `address' and `decrement' parts. The term `cdr' was originally `Contents of Decrement part of Register'. Similarly, `car' stood for `Contents of Address part of Register'. The cdr and car operations have since become bases for formation of compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts. GLS recalls, for example, a programming project in which strings were represented as linked lists; the get-character and skip-character operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ce (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures. %% chad box: n. {Iron Age} card punches contained boxes inside them, about the size of a lunchbox (or in some models a large wastebasket), that held the {chad} (sense 2). You had to open the covers of the card punch periodically and empty the chad box. The {bit bucket} was notionally the equivalent device in the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in another great gray-and-blue box. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chad: /chad/ n. 1. The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called {selvage} and {perf}. 2. obs. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this was also called `chaff', `computer confetti', and `keypunch droppings'. Historical note: One correspondent believes `chad' (sense 2) derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded back, rather than punching out a circle/rectangle; it was clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be `chad'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chain: 1. [orig. from BASIC's `CHAIN' statement] vi. To hand off execution to a child or successor without going through the {OS} command interpreter that invoked it. The state of the parent program is lost and there is no returning to it. Though this facility used to be common on memory-limited micros and is still widely supported for backward compatibility, the jargon usage is semi-obsolescent; in particular, most UNIX programmers will think of this as an {exec}. Oppose the more modern {subshell}. 2. A series of linked data areas within an operating system or application. `Chain rattling' is the process of repeatedly running through the linked data areas searching for one which is of interest to the executing program. The implication is that there is a very large number of links on the chain. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% channel hopping: [IRC, GEnie] n. To rapidly switch channels on {IRC}, or GEnie chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop from one group to another at a party. This may derive from the TV watcher's idiom `channel surfing'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% channel op: /chan'l op/ [IRC] n. Someone who is endowed with privileges on a particular {IRC} channel; commonly abbreviated `chanop' or `CHOP'. These privileges include the right to {kick} users, to change various status bits, and to make others into CHOPs. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% channel: [IRC] n. The basic unit of discussion on {IRC}. Once one joins a channel, everything one types is read by others on that channel. Channels can either be named with numbers or with strings that begin with a `#' sign, and can have topic descriptions (which are generally irrelevant to the actual subject of discussion). Some notable channels are `#initgame', `#hottub', and `#report'. At times of international crisis, `#report' has hundreds of members, some of whom take turns listening to various news services and summarizing the news, or in some cases, giving first-hand accounts of the action (e.g., Scud missile attacks in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War in 1991). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% char: /keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ n. Shorthand for `character'. Esp. used by C programmers, as `char' is C's typename for character data. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% charityware: /char'it-ee-weir`/ n. Syn. {careware}. %% chase pointers: 1. vi. To go through multiple levels of indirection, as in traversing a linked list or graph structure. Used esp. by programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common data type. This is techspeak, but it remains jargon when used of human networks. "I'm chasing pointers. Bob said you could tell me who to talk to about...." See {dangling pointer} and {snap}. 2. [Cambridge] `pointer chase' or `pointer hunt': The process of going through a dump (interactively or on a large piece of paper printed with hex {runes}) following dynamic data-structures. Used only in a debugging context. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% check: n. A hardware-detected error condition, most commonly used to refer to actual hardware failures rather than software-induced traps. E.g., a `parity check' is the result of a hardware-detected parity error. Recorded here because it's often humorously extended to non-technical problems. For example, the term `child check' has been used to refer to the problems caused by a small child who is curious to know what happens when s/he presses all the cute buttons on a computer's console (of course, this particular problem could have been prevented with {molly-guard}s). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chemist: [Cambridge] n. Someone who wastes computer time on {number-crunching} when you'd far rather the machine were doing something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running {life} patterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chemistry professors don't die, they just fail to react! %% chemists do it periodically on table %% chicken head: [Commodore] n. The Commodore Business Machines logo, which strongly resembles a poultry part. Rendered in ASCII as `C='. With the arguable exception of the Amiga (see {amoeba}), Commodore's machines are notoriously crocky little {bitty box}es (see also {PETSCII}). Thus, this usage may owe something to Philip K. Dick's novel `Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (the basis for the movie `Blade Runner'), in which a `chickenhead' is a mutant with below-average intelligence. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chiclet keyboard: n. A keyboard with small rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like pieces of chewing gum. (Chiclets is the brand name of a variety of chewing gum that does in fact resemble the keys of chiclet keyboards.) Used esp. to describe the original IBM PCjr keyboard. Vendors unanimously liked these because they were cheap, and a lot of early portable and laptop products got launched using them. Customers rejected the idea with almost equal unanimity, and chiclets are not often seen on anything larger than a digital watch any more. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chine nual: /sheen'yu-*l/ [MIT] n.,obs. The Lisp Machine Manual, so called because the title was wrapped around the cover so only those letters showed on the front. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% choke: v. 1. To reject input, often ungracefully. "NULs make System V's `lpr(1)' choke." "I tried building an {EMACS} binary to use {X}, but `cpp(1)' choked on all those `#define's." See {barf}, {gag}, {vi}. 2. [MIT] More generally, to fail at any endeavor, but with some flair or bravado; the popular definition is "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% choke: v. To reject input, often ungracefully. "Nuls make System V's `lpr(1)' choke." "I tried building an {EMACS} binary to use {X}, but `cpp(1)' choked on all those `#define's." See {barf}, {gag}, {vi}. %% chomp: vi. To {lose}; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. See {bagbiter}. A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means `chomp chomp' (see "{Verb Doubling}" in the "{Jargon Construction}" section of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying "You chomper!" If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chomper: n. Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. See {loser}, {bagbiter}, {chomp}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chrome: [from automotive slang via wargaming] n. Showy features added to attract users but contributing little or nothing to the power of a system. "The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome, but they certainly are *pretty* chrome!" Distinguished from {bells and whistles} by the fact that the latter are usually added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. Often used as a term of contempt. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% chug: vi. To run slowly; to {grind} or {grovel}. "The disk is chugging like crazy." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% clean climber: climber who doesn't smoke or consume hard liquor, and who changes undergarments daily. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% clean: 1. adj. Used of hardware or software designs, implies `elegance in the small', that is, a design or implementation that may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is `grungy' or {crufty}. 2. v. To remove unneeded or undesired files in a effort to reduce clutter: "I'm cleaning up my account." "I cleaned up the garbage and now have 100 Meg free on that partition." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% climactic lines of which are as follows: He died at the console Of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, Face down, 9-edge first. The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking. See {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {card walloper}. %% clobber: vt. To overwrite, usually unintentionally: "I walked off the end of the array and clobbered the stack." Compare {mung}, {scribble}, {trash}, and {smash the stack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% clocks: n. Processor logic cycles, so called because each generally corresponds to one clock pulse in the processor's timing. The relative execution times of instructions on a machine are usually discussed in clocks rather than absolute fractions of a second; one good reason for this is that clock speeds for various models of the machine may increase as technology improves, and it is usually the relative times one is interested in when discussing the instruction set. Compare {cycle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% clone: n. 1. An exact duplicate: "Our product is a clone of their product." Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by reverse-engineering. Also connotes lower price. 2. A shoddy, spurious copy: "Their product is a clone of our product." 3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or trade secret protections: "Your product is a clone of my product." This use implies legal action is pending. 4. A `PC clone'; a PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-compatible 80x86-based microcomputer (this use is sometimes spelled `klone' or `PClone'). These invariably have much more bang for the buck than the IBM archetypes they resemble. 5. In the construction `UNIX clone': An OS designed to deliver a UNIX-lookalike environment without UNIX license fees, or with additional `mission-critical' features such as support for real-time programming. 6. v. To make an exact copy of something. "Let me clone that" might mean "I want to borrow that paper so I can make a photocopy" or "Let me get a copy of that file before you {mung} it". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% clustergeeking: /kluh'st*r-gee`king/ [CMU] n. Spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people spend breathing. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% code grinder: n. 1. A {suit}-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages in RPG and other such unspeakable horrors. In its native habitat, the code grinder often removes the suit jacket to reveal an underplumage consisting of button-down shirt (starch optional) and a tie. In times of dire stress, the sleeves (if long) may be rolled up and the tie loosened about half an inch. It seldom helps. The {code grinder}'s milieu is about as far from hackerdom as one can get and still touch a computer; the term connotes pity. See {Real World}, {suit}. 2. Used of or to a hacker, a really serious slur on the person's creative ability; connotes a design style characterized by primitive technique, rule-boundedness, {brute force}, and utter lack of imagination. Compare {card walloper}; contrast {hacker}, {real programmer}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% code police: [by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] n. A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's office and arrest one for violating programming style rules. May be used either seriously, to underline a claim that a particular style violation is dangerous, or ironically, to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by anal-retentive {weenie}s. "Dike out that goto or the code police will get you!" The ironic usage is perhaps more common. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% codewalker: n. A program component that traverses other programs for a living. Compilers have codewalkers in their front ends; so do cross-reference generators and some database front ends. Other utility programs that try to do too much with source code may turn into codewalkers. As in "This new `vgrind' feature would require a codewalker to implement." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% coefficient of X: n. Hackish speech makes rather heavy use of pseudo-mathematical metaphors. Four particularly important ones involve the terms `coefficient', `factor', `index', and `quotient'. They are often loosely applied to things you cannot really be quantitative about, but there are subtle distinctions among them that convey information about the way the speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing. `Foo factor' and `foo quotient' tend to describe something for which the issue is one of presence or absence. The canonical example is {fudge factor}. It's not important how much you're fudging; the term simply acknowledges that some fudging is needed. You might talk of liking a movie for its silliness factor. Quotient tends to imply that the property is a ratio of two opposing factors: "I would have won except for my luck quotient." This could also be "I would have won except for the luck factor", but using *quotient* emphasizes that it was bad luck overpowering good luck (or someone else's good luck overpowering your own). `Foo index' and `coefficient of foo' both tend to imply that foo is, if not strictly measurable, at least something that can be larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or person as having a `high bogosity index', whereas you would be less likely to speak of a `high bogosity factor'. `Foo index' suggests that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane cost-of-living index; `coefficient of foo' suggests that foo is a fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of friction. The choice between these terms is often one of personal preference; e.g., some people might feel that bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus say `coefficient of bogosity', whereas others might feel it is a combination of factors and thus say `bogosity index'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cokebottle: /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the `control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained right back about the `{altmode}-altmode-cokebottle' commands at MIT. After the demise of the {space-cadet keyboard}, `cokebottle' faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager, `mwm(1)', has a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not) `control-meta-bang' (see {bang}). Since the exclamation point looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke as `cokebottle'. See also {quadruple bucky}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cold front: acute discomfort caused by an unzipped trouser fly. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% comm mode: /kom mohd/ [ITS: from the feature supporting on-line chat; the term may spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for {talk mode}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% command key: [Mac users] n. The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its keytop; sometimes referred to as `flower', `pretzel', `clover', `propeller', `beanie' (an apparent reference to the major feature of a propeller beanie), or {splat}. The Mac's equivalent of an {ALT} key. The proliferation of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces. %% command the universe. -- Selma Fraiberg, "The Magic Years", pg. 107 %% comment out: vt. To surround a section of code with comment delimiters or to prefix every line in the section with a comment marker; this prevents it from being compiled or interpreted. Often done when the code is redundant or obsolete, but you want to leave it in the source to make the intent of the active code clearer; also when the code in that section is broken and you want to bypass it in order to debug some other part of the code. Compare {condition out}, usually the preferred technique in languages (such as {C}) that make it possible. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% commercially developed software, which displays the quality far more often than it ought to. Oppose {robust}. %% communication: following are the terms most employed: command meaning (climber) "on belay" "do i tie in with an overhand knot or a clove hitch" (belayer) "belay on" "i'm not ready yet" (climber) "climbing" "i'm having second thoughts about this" (belayer) "climb on" "i'm still not ready" (climber) "slack" "what do you think i am, a eunuch?" (belayer) "slack" "did he say tension?" (climber) "don't give me no slack!" "falling" (belayer) "what?" "did he say more slack?" (climber) "tension" "i'm climbing up the goddamn rope" (either) "shit" "shit" -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% compact: adj. Of a design, describes the valuable property that it can all be apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means the thing created from the design can be used with greater facility and fewer errors than an equivalent tool that is not compact. Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of power; for example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful than FORTRAN. Designs become non-compact through accreting {feature}s and {cruft} that don't merge cleanly into the overall design scheme (thus, some fans of {Classic C} maintain that ANSI C is no longer compact). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% compiler jock: n. See {jock} (sense 2). %% compress: [UNIX] vt. When used without a qualifier, generally refers to {crunch}ing of a file using a particular C implementation of Lempel-Ziv compression by James A. Woods et al. and widely circulated via {USENET}. Use of {crunch} itself in this sense is rare among UNIX hackers. %% compress: [UNIX] vt. When used without a qualifier, generally refers to {crunch}ing of a file using a particular C implementation of compression by James A. Woods et al. and widely circulated via {USENET}; use of {crunch} itself in this sense is rare among UNIX hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", Terry A. Welch, `IEEE Computer', vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8--19. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% computer confetti: n. Syn. {chad}. Though this term is common, this use of punched-card chad is not a good idea, as the pieces are stiff and have sharp corners that could injure the eyes. GLS reports that he once attended a wedding at MIT during which he and a few other guests enthusiastically threw chad instead of rice. The groom later grumbled that he and his bride had spent most of the evening trying to get the stuff out of their hair. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% computer geek: n. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black usage of `nigger'. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in {larval stage}. Also called `turbo nerd', `turbo geek'. See also {propeller head}, {clustergeeking}, {geek out}, {wannabee}, {terminal junkie}, {spod}, {weenie}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% computron: /kom'pyoo-tron`/ n. 1. A notional unit of computing power combining instruction speed and storage capacity, dimensioned roughly in instructions-per-second times megabytes-of-main-store times megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That machine can't run GNU EMACS, it doesn't have enough computrons!" This usage is usually found in metaphors that treat computing power as a fungible commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel horsepower. See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!}, {toy}, {crank}. 2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity of computation or information, in much the same way that an electron bears one unit of electric charge (see also {bogon}). An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons has been developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in a solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued that an object melts because the molecules have lost their information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they have emitted computrons). This explains why computers get so hot and require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it should be possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path of a computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why machines that work at the factory fail in the computer room: the computrons there have been all used up by the other hardware. (This theory probably owes something to the "Warlock" stories by Larry Niven, the best known being "What Good is a Glass Dagger?", in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural resource called `mana'.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% con: [from SF fandom] n. A science-fiction convention. Not used of other sorts of conventions, such as professional meetings. This term, unlike many others of SF-fan slang, is widely recognized even by hackers who aren't {fan}s. "We'd been corresponding on the net for months, then we met face-to-face at a con." . -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% concourse - a golf course located in a penetentary %% concrete - to swindle a resident of Crete %% condition out: vt. To prevent a section of code from being compiled by surrounding it with a conditional-compilation directive whose condition is always false. The {canonical} examples of this are `#if 0' (or `#ifdef notdef', though some find this {bletcherous}) and `#endif' in C. Compare {comment out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% condom: n. 1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch microfloppy diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the write protect tab, the condom (when left on) not only impedes the practice of {SEX} but has also been shown to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk --- and can even fatally frustrate insertion. 2. The protective cladding on a {light pipe}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% confuser: n. Common soundalike slang for `computer'. Usually encountered in compounds such as `confuser room', `personal confuser', `confuser guru'. Usage: silly. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% connector conspiracy: [probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10 (one model of the {PDP-10}), none of whose connectors matched anything else] n. The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors of anything) to come up with new products that don't fit together with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive interface devices. The KL-10 Massbus connector was actually *patented* by DEC, which reputedly refused to license the design and thus effectively locked third parties out of competition for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. This is a source of never-ending frustration for the diehards who maintain older PDP-10 or VAX systems. Their CPUs work fine, but they are stuck with dying, obsolescent disk and tape drives with low capacity and high power requirements. (A closely related phenomenon, with a slightly different intent, is the habit manufacturers have of inventing new screw heads so that only Designated Persons, possessing the magic screwdrivers, can remove covers and make repairs or install options. The Apple Macintosh takes this one step further, requiring not only a hex wrench but a specialized case-cracking tool to open the box.) In these latter days of open-systems computing this term has fallen somewhat into disuse, to be replaced by the observation that "Standards are great! There are so *many* of them to choose from!" Compare {backward combatability}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cons: /konz/ or /kons/ [from LISP] 1. vt. To add a new element to a specified list, esp. at the top. "OK, cons picking a replacement for the console TTY onto the agenda." 2. `cons up': vt. To synthesize from smaller pieces: "to cons up an example". In LISP itself, `cons' is the most fundamental operation for building structures. It takes any two objects and returns a `dot-pair' or two-branched tree with one object hanging from each branch. Because the result of a cons is an object, it can be used to build binary trees of any shape and complexity. Hackers think of it as a sort of universal constructor, and that is where the jargon meanings spring from. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% considered harmful: adj. Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 `Communications of the ACM', "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y". The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realization that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the `considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% console jockey: n. See {terminal junkie}. %% console:: n. 1. The operator's station of a {mainframe}. In times past, this was a privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to anyone with fingers on its keys. Under UNIX and other modern timesharing OSes, such privileges are guarded by passwords instead, and the console is just the {tty} the system was booted from. Some of the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional for sysadmins to post urgent messages to all users from the console (on UNIX, /dev/console). 2. On microcomputer UNIX boxes, the main screen and keyboard (as opposed to character-only terminals talking to a serial port). Typically only the console can do real graphics or run {X}. See also {CTY}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% content-free: [by analogy with techspeak `context-free'] adj. Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge. Though this adjective is sometimes applied to {flamage}, it more usually connotes derision for communication styles that exalt form over substance or are centered on concerns irrelevant to the subject ostensibly at hand. Perhaps most used with reference to speeches by company presidents and other professional manipulators. "Content-free? Uh... that's anything printed on glossy paper." See also {four-color glossies}. "He gave a talk on the implications of electronic networks for postmodernism and the fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It was content-free." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% control of the pesty spirits is most helpful %% control-C: vi. 1. "Stop whatever you are doing." From the interrupt character used on many operating systems to abort a running program. Considered silly. 2. interj. Among BSD UNIX hackers, the canonical humorous response to "Give me a break!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% control-O: vi. "Stop talking." From the character used on some operating systems to abort output but allow the program to keep on running. Generally means that you are not interested in hearing anything more from that person, at least on that topic; a standard response to someone who is flaming. Considered silly. Compare {control-S}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% control-Q: vi. "Resume." From the ASCII DC1 or {XON} character (the pronunciation /X-on/ is therefore also used), used to undo a previous {control-S}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% control-Q: vi. "Resume." From the ASCII XON character used to undo a previous control-S (in fact it is also pronounced XON /X-on/). %% control-S: vi. "Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII DC3 or XOFF character (the pronunciation /X-of/ is therefore also used). Control-S differs from {control-O} in that the person is asked to stop talking (perhaps because you are on the phone) but will be allowed to continue when you're ready to listen to him --- as opposed to control-O, which has more of the meaning of "Shut up." Considered silly. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% convict the bookstore owner, and vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong impression. -- Dave Barry, "Pornography" %% cookbook: [from amateur electronics and radio] n. A book of small code segments that the reader can use to do various {magic} things in programs. One current example is the `{{PostScript}} Language Tutorial and Cookbook' by Adobe Systems, Inc (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3) which has recipes for things like wrapping text around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts. Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one into {voodoo programming}, but are useful for hackers trying to {monkey up} small programs in unknown languages. This is analogous to the role of phrasebooks in human languages. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cooked mode: [UNIX] n. The normal character-input mode, with interrupts enabled and with erase, kill and other special-character interpretations done directly by the tty driver. Oppose {raw mode}, {rare mode}. This is techspeak under UNIX but jargon elsewhere; other operating systems often have similar mode distinctions, and the raw/rare/cooked way of describing them has spread widely along with the C language and other UNIX exports. Most generally, `cooked mode' may refer to any mode of a system that does extensive preprocessing before presenting data to a program. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cookie bear: n. Syn. {cookie monster}. %% cookie file: n. A collection of {fortune cookie}s in a format that facilitates retrieval by a fortune program. There are several different ones in public distribution, and site admins often assemble their own from various sources including this lexicon. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cookie monster: [from "Sesame Street"] n. Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported on {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {{Multics}}, and elsewhere that would lock up either the victim's terminal (on a time-sharing machine) or the {{console}} (on a batch {mainframe}), repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The required responses ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE" and upward. See also {wabbit}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cookie: n. A handle, transaction ID, or other token of agreement between cooperating programs. "I give him a packet, he gives me back a cookie." The claim check you get from a dry-cleaning shop is a perfect mundane example of a cookie; the only thing it's useful for is to relate a later transaction to this one (so you get the same clothes back). Compare {magic cookie}; see also {fortune cookie}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cookie: not found %% copious free time: [Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's song "It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier"] n. 1. [used ironically to indicate the speaker's lack of the quantity in question] A mythical schedule slot for accomplishing tasks held to be unlikely or impossible. Sometimes used to indicate that the speaker is interested in accomplishing the task, but believes that the opportunity will not arise. "I'll implement the automatic layout stuff in my copious free time." 2. [Archly] Time reserved for bogus or otherwise idiotic tasks, such as implementation of {chrome}, or the stroking of {suit}s. "I'll get back to him on that feature in my copious free time." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% copper: n. Conventional electron-carrying network cable with a core conductor of copper --- or aluminum! Opposed to {light pipe} or, say, a short-range microwave link. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% copy protection: n. A class of (occasionally clever) methods for preventing incompetent pirates from stealing software and legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% copybroke: /ko'pee-brohk/ adj. 1. [play on `copyright'] Used to describe an instance of a copy-protected program that has been `broken'; that is, a copy with the copy-protection scheme disabled. Syn. {copywronged}. 2. Copy-protected software which is unusable because of some bit-rot or bug that has confused the anti-piracy check. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% copyleft: /kop'ee-left/ [play on `copyright'] n. 1. The copyright notice (`General Public License') carried by {GNU} {EMACS} and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also {General Public Virus}). 2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to achieve similar aims. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% copywronged: /ko'pee-rongd/ [play on `copyright'] adj. Syn. for {copybroke}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% core cancer: n. A process which exhibits a slow but inexorable resource {leak} --- like a cancer, it kills by crowding out productive `tissue'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% core dump: n. [common {Iron Age} jargon, preserved by UNIX] 1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents of {core}, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error. 2. By extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or registering extreme shock. "He dumped core. All over the floor. What a mess." "He heard about X and dumped core." 3. Occasionally used for a human rambling on pointlessly at great length; esp. in apology: "Sorry, I dumped core on you". 4. A recapitulation of knowledge (compare {bits}, sense 1). Hence, spewing all one knows about a topic (syn. {brain dump}), esp. in a lecture or answer to an exam question. "Short, concise answers are better than core dumps" (from the instructions to an exam at Columbia). See {core}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% core error - bus dumped %% core leak: n. Syn. {memory leak}. %% core: n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; `in core', for example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on disk'), and both {core dump} and the `core image' or `core file' produced by one are terms in favor. Commonwealth hackish prefers {store}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% corge: /korj/ [originally, the name of a cat] n. Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the {GOSMACS} documentation. See {grault}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cornice: snow waiting for a climber to step on it before becoming an avalanche. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% cosmic rays: n. Notionally, the cause of {bit rot}. However, this is a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to {handwave} away any minor {randomness} that doesn't seem worth the bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric --- I just got a burst of garbage on my {tube}, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, I guess." Compare {sunspots}, {phase of the moon}. The British seem to prefer the usage `cosmic showers'; `alpha particles' is also heard, because stray alpha particles passing through a memory chip can cause single-bit errors (this becomes increasingly more likely as memory sizes and densities increase). Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that you have to design memories to withstand these hits. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cough and die: v. Syn. {barf}. Connotes that the program is throwing its hands up by design rather than because of a bug or oversight. "The parser saw a control-A in its input where it was looking for a printable, so it coughed and died." Compare {die}, {die horribly}, {scream and die}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% counterpart - subassemblies or pieces of an article of kitchen furniture %% cowboy: [Sun, from William Gibson's {cyberpunk} SF] n. Synonym for {hacker}. It is reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crack root: v. To defeat the security system of a UNIX machine and gain {root} privileges thereby; see {cracking}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cracker: n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of {hacker} (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981--82 on USENET was largely a failure. %% cracker: n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of {hacker} (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981--82 on USENET was largely a failure. Both these neologisms reflected a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past {larval stage} is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so. Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the {mundane} reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe *themselves* as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life. Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone else's has to be pretty {losing}. Some other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on {cracking} and {phreaking}. See also {samurai}, {dark-side hacker}, and {hacker ethic, the}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cracking: n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a {cracker} does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crank: [from automotive slang] vt. Verb used to describe the performance of a machine, especially sustained performance. "This box cranks (or, cranks at) about 6 megaflops, with a burst mode of twice that on vectorized operations." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crash and burn: vi.,n. A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie "Bullitt" and many subsequent imitators (compare {die horribly}). Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. The construction `crash-and-burn machine' is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or {beta} testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crash: 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the {system} (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happened when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). "Three {luser}s lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash', whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault. 2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" "Something crashed the OS!" See {down}. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing {SPACEWAR} crashed the system." 3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long {hacking run}; see {gronk out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crawling horror: n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like {dusty deck} or {gonkulator}, but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation but an active menace to health and sanity. "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror...." Compare {WOMBAT}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cray instability: n. A shortcoming of a program or algorithm that manifests itself only when a large problem is being run on a powerful machine (see {cray}). Generally more subtle than bugs that can be detected in smaller problems running on a workstation or mini. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cray: /kray/ n. 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at all. 3. The {canonical} {number-crunching} machine. The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cray, a noted computer architect and co-founder of the company. Numerous vivid legends surround him, some true and some admittedly invented by Cray Research brass to shape their corporate culture and image. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crayola books: n. The {rainbow series} of NCSC computer security standards (see {Orange Book}). Usage: humorous and/or disparaging. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crayola: /kray-oh'l*/ n. A super-mini or -micro computer that provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer performance for an unreasonably low price. Might also be a {killer micro}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crayon: n. 1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a UNIX background tend not to be described as crayons. 2. A {computron} (sense 2) that participates only in {number-crunching}. 3. A unit of computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a standard joke about this that derives from an old Crayola crayon promotional gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons you get a free sharpener. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% creationism: n. The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population --- and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong. Unfortunately, because these truths don't fit the planning models beloved of {management}, they are generally ignored. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% creep: v. To advance, grow, or multiply inexorably. In hackish usage this verb has overtones of menace and silliness, evoking the creeping horrors of low-budget monster movies. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% creeping elegance: n. Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become {elegant} past the point of diminishing return. This often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed important in the {Real World}. See also {creeping featurism}, {second-system effect}, {tense}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% creeping featurism: /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ n. 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more {chrome} and {feature}s onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. See also {feeping creaturism}. "You know, the main problem with {BSD} UNIX has always been creeping featurism." 2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". (See {feature}.) The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone ... and then another ... and another.... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns; see {second-system effect}. See also {creeping elegance}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% creeping featuritis: /kree'ping fee'-chr-i:`t*s/ n. Variant of {creeping featurism}, with its own spoonerization: `feeping creaturitis'. Some people like to reserve this form for the disease as it actually manifests in software or hardware, as opposed to the lurking general tendency in designers' minds. (After all, -ism means `condition' or `pursuit of', whereas -itis usually means `inflammation of'.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cretin: /kret'n/ or /kree'tn/ n. Congenital {loser}; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do anything right. It has been observed that many American hackers tend to favor the British pronunciation /kre'tn/ over standard American /kree'tn/; it is thought this may be due to the insidious phonetic influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cretinous: /kret'n-*s/ or /kreet'n-*s/ adj. Wrong; stupid; non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used pejoratively of people. See {dread high-bit disease} for an example. Approximate synonyms: {bletcherous}, `bagbiting' (see {bagbiter}), {losing}, {brain-damaged}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crippleware: n. 1. Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version. 2. [Cambridge] {Guiltware} that exhorts you to donate to some charity (compare {careware}). 3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper). %% crippleware: n. 1. Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version. 2. [Cambridge] {Guiltware} that exhorts you to donate to some charity (compare {careware}). 3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper). An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX chip, which is a standard 486DX chip with the co-processor disabled. To upgrade, you buy another 486 chip with everything *but* the co-processor disabled. When you put them together you have two crippled chips doing the work of one. Don't you love Intel? -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% critical mass: n. In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable material required to sustain a chain reaction. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus {epsilon} bugs. When software achieves critical mass, it can only be discarded and rewritten. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crlf: /ker'l*f/, sometimes /kru'l*f/ or /C-R-L-F/ n. (often capitalized as `CRLF') A carriage return (CR) followed by a line feed (LF). More loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next line. See {newline}, {terpri}. Under {{UNIX}} influence this usage has become less common (UNIX uses a bare line feed as its `CRLF'). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crock: [from the obvious mainstream scatologism] n. 1. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. Using small integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example, UNIX `make(1)', which returns code 139 for a process that dies due to {segfault}). 2. A technique that works acceptably, but which is quite prone to failure if disturbed in the least, for example depending on the machine opcodes having particular bit patterns so that you can use instructions as data words too; a tightly woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See {kluge}, {brittle}. Also in the adjectives `crockish' and `crocky', and the nouns `crockishness' and `crockitude'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cross-post: [USENET] vi. To post a single article simultaneously to several newsgroups. Distinguished from posting the article repeatedly, once to each newsgroup, which causes people to see it multiple times (this is very bad form). Gratuitous cross-posting without a Followup-To line directing responses to a single followup group is frowned upon, as it tends to cause {followup} articles to go to inappropriate newsgroups when people respond to only one part of the original posting. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crudware: /kruhd'weir/ n. Pejorative term for the hundreds of megabytes of low-quality {freeware} circulated by user's groups and BBS systems in the micro-hobbyist world. "Yet *another* set of disk catalog utilities for {{MS-DOS}}? What crudware!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cruft together: vt. (also `cruft up') To throw together something ugly but temporarily workable. Like vt. {kluge up}, but more pejorative. "There isn't any program now to reverse all the lines of a file, but I can probably cruft one together in about 10 minutes." See {hack together}, {hack up}, {kluge up}, {crufty}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cruft: /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n. Excess; superfluous junk. Esp. used of redundant or superseded code. %% cruft: /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from `hand cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n. Excess; superfluous junk. Esp. used of redundant or superseded code. This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1992) the windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cruftsmanship: /kruhfts'm*n-ship / n. [from {cruft}] The antithesis of craftsmanship. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crufty: /kruhf'tee/ [origin unknown; poss. from `crusty' or `cruddy'] adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The {canonical} example is "This is standard old crufty DEC software". In fact, one fanciful theory of the origin of `crufty' holds that was originally a mutation of `crusty' applied to DEC software so old that the `s' characters were tall and skinny, looking more like `f' characters. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup. 3. Generally unpleasant. 4. (sometimes spelled `cruftie') n. A small crufty object (see {frob}); often one that doesn't fit well into the scheme of things. "A LISP property list is a good place to store crufties (or, collectively, {random} cruft)." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crumb: n. Two binary digits; a {quad}. Larger than a {bit}, smaller than a {nybble}. Considered silly. Syn. {tayste}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% crunch: 1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due to the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000. "FORTRAN programs do mostly {number-crunching}." 2. vt. To reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking like a paper document would if somebody crunched the paper into a wad.) Since such compression usually takes more computations than simpler methods such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction `file crunch(ing)' to distinguish it from {number-crunching}.) See {compress}. 3. n. The character `#'. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places. See {{ASCII}}. 4. vt. To squeeze program source into a minimum-size representation that will still compile or execute. The term came into being specifically for a famous program on the BBC micro that crunched BASIC source in order to make it run more quickly (it was a wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters mattered). {Obfuscated C Contest} entries are often crunched; see the first example under that entry. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cruncha cruncha cruncha: /kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch*/ interj. An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in a serious {grovel}. Also describes a notional sound made by groveling hardware. See {wugga wugga}, {grind} (sense 3). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cryppie: /krip'ee/ n. A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software or hardware. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cube: n. 1. [short for `cubicle'] A module in the open-plan offices used at many programming shops. "I've got the manuals in my cube." 2. A NeXT machine (which resembles a matte-black cube). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cubing: [parallel with `tubing'] vi. 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing *again*!!" 2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles, either physically or mathematically. 3. An indescribable form of self-torture (see sense 1 or 2). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% curses! may you be forced to grep the termcap of an unclean yacc while a herd of wild rogue emacs fsck your troff and vgrind your pathalias! %% cursor address, n: "Hello, cursor!" -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" %% cursor dipped in X: n. There are a couple of metaphors in English of the form `pen dipped in X' (perhaps the most common values of X are `acid', `bile', and `vitriol'). These map over neatly to this hackish usage (the cursor being what moves, leaving letters behind, when one is composing on-line). "Talk about a {nastygram}! He must've had his cursor dipped in acid when he wrote that one!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cuspy: /kuhs'pee/ [WPI: from the DEC abbreviation CUSP, for `Commonly Used System Program', i.e., a utility program used by many people] adj. 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See {rude}. 3. [NYU] Said of an attractive woman, especially one regarded as available. Implies a certain curvaceousness. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cut a tape: [poss. fr. mainstream `cut a check' or from the recording industry's `cut a record'] vi. To write a software or document distribution on magnetic tape for shipment. Has nothing to do with physically cutting the medium! Though this usage is quite widespread, one never speaks of analogously `cutting a disk' or anything else in this sense. %% cut a tape: vi. To write a software or document distribution on magnetic tape for shipment. Has nothing to do with physically cutting the medium! Early versions of this lexicon claimed that one never analogously speaks of `cutting a disk', but this has since been reported as live usage. Related slang usages are mainstream business's `cut a check', the recording industry's `cut a record', and the military's `cut an order'. All of these usages reflect physical processes in obsolete recording and duplication technologies. The first stage in manufacturing an old-style vinyl record involved cutting grooves in a stamping die with a precision lathe. More mundanely, the dominant technology for mass duplication of paper documents in pre-photocopying days involved "cutting a stencil", punching away portions of the wax overlay on a silk screen. More directly, paper tape with holes punched in it was an inportant early storage medium. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cybercrud: /si:'ber-kruhd/ [coined by Ted Nelson] n. Obfuscatory tech-talk. Verbiage with a high {MEGO} factor. The computer equivalent of bureaucratese. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cyberpunk: /si:'ber-puhnk/ [orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois] n.,adj. A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel `Neuromancer' (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's `True Names' (see "{True Names ... and Other Dangers}" in appendix C) to John Brunner's 1975 novel `The Shockwave Rider'). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly na"ive and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See {cyberspace}, {ice}, {jack in}, {go flatline}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cyberspace: /si:'ber-spays/ n. 1. Notional `information-space' loaded with visual cues and navigable with brain-computer interfaces called `cyberspace decks'; a characteristic prop of {cyberpunk} SF. At the time of this writing (mid-1991), serious efforts to construct {virtual reality} interfaces modeled explicitly on Gibsonian cyberspace are already under way, using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and binocular TV headsets. Few hackers are prepared to deny outright the possibility of a cyberspace someday evolving out of the network (see {network, the}). 2. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in {hack mode}. Some hackers report experiencing strong eidetic imagery when in hack mode; interestingly, independent reports from multiple sources suggest that there are common features to the experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this subjective `cyberspace' are often gray and silver, and the imagery often involves constellations of marching dots, elaborate shifting patterns of lines and angles, or moire patterns. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cycle crunch: n. A situation where the number of people trying to use the computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to {thrash}. This is an inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing. Usually the only solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this has rapidly become easier in recent years, so much so that the very term `cycle crunch' now has a faintly archaic flavor; most hackers now use workstations or personal computers as opposed to traditional timesharing systems. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cycle drought: n. A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a {cycle crunch}, but it could also occur because part of the computer is temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around. "The {high moby} is {down}, so we're running with only half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle drought until it's fixed." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cycle of reincarnation: [coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970] n. Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again. Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as `the Wheel of Life', `the Wheel of Samsara', and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cycle server: n. A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large {batch} jobs. Implies that interactive tasks such as editing are done on other machines on the network, such as workstations. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% cycle: 1. n. The basic unit of computation. What every hacker wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper describes himself as a "cycle junkie"). One can describe an instruction as taking so many `clock cycles'. Often the computer can access its memory once on every clock cycle, and so one speaks also of `memory cycles'. These are technical meanings of {cycle}. The jargon meaning comes from the observation that there are only so many cycles per second, and when you are sharing a computer the cycles get divided up among the users. The more cycles the computer spends working on your program rather than someone else's, the faster your program will run. That's why every hacker wants more cycles: so he can spend less time waiting for the computer to respond. 2. By extension, a notional unit of *human* thought power, emphasizing that lots of things compete for the typical hacker's think time. "I refused to get involved with the Rubik's Cube back when it was big. Knew I'd burn too many cycles on it if I let myself." 3. vt. Syn. {bounce}, {120 reset}; from the phrase `cycle power'. "Cycle the machine again, that serial port's still hung." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% d [On phone to the x-ray technician]: I'm sending over a hand. Maybe an arm will come later. Maybe a body will come with it. %% d cabin ------- = log cabin cabin %% daemon: /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ [from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor'] n. A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, under {{ITS}} writing a file on the {LPT} spooler's directory would invoke the spooling daemon, which would then print the file. The advantage is that programs wanting (in this example) files printed need not compete for access to the {LPT}. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals. Daemon and {demon} are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. The term `daemon' was introduced to computing by {CTSS} people (who pronounced it /dee'mon/) and used it to refer to what ITS called a {dragon}. Although the meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary reflects current (1991) usage. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dangling pointer: n. A reference that doesn't actually lead anywhere (in C and some other languages, a pointer that doesn't actually point at anything valid). Usually this is because it formerly pointed to something that has moved or disappeared. Used as jargon in a generalization of its techspeak meaning; for example, a local phone number for a person who has since moved to the other coast is a dangling pointer. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dark-side hacker: n. A criminal or malicious hacker; a {cracker}. From George Lucas's Darth Vader, "seduced by the dark side of the Force". The implication that hackers form a sort of elite of technological Jedi Knights is intended. Oppose {samurai}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% day mode: n. See {phase} (sense 1). Used of people only. %% dd: /dee-dee/ [UNIX: from IBM {JCL}] vt. Equivalent to {cat} or {BLT}. This was originally the name of a UNIX copy command with special options suitable for block-oriented devices. Often used in heavy-handed system maintenance, as in "Let's `dd' the root partition onto a tape, then use the boot PROM to load it back on to a new disk". The UNIX `dd(1)' was designed with a weird, distinctly non-UNIXy keyword option syntax reminiscent of IBM System/360 JCL (which had an elaborate DD `Dataset Definition' specification for I/O devices); though the command filled a need, the interface design was clearly a prank. The jargon usage is now very rare outside UNIX sites and now nearly obsolete even there, as `dd(1)' has been {deprecated} for a long time (though it has no exact replacement). Replaced by {BLT} or simple English `copy'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% de-rezz: /dee-rez'/ [from `de-resolve' via the movie "Tron"] (also `derez') 1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the image that goes with it is of an object breaking up into raster lines and static and then dissolving. Occasionally used of a person who seems to have suddenly `fuzzed out' mentally rather than physically. Usage: extremely silly, also rare. This verb was actually invented as *fictional* hacker jargon, and adopted in a spirit of irony by real hackers years after the fact. 2. vt. On a Macintosh, many program structures (including the code itself) are managed in small segments of the program file known as `resources'. The standard resource compiler is Rez. The standard resource decompiler is DeRez. Thus, decompiling a resource is `derezzing'. Usage: very common. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% de5@ornl.gov (Dave Sill) writes: > I don't mind open debate on theological issues, but it's quite rude to come > into my church ranting and raving and trying to convert me. dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk (Matthew Farwell) writes: > Why? Are you so insecure in your beliefs that you are frightened of vi users? Hey, vi fanatics make the best converts. They're already hooked on religion, but, with respect to their first gods, they did not choose... wisely. We have ways of fixing that. -- gaynor@romulus.rutgers.edu, from alt.religion.emacs %% dead code: n. Routines that can never be accessed because all calls to them have been removed, or code that cannot be reached because it is guarded by a control structure that provably must always transfer control somewhere else. The presence of dead code may reveal either logical errors due to alterations in the program or significant changes in the assumptions and environment of the program (see also {software rot}); a good compiler should report dead code so a maintainer can think about what it means. Syn. {grunge}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dead fish in trees water rising above tree tops flooding the levee fish carried by jubilant waves into waiting limbs Are these cruel branches the same that nurture spring? %% dead: adj. 1. Non-functional; {down}; {crash}ed. Especially used of hardware. 2. At XEROX PARC, software that is working but not undergoing continued development and support. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deadlock: n. 1. [techspeak] A situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for one of the others to do something. A common example is a program communicating to a server, which may find itself waiting for output from the server before sending anything more to it, while the server is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling program before outputting anything. (It is reported that this particular flavor of deadlock is sometimes called a `starvation deadlock', though the term `starvation' is more properly used for situations where a program can never run simply because it never gets high enough priority. Another common flavor is `constipation', where each process is trying to send stuff to the other but all buffers are full because nobody is reading anything.) See {deadly embrace}. 2. Also used of deadlock-like interactions between humans, as when two people meet in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress because they always both move the same way at the same time. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deadly embrace: n. Same as {deadlock}, though usually used only when exactly two processes are involved. This is the more popular term in Europe, while {deadlock} predominates in the United States. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deadman: climber (male) who forgets to knot either end of a rappel rope. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% death code: n. A routine whose job is to set everything in the computer --- registers, memory, flags, everything --- to zero, including that portion of memory where it is running; its last act is to stomp on its own "store zero" instruction. Death code isn't very useful, but writing it is an interesting hacking challenge on architectures where the instruction set makes it possible, such as the PDP-8 (it has also been done on the DG Nova). Death code is much less common, and more anti-social, on modern multi-user machines. It was very impressive on earlier hardware that provided front panel switches and displays to show register and memory contents, esp. when these were used to prod the corpse to see why it died. Perhaps the ultimate death code is on the TI 990 series, where all registers are actually in RAM, and the instruction "store immediate 0" has the opcode "0". The PC will immediately wrap around core as many times as it can until a user hits HALT. Any empty memory location is death code. Worse, the manufacturer recommended use of this instruction in startup code (which would be in ROM and therefore survive). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% decay: [from nuclear physics] n.,vi. An automatic conversion which is applied to most array-valued expressions in {C}; they `decay into' pointer-valued expressions pointing to the array's first element. This term is borderline techspeak, but is not used in the official standard for the language. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deckle: /dek'l/ [from dec- and {nybble}; the original spelling seems to have been `decle'] n. Two {nickle}s; 10 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deep hack mode: n. See {hack mode}. %% deep magic: [poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] n. An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one not generally published and available to hackers at large (compare {black art}); one that could only have been composed by a true {wizard}. Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects of {OS} design used to be {deep magic}; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are. Compare {heavy wizardry}. Esp. found in comments of the form "Deep magic begins here...". Compare {voodoo programming}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deep space: n. 1. Describes the notional location of any program that has gone {off the trolley}. Esp. used of programs that just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. "Uh oh. I should have gotten a prompt ten seconds ago. The program's in deep space somewhere." Compare {buzz}, {catatonic}, {hyperspace}. 2. The metaphorical location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some esoteric form of {bogosity} that he or she no longer responds coherently to normal communication. Compare {page out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% default, n.: [Possibly from Black English "De fault wid dis system is you, mon."] The vain attempt to avoid errors by inactivity. "Nothing will come of nothing: speak again." -- King Lear. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" %% defenestration: [from the traditional Czechoslovak method of assassinating prime ministers, via SF fandom] n. 1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that was *awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. The act of exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a full-screen program. This comes from the dictionary meaning of `defenestrate', which is to throw something out a window. 3. The act of discarding something under the assumption that it will improve matters. "I don't have any disk space left." "Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?" 4. [proposed] The requirement to support a command-line interface. "It has to run on a VT100." "Curses! I've been defenestrated!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% defined as: adj. In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. "Pete is currently defined as bug prioritizer." Compare {logical}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dehose: /dee-hohz/ vt. To clear a {hosed} condition. %% delint: /dee-lint/ v. To modify code to remove problems detected when {lint}ing. %% delint: /dee-lint/ v. To modify code to remove problems detected when {lint}ing. Confusingly, this is also referred to as `linting' code. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% delta: n. 1. [techspeak] A quantitative change, especially a small or incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). "I just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on program size?" "About 30 percent." (He doubled the speed of his program, but increased its size by only 30 percent.) 2. [UNIX] A {diff}, especially a {diff} stored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System). 3. n. A small quantity, but not as small as {epsilon}. The jargon usage of {delta} and {epsilon} stems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities, particularly in `epsilon-delta' proofs in limit theory (as in the differential calculus). The term {delta} is often used, once {epsilon} has been mentioned, to mean a quantity that is slightly bigger than {epsilon} but still very small. "The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. Common constructions include `within delta of ---', `within epsilon of ---': that is, close to and even closer to. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% demented: adj. Yet another term of disgust used to describe a program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. Compare {wonky}, {bozotic}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% demigod: n. A hacker with years of experience, a national reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors of {{UNIX}} and {C}) and Richard M. Stallman (inventor of {EMACS}). In their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of someday becoming demigods themselves, and more than one major software project has been driven to completion by the author's veiled hopes of apotheosis. See also {net.god}, {true-hacker}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% demo mode: [Sun] n. 1. The state of being {heads down} in order to finish code in time for a {demo}, usually due yesterday. 2. A mode in which video games sit there by themselves running through a portion of the game, also known as `attract mode'. Some serious {app}s have a demo mode they use as a screen saver, or may go through a demo mode on startup (for example, the Microsoft Windows opening screen --- which lets you impress your neighbors without actually having to put up with {Microsloth Windows}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% demo: /de'moh/ [short for `demonstration'] 1. v. To demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective way of inducing bugs to manifest than any number of {test} runs, especially when important people are watching. 2. n. The act of demoing. %% demo: /de'moh/ [short for `demonstration'] 1. v. To demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective way of inducing bugs to manifest than any number of {test} runs, especially when important people are watching. 2. n. The act of demoing. 3. n. Esp. as `demo version', can refer to either a special version of a program (frequently with some features crippled) which is distributed at little or no cost to the user for demonstration purposes. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% demon: n. 1. [MIT] A portion of a program that is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. See {daemon}. The distinction is that demons are usually processes within a program, while daemons are usually programs running on an operating system. Demons are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue with whatever its primary task was. 2. [outside MIT] Often used equivalently to {daemon} --- especially in the {{UNIX}} world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% depeditate: /dee-ped'*-tayt/ [by (faulty) analogy with `decapitate'] vt. Humorously, to cut off the feet of. When one is using some computer-aided typesetting tools, careless placement of text blocks within a page or above a rule can result in chopped-off letter descenders. Such letters are said to have been depeditated. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deprecated: adj. Said of a program or feature that is considered obsolescent and in the process of being phased out, usually in favor of a specified replacement. Deprecated features can, unfortunately, linger on for many years. %% deprecated: adj. Said of a program or feature that is considered obsolescent and in the process of being phased out, usually in favor of a specified replacement. Deprecated features can, unfortunately, linger on for many years. This term appears with distressing frequency in standards documents when the committees which write them decide that a sufficient number of users have written code which depends on specific features which are out of favor. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% deserves to lose: adj. Said of someone who willfully does the {Wrong Thing}; humorously, if one uses a feature known to be {marginal}. What is meant is that one deserves the consequences of one's {losing} actions. "Boy, anyone who tries to use {mess-dos} deserves to {lose}!" ({{ITS}} fans used to say this of {{UNIX}}; many still do.) See also {screw}, {chomp}, {bagbiter}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% desk check: n.,v. To {grovel} over hardcopy of source code, mentally simulating the control flow; a method of catching bugs. No longer common practice in this age of on-screen editing, fast compiles, and sophisticated debuggers --- though some maintain stoutly that it ought to be. Compare {eyeball search}, {vdiff}, {vgrep}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% devo: /dee'voh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A person in a development group. See also {doco} and {mango}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dexterity allows you to carry more %% diaper seat: article of climbing used by novices who are still learning self-control. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% dickless workstation: n. Extremely pejorative hackerism for `diskless workstation', a class of botches including the Sun 3/50 and other machines designed exclusively to network with an expensive central disk server. These combine all the disadvantages of time-sharing with all the disadvantages of distributed personal computers; typically, they cannot even {boot} themselves without help (in the form of some kind of {breath-of-life packet}) from the server. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dictionary flame: [USENET] n. An attempt to sidetrack a debate away from issues by insisting on meanings for key terms that presuppose a desired conclusion or smuggle in an implicit premise. A common tactic of people who prefer argument over definitions to disputes about reality. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% did someone put itching powder in your armor? %% did you hear about the guy who died from snorting saccharine? yeah, he thought it was diet coke. %% diddle: 1. vt. To work with or modify in a not particularly serious manner. "I diddled a copy of {ADVENT} so it didn't double-space all the time." "Let's diddle this piece of code and see if the problem goes away." See {tweak} and {twiddle}. 2. n. The action or result of diddling. See also {tweak}, {twiddle}, {frob}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% die horribly: v. The software equivalent of {crash and burn}, and the preferred emphatic form of {die}. "The converter choked on an FF in its input and died horribly". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% die: v. Syn. {crash}. Unlike {crash}, which is used primarily of hardware, this verb is used of both hardware and software. See also {go flatline}, {casters-up mode}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% diff: /dif/ n. 1. A change listing, especially giving differences between (and additions to) source code or documents (the term is often used in the plural `diffs'). "Send me your diffs for the Jargon File!" Compare {vdiff}. 2. Specifically, such a listing produced by the `diff(1)' command, esp. when used as specification input to the `patch(1)' utility (which can actually perform the modifications; see {patch}). This is a common method of distributing patches and source updates in the UNIX/C world. See also {vdiff}, {mod}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% difficulty affects regeneration %% digit: n. An employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. See also {VAX}, {VMS}, {PDP-10}, {{TOPS-10}}, {DEChead}, {double DECkers}, {field circus}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dike: vt. To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is "When in doubt, dike it out". (The implication is that it is usually more effective to attack software problems by reducing complexity than by increasing it.) The word `dikes' is widely used among mechanics and engineers to mean `diagonal cutters', esp. the heavy-duty metal-cutting version, but may also refer to a kind of wire-cutters used by electronics techs. To `dike something out' means to use such cutters to remove something. Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as "to attack with dikes". Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended to informational objects such as sections of code. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ding: n.,vi. 1. Synonym for {feep}. Usage: rare among hackers, but commoner in the {Real World}. 2. `dinged': What happens when someone in authority gives you a minor bitching about something, esp. something trivial. "I was dinged for having a messy desk." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dink: /dink/ n. Said of a machine that has the {bitty box} nature; a machine too small to be worth bothering with --- sometimes the system you're currently forced to work on. First heard from an MIT hacker working on a CP/M system with 64K, in reference to any 6502 system, then from fans of 32-bit architectures about 16-bit machines. "GNUMACS will never work on that dink machine." Probably derived from mainstream `dinky', which isn't sufficiently pejorative. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dinosaur pen: n. A traditional {mainframe} computer room complete with raised flooring, special power, its own ultra-heavy-duty air conditioning, and a side order of Halon fire extinguishers. See {boa}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dinosaur: n. 1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the 1988 UNIX EXPO, Bill Joy compared the mainframe in the massive IBM display with a grazing dinosaur "with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it". IBM was not amused. Compare {big iron}; see also {mainframe}. 2. [IBM] A very conservative user; a {zipperhead}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dinosaurs mating: n. Said to occur when yet another {big iron} merger or buyout occurs; reflects a perception by hackers that these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the {mainframe} industry. In its glory days of the 1960s, it was `IBM and the Seven Dwarves': Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. RCA and GE sold out early, and it was `IBM and the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while. Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 --- this was when the phrase `dinosaurs mating' was coined); and as this is written (early 1991) AT&T is attempting to recover from a disastrously bad first six years in the hardware industry by absorbing NCR. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dirtball: [XEROX PARC] n. A small, perhaps struggling outsider; not in the major or even the minor leagues. For example, "Xerox is not a dirtball company". [Outsiders often observe in the PARC culture an institutional arrogance which usage of this term exemplifies. The brilliance and scope of PARC's contributions to computer science have been such that this superior attitude is not much resented. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dirty power: n. Electrical mains voltage that is unfriendly to the delicate innards of computers. Spikes, {drop-outs}, average voltage significantly higher or lower than nominal, or just plain noise can all cause problems of varying subtlety and severity (these are collectively known as {power hit}s). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% disclaimer: n. [USENET] n. Statement ritually appended to many USENET postings (sometimes automatically, by the posting software) reiterating the fact (which should be obvious, but is easily forgotten) that the article reflects its author's opinions and not necessarily those of the organization running the machine through which the article entered the network. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% disk farm: n. (also {laundromat}) A large room or rooms filled with disk drives (esp. {washing machine}s). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% disney, diz'nee, v.t. to queue excessively for a very short ride [prob S.E. & S.W. U.S.] %% display hack: n. A program with the same approximate purpose as a kaleidoscope: to make pretty pictures. Famous display hacks include {munching squares}, {smoking clover}, the BSD UNIX `rain(6)' program, `worms(6)' on miscellaneous UNIXes, and the {X} `kaleid(1)' program. Display hacks can also be implemented without programming by creating text files containing numerous escape sequences for interpretation by a video terminal; one notable example displayed, on any VT100, a Christmas tree with twinkling lights and a toy train circling its base. The {hack value} of a display hack is proportional to the esthetic value of the images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the size of the code. Syn. {psychedelicware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% distribution: n. 1. A software source tree packaged for distribution; but see {kit}. 2. A vague term encompassing mailing lists and USENET newsgroups (but not {BBS} {fora}); any topic-oriented message channel with multiple recipients. 3. An information-space domain (usually loosely correlated with geography) to which propagation of a USENET message is restricted; a much-underutilized feature. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% do protocol: [from network protocol programming] vi. To perform an interaction with somebody or something that follows a clearly defined procedure. For example, "Let's do protocol with the check" at a restaurant means to ask for the check, calculate the tip and everybody's share, collect money from everybody, generate change as necessary, and pay the bill. See {protocol}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% doc: /dok/ n. Common spoken and written shorthand for `documentation'. Often used in the plural `docs' and in the construction `doc file' (documentation available on-line). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% doco: /do'koh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A documentation writer. See also {devo} and {mango}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% documentation:: n. The multiple kilograms of macerated, pounded, steamed, bleached, and pressed trees that accompany most modern software or hardware products (see also {tree-killer}). Hackers seldom read paper documentation and (too) often resist writing it; they prefer theirs to be terse and on-line. A common comment on this is "You can't {grep} dead trees". See {drool-proof paper}, {verbiage}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dodgy: adj. Syn. with {flaky}. Preferred outside the U.S. %% dogcow: /dog'kow/ n. See {Moof}. %% dogwash: /dog'wosh/ [From a quip in the `urgency' field of a very optional software change request, ca. 1982. It was something like "Urgency: Wash your dog first".] 1. n. A project of minimal priority, undertaken as an escape from more serious work. 2. v. To engage in such a project. Many games and much {freeware} get written this way. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% domainist: /doh-mayn'ist/ adj. 1. Said of an {{Internet address}} (as opposed to a {bang path}) because the part to the right of the `@' specifies a nested series of `domains'; for example, eric@snark.thyrsus.com specifies the machine called snark in the subdomain called thyrsus within the top-level domain called com. See also {big-endian}, sense 2. 2. Said of a site, mailer, or routing program which knows how to handle domainist addresses. 3. Said of a person (esp. a site admin) who prefers domain addressing, supports a domainist mailer, or prosyletizes for domainist addressing and disdains {bang path}s. This is now (1991) semi-obsolete, as most sites have converted. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% don't fall into a bottomless pit %% don't pry into the affairs of others %% don't worry . . . be happy should it happen your programs fail do you need to fret or wail don't worry . . . be happy updates didn't load last night pretty soon we'll make it right don't worry . . . be happy when your process takes too long take a minute and sing this song don't worry . . . be happy you don't have to sit and stare you don't have to pull your hair don't worry . . . be happy is it bound by cpu or by IO we'll check it out to find it so don't worry . . . be happy don't worry . be happy, now with computers we expect some trouble worrying only makes it double don't worry . . . be happy just because the disk drive broke doesn't mean you have a stroke don't worry . . . be happy sometimes the systems go down you know it'll come around don't worry . . . be happy don't worry . be happy, now just call me, I'll make you happy to every month must come an end ad-hoc query can be your friend don't worry . . . be happy even when its end of quarter doesn't mean jobs will falter don't worry . . . be happy and whenever its end of year of the systems we need not fear don't worry . . . be happy %% dongle-disk: /don'gl disk/ n. See {dongle}; a `dongle-disk' is a floppy disk which is required in order to perform some task. Some contain special coding that allows an application to identify it uniquely, others *are* special code that does something that normally-resident programs don't or can't. (For example, AT&T's "Unix PC" would only come up in {root mode} with a special boot disk.) Also called a `key disk'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dongle-disk: /don'gl disk/ n. See {dongle}; a `dongle-disk' is a floppy disk with some coding that allows an application to identify it uniquely. It can therefore be used as a {dongle}. Also called a `key disk'. %% dongle: /dong'gl/ n. 1. A security or {copy protection} device for commercial microcomputer programs consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in a D-25 connector shell, which must be connected to an I/O port of the computer while the program is run. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup and at programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users can make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay for each dongle. The idea was clever, but it was initially a failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port this way. Most dongles on the market today (1991) will pass data through the port and monitor for {magic} codes (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any interference with devices further down the line --- this innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces of software. The devices are still not widely used, as the industry has moved away from copy-protection schemes in general. 2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferrable ID required for a program to function. Common variations on this theme have used parallel or even joystick ports. See {dongle-disk}. [Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow Technologies (a manufacturer of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from "Don Gall", allegedly the inventor of the device. The company's receptionist will cheerfully tell you that the story is a myth invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my life as a lexicographer for at least the next ten years. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% donuts: n.obs. A collective noun for any set of memory bits. This is extremely archaic and may no longer be live jargon; it dates from the days of ferrite-{core} memories in which each bit was implemented by a doughnut-shaped magnetic flip-flop. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% doorstop: n. Used to describe equipment that is non-functional and halfway expected to remain so, especially obsolete equipment kept around for political reasons or ostensibly as a backup. "When we get another Wyse-50 in here, that ADM 3 will turn into a doorstop." Compare {boat anchor}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dos thou strive for perfection? %% dot file: [UNIX] n. A file which is not visible by default to normal directory-browsing tools (on UNIX, files named with a leading dot are, by convention, not normally presented in directory listings). Many programs define one or more dot files in which startup or configuration information may be optionally recorded; a user can customize the program's behavior by creating the appropriate file in the current or home directory. (Therefore, dot files tend to {creep} --- with every nontrivial application program defining at least one, a user's home directory can be filled with scores of dot files, of course without the user's really being aware of it.) See also {rc file}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% double DECkers: n. Used to describe married couples in which both partners work for Digital Equipment Corporation. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% double bucky: adj. Using both the CTRL and META keys. "The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F." This term originated on the Stanford extended-ASCII keyboard, and was later taken up by users of the {space-cadet keyboard} at MIT. A typical MIT comment was that the Stanford {bucky bits} (control and meta shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't enough of them; you could type only 512 different characters on a Stanford keyboard. An obvious way to address this was simply to add more shifting keys, and this was eventually done; but a keyboard with that many shifting keys is hard on touch-typists, who don't like to move their hands away from the home position on the keyboard. It was half-seriously suggested that the extra shifting keys be implemented as pedals; typing on such a keyboard would be very much like playing a full pipe organ. This idea is mentioned in a parody of a very fine song by Jeffrey Moss called "Rubber Duckie", which was published in `The Sesame Street Songbook' (Simon and Schuster 1971, ISBN 0-671-21036-X). These lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in celebration of the Stanford keyboard: Double Bucky Double bucky, you're the one! You make my keyboard lots of fun. Double bucky, an additional bit or two: (Vo-vo-de-o!) Control and meta, side by side, Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide! Double bucky! Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few! Oh, I sure wish that I Had a couple of Bits more! Perhaps a Set of pedals to Make the number of Bits four: Double double bucky! Double bucky, left and right OR'd together, outta sight! Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you! --- The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss) [This, by the way, is an excellent example of computer {filk} --- ESR] See also {meta bit}, {cokebottle}, and {quadruple bucky}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% doubled sig: [USENET] n. A {sig block} that has been included twice in a {USENET} article or, less commonly, in an electronic mail message. An article or message with a doubled sig can be caused by improperly configured software. More often, however, it reveals the author's lack of experience in electronic communication. See {BIFF}, {pseudo}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% down-chuck (downn tsh-uhk) v.: to re-ingest vomit at the last possible moment. Compare: "bumgulp" %% down: 1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a humorous thing to say, and "The elevator is down" always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on. With respect to computers, this usage has passed into the mainstream; the extension to other kinds of machine is still hackish. 2. `go down' vi. To stop functioning; usually said of the {system}. The message from the {console} that every hacker hates to hear from the operator is "The system will go down in 5 minutes". 3. `take down', `bring down' vt. To deactivate purposely, usually for repair work or {PM}. "I'm taking the system down to work on that bug in the tape drive." Occasionally one hears the word `down' by itself used as a verb in this vt. sense. See {crash}; oppose {up}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% download: vt. To transfer data or (esp.) code from a larger `host' system (esp. a {mainframe}) over a digital comm link to a smaller `client' system, esp. a microcomputer or specialized peripheral. Oppose {upload}. However, note that ground-to-space communications has its own usage rule for this term. Space-to-earth transmission is always download and the reverse upload regardless of the relative size of the computers involved. So far the in-space machines have invariably been smaller; thus the upload/download distinction has been reversed from its usual sense. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dragon: n. [MIT] A program similar to a {daemon}, except that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in, accumulates load-average statistics, etc. Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise), which was generated by the `name dragon'. Usage: rare outside MIT --- under UNIX and most other OSes this would be called a `background demon' or {daemon}. The best-known UNIX example of a dragon is `cron(1)'. At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a `phantom'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drain: [IBM] v. Syn. for {flush} (sense 2). Has a connotation of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device before taking it offline. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dread high-bit disease: n. A condition endemic to PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME) minicomputers that results in all the characters having their high (0x80) bit ON rather than OFF. This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention talking to true 8-bit devices. Folklore had it that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine; PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim they inherited the disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility requirements and struggled manfully to cure it. Whoever was responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most {cretinous} design tradeoffs ever made. See {meta bit}. A few other machines have exhibited similar brain damage. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drinking can be hazardous to your health %% drive type not configured %% driver: n. 1. The {main loop} of an event-processing program; the code that gets commands and dispatches them for execution. 2. [techspeak] In `device driver', code designed to handle a particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or tape unit. 3. In the TeX world and the computerized typesetting world in general, `driver' also means a program that translates some device-independent or other common format to something a real device can actually understand. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% droid: n. A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the following characteristics: (a) na"ive trust in the wisdom of the parent organization or `the system'; (b) a propensity to believe obvious nonsense emitted by authority figures (or computers!); blind faith; (c) a rule-governed mentality, one unwilling or unable to look beyond the `letter of the law' in exceptional situations; and (d) no interest in fixing that which is broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitude. Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures constitute software that the droid is executing. This becomes a problem when the software has not been properly debugged. The term `droid mentality' is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}; see {-oid}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drool-proof paper: n. Documentation that has been obsessively {dumbed down}, to the point where only a {cretin} could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the `drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been `written on drool-proof paper'. For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drop on the floor: vt. To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay sites that lose messages. See also {black hole}, {bit bucket}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drop-ins: [prob. by analogy with {drop-outs}] n. Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result of line noise or a system malfunction of some sort. Esp. used when these are interspersed with one's own typed input. Compare {drop-outs}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drop-outs: n. 1. A variety of `power glitch' (see {glitch}); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains. 2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (this can happen under UNIX when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts). 3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See {glitch}, {fried}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drugged: adj. (also `on drugs') 1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward {brain-damaged}. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint (but see {appendix B}). 2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drum: adj,n. Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media which were once state-of-the-art mass-storage devices. Under BSD UNIX the disk partition used for swapping is still called `/dev/drum'; this has led to considerable humor and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogus `explanations' getting foisted on {newbie}s. See also "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in {appendix A}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% drunk mouse syndrome: (also `mouse on drugs') n. A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees. At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier cleaner (isopropyl alcohol) at their desks. When the steel ball on the mouse had picked up enough {cruft} to be unreliable, the mouse was doused in cleaner, which restored it for a while. However, this operation left a fine residue that accelerated the accumulation of cruft, so the dousings became more and more frequent. Finally, the mouse was declared `alcoholic' and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC ultrasonic bath. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dumb terminal: n. A terminal which is one step above a {glass tty}, having a minimally-addressable cursor but no on-screen editing or other features which are claimed by a {smart terminal}. Once upon a time, when glass ttys were common and addressable cursors were something special, what is now called a dumb terminal could pass for a smart terminal. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dumbass attack: /duhm'as *-tak'/ [Purdue] n. Notional cause of a novice's mistake made by the experienced, especially one made while running as {root} under UNIX, e.g., typing `rm -r *' or `mkfs' on a mounted file system. Compare {adger}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dumbed down: adj. Simplified, with a strong connotation of *over*simplified. Often, a {marketroid} will insist that the interfaces and documentation of software be dumbed down after the designer has burned untold gallons of midnight oil making it smart. This creates friction. See {user-friendly}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dump: n. 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem or the state of a system, especially one routed to the slowest available output device (compare {core dump}), and most especially one consisting of hex or octal {runes} describing the byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In {elder days}, debugging was generally done by `groveling over' a dump (see {grovel}); increasing use of high-level languages and interactive debuggers has made this uncommon, and the term `dump' now has a faintly archaic flavor. 2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing installations. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dumpster diving: /dump'-ster di:'-ving/ n. 1. The practice of sifting refuse from an office or technical installation to extract confidential data, especially security-compromising information (`dumpster' is an Americanism for what is elsewhere called a `skip'). Back in AT&T's monopoly days, before paper shredders became common office equipment, phone phreaks (see {phreaking}) used to organize regular dumpster runs against phone company plants and offices. Discarded and damaged copies of AT&T internal manuals taught them much. The technique is still rumored to be a favorite of crackers operating against careless targets. 2. The practice of raiding the dumpsters behind buildings where producers and/or consumers of high-tech equipment are located, with the expectation (usually justified) of finding discarded but still-valuable equipment to be nursed back to health in some hacker's den. Experienced dumpster-divers not infrequently accumulate basements full of moldering (but still potentially useful) {cruft}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dup killer: /d[y]oop kill'r/ [FidoNet] n. Software that is supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message that may have reached the FidoNet system via different routes. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dup loop: /d[y]oop loop/ (also `dupe loop') [FidoNet] n. An incorrectly configured system or network gateway may propagate duplicate messages on one or more {echo}es, with different identification information that renders {dup killer}s ineffective. If such a duplicate message eventually reaches a system through which it has already passed (with the original identification information), all systems passed on the way back to that system are said to be involved in a {dup loop}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dusty deck: n. Old software (especially applications) which one is obliged to remain compatible with (or to maintain). The term implies that the software in question is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when referring to old scientific and {number-crunching} software, much of which was written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but is believed to be too expensive to replace. See {fossil}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% dynner: /din'r/ 32 bits, by analogy with {nybble} and {{byte}}. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also {playte}, {tayste}, {crumb}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% e-credibility: the non-guaranteeable likelihood that the electronic data you're seeing is genuine rather than somebody's made-up crap. -- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com %% eHpl ! Imat arppdei sndi eht eDP-P11 %% eHpl ! Imat arppdei sndi eht eED-C20 %% earthquake: [IBM] n. The ultimate real-world shock test for computer hardware. Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the company to test quality-assurance procedures at its California plants. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% eat flaming death: imp. A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposed to derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, {{EBCDIC}} users!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% echo: [FidoNet] n. A {topic group} on {FidoNet}'s echomail system. Compare {newsgroup}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% eggs derelict (ehgz dare-a-licked) n.: a plate of unfinished breakfast that has been used as an ashtray %% egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0 %% egrep patterns are full regular expressions; it uses a fast deterministic algorithm that sometimes needs exponential space. -- unix manuals %% eighty-column mind: [IBM] n. The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the transition from {punched card} to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last Bug", the climactic lines of which are as follows: He died at the console Of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, Face down, 9-edge first. The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking. See {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {card walloper}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% el capitan: expedition leader in a spanish speaking country. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% elder days: n. The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly, pre-1980); the era of the {PDP-10}, {TECO}, {{ITS}}, and the ARPANET. This term has been rather consciously adopted from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic `The Lord of the Rings'. Compare {Iron Age}; see also {elvish}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% elegant: [from mathematical usage] adj. Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever', `winning', or even {cuspy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% elephantine: adj. Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous {hog}s (owing perhaps to poor design founded on {brute force and ignorance}) and exceedingly {hairy} in source form. An elephantine program may be functional and even friendly, but (as in the old joke about being in bed with an elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and, like a pachyderm, difficult to maintain). In extreme cases, hackers have been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive proboscatory mime at the mention of the offending program. Usage: semi-humorous. Compare `has the elephant nature' and the somewhat more pejorative {monstrosity}. See also {second-system effect} and {baroque}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% elevator controller: n. Another archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like {toaster} (which superseded it). During one period (1983--84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C standardization committee) this was the canonical example of a really stupid, memory-limited computation environment. "You can't require `printf(3)' to be part of the default runtime library --- what if you're targeting an elevator controller?" Elevator controllers became important rhetorical weapons on both sides of several {holy wars}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% elvish: n. 1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the `Book of Kells'. Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in `The Lord of The Rings' as an orthography for his fictional `elvish' languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically elegant) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be interested by artificial languages in general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items. See also {elder days}. 2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface produced by a graphics device. 3. The typeface mundanely called `B"ocklin', an art-decoish display font. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% email: /ee'mayl/ 1. n. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer networks and/or via modems over common-carrier lines. Contrast {snail-mail}, {paper-net}, {voice-net}. See {network address}. 2. vt. To send electronic mail. Oddly enough, the word `emailed' is actually listed in the OED; it means "embossed (with a raised pattern) or arranged in a net work". A use from 1480 is given. The word is derived from French `emmailleure', network. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% emoticon: /ee-moh'ti-kon/ n. An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in email or news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some other explicit humor indication) are virtually required under certain circumstances in high-volume text-only communication forums such as USENET; the lack of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were intended to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by {newbie}s), resulting in arguments and {flame war}s. Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in common use. These include: :-) `smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness, occasionally sarcasm) :-( `frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset) ;-) `half-smiley' ({ha ha only serious}); also known as `semi-smiley' or `winkey face'. :-/ `wry face' (These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head sideways, to the left.) The first two listed are by far the most frequently encountered. Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX; see also {bixie}. On {USENET}, `smiley' is often used as a generic term synonymous with {emoticon}, as well as specifically for the happy-face emoticon. It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the CMU {bboard} systems around 1980. He later wrote: "I wish I had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date for posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world's communication channels." [GLS confirms that he remembers this original posting]. Note for the {newbie}: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of loserhood! More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that you've gone over the line. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% empire: n. Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. There are five or six multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication, and one single-player version implemented for both UNIX and VMS; the latter is even available as MS-DOS freeware. All are notoriously addictive. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% encrypt - where Egyptian kings are buried %% endless loop n. see LOOP, ENDLESS In YOUR PROGRAM an endless loop is an elementary blunder, whereas in MY PROGRAM it is a DYNAMIC HALT. %% energy rings affect spell regeneration %% engine: n. 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but can't be used without some kind of {front end}. Today we have, especially, `print engine': the guts of a laser printer. 2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a `database engine'. The hackish senses of `engine' are actually close to its original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity'). This sense had not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which explains why he named the stored-program computer that he designed in 1844 the `Analytical Engine'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% enhancement: n. {Marketroid}-speak for a bug {fix}. This abuse of language is a popular and time-tested way to turn incompetence into increased revenue. A hacker being ironic would instead call the fix a {feature} --- or perhaps save some effort by declaring the bug itself to be a feature. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a {wannabee}, or in {larval stage}. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also {{Humor, Hacker}}, and {AI koans}. %% epoch: [UNIX: prob. from astronomical timekeeping] n. The time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under most UNIX versions the epoch is 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970; under VMS, it's 00:00:00 GMT of November 17, 1858 (base date of the U.S. Naval Observatory's ephemerides). System time is measured in seconds or {tick}s past the epoch. Weird problems may ensue when the clock wraps around (see {wrap around}), which is not necessarily a rare event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed 32-bit count of ticks is good only for 6.8 years. The 1-tick-per-second clock of UNIX is good only until January 18, 2038, assuming at least some software continues to consider it signed and that word lengths don't increase by then. See also {wall time}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% epsilon squared: n. A quantity even smaller than {epsilon}, as small in comparison to epsilon as epsilon is to something normal; completely negligible. If you buy a supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the thousand-dollar terminal to go with it is {epsilon}, and the cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared. Compare {lost in the underflow}, {lost in the noise}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% epsilon: [see {delta}] 1. n. A small quantity of anything. "The cost is epsilon." 2. adj. Very small, negligible; less than {marginal}. "We can get this feature for epsilon cost." 3. `within epsilon of': close enough to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes. This is even closer than being `within delta of'. "That's not what I asked for, but it's within epsilon of what I wanted." Alternatively, it may mean not close enough, but very little is required to get it there: "My program is within epsilon of working." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% era, the: Syn. {epoch}. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but `era' usually connotes a span of time rather than a point in time. The {epoch} usage is recommended. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% erotics: /ee-ro'tiks/ n. [Helsinki University of Technology, Finland] n. English-language university slang for electronics. Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good electronics excites them and makes them warm. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% error Error ERROR ERROR ERROR must analyze must analyze %% error 33: [XEROX PARC] n. 1. Predicating one research effort upon the success of another. 2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research effort or not). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% error correction count = %% essentials: everything you left at home. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% essentials: n. Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure hacking environment. "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a 20-megahertz 80386 box with 8 meg of core and a 300-megabyte disk supporting full UNIX with source and X windows and EMACS and UUCP via a 'blazer to a friendly Internet site, and thou." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% evil: adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the {cretinous}/{losing}/{brain-damaged} series, `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about adding a {Blue Glue} interface but decided it was too evil to deal with." "{TECO} is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee'vil/. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% exa-: /ek's*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}. %% examining the entrails: n. The process of {grovel}ling through a core dump or hex image in the attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. The reference is to divination from the entrails of a sacrified animal. Compare {runes}, {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% except possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to specify the exact characters `foo!' one would speak "Eff oh oh bang". See {shriek}, {{ASCII}}. 2. interj. An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!" Often used to acknowledge that one has perpetrated a {thinko} immediately after one has been called on it. %% excl: /eks'kl/ n. Abbreviation for `exclamation point'. See {bang}, {shriek}, {{ASCII}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% exec: /eg-zek'/ vt.,n. 1. [UNIX: from `execute'] Synonym for {chain}, derives from the `exec(2)' call. 2. [from `executive'] obs. The command interpreter for an {OS} (see {shell}); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob. derived from UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems. 3. At IBM and VM/CMS shops, the equivalent of a shell command file (among VM/CMS users). The mainstream `exec' as an abbreviation for (human) executive is *not* used. To a hacker, an `exec' is a always a program, never a person. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% exercise, left as an: [from technical books] Used to complete a proof when one doesn't mind a {handwave}, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is: "The proof (or the rest) is left as an exercise for the reader." This comment *has* occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% expedition: highly organized way to spend a great deal of money in a relatively short period of time. the best are those in which your time and someone else's money are involved. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% exposure: result of answering the call of nature during a climb. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% eyeball search: n. To look for something in a mass of code or data with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to using some sort of pattern matching software like {grep} or any other automated search tool. Also called a {vgrep}; compare {vdiff}, {desk check}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% f u cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd. %% f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng. %% fab: /fab/ [from `fabricate'] v. 1. To produce chips from a design that may have been created by someone at another company. Fabbing chips based on the designs of others is the activity of a {silicon foundry}. To a hacker, `fab' is practically never short for `fabulous'. 2. `fab line': the production system (lithography, diffusion, etching, etc.) for chips at a chip manufacturer. Different `fab lines' are run with different process parameters, die sizes, or technologies, or simply to provide more manufacturing volume. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% face time: n. Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as opposed to via electronic links). "Oh, yeah, I spent some face time with him at the last Usenix." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% factor: n. See {coefficient}. %% fall over: [IBM] vi. Yet another synonym for {crash} or {lose}. `Fall over hard' equates to {crash and burn}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fall through: v. (n. `fallthrough', var. `fall-through') 1. To exit a loop by exhaustion, i.e., by having fulfilled its exit condition rather than via a break or exception condition that exits from the middle of it. This usage appears to be *really* old, dating from the 1940s and 1950s. 2. To fail a test that would have passed control to a subroutine or some other distant portion of code. 3. In C, `fall-through' occurs when the flow of execution in a switch statement reaches a `case' label other than by jumping there from the switch header, passing a point where one would normally expect to find a `break'. A trivial example: switch (color) { case GREEN: do_green(); break; case PINK: do_pink(); /* FALL THROUGH */ case RED: do_red(); break; default: do_blue(); break; } The variant spelling `/* FALL THRU */' is also common. The effect of this code is to `do_green()' when color is `GREEN', `do_red()' when color is `RED', `do_blue()' on any other color other than `PINK', and (and this is the important part) `do_pink()' *and then* `do_red()' when color is `PINK'. Fall-through is {considered harmful} by some, though there are contexts (such as the coding of state machines) in which it is natural; it is generally considered good practice to include a comment highlighting the fall-through where one would normally expect a break. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fall: good time of year for climbing. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% falling barometer: barometer that has slipped out of a pocket when climbing. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% fan: n. Without qualification, indicates a fan of science fiction, especially one who goes to {con}s and tends to hang out with other fans. Many hackers are fans, so this term has been imported from fannish slang; however, unlike much fannish slang it is recognized by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the plural is correctly `fen', but this usage is not automatic to hackers. "Laura reads the stuff occasionally but isn't really a fan." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fandango on core: [UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] n. In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a {core dump}, or corrupts the `malloc(3)' {arena} in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have `done a fandango on core'. On low-end personal machines without an MMU, this can corrupt the OS itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted. See {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {smash the stack}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {overrun screw}, {core}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% faradize: /far'*-di:z/ [US Geological Survey] v. To start any hyper-addictive process or trend, or to continue adding current to such a trend. Telling one user about a new octo-tetris game you compiled would be a faradizing act --- in two weeks you might find your entire department playing the faradic game. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% farkled: /far'kld/ [DeVry Institute of Technology, Atlanta] adj. Syn. {hosed}. Poss. owes something to Yiddish `farblondjet'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% farming: [Adelaide University, Australia] n. What the heads of a disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media. Associated with a {crash}. Typically used as follows: "Oh no, the machine has just crashed; I hope the hard drive hasn't gone {farming} again." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fascist: adj. 1. Said of a computer system with excessive or annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The implication is that said policies are preventing hackers from getting interesting work done. The variant `fascistic' seems to have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with `touristic' (see {tourist}). 2. In the design of languages and other software tools, `the fascist alternative' is the most restrictive and structured way of capturing a particular function; the implication is that this may be desirable in order to simplify the implementation or provide tighter error checking. Compare {bondage-and-discipline language}, but that term is global rather than local. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fat electrons: n. Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the causation of computer glitches. Your typical electric utility draws its line current out of the big generators with a pair of coil taps located near the top of the dynamo. When the normal tap brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean up, and use special auxiliary taps on the *bottom* of the coil. Now, this is a problem, because when they do that they get not ordinary or `thin' electrons, but the fat'n'sloppy electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the generator. These flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn a sharp corner (as in an integrated-circuit via) they're apt to get stuck. This is what causes computer glitches. [Fascinating. Obviously, fat electrons must gain mass by {bogon} absorption --- ESR] Compare {bogon}, {magic smoke}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% faulty: adj. Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as {bletcherous}, {losing}, q.v., but the connotation is much milder. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fcore proc on q %% fd leak: /F-D leek/ n. A kind of programming bug analogous to a {core leak}, in which a program fails to close file descriptors (`fd's) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See {leak}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fear and loathing: [from Hunter S. Thompson] n. A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally {brain-damaged} but ubiquitous --- Intel 8086s, or {COBOL}, or {{EBCDIC}}, or any {IBM} machine except the Rios (a.k.a. the RS/6000). "Ack! They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing time!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feature creature: [poss. fr. slang `creature feature' for a horror movie] n. 1. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision, or {taste}. 2. Alternately, a mythical being that induces otherwise rational programmers to perpetrate such crocks. See also {feeping creaturism}, {creeping featurism}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feature key: n. The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its keytop; sometimes referred to as `flower', `pretzel', `clover', `propeller', `beanie' (an apparent reference to the major feature of a propeller beanie), {splat}, or the `command key'. The Mac's equivalent of an {alt} key. The proliferation of terms for this creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces. Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is `cross of St. Hannes', but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to mark sites of historical interest. Though this symbol technically stands for the word `sev"ardhet' (interesting feature) many of these are old churches; hence, the Swedish idiom for the symbol is `kyrka', cognate to English `church' and Scots-dialect `kirk' but pronounced /shir'k*/ in modern Swedish. This is in fact where Apple got the symbol; they give the translation "interesting feature"! -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feature shock: [from Alvin Toffler's book title `Future Shock'] n. A user's (or programmer's!) confusion when confronted with a package that has too many features and poor introductory material. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feature: n. 1. A good property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial. 2. An intended property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad, it is also a {misfeature}). 3. A surprising property or behavior; in particular, one that is purposely inconsistent because it works better that way --- such an inconsistency is therefore a {feature} and not a {bug}. This kind of feature is sometimes called a {miswart}; see that entry for a classic example. 4. A property or behavior that is gratuitous or unnecessary, though perhaps also impressive or cute. For example, one feature of Common LISP's `format' function is the ability to print numbers in two different Roman-numeral formats (see {bells, whistles, and gongs}). 5. A property or behavior that was put in to help someone else but that happens to be in your way. 6. A bug that has been documented. To call something a feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider the particular case, and that the program responded in a way that was unexpected but not strictly incorrect. A standard joke is that a bug can be turned into a {feature} simply by documenting it (then theoretically no one can complain about it because it's in the manual), or even by simply declaring it to be good. "That's not a bug, that's a feature!" is a common catchphrase. See also {feetch feetch}, {creeping featurism}, {wart}, {green lightning}. The relationship among bugs, features, misfeatures, warts, and miswarts might be clarified by the following hypothetical exchange between two hackers on an airliner: A: "This seat doesn't recline." B: "That's not a bug, that's a feature. There is an emergency exit door built around the window behind you, and the route has to be kept clear." A: "Oh. Then it's a misfeature; they should have increased the spacing between rows here." B: "Yes. But if they'd increased spacing in only one section it would have been a wart --- they would've had to make nonstandard-length ceiling panels to fit over the displaced seats." A: "A miswart, actually. If they increased spacing throughout they'd lose several rows and a chunk out of the profit margin. So unequal spacing would actually be the Right Thing." B: "Indeed." `Undocumented feature' is a common, allegedly humorous euphemism for a {bug}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% featurectomy: /fee`ch*r-ek't*-mee/ n. The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies come in two flavors, the `righteous' and the `reluctant'. Righteous featurectomies are performed because the remover believes the program would be more elegant without the feature, or there is already an equivalent and better way to achieve the same end. (This is not quite the same thing as removing a {misfeature}.) Reluctant featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external constraint such as code size or execution speed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% federation - having given a ration of food to someone %% feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous `ANSI standard cup of tea' and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. Milk and lemon don't mix very well. %% feep: /feep/ 1. n. The soft electronic `bell' sound of a display terminal (except for a VT-52); a beep (in fact, the microcomputer world seems to prefer {beep}). 2. vi. To cause the display to make a feep sound. ASR-33s (the original TTYs) do not feep; they have mechanical bells that ring. Alternate forms: {beep}, `bleep', or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip "Shoe", uses the word `eep' for sounds made by computer terminals and video games; this is perhaps the closest written approximation yet.) The term `breedle' was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly soft (they sound more like the musical equivalent of a raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek communicator's beep lasting for five seconds). The `feeper' on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also {ding}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feeper: /fee'pr/ n. The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the {feep} sound. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feeping creature: [from {feeping creaturism}] n. An unnecessary feature; a bit of {chrome} that, in the speaker's judgment, is the camel's nose for a whole horde of new features. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feeping creaturism: /fee'ping kree`ch*r-izm/ n. A deliberate spoonerism for {creeping featurism}, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn't really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% feetch feetch: /feech feech/ interj. If someone tells you about some new improvement to a program, you might respond: "Feetch, feetch!" The meaning of this depends critically on vocal inflection. With enthusiasm, it means something like "Boy, that's great! What a great hack!" Grudgingly or with obvious doubt, it means "I don't know; it sounds like just one more unnecessary and complicated thing". With a tone of resignation, it means, "Well, I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be done". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fence: n. 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished ({out-of-band}) characters (or other data items), used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature calls this a `sentinel'). The NUL (ASCII 0000000) character that terminates strings in C is a fence. Hex FF is also (though slightly less frequently) used this way. See {zigamorph}. 2. [among users of optimizing compilers] Any technique, usually exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain optimizations. Used when explicit mechanisms are not available or are overkill. Typically a hack: "I call a dummy procedure there to force a flush of the optimizer's register-coloring info" can be expressed by the shorter "That's a fence procedure". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fencepost error: n. 1. A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary condition. Often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?" Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10. For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is off by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. A program that used the `obvious' formula would have a fencepost error in it. See also {zeroth} and {off-by-one error}, and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row. 2. Occasionally, an error induced by unexpectedly regular spacing of inputs, which can (for instance) screw up your hash table. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fepped out: /fept owt/ adj. The Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine has a Front-End Processor called a `FEP' (compare sense 2 of {box}). When the main processor gets {wedged}, the FEP takes control of the keyboard and screen. Such a machine is said to have `fepped out'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% field circus: [a derogatory pun on `field service'] n. The field service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but especially DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about DEC field circus engineers: Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer with a flat tire? A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat. Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer who is out of gas? A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat. [See {Easter egging} for additional insight on these jokes.] There is also the `Field Circus Cheer' (from the {plan file} for DEC on MIT-AI): Maynard! Maynard! Don't mess with us! We're mean and we're tough! If you get us confused We'll screw up your stuff. (DEC's service HQ is located in Maynard, Massachusetts.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% field servoid: [play on `android'] /fee'ld ser'voyd/ n. Representative of a field service organization (see {field circus}). This has many of the implications of {droid}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% filk: /filk/ [from SF fandom, where a typo for `folk' was adopted as a new word] n.,v. A `filk' is a popular or folk song with lyrics revised or completely new lyrics, intended for humorous effect when read and/or to be sung late at night at SF conventions. There is a flourishing subgenre of these called `computer filks', written by hackers and often containing rather sophisticated technical humor. See {double bucky} for an example. Compare {hing} and {newsfroup}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% film at 11: [MIT: in parody of TV newscasters] 1. Used in conversation to announce ordinary events, with a sarcastic implication that these events are earth-shattering. "{{ITS}} crashes; film at 11." "Bug found in scheduler; film at 11." 2. Also widely used outside MIT to indicate that additional information will be available at some future time, *without* the implication of anything particularly ordinary about the referenced event. For example, "The mail file server died this morning; we found garbage all over the root directory. Film at 11." would indicate that a major failure had occurred but the people working on it have no additional information about it. Use of the phrase in this way suggests gently that people would appreciate it if users would quit bothering them and wait for the 11:00 news for additional information. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% film at 11: [MIT: in parody of TV newscasters] Used in conversation to announce ordinary events, with a sarcastic implication that these events are earth-shattering. "{{ITS}} crashes; film at 11." "Bug found in scheduler; film at 11." %% filter: [orig. {{UNIX}}, now also in {{MS-DOS}}] n. A program that processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a `pipeline' (see {plumbing}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% final moving scenes of the film, HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR." "Our apologies to the entire film industry, as well as our listening audience. We are *very* sorry." "Sorry." -- Duck's Breath Homemade Radio %% final pitch: act of throwing down a rope without securing one of the ends. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% fine: [WPI] adj. Good, but not good enough to be {cuspy}. The word `fine' is used elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit comparison to the higher level implied by {cuspy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% finger-pointing syndrome: n. All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp. in new or experimental configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% finger: [WAITS, via BSD UNIX] 1. n. A program that displays a particular user or all users logged on the system or a remote system. Typically shows full name, last login time, idle time, terminal line, and terminal location (where applicable). May also display a {plan file} left by the user. 2. vt. To apply finger to a username. 3. vt. By extension, to check a human's current state by any means. "Foodp?" "T!" "OK, finger Lisa and see if she's idle." 4. Any picture (composed of ASCII characters) depicting `the finger'. Originally a humorous component of one's plan file to deter the curious fingerer (sense 2), it has entered the arsenal of some {flamer}s. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% finn: [IRC] v. To pull rank on somebody based on the amount of time one has spent on {IRC}. The term derives from the fact that IRC was originally written in Finland in 1987. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% firebottle: n. A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical device, similar in function to a FET but constructed out of glass, metal, and vacuum. Characterized by high cost, low density, low reliability, high-temperature operation, and high power dissipation. Sometimes mistakenly called a `tube' in the U.S. or a `valve' in England; another hackish term is {glassfet}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% firefighting: n. 1. What sysadmins have to do to correct sudden operational problems. An opposite of hacking. "Been hacking your new newsreader?" "No, a power glitch hosed the network and I spent the whole afternoon fighting fires." 2. The act of throwing lots of manpower and late nights at a project, esp. to get it out before deadline. See also {gang bang}, {Mongolian Hordes technique}; however, the term `firefighting' connotes that the effort is going into chasing bugs rather than adding features. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% firehose syndrome: n. In mainstream folklore it is observed that trying to drink from a firehose can be a good way to rip your lips off. On computer networks, the absence or failure of flow control mechanisms can lead to situations in which the sending system sprays a massive flood of packets at an unfortunate receiving system; more than it can handle. Compare {overrun}, {buffer overflow}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% firewall code: n. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone switch) to make sure that the users can't do any damage. Since users always want to be able to do everything but never want to suffer for any mistakes, the construction of a firewall is a question not only of defensive coding but also of interface presentation, so that users don't even get curious about those corners of a system where they can burn themselves. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% firewall machine: n. A dedicated gateway machine with special security precautions on it, used to service outside network connections and dial-in lines. The idea is to protect a cluster of more loosely administered machines hidden behind it from {cracker}s. The typical firewall is an inexpensive micro-based UNIX box kept clean of critical data, with a bunch of modems and public network ports on it but just one carefully watched connection back to the rest of the cluster. The special precautions may include threat monitoring, callback, and even a complete {iron box} keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns. Syn. {flytrap}, {Venus flytrap}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fireworks mode: n. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a {crash and burn} operation. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% firmy: /fer'mee/ Syn. {stiffy} (a 3.5-inch floppy disk). %% fish: [Adelaide University, Australia] n. 1. Another {metasyntactic variable}. See {foo}. Derived originally from the Monty Python skit in the middle of "The Meaning of Life" entitled "Find the Fish". 2. A pun for `microfiche'. A microfiche file cabinet may be referred to as a `fish tank'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fix: n.,v. What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to be ignored. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flag day: n. A software change that is neither forward- nor backward-compatible, and which is costly to make and costly to reverse. "Can we install that without causing a flag day for all users?" This term has nothing to do with the use of the word {flag} to mean a variable that has two values. It came into use when a massive change was made to the {{Multics}} timesharing system to convert from the old ASCII code to the new one; this was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday), June 14, 1966. See also {backward combatability}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flag: n. A variable or quantity that can take on one of two values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate one of two outcomes or is used to control which of two things is to be done. "This flag controls whether to clear the screen before printing the message." "The program status word contains several flag bits." Used of humans analogously to {bit}. See also {hidden flag}, {mode bit}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flake: weird, erratic climber. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% flaky: adj. (var sp. `flakey') Subject to frequent {lossage}. This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of --- enough that you are tempted to try to use it --- but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers {dodgy} or {wonky}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flamage: /flay'm*j/ n. Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal postings to {USENET} or other electronic {fora}. Often in the phrase `the usual flamage'. `Flaming' is the act itself; `flamage' the content; a `flame' is a single flaming message. See {flame}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flame bait: n. A posting intended to trigger a {flame war}, or one that invites flames in reply. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flame on: vi.,interj. 1. To begin to {flame}. The punning reference to Marvel Comics's Human Torch is no longer widely recognized. 2. To continue to flame. See {rave}, {burble}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flame war: n. (var. `flamewar') An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as {USENET}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flame: 1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. 2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. 3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people. 4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to speak). USENETter Marc Ramsey, who was at WPI from 1972 to 1976, adds: "I am 99% certain that the use of `flame' originated at WPI. Those who made a nuisance of themselves insisting that they needed to use a TTY for `real work' came to be known as `flaming asshole lusers'. Other particularly annoying people became `flaming asshole ravers', which shortened to `flaming ravers', and ultimately `flamers'. I remember someone picking up on the Human Torch pun, but I don't think `flame on/off' was ever much used at WPI." See also {asbestos}. The term may have been independently invented at several different places; it is also reported that `flaming' was in use to mean something like `interminably drawn-out semi-serious discussions' (late-night bull sessions) at Carleton College during 1968--1971. It's possible that the hackish sense of `flame' is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's `Troilus and Cressida', Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would be right at home on USENET. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flamer: n. One who habitually {flame}s. Said esp. of obnoxious {USENET} personalities. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flap: vt. 1. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and {microtape}s were 1, 2,... and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet near the disk. 2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape. See also {macrotape}. Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. (The term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many tape-eating failure modes.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flarp: /flarp/ [Rutgers University] n. Yet another {metasyntactic variable} (see {foo}). Among those who use it, it is associated with a legend that any program not containing the word `flarp' somewhere will not work. The legend is discreetly silent on the reliability of programs which *do* contain the magic word. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flat-ASCII: adj. Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter or markup language, and no {meta}-characters). Syn. {plain-ASCII}. Compare {flat-file}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flat-file: adj. A {flatten}ed representation of some database or tree or network structure as a single file from which the structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in {flat-ASCII} form. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flat: adj. 1. Lacking any complex internal structure. "That {bitty box} has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is {flatten}. 2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear address space (typically with each possible value of a processor register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a `segmented' architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented designs are generally considered {cretinous}). Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a {Good Thing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flatten: vt. To remove structural information, esp. to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to {flat-ASCII}. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent {canonical} form." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flavor: n. 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." See {vanilla}. 2. The attribute that causes something to be {flavorful}. Usually used in the phrase "yields additional flavor". "This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." See {vanilla}. This usage was certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks (the constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) --- however, hackish use of `flavor' at MIT predated QCD. 3. The term for `class' (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has been superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term `flavor' is still used as a general synonym for `class' by some LISP hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flavorful: adj. Full of {flavor}; esthetically pleasing. See {random} and {losing} for antonyms. See also the entries for {taste} and {elegant}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flippy: /flip'ee/ n. A single-sided floppy disk altered for double-sided use by addition of a second write-notch, so called because it must be flipped over for the second side to be accessible. No longer common. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flood: [IRC] v. To dump large amounts of text onto an {IRC} channel. This is especially rude when the text is uninteresting and the other users are trying to carry on a serious conversation. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flowchart, n. & v.: [From flow "to ripple down in rich profusion, as hair" + chart "a cryptic hidden-treasure map designed to mislead the uninitiated."] 1. n. The solution, if any, to a class of Mascheroni construction problems in which given algorithms require geometrical representation using only the 35 basic ideograms of the ANSI template. 2. n. Neronic doodling while the system burns. 3. n. A low-cost substitute for wallpaper. 4. n. The innumerate misleading the illiterate. "A thousand pictures is worth ten lines of code." -- The Programmer's Little Red Vade Mecum, Mao Tse T'umps. 5. v.intrans. To produce flowcharts with no particular object in mind. 6. v.trans. To obfuscate (a problem) with esoteric cartoons. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" %% flowchart:: [techspeak] n. An archaic form of visual control-flow specification employing arrows and `speech balloons' of various shapes. Hackers never use flowcharts, consider them extremely silly, and associate them with {COBOL} programmers, {card walloper}s, and other lower forms of life. This is because (from a hacker's point of view) they are no easier to read than code, are less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with the code (so that they either obfuscate it rather than explaining it or require extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the code). See also {pdl}, sense 3. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flower key: [Mac users] n. See {command key}. %% fluke, snow: unexpected happening on a glacier. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% flush: v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed." 2. [UNIX/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an `fflush(3)' call. This is *not* an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion! 3. To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). "I'm going to flush now." "Time to flush." 4. To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person. `Flush' was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation; one spoke of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before they can be printed. The UNIX/C usage, on the other hand, was propagated by the `fflush(3)' call in C's standard I/O library (though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). UNIX/C hackers find the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% flytrap: n. See {firewall machine}. %% fold case: v. See {smash case}. This term tends to be used more by people who don't mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case is ignored but case distinctions in data processed by the tool in question aren't destroyed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% followup: n. On USENET, a {posting} generated in response to another posting (as opposed to a {reply}, which goes by email rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the {parent message} in their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to present USENET news in `conversation' sequence rather than order-of-arrival. See {thread}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fontology: [XEROX PARC] n. The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new fonts (e.g., for window systems and typesetting software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny. [Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to `files' and `folders' --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% foo: /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also {bar}, {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {corge}, {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}. {foo} is the {canonical} example of a `metasyntactic variable' --- a name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. To avoid confusion, hackers never use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning `foo' is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time. The etymology of hackish `foo' is obscure. When used in connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'), later bowdlerized to {foobar}. (See also {FUBAR}). However, the use of the word `foo' itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. The old "Smokey Stover" comic strips by Bill Holman often included the word `FOO', in particular on license plates of cars; allegedly, `FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "Daffy Doc", a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!"; oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It is even possible that hacker usage actually springs from `FOO, Lampoons and Parody', the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958; the byline read `C. Crumb' but this may well have been a sort-of pseudonym for noted weird-comix artist Robert Crumb. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. An old-time member reports that in the 1959 `Dictionary of the TMRC Language', compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went something like this: FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning. For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}. Almost the entire AI staff was involved with TMRC, so it is not clear which group introduced the other to the word FOO. Very probably, hackish `foo' had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish `feh' and/or English `fooey'. %% foo: /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of {metasyntactic variable}s used in syntax examples. See also {bar}, {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {corge}, {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}. The etymology of hackish `foo' is obscure. When used in connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'), later bowdlerized to {foobar}. (See also {FUBAR}). However, the use of the word `foo' itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. The old "Smokey Stover" comic strips by Bill Holman often included the word `FOO', in particular on license plates of cars; allegedly, `FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!"; oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be related to the Chinese word `fu' (sometimes transliterated `foo'), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called "fu dogs"). Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually springs from `FOO, Lampoons and Parody', the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually curculated, and students of Crumb's `oeuvre' have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. An old-time member reports that in the 1959 `Dictionary of the TMRC Language', compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went something like this: FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning. For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}. Almost the entire staff of what became the MIT AI LAB was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there. Very probably, hackish `foo' had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish `feh' and/or English `fooey'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% foobar: n. Another common {metasyntactic variable}; see {foo}. Hackers do *not* generally use this to mean {FUBAR} in either the slang or jargon sense. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fool file, the: [USENET] n. A notional repository of all the most dramatically and abysmally stupid utterances ever. There is a subgenre of {sig block}s that consists of the header "From the fool file:" followed by some quote the poster wishes to represent as an immortal gem of dimwittery; for this to be really effective, the quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be laughable. More than one USENETter has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fool: n. As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively in executing their errors. See also {cretin}, {loser}, {fool file, the}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% foot jam: offensive accumulation between the toes, caused by wearing the same socks for several days. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% footprint: n. 1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware. 2. [IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural, `footprints'). See also {toeprint}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!! %% for Grace I'm sorry to see she's not there The lights are off I know because I check this time each night So I can see if I can talk to her tonight I like to talk to her because She's not like the others who say hihowareyoudoing as they walk away She says Hi. How are you doing? How can so many people miss such an important difference? And why are her lights out now when I need to say I'm not doing well at all? -- Tom Travis, 10/28/88 %% for free: adj. Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware equipment that is available by its design without needing cleverness to implement: "In APL, we get the matrix operations for free." "And owing to the way revisions are stored in this system, you get revision trees for free." Usually it refers to a serendipitous feature of doing things a certain way (compare {big win}), but it may refer to an intentional but secondary feature. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% for programmers to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in English. -- SIGPLAN Notices, Vol 2 No 2 %% for the rest of us: [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"] adj. 1. Used to describe a {spiffy} product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe {spiffy} but very overpriced products. 2. Describes a program with a limited interface, deliberately limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose primitives, or any other limitation designed to not `confuse' a na"ive user. This places an upper bound on how far that user can go before the program begins to get in the way of the task instead of helping accomplish it. Used in reference to Macintosh software which doesn't provide obvious capabilities because it is thought that the poor lusers might not be able to handle them. Becomes `the rest of *them*' when used in third-party reference; thus, "Yes, it is an attractive program, but it's designed for The Rest Of Them" means a program that superficially looks neat but has no depth beyond the surface flash. See also {WIMP environment}, {Macintrash}, {point-and-drool interface}, {user-friendly}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% for values of: [MIT] A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the canonical {random numbers} as placeholders for variables. "The max function takes 42 arguments, for arbitrary values of 42." "There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 69 = 50." This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered a random number and realizes that it was not recognized as such, but even `non-random' numbers are occasionally used in this fashion. A related joke is that pi equals 3 --- for small values of pi and large values of 3. Historical note: this usage probably derives from the programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an Algol-like language that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in the mid-60s. It had a control structure FOR VALUES OF X = 3, 7, 99 DO ... that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in the list (unlike the usual FOR that only works for arithmetic sequences of values). MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still flourish (e.g., in UNIX's shell languages). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fora: pl.n. Plural of {forum}. %% foreground: [UNIX] vt. To foreground a task is to bring it to the top of one's {stack} for immediate processing, and hackers often use it in this sense for non-computer tasks. "If your presentation is due next week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the design document." Technically, on a time-sharing system, a task executing in foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to the user; oppose {background}. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with {{UNIX}}, but it appears first to have been used in this sense on OS/360. Normally, there is only one foreground task per terminal (or terminal window); having multiple processes simultaneously reading the keyboard is a good way to {lose}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fork bomb: [UNIX] n. A particular species of {wabbit} that can be written in one line of C (`main() {for(;;)fork();}') or shell (`$0 & $0 &') on any UNIX system, or occasionally created by an egregious coding bug. A fork bomb process `explodes' by recursively spawning copies of itself (using the UNIX system call `fork(2)'). Eventually it eats all the process table entries and effectively wedges the system. Fortunately, fork bombs are relatively easy to spot and kill, so creating one deliberately seldom accomplishes more than to bring the just wrath of the gods down upon the perpetrator. See also {logic bomb}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% forked: [UNIX; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] adj. Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system slowed to incredibly bad speeds because of a process recursively spawning copies of itself (using the UNIX system call `fork(2)') and taking up all the process table entries. %% forked: [UNIX; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] adj. Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when one system was slowed to a snail's pace by an inadvertent {fork bomb}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place. -- IEEE Grid newsmagazine %% fortune cookie: [WAITS, via UNIX] n. A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time. Items from this lexicon have often been used as fortune cookies. See {cookie file}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fortune's Contribution of the Month to the Animal Rights Debate: I'll stay out of animals' way if they'll stay out of mine. "Hey you, get off my plate" -- Roger Midnight %% fortune: No such file or directory %% fortune: cannot execute. Out of cookies. %% fortune: cpu time/usefulness ratio too high -- core dumped. %% fortune: error: All your files and directories have been deleted. %% fortune: not found %% forum: n. [USENET, GEnie, CI$; pl. `fora' or `forums'] Any discussion group accessible through a dial-in {BBS}, a {mailing list}, or a {newsgroup} (see {network, the}). A forum functions much like a bulletin board; users submit {posting}s for all to read and discussion ensues. Contrast real-time chat via {talk mode} or point-to-point personal {email}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fossil: n. 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in {C}, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See {dusty deck}. 2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and {BSD} UNIX tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later {USG UNIX} releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits. 3. The FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification for serial-port access to replace the {brain-dead} routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS {BBS} software in preference to the `supported' ROM routines, which do not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the {bare metal} serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use the {hook} but do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in `video fossil'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% founder - what the police did to a lost female %% four-color glossies: 1. Literature created by {marketroid}s that allegedly contains technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible without being totally {content-free}. "Forget the four-color glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white. Four-color-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the expected or desired output. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fragile: adj. Syn {brittle}. %% fred: n. 1. The personal name most frequently used as a {metasyntactic variable} (see {foo}). Allegedly popular because it's easy for a non-touch-typist to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard. Unlike {J. Random Hacker} or `J. Random Loser', this name has no positive or negative loading (but see {Mbogo, Dr. Fred}). See also {barney}. 2. An acronym for `Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device'; other F-verbs may be substituted for `flipping'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frednet: /fred'net/ n. Used to refer to some {random} and uncommon protocol encountered on a network. "We're implementing bridging in our router to solve the frednet problem." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% free climb: climb done without expensive equipment. there are cheap thrills, too. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% freeware: n. Free software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, {USENET}, or other electronic media. At one time, `freeware' was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See {shareware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% freeze: v. To lock an evolving software distribution or document against changes so it can be released with some hope of stability. Carries the strong implication that the item in question will `unfreeze' at some future date. "OK, fix that bug and we'll freeze for release." There are more specific constructions on this. A `feature freeze', for example, locks out modifications intended to introduce new features; a `code freeze' connotes no more changes at all. At Sun Microsystems and elsewhere, one may also hear references to `code slush' --- that is, an almost-but-not-quite frozen state. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% friction: what often develops among members of an expedition. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% fried: adj. 1. Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out. Especially used of hardware brought down by a `power glitch' (see {glitch}), {drop-outs}, a short, or some other electrical event. (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic circuits! In particular, resistors can burn out and transformers can melt down, emitting noxious smoke --- see {friode}, {SED} and {LER}. However, this term is also used metaphorically.) Compare {frotzed}. 2. Of people, exhausted. Said particularly of those who continue to work in such a state. Often used as an explanation or excuse. "Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the file system, but I was fried when I put it in." Esp. common in conjunction with `brain': "My brain is fried today, I'm very short on sleep." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% friode: /fri:'ohd/ [TMRC] n. A reversible (that is, fused or blown) diode. Compare {fried}; see also {SED}, {LER}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fritterware: n. An excess of capability that serves no productive end. The canonical example is font-diddling software on the Mac (see {macdink}); the term describes anything that eats huge amounts of time for quite marginal gains in function but seduces people into using it anyway. See also {window shopping}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frob: /frob/ 1. n. [MIT] The {TMRC} definition was "FROB = a protruding arm or trunnion"; by metaphoric extension, a `frob' is any random small thing; an object that you can comfortably hold in one hand; something you can frob. See {frobnitz}. 2. vt. Abbreviated form of {frobnicate}. 3. [from the {MUD} world] A command on some MUDs that changes a player's experience level (this can be used to make wizards); also, to request {wizard} privileges on the `professional courtesy' grounds that one is a wizard elsewhere. The command is actually `frobnicate' but is universally abbreviated to the shorter form. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frobnicate: /frob'ni-kayt/ vt. [Poss. derived from {frobnitz}, and usually abbreviated to {frob}, but `frobnicate' is recognized as the official full form.] To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. One frequently frobs bits or other 2-state devices. Thus: "Please frob the light switch" (that is, flip it), but also "Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break it". One also sees the construction `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. The variant `frobnosticate' has been recently reported. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frobnitz: /frob'nits/, pl. `frobnitzem' /frob'nit-zm/ or `frobni' /frob'ni:/ [TMRC] n. An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to `frotz', or more commonly to {frob}. Also used are `frobnule' (/frob'n[y]ool/) and `frobule' (/frob'yool/). Starting perhaps in 1979, `frobozz' /fr*-boz'/ (plural: `frobbotzim' /fr*-bot'zm/) has also become very popular, largely through its exposure as a name via {Zork}. These can also be applied to nonphysical objects, such as data structures. Pete Samson, compiler of the {TMRC} lexicon, adds, "Under the TMRC [railroad] layout were many storage boxes, managed (in 1958) by David R. Sawyer. Several had fanciful designations written on them, such as `Frobnitz Coil Oil'. Perhaps DRS intended Frobnitz to be a proper name, but the name was quickly taken for the thing". This was almost certainly the origin of the term. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frog: alt. `phrog' 1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them). 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See {foo}. 3. n. Of things, a crock. 4. n. Of people, somewhere in between a turkey and a toad. 5. `froggy': adj. Similar to `bagbiting' (see {bagbiter}), but milder. "This froggy program is taking forever to run!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frogging: [University of Waterloo] v. 1. Partial corruption of a text file or input stream by some bug or consistent glitch, as opposed to random events like line noise or media failures. Might occur, for example, if one bit of each incoming character on a tty were stuck, so that some characters were correct and others were not. See {terminak} for a historical example. 2. By extension, accidental display of text in a mode where the output device emits special symbols or mnemonics rather than conventional ASCII. Often happens, for example, when using a terminal or comm program on a device like an IBM PC with a special `high-half' character set and with the bit-parity assumption wrong. A hacker sufficiently familiar with ASCII bit patterns might be able to read the display anyway. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% from The New Yorker, Jan. 15, 1990 CLEAR DAYS ON THE I.R.S. SCENE [From Publication 590, Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs)] If your life expectancy or that of your spouse, is refigured annually and either of you dies, the remaining life expectancy of the one who died is reduced to zero in the year after death. %% front end: n. 1. An intermediary computer that does set-up and filtering for another (usually more powerful but less friendly) machine (a `back end'). 2. What you're talking to when you have a conversation with someone who is making replies without paying attention. "Look at the dancing elephants!" "Uh-huh." "Do you know what I just said?" "Sorry, you were talking to the front end." See also {fepped out}. 3. Software that provides an interface to another program `behind' it, which may not be as user-friendly. Probably from analogy with hardware front-ends (see sense 1) that interfaced with mainframes. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% front points: forwardmost extremities of a female climber on a chilly morning. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% frotz: /frots/ 1. n. See {frobnitz}. 2. `mumble frotz': An interjection of very mild disgust. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frotzed: /frotst/ adj. {down} because of hardware problems. Compare {fried}. A machine that is merely frotzed may be fixable without replacing parts, but a fried machine is more seriously damaged. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% frowney: n. (alt. `frowney face') See {emoticon}. %% fry: 1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See {fried}, {magic smoke}. 2. vt. To cause to fail; to {roach}, {toast}, or {hose} a piece of hardware. Never used of software or humans, but compare {fried}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fuck me harder: excl. Sometimes uttered in response to egregious misbehavior, esp. in software, and esp. of misbehaviors which seem unfairly persistent (as though designed in by the imp of the perverse). Often theatrically elaborated: "Aiighhh! Fuck me with a piledriver and 16 feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron fence *and no lubricants*!" The phrase is sometimes heard abbreviated `FMH' in polite company. [This entry is an extreme example of the hackish habit of coining elaborate and evocative terms for lossage. Here we see a quite self-conscious parody of mainstream expletives that has become a running gag in part of the hacker culture; it illustrates the hackish tendency to turn any situation, even one of extreme frustration, into an intellectual game (the point being, in this case, to creatively produce a long-winded description of the most anatomically absurd mental image possible --- the short forms implicitly allude to all the ridiculous long forms ever spoken). Scatological language is actually relatively uncommon among hackers, and there was some controversy over whether this entry ought to be included at all. As it reflects a live usage recognizably peculiar to the hacker culture, we feel it is in the hackish spirit of truthfulness and opposition to all forms of censorship to record it here. --- ESR & GLS] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fudge factor: n. A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the desired result. The terms `tolerance' and {slop} are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary because one isn't sure exactly how large it needs to be, and it is better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is the `fuzz' typically allowed in floating-point calculations: two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate. Fudge factors are frequently adjusted incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import. See also {coefficient of X}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fudge: 1. vt. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable way, particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I didn't feel like going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged it --- I'll fix it later." 2. n. The resulting code. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fuel up: vi. To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking. "Food-p?" "Yeah, let's fuel up." "Time for a {great-wall}!" See also {{oriental food}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fuggly: /fuhg'lee/ adj. Emphatic form of {funky}; funky + ugly). Unusually for hacker jargon, this may actually derive from black street-jive. To say it properly, the first syllable should be growled rather than spoken. Usage: humorous. "Man, the {{ASCII}}-to-{{EBCDIC}} code in that printer driver is *fuggly*." See also {wonky}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fum: [XEROX PARC] n. At PARC, often the third of the standard {metasyntactic variable}s (after {foo} and {bar}. Competes with {baz}, which is more common outside PARC. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% funky: adj. Said of something that functions, but in a slightly strange, klugey way. It does the job and would be difficult to change, so its obvious non-optimality is left alone. Often used to describe interfaces. The more bugs something has that nobody has bothered to fix because workarounds are easier, the funkier it is. {TECO} and UUCP are funky. The Intel i860's exception handling is extraordinarily funky. Most standards acquire funkiness as they age. "The new mailer is installed, but is still somewhat funky; if it bounces your mail for no reason, try resubmitting it." "This UART is pretty funky. The data ready line is active-high in interrupt mode and active-low in DMA mode." See {fuggly}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% funny money: n. 1. Notional `dollar' units of computing time and/or storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer course; also called `play money' or `purple money' (in implicit opposition to real or `green' money). In New Zealand and Germany the odd usage `paper money' has been recorded; in Germany, the particularly amusing synonym `transfer ruble' commemmorates the worthlessness of the ex-USSR's currency. When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you needed to go to a professor to get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing cycles has made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts. 2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used as a resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym: `real money'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% fuzzball: [TCP/IP hackers] n. A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of homebrewed software written by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators, used in the early 1980s for Internet protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as NSFnet backbone sites in its early 56KB-line days; a few are still active on the Internet as of early 1991, doing odd jobs such as network time service. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gabriel: /gay'bree-*l/ [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic] n. An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, `pulling a Gabriel', `Gabriel mode'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gag: vi. Equivalent to {choke}, but connotes more disgust. "Hey, this is FORTRAN code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See also {barf}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gang bang: n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's `Hackers'), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines and produce enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in {orthogonal}ity. When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, they often miss the importance of maintaining a coherent design. See also {firefighting}, {Mongolian Hordes technique}, {Conway's Law}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% garbage collect: vi. (also `garbage collection', n.) See {GC}. %% garply: /gar'plee/ [Stanford] n. Another metasyntactic variable (see {foo}); once popular among SAIL hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gas: [as in `gas chamber'] 1. interj. A term of disgust and hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation. "Some loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!" 2. interj. A suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of mercy. "The system's getting {wedged} every few minutes. Gas!" 3. vt. To {flush} (sense 1). "You should gas that old crufty software." 4. [IBM] n. Dead space in nonsequentially organized files that was occupied by data that has been deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called `degassing' (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term in vacuum technology). 5. [IBM] n. Empty space on a disk that has been clandestinely allocated against future need. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gaseous: adj. Deserving of being {gas}sed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of manslaughter). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gedanken: /g*-don'kn/ adj. Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested. `Gedanken' is a German word for `thought'. A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term `gedanken experiment' is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because you can reason about it theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but you have to be careful. It's too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the real world in contructing your `apparatus'. Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation. It is said of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence research, that is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people who aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are just in a hurry. A `gedanken thesis' is usually marked by an obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear specification of an algorithm. See also {AI-complete}, {DWIM}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% geef: v. [ostensibly from `gefingerpoken'] vt. Syn. {mung}. See also {blinkenlights}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% geek out: vi. To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a non-hackish context, for example at parties held near computer equipment. Especially used when you need to do something highly technical and don't have time to explain: "Pardon me while I geek out for a moment." See {computer geek}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gen: /jen/ n.,v. Short for {generate}, used frequently in both spoken and written contexts. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gender mender: n. A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that result when some {loser} didn't understand the RS232C specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC's bogus D-9 format. Also called `gender bender', `gender blender', `sex changer', and even `homosexual adapter'; however, there appears to be some confusion as to whether a `male homosexual adapter' has pins on both sides (is male) or sockets on both sides (connects two males). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% generate: vt. To produce something according to an algorithm or program or set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the execution of an algorithm or program. The opposite of {parse}. This term retains its mechanistic connotations (though often humorously) when used of human behavior. "The guy is rational most of the time, but mention nuclear energy around him and he'll generate {infinite} flamage." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gensym: /jen'sim/ [from MacLISP for `generated symbol'] 1. v. To invent a new name for something temporary, in such a way that the name is almost certainly not in conflict with one already in use. 2. n. The resulting name. The canonical form of a gensym is `Gnnnn' where nnnn represents a number; any LISP hacker would recognize G0093 (for example) as a gensym. 3. A freshly generated data structure with a gensymmed name. These are useful for storing or uniquely identifying crufties (see {cruft}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% getting [cruise missiles] more accurate so that we can have precise precision. -- Vice President Dan Quayle referring to his legislative work dealing with cruise missiles %% gig: /jig/ or /gig/ [SI] n. See {{quantifiers}}. %% giga-: /ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}. %% gilley: [USENET] n. The unit of analogical bogosity. According to its originator, the standard for one gilley was "the act of bogotoficiously comparing the shutting down of 1000 machines for a day with the killing of one person". The milligilley has been found to suffice for most normal conversational exchanges. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gillion: /gil'y*n/ or /jil'y*n/ [formed from {giga-} by analogy with mega/million and tera/trillion] n. 10^9. Same as an American billion or a British `milliard'. How one pronounces this depends on whether one speaks {giga-} with a hard or soft `g'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% glark: /glark/ vt. To figure something out from context. "The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from context." Interestingly, the word was originally `glork'; the context was "This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context" (David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in his "Metamagical Themas" column in the January 1981 `Scientific American'). It is conjectured that hackish usage mutated the verb to `glark' because {glork} was already an established jargon term. Compare {grok}, {zen}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% glass tty: /glas T-T-Y/ or /glas ti'tee/ n. A terminal that has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early `dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}, {smart terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (appendix A) for an interesting true story about a glass tty. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% glass: [IBM] n. Synonym for {silicon}. %% glassfet: /glas'fet/ [by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for `Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor'] n. Syn. {firebottle}, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% glitch: /glich/ [from German `glitschen' to slip, via Yiddish `glitshen', to slide or skid] 1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service is specifically called a `power glitch' (also {power hit}). This is of grave concern because it usually crashes all the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it might say, "Sorry, I just glitched". 2. vi. To commit a glitch. See {gritch}. 3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen, esp. several lines at a time. {{WAITS}} terminals used to do this in order to avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting to the eye. 4. obs. Same as {magic cookie}, sense 2. All these uses of `glitch' derive from the specific technical meaning the term has in the electronic hardware world, where it is now techspeak. A glitch can occur when the inputs of a circuit change, and the outputs change to some {random} value for some very brief time before they settle down to the correct value. If another circuit inspects the output at just the wrong time, reading the random value, the results can be very wrong and very hard to debug (a glitch is one of many causes of electronic {heisenbug}s). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% glob: /glob/, *not* /glohb/ [UNIX] vt.,n. To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called `globbing'). The UNIX conventions for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the following: * wildcard for any string (see also {UN*X}) ? wildcard for any character (generally read this way only at the beginning or in the middle of a word) [] delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters {} alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, `foo{baz,qux}' would be read as `foobaz' or `fooqux' Some examples: "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses ambiguity). "I don't read talk.politics.*" (any of the talk.politics subgroups on {USENET}). Other examples are given under the entry for {X}. Compare {regexp}. Historical note: The jargon usage derives from `glob', the name of a subprogram that expanded wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne versions of the UNIX shell. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% glork: /glork/ 1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of two hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed. 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See {foo}. 3. vt. Similar to {glitch}, but usually used reflexively. "My program just glorked itself." See also {glark}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% glue: n. Generic term for any interface logic or protocol that connects two component blocks. For example, {Blue Glue} is IBM's SNA protocol, and hardware designers call anything used to connect large VLSI's or circuit blocks `glue logic'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gnarly: /nar'lee/ adj. Both {obscure} and {hairy} in the sense of complex. "{Yow!} --- the tuned assembler implementation of BitBlt is really gnarly!" From a similar but less specific usage in surfer slang. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% go flatline: [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] vi., also adjectival `flatlined'. 1. To {die}, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being considered somewhat too serious a matter to employ jargon-jokes about. 2. To go completely quiescent; said of machines undergoing controlled shutdown. "You can suffer file damage if you shut down UNIX but power off before the system has gone flatline." 3. Of a video tube, to fail by losing vertical scan, so all one sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% go root: [UNIX] vi. To temporarily enter {root mode} in order to perform a privileged operation. This use is deprecated in Australia, where v. `root' refers to animal sex. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% go-faster stripes: [UK] Syn. {chrome}. %% gobble: vt. To consume or to obtain. The phrase `gobble up' tends to imply `consume', while `gobble down' tends to imply `obtain'. "The output spy gobbles characters out of a {tty} output buffer." "I guess I'll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow." See also {snarf}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% goddamn these haikus I'm so sick of seeing them when will it all end? -- Curtis Galloway (curtisg@sco.COM) %% golden: adj. [prob. from folklore's `golden egg'] When used to describe a magnetic medium (e.g., `golden disk', `golden tape'), describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software version. Compare {platinum-iridium}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% golf-ball printer: n. The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The `golf ball' was a round object bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four meridians of latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different golf ball. This was the technology that enabled APL to use a non-EBCDIC, non-ASCII, and in fact completely non-standard character set. This put it 10 years ahead of its time --- where it stayed, firmly rooted, for the next 20, until character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices with the flexibility to support other character sets. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gonk: /gonk/ vt.,n. 1. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged that in German the term is (mythically) `gonken'; in Spanish the verb becomes `gonkar'. "You're gonking me. That story you just told me is a bunch of gonk." In German, for example, "Du gonkst mir" (You're pulling my leg). See also {gonkulator}. 2. [British] To grab some sleep at an odd time; compare {gronk out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gonkulator: /gon'kyoo-lay-tr/ [from the old "Hogan's Heroes" TV series] n. A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe one's least favorite piece of computer hardware. See {gonk}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gonzo: /gon'zoh/ [from Hunter S. Thompson] adj. Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files, or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of {moby} and {hairy}, but without the implication of obscurity or complexity. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% goose down: a way to get a slow climber to descend quickly. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% gorilla arm: n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those {spiffy} touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized; hence `gorilla arm'. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in *real* use?". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gorp: /gorp/ [CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo} and {bar}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gorp: mealtime sound made by a hungry alpinist. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% gotcha: n. A {misfeature} of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it behaves in an unexpected way. For example, a classic gotcha in {C} is the fact that `if (a=b) {code;}' is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the value of `b' into `a' and then executes `code' if `a' is non-zero. What the programmer probably meant was `if (a==b) {code;}', which executes `code' if `a' and `b' are equal. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% grault: /grawlt/ n. Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the {GOSMACS} documentation. See {corge}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% graven - a very serious `n' %% gray goo: n. A hypothetical substance composed of {sagan}s of sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The image that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of Earth being eventually converted to robot goo. This is the simplest of the {{nanotechnology}} disaster scenarios, easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances. Compare {blue goo}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% great-wall: [from SF fandom] vi.,n. A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order, expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the value of N, which is the number of people in the group, can be inferred from context (see {N}). See {{oriental food}}, {ravs}, {stir-fried random}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% green bytes: n. (also `green words') 1. Meta-information embedded in a file, such as the length of the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file or record. The term comes from an IBM user's group meeting (ca. 1962) at which these two approaches were being debated and the diagram of the file on the blackboard had the `green bytes' drawn in green. 2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format. "A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing the packing method for the image." Compare {out-of-band}, {zigamorph}, {fence} (sense 1). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% green card: n. [after the `IBM System/360 Reference Data' card] This is used for any summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. "I'll go get my green card so I can check the addressing mode for that instruction." Some green cards are actually booklets. The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a scene that took place in a programmers' terminal room at Yorktown in 1978. A luser overheard one of the programmers ask another "Do you have a green card?" The other grunted and passed the first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to return. See also {card}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% green lightning: [IBM] n. 1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some genius within IBM suggested it would let the user know that `something is happening'. That, it certainly does. Later microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actually *programmed* to produce green lightning! 2. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit rationalization or marketing. "Motorola calls the CISC cruft in the 88000 architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green lightning". See also {feature}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% green machine: n. A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab `uniform' paint used for military equipment. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% greetings from mars %% grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines. %% grep: /grep/ [from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p , where re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it, via {{UNIX}} `grep(1)'] vt. To rapidly scan a file or set of files looking for a particular string or pattern (when browsing through a large set of files, one may speak of `grepping around'). By extension, to look for something by pattern. "Grep the bulletin board for the system backup schedule, would you?" See also {vgrep}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% grind crank: n. A mythical accessory to a terminal. A crank on the side of a monitor, which when operated makes a zizzing noise and causes the computer to run faster. Usually one does not refer to a grind crank out loud, but merely makes the appropriate gesture and noise. See {grind} and {wugga wugga}. Historical note: At least one real machine actually had a grind crank --- the R1, a research machine built toward the end of the days of the great vacuum tube computers, in 1959. R1 (also known as `The Rice Institute Computer' (TRIC) and later as `The Rice University Computer' (TRUC)) had a single-step/free-run switch for use when debugging programs. Since single-stepping through a large program was rather tedious, there was also a crank with a cam and gear arrangement that repeatedly pushed the single-step button. This allowed one to `crank' through a lot of code, then slow down to single-step for a bit when you got near the code of interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter, and then keep on cranking. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% grind: vt. 1. [MIT and Berkeley] To format code, especially LISP code, by indenting lines so that it looks pretty. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare; {prettyprint} was and is the generic term for such operations. 2. [UNIX] To generate the formatted version of a document from the {{nroff}}, {{troff}}, {{TeX}}, or Scribe source. The BSD program `vgrind(1)' grinds code for printing on a Versatec bitmapped printer. 3. To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to {crunch} or {grovel}. Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc. See also {hog}. 4. To make the whole system slow. "Troff really grinds a PDP-11." 5. `grind grind' excl. Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gripenet: [IBM] n. A wry (and thoroughly unoffical) name for IBM's internal VNET system, deriving from its common use by IBMers to voice pointed criticism of IBM management that would be taboo in more formal channels. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gritch: /grich/ 1. n. A complaint (often caused by a {glitch}). 2. vi. To complain. Often verb-doubled: "Gritch gritch". 3. A synonym for {glitch} (as verb or noun). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% grok: /grok/, var. /grohk/ [from the novel `Stranger in a Strange Land', by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally `to drink' and metaphorically `to be one with'] vt. 1. To understand, usually in a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. Contrast {zen}, similar supernal understanding as a single brief flash. See also {glark}. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok the `void' type these days." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gronk out: vi. To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep. "I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gronk: /gronk/ [popularized by Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." but the word apparently predates that] vt. 1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe than `to {frob}'. 2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash, or similarly disable. 3. The sound made by many 3.5-inch diskette drives. In particular, the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go "grink, gronk". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gronked: adj. 1. Broken. "The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the system down." 2. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or (less commonly) sick. "I've been chasing that bug for 17 hours now and I am thoroughly gronked!" Compare {broken}, which means about the same as {gronk} used of hardware, but connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in people. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% grovel: vi. 1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used transitively with `over' or `through'. "The file scavenger has been groveling through the file directories for 10 minutes now." Compare {grind} and {crunch}. Emphatic form: `grovel obscenely'. 2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate it." "I grovelled through all the documentation, but I still couldn't find the command I wanted." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gruesome - what farmer Brown did to corn last year %% grunge: /gruhnj/ n. 1. That which is grungy, or that which makes it so. 2. [Cambridge] Code which is inaccessible due to changes in other parts of the program. The preferred term in North America is {dead code}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gubbish: /guhb'*sh/ [a portmanteau of `garbage' and `rubbish'?] n. Garbage; crap; nonsense. "What is all this gubbish?" The opposite portmanteau `rubbage' is also reported. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% guiltware: /gilt'weir/ n. 1. A piece of {freeware} decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money. 2. {Shareware} that works. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gumby: /guhm'bee/ [from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. with some influence from the 1960s claymation character] n. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in `gumby maneuver' or `pull a gumby'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gun: [ITS: from the `:GUN' command] vt. To forcibly terminate a program or job (computer, not career). "Some idiot left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I gunned it." Compare {can}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gunch: /guhnch/ [TMRC] vt. To push, prod, or poke at a device that has almost produced the desired result. Implies a threat to {mung}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gurfle: /ger'fl/ interj. An expression of shocked disbelief. "He said we have to recode this thing in FORTRAN by next week. Gurfle!" Compare {weeble}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% guru meditation: n. Amiga equivalent of `panic' in UNIX (sometimes just called a `guru' or `guru event'). When the system crashes, a cryptic message "GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" appears, indicating what the problem was. An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Generally a {guru} event must be followed by a {Vulcan nerve pinch}. This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days of the Amiga. There used to be a device called a `Joyboard' which was basically a plastic board built onto on a joystick-like device; it was sold with a skiing game cartridge for the Atari game machine. It is said that whenever the prototype OS crashed, the system programmer responsible would calm down by concentrating on a solution while sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard trying to keep the board in balance. This position resembled that of a meditating guru. Sadly, the joke was removed in AmigaOS 2.04. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% guru: n. 1. [UNIX] An expert. Implies not only {wizard} skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others. Less often, used (with a qualifier) for other experts on other systems, as in `VMS guru'. See {source of all good bits}. 2. Amiga equivalent of `panic' in UNIX. When the system crashes, a cryptic message "GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" appears, indicating what the problem was. An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Generally a {guru} event must be followed by a {Vulcan nerve pinch}. %% guru: n. [UNIX] An expert. Implies not only {wizard} skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others. Less often, used (with a qualifier) for other experts on other systems, as in `VMS guru'. See {source of all good bits}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% gweep: /gweep/ [WPI] 1. v. To {hack}, usually at night. At WPI, from 1977 onwards, this often indicated that the speaker could be found at the College Computing Center punching cards or crashing the {PDP-10} or, later, the DEC-20; the term has survived the demise of those technologies, however, and is still live in late 1991. "I'm going to go gweep for a while. See you in the morning" "I gweep from 8pm till 3am during the week." 2. n. One who habitually gweeps in sense 1; a {hacker}. "He's a hard-core gweep, mumbles code in his sleep." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% h: [from SF fandom] infix. A method of `marking' common words, i.e., calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a nonstandard, ironic, or humorous way. Originated in the fannish catchphrase "Bheer is the One True Ghod!" from decades ago. H-infix marking of `Ghod' and other words spread into the 1960s counterculture via underground comix, and into early hackerdom either from the counterculture or from SF fandom (the three overlapped heavily at the time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of benchmark names (Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is prob. patterning on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the fannish/counterculture h infix. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ha ha only serious: [from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, `Ha Ha Only Kidding'] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a {wannabee}, or in {larval stage}. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also {{Humor, Hacker}}, and {AI koans}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack attack: [poss. by analogy with `Big Mac Attack' from ads for the McDonald's fast-food chain; the variant `big hack attack' is reported] n. Nearly synonymous with {hacking run}, though the latter more strongly implies an all-nighter. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack mode: n. 1. What one is in when hacking, of course. 2. More specifically, a Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem that may be achieved when one is hacking (this is why every good hacker is part mystic). Ability to enter such concentration at will correlates strongly with wizardliness; it is one of the most important skills learned during {larval stage}. Sometimes amplified as `deep hack mode'. Being yanked out of hack mode (see {priority interrupt}) may be experienced as a physical shock, and the sensation of being in it is more than a little habituating. The intensity of this experience is probably by itself sufficient explanation for the existence of hackers, and explains why many resist being promoted out of positions where they can code. See also {cyberspace} (sense 2). Some aspects of hackish etiquette will appear quite odd to an observer unaware of the high value placed on hack mode. For example, if someone appears at your door, it is perfectly okay to hold up a hand (without turning one's eyes away from the screen) to avoid being interrupted. One may read, type, and interact with the computer for quite some time before further acknowledging the other's presence (of course, he or she is reciprocally free to leave without a word). The understanding is that you might be in {hack mode} with a lot of delicate {state} (sense 2) in your head, and you dare not {swap} that context out until you have reached a good point to pause. See also {juggling eggs}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack on: vt. To {hack}; implies that the subject is some pre-existing hunk of code that one is evolving, as opposed to something one might {hack up}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack this heat!" 7. To work on something (typically a program). In specific sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In general sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." (The former is time-immediate, the latter time-extended.) More generally, "I hack x" is roughly equivalent to "x is my bag". "I hack solid-state physics." -- From the AI Hackers' Dictionary %% hack together: vt. To throw something together so it will work. Unlike `kluge together' or {cruft together}, this does not necessarily have negative connotations. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack up: vt. To {hack}, but generally implies that the result is a hack in sense 1 (a quick hack). Contrast this with {hack on}. To `hack up on' implies a {quick-and-dirty} modification to an existing system. Contrast {hacked up}; compare {kluge up}, {monkey up}, {cruft together}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack value: n. Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP had features for reading and printing Roman numerals, which were installed purely for hack value. See {display hack} for one method of computing hack value, but this cannot really be explained. As a great artist once said of jazz: "If you hafta ask, you ain't never goin' to find out." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack-and-slay: v. (also `hack-and-slash') 1. To play a {MUD} or go mudding, especially with the intention of {berserking} for pleasure. 2. To undertake an all-night programming/hacking session, interspersed with stints of mudding as a change of pace. This term arose on the British academic network amongst students who worked nights and logged onto Essex University's MUDs during public-access hours (2 A.M. to 7 A.M.). Usually more mudding than work was done in these sessions. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hack: 1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed. 3. vt. To bear emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this heat!" 4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In a general (time-extended) sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." More generally, "I hack `foo'" is roughly equivalent to "`foo' is my major interest (or project)". "I hack solid-state physics." 5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and {hacker} (sense 5). 6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. "Whatcha up to?" "Oh, just hacking." 7. n. Short for {hacker}. 8. See {nethack}. 9. [MIT] v. To explore the basements, roof ledges, and steam tunnels of a large, institutional building, to the dismay of Physical Plant workers and (since this is usually performed at educational institutions) the Campus Police. This activity has been found to be eerily similar to playing adventure games such as Dungeons and Dragons and {Zork}. See also {vadding}. Constructions on this term abound. They include `happy hacking' (a farewell), `how's hacking?' (a friendly greeting among hackers) and `hack, hack' (a fairly content-free but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell). For more on this totipotent term see "{The Meaning of `Hack'}". See also {neat hack}, {real hack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hacked off: [analogous to `pissed off'] adj. Said of system administrators who have become annoyed, upset, or touchy owing to suspicions that their sites have been or are going to be victimized by crackers, or used for inappropriate, technically illegal, or even overtly criminal activities. For example, having unreadable files in your home directory called `worm', `lockpick', or `goroot' would probably be an effective (as well as impressively obvious and stupid) way to get your sysadmin hacked off at you. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hacked up: adj. Sufficiently patched, kluged, and tweaked that the surgical scars are beginning to crowd out normal tissue (compare {critical mass}). Not all programs that are hacked become `hacked up'; if modifications are done with some eye to coherence and continued maintainability, the software may emerge better for the experience. Contrast {hack up}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hacker ethic, the: n. 1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible. 2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality. Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no means universally) accepted among hackers. Most hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it by writing and giving away free software. A few go further and assert that *all* information should be free and *any* proprietary control of it is bad; this is the philosophy behind the {GNU} project. Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But this principle at least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as `benign' crackers (see also {samurai}). On this view, it is one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the sysop, preferably by email from a {superuser} account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged --- acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) {tiger team}. The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative networks such as {USENET}, {FidoNet} and Internet (see {Internet address}) can function without central control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible asset. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hacker: [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating {hack value}. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a UNIX hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term is {cracker}. The term `hacker' also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net (see {network, the} and {Internet address}). It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic (see {hacker ethic, the}. It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you'll quickly be labeled {bogus}). See also {wannabee}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hacking run: [analogy with `bombing run' or `speed run'] n. A hack session extended long outside normal working times, especially one longer than 12 hours. May cause you to `change phase the hard way' (see {phase}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hackish: /hak'ish/ adj. (also {hackishness} n.) 1. Said of something that is or involves a hack. 2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also {true-hacker}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hackishness: n. The quality of being or involving a hack. This term is considered mildly silly. Syn. {hackitude}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hackitude: n. Syn. {hackishness}; this word is considered sillier. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hair: [back-formation from {hairy}] n. The complications that make something hairy. "Decoding {TECO} commands requires a certain amount of hair." Often seen in the phrase `infinite hair', which connotes extreme complexity. Also in `hairiferous' (tending to promote hair growth): "GNUMACS elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes." "Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." (or just: "Hair squared!") -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hairy: adj. 1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." See also {hirsute}. There is a well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem, which states that any continuous transformation of a surface into itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term `hairy' with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth." The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern `hairy' senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun `long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person satisfying sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish `hairy' as a sort of stunted mutant relic. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hakspek: /hak'speek/ n. A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic bulletin boards and {talker system}s. Syllables and whole words in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which are phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are usually dropped. Hence, `for' becomes `4'; `two', `too', and `to' become `2'; `ck' becomes `k'. "Before I see you tomorrow" becomes "b4 i c u 2moro". First appeared in London about 1986, and was probably caused by the slowness of available talker systems, which operated on archaic machines with outdated operating systems and no standard methods of communication. Has become rarer since. See also {talk mode}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hammers and brains don't mix %% hamster: n. 1. [Fairchild] A particularly slick little piece of code that does one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamster happily spinning its exercise wheel. 2. A tailless mouse; that is, one with an infrared link to a receiver on the machine, as opposed to the conventional cable. 3. [UK] Any item of hardware made by Amstrad, a company famous for its cheap plastic PC-almost-compatibles. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hand-hacking: n. 1. The practice of translating {hot spot}s from an {HLL} into hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See {tune}, {bum}, {by hand}; syn. with v. {cruft}. 2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hand-roll: [from obs. mainstream slang `hand-rolled' in opposition to `ready-made', referring to cigarettes] v. To perform a normally automated software installation or configuration process {by hand}; implies that the normal process failed due to bugs in the configurator or was defeated by something exceptional in the local environment. "The worst thing about being a gateway between four different nets is having to hand-roll a new sendmail configuration every time any of them upgrades." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% handhold: what two climbers do during long bivouacs on narrow ledges. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% handle: [from CB slang] n. An electronic pseudonym; a `nom de guerre' intended to conceal the user's true identity. Network and BBS handles function as the same sort of simultaneous concealment and display one finds on Citizen's Band radio, from which the term was adopted. Use of grandiose handles is characteristic of {cracker}s, {weenie}s, {spod}s, and other lower forms of network life; true hackers travel on their own reputations rather than invented legendry. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% handshaking: n. Hardware or software activity designed to start or keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they {do protocol}. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to indicate that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh, they're handshaking!". See also {protocol}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% handwave: [poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] 1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic. 2. n. The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a handwave!" If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to handwave (alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you have said is {bogus}. Failing that, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your hand. The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could express, that his logic is faulty. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hang: v. 1. To wait for an event that will never occur. "The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive". See {wedged}, {hung}. 2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. "The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type a character." Compare {block}. 3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in the construction `hang off': "We're going to hang another tape drive off the file server." Implies a device attached with cables, rather than something that is strictly inside the machine's chassis. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% happily: adv. Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some important fact about its environment, either because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense of `happy' here is not that of elation, but rather that of blissful ignorance. "The program continues to run, happily unaware that its output is going to /dev/null." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% happy loving couples make it look so easy happy loving couples always talk so kind till the time that I can do my dancing with a partner those happy couples ain't no friends of mine. -- Joe Jackson %% haque: /hak/ [USENET] n. Variant spelling of {hack}, used only for the noun form and connoting an {elegant} hack. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hard boot: n. See {boot}. %% hard err on diskunit %% hardcoded: adj. 1. Said of data inserted directly into a program, where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some {profile}, resource (see {de-rezz} sense 2), or environment variable that a {user} or hacker can easily modify. 2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a `#define' macro (see {magic number}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hardcore signature virus: "As a juror in a Trial by Jury, you have the right, power and duty to acquit the defendant if you judge the law itself to be unjust." -- John McPherson, mcpherso@macvax.ucsd.edu %% hardware bum makes the jump instruction faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by v. {tune} (and n. {tweak}, {hack}), though none of these exactly capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English `bum' is a rude synonym for `buttocks'. %% hardware n. The easy part of the system. Compare FIRMWARE, MIDDLEWARE, SOFTWARE. %% hardware: metal which when draped around the neck gives a musical accompaniment to a climb and provides ballast to regulate a climber's ascent. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% hardwarily: /hard-weir'*-lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system is hardwarily unreliable." The adjective `hardwary' is *not* traditionally used, though it has recently been reported from the U.K. See {softwarily}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hardwired: adj. 1. In software, syn. for {hardcoded}. 2. By extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the sense of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% has the X nature: [seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the form "Does an X have the Buddha-nature?"] adj. Common hacker construction for `is an X', used for humorous emphasis. "Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help embedded in it truly has the {loser} nature!" See also {the X that can be Y is not the true X}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hash bucket: n. A notional receptacle into which more than one thing accessed by the same key or short code might be dropped. When you look up a name in the phone book (for example), you typically hash it by extracting its first letter; the hash buckets are the alphabetically ordered letter sections. This is used as techspeak with respect to code that uses actual hash functions; in jargon, it is used for human associative memory as well. Thus, two things `in the same hash bucket' may be confused with each other. "If you hash English words only by length, you get too many common grammar words in the first couple of hash buckets." Compare {hash collision}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hash collision: [from the technical usage] n. (var. `hash clash') When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see {thinko}). True story: One of us [ESR] was once on the phone with a friend about to move out to Berkeley. When asked what he expected Berkeley to be like, the friend replied: "Well, I have this mental picture of naked women throwing Molotov cocktails, but I think that's just a collision in my hash tables." Compare {hash bucket}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hat: n. Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII 1011110) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% heading: going to the latrine. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% headlamp: lantern left shining at night to mark a latrine. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% heads down: [Sun] adj. Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also {hack mode} and {larval stage}, although it is not confined to fledgling hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% healing a mighty wizard can be exhilarating %% hear that hollywood is making a movie about the dangers of casual sex? its called "Germs of Endearment" %% heartbeat: n. 1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected. 2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a bus clock or a periodic interrupt. 3. The `natural' oscillation frequency of a computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock rate. 4. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate that it is still alive. Sometimes hardware is designed to reboot the machine if it stops hearing a heartbeat. See also {breath-of-life packet}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% heatseeker: [IBM] n. A customer who can be relied upon to always buy the latest version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member the {lunatic fringe}). A 1992 example of a heatseeker is someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, goes out and buys Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by just fixing the bugs in each release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% heavy metal: [Cambridge] n. Syn. {big iron}. %% heavy wizardry: n. Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from {deep magic}, which trades more on arcane *theoretical* knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to {X} (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in comments similar to "Heavy wizardry begins here ...". Compare {voodoo programming}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% heavyweight: adj. High-overhead; {baroque}; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory utilization, and startup time. {EMACS} is a heavyweight editor; {X} is an *extremely* heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one man's heavyweight is another's {elephantine} and a third's {monstrosity}. Oppose `lightweight'. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the compound `heavyweight process'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% heisenbug: /hi:'zen-buhg/ [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of {Bohr bug}; see also {mandelbug}, {schroedinbug}. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from either {fandango on core} phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc {arena}) or errors that {smash the stack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hello, sailor!: interj. Occasional West Coast equivalent of {hello, world}; seems to have originated at SAIL, later associated with the game {Zork} (which also included "hello, aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the traditional hooker's greeting to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of course. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hello, wall!: excl. See {wall}. %% hello, world: interj. 1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/UNIX universe. 2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message. Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that just prints "hello, world" to standard output (and indeed it is the first example program in {K&R}). Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a {hairy} compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to {lose} (see {X}). 3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the {VAX} back up yet?" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hero loop: aerial maneuver performed by a valiant climber. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% hex: n. 1. Short for {{hexadecimal}}, base 16. 2. A 6-pack of anything (compare {quad}, sense 2). Neither usage has anything to do with {magic} or {black art}, though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: As a joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be worn as protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were, of course, hex inverters. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hexadecimal:: n. Base 16. Coined in the early 1960s to replace earlier `sexadecimal', which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by the rest of the industry. Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take `binary' to be paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct term for base 10, for example, is `denary', which comes from `deni' (ten at a time, ten each), a Latin `distributive' number; the corresponding term for base-16 would be something like `sendenary'. `Decimal' is from an ordinal number; the corresponding prefix for 6 would imply something like `sextidecimal'. The `sexa-' prefix is Latin but incorrect in this context, and `hexa-' is Greek. The word `octal' is similarly incorrect; a correct form would be `octaval' (to go with decimal), or `octonary' (to go with binary). If anyone ever implements a base-3 computer, computer scientists will be faced with the unprecedented dilemma of a choice between two *correct* forms; both `ternary' and `trinary' have a claim to this throne. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hexit: /hek'sit/ n. A hexadecimal digit (0--9, and A--F or a--f). Used by people who claim that there are only *ten* digits, dammit; sixteen-fingered human beings are rather rare, despite what some keyboard designs might seem to imply (see {space-cadet keyboard}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hidden flag: [scientific computation] n. An extra option added to a routine without changing the calling sequence. For example, instead of adding an explicit input variable to instruct a routine to give extra diagnostic output, the programmer might just add a test for some otherwise meaningless feature of the existing inputs, such as a negative mass. Liberal use of hidden flags can make a program very hard to debug and understand. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% high bit: [from `high-order bit'] n. 1. The most significant bit in a byte. 2. By extension, the most significant part of something other than a data byte: "Spare me the whole {saga}, just give me the high bit." See also {meta bit}, {hobbit}, {dread high-bit disease}, and compare the mainstream slang `bottom line'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% high moby: /hi:' mohb'ee/ n. The high half of a 512K {PDP-10}'s physical address space; the other half was of course the low moby. This usage has been generalized in a way that has outlasted the {PDP-10}; for example, at the 1990 Washington D.C. Area Science Fiction Conclave (Disclave), when a miscommunication resulted in two separate wakes being held in commemoration of the shutdown of MIT's last {{ITS}} machines, the one on the upper floor was dubbed the `high moby' and the other the `low moby'. All parties involved {grok}ked this instantly. See {moby}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% highly: [scientific computation] adv. The preferred modifier for overstating an understatement. As in: `highly nonoptimal', the worst possible way to do something; `highly nontrivial', either impossible or requiring a major research project; `highly nonlinear', completely erratic and unpredictable; `highly nontechnical', drivel written for {luser}s, oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect (compare {drool-proof paper}). In other computing cultures, postfixing of {in the extreme} might be preferred. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hing: // [IRC] n. Fortuitous typo for `hint', now in wide intentional use among players of {initgame}. Compare {newsfroup}, {filk}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hip belay: belay by an unsquare climber. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% hirsute: adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for {hairy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% his is implied by sense 2. 4. A peripheral device. "I bought my box without toasters, but since then I've added two boards and a second disk drive." %% hit point gain/loss when raising a level depends on constitution %% hoarfrost: icy stare given by a coldhearted woman of ill repute. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% hobbit: n. 1. The High Order Bit of a byte; same as the {meta bit} or {high bit}. 2. The non-ITS name of vad@ai.mit.edu (*Hobbit*), master of lasers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hog: n.,vt. 1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which noticeably degrade interactive response. *Not* used of programs that are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves (see {pig, run like a}). More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g., `memory hog', `core hog', `hog the processor', `hog the disk'. "A controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the bus-hog timer expires." 2. Also said of *people* who use more than their fair share of resources (particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one filesystem, they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hold: what you try to do when you wake at 4am after having overrehydrated yourself. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% holy wars: [from {USENET}, but may predate it] n. {flame war}s over {religious issues}. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms {big-endian} and {little-endian} in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace". Other perennial Holy Wars have included {EMACS} vs. {vi}, my personal computer vs. everyone else's personal computer, {{ITS}} vs. {{UNIX}}, {{UNIX}} vs. {VMS}, {BSD} UNIX vs. {USG UNIX}, {C} vs. {{Pascal}}, {C} vs. {LISP}, etc., ad nauseam. The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy wars most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. See also {theology}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% home box: n. A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns. "Yeah? Well, *my* home box runs a full 4.2 BSD, so there!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hook: n. A software or hardware feature included in order to simplify later additions or changes by a user. For example, a simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base 10, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print numbers in base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even more flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16 or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number. This is a {hairy} but powerful hook; one can then write a routine to print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and plug it into the program through the hook. Often the difference between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has useful hooks in judiciously chosen places. Both may do the original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much more flexible for future expansion of capabilities ({EMACS}, for example, is *all* hooks). The term `user exit' is synonymous but much more formal and less hackish. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hop: n. One file transmission in a series required to get a file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such networks (including {UUCPNET} and {FidoNet}), the important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path between them, rather than their geographical separation. See {bang path}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% horn: malady brought on by being too long alone in the mountains. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% horticulture - a `lady of the night' en route to an opera %% hose: 1. vt. To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance. "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system." See {hosed}. 2. n. A narrow channel through which data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths that represent performance bottlenecks. 3. n. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called `bit hose' or `hosery' (play on `hosiery') or `etherhose'. See also {washing machine}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hosed: adj. Same as {down}. Used primarily by UNIX hackers. Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably derived from the Canadian slang `hoser' popularized by the Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV. See {hose}. It is also widely used of people in the mainstream sense of `in an extremely unfortunate situation'. Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic difficulties crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed. It was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of some coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed. See also {dehose}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hot spot: n. 1. [primarily used by C/UNIX programmers, but spreading] It is received wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code eats 90% of the execution time; if one were to graph instruction visits versus code addresses, one would typically see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such spikes are called `hot spots' and are good candidates for heavy optimization or {hand-hacking}. The term is especially used of tight loops and recursions in the code's central algorithm, as opposed to (say) initial set-up costs or large but infrequent I/O operations. See {tune}, {bum}, {hand-hacking}. 2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left button." 3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse clicks, which trigger some action. Hypertext help screens are an example, in which a hot spot exists in the vicinity of any word for which additional material is available. 4. In a massively parallel computer with shared memory, the one location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or write at once (perhaps because they are all doing a {busy-wait} on the same lock). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% house wizard: [prob. from ad-agency lingo, `house freak'] n. A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of UNIX wizards. The term `house guru' is equivalent. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% how come Smokey the Bear and his wife never had any kids? ....`cause every time she'd get hot, he'd hit her over the head with a shovel. %% how do you know if someone likes moosehead??????????? look for antler marks on their thighs!!!!!! %% hubub, hubub, HUBUB, hubub, hubub, hubub, HUBUB, hubub, hubub, hubub. %% huff: v. To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs that use such methods have been called `HUFF' or some variant thereof. Oppose {puff}. Compare {crunch}, {compress}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% humma: // excl. A filler word used on various `chat' and `talk' programs when you had nothing to say but felt that it was important to say something. The word apparently originated (at least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System (MTS, a now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on early UNIX systems. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hung: [from `hung up'] adj. Equivalent to {wedged}, but more common at UNIX/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with {locked up}, {wedged}; compare {hosed}. See also {hang}. A hung state is distinguished from {crash}ed or {down}, where the program or system is also unusable but because it is not running rather than because it is waiting for something. However, the recovery from both situations is often the same. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hungry puppy: n. Syn. {slopsucker}. %% hungus: /huhng'g*s/ [perhaps related to slang `humongous'] adj. Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set of modifications." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% hunt them down and kill them. %% hyperspace: /hi:'per-spays/ n. A memory location that is *far* away from where the program counter should be pointing, often inaccessible because it is not even mapped in. "Another core dump --- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow." (Compare {jump off into never-never land}.) This usage is from the SF notion of a spaceship jumping `into hyperspace', that is, taking a shortcut through higher-dimensional space --- in other words, bypassing this universe. The variant `east hyperspace' is recorded among CMU and Bliss hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% i dont like capital letters small letters down here where i can read with curls and hooks and things gracefully encourage my eye to trip along BUT ALONG COME CAPITALS in their serifed boots tromping l'oeil shouting me down i like lowercase it flows in america, they capitalize things that are Important like Values, and VIPs and Places of Significance and most of all I in spain, they capitalize You So i will not majuscule without a good reason. when i feel like it apostrophes go too -- mgq %% i got gum .. I GOT LICORICE .. i got chocolate .. I GOT AN APPLE ...... i got a rock %% i'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. -- e. e. cummings (1894-1963) %% i14y: // n. Abbrev. for `interoperability', with the `14' replacing fourteen letters. Used in the {X} (windows) community. Refers to portability and compatibility of data formats (even binary ones) between different programs or implementations of the same program on different machines. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% i18n: // n. Abbrev. for `internationali{z,s}ation', with the 18 replacing 18 letters. Used in the {X} (windows) community. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ice screw: drastic cure for a severe case of horn. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% ice: [coined by USENETter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for `Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's novels, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to literally kill the intruder). Also, `icebreaker': a program designed for cracking security on a system. Neither term is in serious use yet as of mid-1991, but many hackers find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in the future. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% idempotent: [from mathematical techspeak] adj. Acting as if used only once, even if used multiple times. This term is often used with respect to {C} header files, which contain common definitions and declarations to be included by several source files. If a header file is ever included twice during the same compilation (perhaps due to nested #include files), compilation errors can result unless the header file has protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file so protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to describe an initialization subroutine which is arranged to perform some critical action exactly once, even if the routine is called several times. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% identify things before you use them %% if (rsfp = mypopen("/bin/mail root","w")) { /* heh, heh */ -- Larry Wall, lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov in perl.c from the perl source code %% ifdef out: /if'def owt/ v. Syn. for {condition out}, specific to {C}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% igloo: (british) latrine for igs. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% ill-behaved: adj. 1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties. 2. Software that bypasses the defined {OS} interfaces to do things (like screen, keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often in a way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software. In the IBM PC/MS-DOS world, there is a folk theorem (nearly true) to the effect that (owing to gross inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS interface) all interesting applications are ill-behaved. See also {bare metal}. Oppose {well-behaved}, compare {PC-ism}. See {mess-dos}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% implementation - a sorrowful statement by a very small person %% in the extreme: adj. A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish terms. See, for example, `obscure in the extreme' under {obscure}, and compare {highly}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% incantation: n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented they must be learned from a {wizard}. "This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you {mutter} the right incantation they will be forced into text space." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% include war: n. Excessive multi-leveled including within a discussion {thread}, a practice that tends to annoy readers. In a forum with high-traffic newsgroups, such as USENET, this can lead to {flame}s and the urge to start a {kill file}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% include: vt. [USENET] 1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response. See the the discussion of inclusion styles under "Hacker Writing Style". 2. [from {C}] `#include ' has appeared in {sig block}s to refer to a notional `standard {disclaimer} file'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% indent style: [C programmers] n. The rules one uses to indent code in a readable fashion; a subject of {holy wars}. There are four major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to visually track the scope of control constructs. The significant variable is the placement of `{' and `}' with respect to the statement(s) they enclose and the guard or controlling statement (`if', `else', `for', `while', or `do') on the block, if any. `K&R style' --- Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the examples in {K&R} are formatted this way. Also called `kernel style' because the UNIX kernel is written in it, and the `One True Brace Style' (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. The basic indent shown here is eight spaces (or one tab) per level; four are occasionally seen, but are much less common. if (cond) { } `Allman style' --- Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called `BSD style'). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal and Algol. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four is just as common (esp. in C++ code). if (cond) { } `Whitesmiths style' --- popularized by the examples that came with Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four is occasionally seen. if (cond) { } `GNU style' --- Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software Foundation code, and just about nowhere else. Indents are always four spaces per level, with `{' and `}' halfway between the outer and inner indent levels. if (cond) { } Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be nearly universal, but is now much less common (the opening brace tends to get lost against the right paren of the guard part in an `if' or `while', which is a {Bad Thing}). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any putative gain in readability is less important than their style's relative economy with vertical space, which enables one to see more code on one's screen at once. Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of {holy wars}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% index: n. See {coefficient}. %% infant mortality: n. It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since power-up (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as `infant mortality' problems (or, occasionally, as `sudden infant death syndrome'). See {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% infatuate: to put on weight. %% infinite loop: n. One that never terminates (that is, the machine {spin}s or {buzz}es forever and goes {catatonic}). There is a standard joke that has been made about each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine: "The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% infinite regeneration ---> temptation %% infinite: adj. Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in: "This program produces infinite garbage." "He is an infinite loser." The word most likely to follow `infinite', though, is {hair} (it has been pointed out that fractals are an excellent example of infinite hair). These uses are abuses of the word's mathematical meaning. The term `semi-infinite', denoting an immoderately large amount of some resource, is also heard. "This compiler is taking a semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my program." See also {semi}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% infinity: n. 1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever). 2. `minus infinity': The smallest such value, not necessarily or even usually the simple negation of plus infinity. In N-bit twos-complement arithmetic, infinity is 2^(N-1) - 1 but minus infinity is - (2^(N-1)), not -(2^(N-1) - 1). Note also that this is different from "time T equals minus infinity", which is closer to a mathematician's usage of infinity. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% information - how the Blue Angels fly %% initgame: /in-it'gaym/ [IRC] n. An {IRC} version of the venerable trivia game "20 questions", in which one user changes his {nick} to the initials of a famous person or other named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions, with the one to guess the person getting to be "it" next. As a courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a 4-letter hint of the form sex, nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example, MAAR means "Male, American, Alive, Real" (as opposed to "fictional"). Initgame can be surprisingly addictive. See also {hing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% insanely great: adj. [Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD UNIX people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly {elegant} that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of {hacker}-natures. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% instable - where horses sleep %% intent: an "AT HOME" when you're on a camping trip. %% interesting: adj. In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of `annoying', or `difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". Oppose {trivial}, {uninteresting}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% interlard - vt., to intersperse; diversify -- Webster's New World Dictionary Of The American Language %% interrupt count = %% interrupt list, the:: [MS-DOS] n. The list of all known software interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and compatibles, maintained and made available for free redistribution by Ralf Brown . As of late 1992, it had grown to approximately two megabytes in length. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% interrupt: 1. [techspeak] n. On a computer, an event that interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts flow-of-control through an "interrupt handler" routine. See also {trap}. 2. interj. A request for attention from a hacker. Often explicitly spoken. "Interrupt --- have you seen Joe recently?" See {priority interrupt}. 3. Under MS-DOS, the term `interrupt' is nearly synonymous with `system call', because the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction (see {{interrupt list, the}}) and because programmers so often have to bypass the OS (going directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonable performance. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% interrupts locked out: adj. When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well observe "She must have interrupts locked out". The synonym `interrupts disabled' is also common. Variations abound; "to have one's interrupt mask bit set" and "interrupts masked out" is also heard. See also {spl}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% iron box: [UNIX/Internet] n. A special environment set up to trap a {cracker} logging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May include a modified {shell} restricting the cracker's movements in unobvious ways, and `bait' files designed to keep him interested and logged on. See also {back door}, {firewall machine}, {Venus flytrap}, and Clifford Stoll's account in `{The Cuckoo's Egg}' of how he made and used one (see the Bibliography in appendix C). Compare {padded cell}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% iron: n. Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of {mainframe} class with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase {big iron}. Oppose {silicon}. See also {dinosaur}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ironmonger: [IBM] n. Derogatory. A hardware specialist. Compare {sandbender}, {polygon pusher}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% is it on? is it off? reply! %% is your nose to big, or did you just have a tetanus shot? %% jack in: v. To log on to a machine or connect to a network or {BBS}, esp. for purposes of entering a {virtual reality} simulation such as a {MUD} or {IRC} (leaving is "jacking out"). This term derives from {cyberpunk} SF, in which it was used for the act of plugging an electrode set into neural sockets in order to interface the brain directly to a virtual reality. It's primarily used by MUD & IRC fans and younger hackers on BBS systems. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% jaggies: /jag'eez/ n. The `stairstep' effect observable when an edge (esp. a linear edge of very shallow or steep slope) is rendered on a pixel device (as opposed to a vector display). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% jamming,nut: very painful way to climb. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com (Jason Asbahr) writes: > Really? What about the price of supercomputers these days? > (Or any day...) What do we have that the NSA doesn't? 78 million IBM-PC clones? -- Peter da Silva, peter@taronga.hackercorp.com %% jiffy: n. 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on the computer (see {tick}). Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently 1/100 sec has become common. "The swapper runs every 6 jiffies" means that the virtual memory management routine is executed once for every 6 ticks of the clock, or about ten times a second. 2. Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1-millisecond {wall time} interval. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use `jiffy' to mean the time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum, which turns out to be close to one *nanosecond*. 3. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. "I'll do it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never. This is a bit contrary to the more widespread use of the word. Oppose {nano}. See also {Real Soon Now}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% jihi sureba if you are tender to them funwo suru nari the young sparrows suzume no ko will shit on you -- Issa (1763-1827) %% job security: n. When some piece of code is written in a particularly {obscure} fashion, and no good reason (such as time or space optimization) can be discovered, it is often said that the programmer was attempting to increase his job security (i.e., by making himself indispensable for maintenance). This sour joke seldom has to be said in full; if two hackers are looking over some code together and one points at a section and says "job security", the other one may just nod. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% jock hitch (hawk hitch) v.: to adjust the family jewels in public. "Those spotty creeps on the corner jock hitch every time I walk by." %% jock: n. 1. A programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute-force programs. See {brute force}. 2. When modified by another noun, describes a specialist in some particular computing area. The compounds `compiler jock' and `systems jock' seem to be the best-established examples of this. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% joe code: /joh' kohd`/ n. 1. Code that is overly {tense} and unmaintainable. "{Perl} may be a handy program, but if you look at the source, it's complete joe code." 2. Badly written, possibly buggy code. Correspondents wishing to remain anonymous have fingered a particular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed that usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet `Joe code' was intended in sense 1. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% jolix: n. /joh'liks/ n.,adj. 386BSD, the freeware port of the BSD Net/2 release to the Intel i386 architecture by Bill Jolitz and friends. Used to differentiate from BSDI's port based on the same source tape, which is called BSD/386. See {BSD}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% juggling eggs: vi. Keeping a lot of {state} in your head while modifying a program. "Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs", means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's being scrambled. In the classic first-contact SF novel `The Mote in God's Eye', by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity." That is a very hackish use of language. See also {hack mode}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% jump off into never-never land: [from J. M. Barrie's `Peter Pan'] v. Same as {branch to Fishkill}, but more common in technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that use the term `jump' rather than `branch'. Compare {hyperspace}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% jupiter: [IRC] vt. To kill an {IRC} {robot} or user, and then take its place by adopting its {nick} so that it cannot reconnect. Named after a particular IRC user who did this to NickServ, the robot in charge of preventing people from inadvertently using a nick claimed by another user. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kahuna: /k*-hoo'nuh/ [IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] n. Synonym for {wizard}, {guru}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kamikaze packet: n. The `official' jargon for what is more commonly called a {Christmas tree packet}. {RFC}-1025, `TCP and IP Bake Off' says: 10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet (AKA nastygram, christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once (e.g., a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data). See also {Chernobyl packet}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kangaroo code: n. Syn. {spaghetti code}. %% ken: /ken/ n. 1. [UNIX] Ken Thompson, principal inventor of UNIX. In the early days he used to hand-cut distribution tapes, often with a note that read "Love, ken". Old-timers still use his first name (sometimes uncapitalized, because it's a login name and mail address) in third-person reference; it is widely understood (on USENET, in particular) that without a last name `Ken' refers only to Ken Thompson. Similarly, Dennis without last name means Dennis Ritchie (and he is often known as dmr). See also {demigod}, {{UNIX}}. 2. A flaming user. This was originated by the Software Support group at Symbolics because the two greatest flamers in the user community were both named Ken. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kgbvax: /K-G-B'vaks/ n. See {kremvax}. %% kick: [IRC] v. To cause somebody to be removed from a {IRC} channel, an option only available to {CHOP}s. This is an extreme measure, often used to combat extreme {flamage} or {flood}ing, but sometimes used at the chop's whim. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kill file: [USENET] n. (alt. `KILL file') Per-user file(s) used by some {USENET} reading programs (originally Larry Wall's `rn(1)') to discard summarily (without presenting for reading) articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or unwanted) patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. Thus to add a person (or subject) to one's kill file is to arrange for that person to be ignored by one's newsreader in future. By extension, it may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in other media. See also {plonk}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% killer micro: [popularized by Eugene Brooks] n. A microprocessor-based machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer performance turf. Often heard in "No one will survive the attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of the downsizers. Used esp. of RISC architectures. The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes" (one of the {canonical} examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even more flavor now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively parallel computers). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% killer poke: n. A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see {poke}) in a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on {bitty box}es without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and trash analog electronics in the monitor. See also {HCF}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kilo-: [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}. %% kit: [USENET; poss. fr. DEC slang for a full software distribution, as opposed to a patch or upgrade] n. A source software distribution that has been packaged in such a way that it can (theoretically) be unpacked and installed according to a series of steps using only standard UNIX tools, and entirely documented by some reasonable chain of references from the top-level {README file}. The more general term {distribution} may imply that special tools or more stringent conditions on the host environment are required. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% klone: /klohn/ n. See {clone}, sense 4. %% kludge: /kluhj/ n. Common (but incorrect) variant of {kluge}, q.v. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kluge around: vt. To avoid a bug or difficult condition by inserting a {kluge}. Compare {workaround}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kluge up: vt. To lash together a quick hack to perform a task; this is milder than {cruft together} and has some of the connotations of {hack up} (note, however, that the construction `kluge on' corresponding to {hack on} is never used). "I've kluged up this routine to dump the buffer contents to a safe place." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% kluge: /klooj/ [from the German `klug', clever] 1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. (A long-ago `Datamation' article by Jackson Granholme said: "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.") 2. n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves {ad-hockery} and verges on being a {crock}. In fact, the TMRC Dictionary defined `kludge' as "a crock that works". 3. n. Something that works for the wrong reason. 4. vt. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way." 5. [WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a {rude} manner. Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling `kludge'. Reports from {old fart}s are consistent that `kluge' was the original spelling, and that `kludge' arose by mutation sometime in the early 1970s. Some people who encountered the word first in print or on-line jumped to the reasonable but incorrect conclusion that the word should be pronounced /kluhj/ (rhyming with `sludge'). The result of this tangled history is a mess; in 1991, many (perhaps even most) hackers pronounce the word correctly as /klooj/ but spell it incorrectly as `kludge' (compare the pronunciation drift of {mung}). Some observers consider this appropriate in view of its meaning. %% kluge: /klooj/ [from the German `klug', clever] 1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. (A long-ago `Datamation' article by Jackson Granholme said: "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.") 2. n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves {ad-hockery} and verges on being a {crock}. In fact, the TMRC Dictionary defined `kludge' as "a crock that works". 3. n. Something that works for the wrong reason. 4. vt. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way." 5. [WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a {rude} manner. Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling `kludge'. Reports from {old fart}s are consistent that `kluge' was the original spelling, reported around computers as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of *hardware* kluges. In 1947, the `New York Folklore Quarterly' reported a classic shaggy-dog story `Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker' then current in the Armed Forces, in which a `kluge' was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial function. Other sources report that `kluge' was common Navy slang in the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently failed at sea. However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a decade older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of a device called a "Kluge paper feeder" dating back at least to 1935, an adjunct to mechanical printing presses. The Kluge feeder was designed before small, cheap electric motors and control electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of cams, belts, and linkages to both power and synchronize all its operations from one motive driveshaft. It was accordingly tempermental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to repair --- but oh, so clever! One traditional folk etymology of `kluge' makes it the name of a design engineer; in fact, `Kluge' is a surname in German, and the designer of the Kluge feeder may well have been the man behind this myth. {TMRC} and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WII military slang (see also {foobar}). It seems likely that `kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge during the war. The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the {Datamation} article mentioned above; it was titled "How to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pages 30 and 31). Some people who encountered the word first in print or on-line jumped to the reasonable but incorrect conclusion that the word should be pronounced /kluhj/ (rhyming with `sludge'). The result of this tangled history is a mess; in 1991, many (perhaps even most) hackers pronounce the word correctly as /klooj/ but spell it incorrectly as `kludge' (compare the pronunciation drift of {mung}). Some observers consider this appropriate in view of its meaning. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% knot: configuration often discovered in the middle of a rappel rope during a rappel. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% known point: (navigation) figment of the imagination. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% kremvax: /krem-vaks/ [from the then large number of {USENET} {VAXen} with names of the form foovax] n. Originally, a fictitious USENET site at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and {kgbvax}, which now seems to be the one by which it is remembered. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on USENET (which has negligible security against them), because the notion that USENET might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time. In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su, joined USENET. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov (avg@hq.demos.su), the major poster from there up to at least the end of 1990, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by blandly asserting that he *was* a hoax! Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site *named* kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into truth and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for this lexicon. --- ESR] %% kremvax: /krem-vaks/ [from the then large number of {USENET} {VAXen} with names of the form foovax] n. Originally, a fictitious USENET site at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and {kgbvax}. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on USENET (which has negligible security against them), because the notion that USENET might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time. In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su, joined USENET. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by blandly asserting that he *was* a hoax! Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site *named* kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into truth and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for this lexicon. --- ESR] In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer networking were proved devastatingly accurate --- and the original kremvax joke became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of `glasnost' and `perestroika' made kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to the West. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lace card: n. obs. A {{punched card}} with all holes punched (also called a `whoopee card'). Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these, as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce these things owing to power-supply problems. When some practical joker fed a lace card through the reader, you needed to clear the jam with a `card knife' --- which you used on the joker first. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% laced in the affections of hackerdom by {EMACS}. Descendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty PDP-11 operating systems, however, and ports of the more advanced MIT versions remain the focus of some antiquarian interest. See also {retrocomputing}, {write-only language}. %% landmark: visual pattern similar to a water mark, only dry. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% language is a virus from outer space and hearing your name is better than seeing your face. -- wm. burroughs, as paraphrased by laurie anderson %% language lawyer: n. A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that together imply the answer to your question "if only you had thought to look there". Compare {wizard}, {legal}, {legalese}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% languages of choice: n. {C} and {LISP}. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities. There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in {appendix A}). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but {HLL} implementation, {glue}, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming. Most hackers tend to frown on languages like {{Pascal}} and {{Ada}}, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}), and to regard everything that's even remotely connected with {COBOL} or other traditional {card walloper} languages as a total and unmitigated {loss}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% larval stage: n. Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour {hacking run} in a given week; neglect of all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never resume a more `normal' life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See also {wannabee}. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a new {OS} or programming language. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lase: /layz/ vt. To print a given document via a laser printer. "OK, let's lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right things." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% laser chicken: n. Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it `laser chicken' for two reasons: It can {zap} you just like a laser, and the sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams. In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as `Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% late-60's variant: Why did the running-dog lackey of the bourgeoisie throw the clock out the window? Because it was a continual reminder of the imminent doom of capitalism! Oh, well, you had to be there... %% laundromat: n. Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing machine}. %% layback: what a climber looks forward to at the end of a day. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% ld a longer life be worthwhile if it had to be lived as prescribed ... without French-fried onion rings, pizza with double cheese, or the occasional Mai-Tai? (Remember, living right doesn't really make you live longer, it just SEEMS like longer.) That, and another piece of coffee cake, should do the trick. %% leaf site: n. A machine that merely originates and reads USENET news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic. Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}, {rib site}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% leak: n. With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in. {memory leak} and {fd leak} have their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a `window handle leak' in a window system. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% leaky heap: [Cambridge] n. An {arena} with a {memory leak}. %% leapfrog attack: n. Use of userid and password information obtained illicitly from one host (e.g., downloading a file of account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to compromise another host. Also, to TELNET through one or more hosts in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% legal: adj. Loosely used to mean `in accordance with all the relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of `natural laws' to achieve a desired objective. Their use of `legal' is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers. Compare {language lawyer}, {legalese}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% legalese: n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a {language lawyer} to {parse} it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, {suit}s, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% let the smoke out: v. To fry hardware (see {fried}). See {magic smoke} for the mythology behind this. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% letterbomb: n. A piece of {email} containing {live data} intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see {cycle}, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under UNIX, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could range from silly to tragic. See also {Trojan horse}; compare {nastygram}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lexer: /lek'sr/ n. Common hacker shorthand for `lexical analyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). "Some C lexers get confused by the old-style compound ops like `=-'." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/ n. A notorious word {chomper} on ITS. See {bagbiter}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% liberal = someone with liberal principles conservative = someone with conservative principles moderate = someone without any principles %% life: n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (`Scientific American', October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in {TECO}!; see {Gosperism}). When a hacker mentions `life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. 2. The opposite of {USENET}. As in {Get a life!} -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% light pipe: n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose {copper}. %% lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the underflow." See also {overflow bit}. %% lightweight: adj. Opposite of {heavyweight}; usually found in combining forms such as `lightweight process'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% like If guns are outlawed, the lawyer population will explode out of control. %% like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj. Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, you *could* write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach." See also {fear and loathing} -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% like nailing jelly to a tree: adj. Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain. "Trying to display the `prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what `prettiest' means algorithmically." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% line 666: [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notational line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either that *somebody* is out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% line eater, the: [USENET] n. 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the `line eater', and postings often included a dummy line of `line eater food'. Ironically, line eater `food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there *was* a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food *and* the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the line eater' continued for some time after the bug had been {nailed to the wall}, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself is still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways. 2. See {NSA line eater}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% line noise: n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms, {cosmic rays}, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is {TECO}; it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable from line noise." Other non-{WYSIWYG} editors, such as Multics `qed' and Unix `ed', in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as {INTERCAL}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% line of weakness: long involved explanation for not attempting a route. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve, `2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Unlike `line feed', `line starve' is *not* standard {{ASCII}} terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well as {{nroff}} and {{troff}}) that suppresses a {newline} or other character(s) that would normally be emitted. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% link farm: [UNIX] n. A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when (for example) one is maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source tree, e.g., when the only difference is architecture-dependent object files. "Let's freeze the source and then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and FROBOZZ-4 link farms." Link farms may also be used to get around restrictions on the number of `-I' (include-file directory) arguments on older C preprocessors. However, they can also get completely out of hand, becoming the filesystem equivalent of {spaghetti code}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% link-dead: [MUD] adj. Said of a {MUD} character who has frozen in place because of a dropped Internet connection. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lint: [from UNIX's `lint(1)', named for the bits of fluff it picks from programs] 1. vt. To examine a program closely for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, most esp. if the UNIX utility `lint(1)' is used. This term used to be restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself, but (judging by references on USENET) it has become a shorthand for {desk check} at some non-UNIX shops, even in languages other than C. Also as v. {delint}. 2. n. Excess verbiage in a document, as in "this draft has too much lint". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lion food: [IBM] n. Middle management or HQ staff (by extension, administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agreed to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me --- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go. -- ee cummings (1894-1963) %% literature, the: n. Computer-science journals and other publications, vaguely gestured at to answer a question that the speaker believes is {trivial}. Thus, one might answer an annoying question by saying "It's in the literature." Oppose {Knuth}, which has no connotation of triviality. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lithium lick: n. [NeXT] n. Steve Jobs. Employees who have gotten too much attention from their esteemed founder are said to have `lithium lick' when they begin to show signs of Jobsian fervor and repeat the most recent catch phrases in normal conversation --- for example, "It just works, right out of the box!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% little-endian: adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored `little-end-first'). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel microprocessors and a lot of communications and networking hardware are little-endian. See {big-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often these are bits within a byte. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% live data: n. 1. Data that is written to be interpreted and takes over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious operation, such as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break security. For example, some smart terminals have commands that allow one to download strings to program keys; this can be used to write live data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with a security-breaking {virus} that is triggered the next time a hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some well-known bugs in {vi} that allow certain texts to send arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed. 2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function {hook}s (executable code). 3. An object, such as a {trampoline}, that is constructed on the fly by a program and intended to be executed as code. 4. Actual real-world data, as opposed to `test data'. For example, "I think I have the record deletion module finished." "Have you tried it out on live data?" It usually carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and must not be corrupted, else bad things will happen. So a possible alternate response to the above claim might be: "Well, make sure it works perfectly before we throw live data at it." The implication here is that record deletion is something pretty significant, and a haywire record-deletion module running amok on live data would cause great harm and probably require restoring from backups. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% livelock: /li:v'lok/ n. A situation in which some critical stage of a task is unable to finish because its clients perpetually create more work for it to do after they have been serviced but before it can clear its queue. Differs from {deadlock} in that the process is not blocked or waiting for anything, but has a virtually infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% liveware: /li:v'weir/ n. 1. Synonym for {wetware}. Less common. 2. [Cambridge] Vermin. "Waiter, there's some liveware in my salad..." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lobotomy: n. 1. What a hacker subjected to formal management training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter doubtless intend it as a joke. 2. The act of removing the processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it. Some very cheap {clone} systems are sold in `lobotomized' form --- everything but the brain. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% locals, the: pl.n. The users on one's local network (as opposed, say, to people one reaches via public Internet or UUCP connects). The marked thing about this usage is how little it has to do with real-space distance. "I have to do some tweaking on this mail utility before releasing it to the locals." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% locked and loaded: [from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted and prepared for firing] adj. Said of a removable disk volume properly prepared for use --- that is, locked into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically, because their heads are `loaded' whenever the power is up, this description is never used of {{Winchester}} drives (which are named after a rifle). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% locked up: adj. Syn. for {hung}, {wedged}. %% logic bomb: n. Code surreptitiously inserted in an application or OS that causes it to perform some destructive or security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are met. Compare {back door}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% logical: [from the technical term `logical device', wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary `logical' name] adj. Having the role of. If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were replaced, the replacement would for a while be known as the `logical' Les Earnest. (This does not imply any judgment on the replacement.) Compare {virtual}. At Stanford, `logical' compass directions denote a coordinate system in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco, `logical west' is toward the ocean, etc., even though logical north varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that, by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-south.) In giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon Tarasco restaurant, get onto {El Camino Bignum} going logical north." Using the word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost directly in front of him. The concept is reinforced by North American highways which are almost, but not quite, consistently labeled with logical rather than physical directions. A similar situation exists at MIT: Route 128 (famous for the electronics industry that has grown up along it) is a 3-quarters circle surrounding Boston at a radius of 10 miles, terminating near the coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the two directions along this highway as `clockwise' and `counterclockwise', but the road signs all say "north" and "south", respectively. A hacker might describe these directions as `logical north' and `logical south', to indicate that they are conventional directions not corresponding to the usual denotation for those words. (If you went logical south along the entire length of route 128, you would start out going northwest, curve around to the south, and finish headed due east, including one infamous stretch of pavement which is simultaneously route 128 south and Interstate 93 north, and is signed as such!) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% login: %% loop through: vt. To process each element of a list of things. "Hold on, I've got to loop through my paper mail." Derives from the computer-language notion of an iterative loop; compare `cdr down' (under {cdr}), which is less common among C and UNIX programmers. ITS hackers used to say `IRP over' after an obscure pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% loose bytes: n. Commonwealth hackish term for the padding bytes or {shim}s many compilers insert between members of a record or structure to cope with alignment requirements imposed by the machine architecture. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lord high fixer: [primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's `lord high executioner'] n. The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See {wizard}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lose lose: interj. A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose, lose." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lose: [MIT] vi. 1. To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner. 2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky. 3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant). See also {deserves to lose}. 4. n. Refers to something that is {losing}, especially in the phrases "That's a lose!" and "What a lose!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% loser: n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are `real loser', `total loser', and `complete loser' (but not *`moby loser', which would be a contradiction in terms). See {luser}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% losing: adj. Said of anything that is or causes a {lose} or {lossage}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% loss: n. Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss', and `total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are "What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `moby loss' is OK even though *`moby loser' is not used; applied to an abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare {lossage}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lossage: /los'*j/ n. The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latter implies a continuing {lose} of which the speaker is currently a victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious lossage. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lost in the noise: adj. Syn. {lost in the underflow}. This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined to hackerdom; physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lost in the underflow: adj. Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to `floating underflow', a condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic processor tries to handle quantities smaller than its limit of magnitude. It is also a pun on `undertow' (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). "Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the underflow." See also {overflow bit}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj. Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in 1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, is a notorious recent example). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% low-bandwidth: [from communication theory] adj. Used to indicate a talk that, although not {content-free}, was not terribly informative. "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you expect for an audience of {suit}s!" Compare {zero-content}, {bandwidth}, {math-out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lsjdgfjdsf;lkjdsfkjsdkfjdfjaskdfkajdsfiwerfnv8enrfiwhcn78wnmfr83n8 Take that you alien tijunpolfz. %% lunatic fringe: [IBM] n. Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% lunge: skillful or desperate move, depending on who is doing it and why. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% lurker: n. One of the `silent majority' in a electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively: "Oh, I'm just lurking." Often used in `the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the group's {flamage}-emitting regulars. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% luser: /loo'zr/ n. A {user}; esp. one who is also a {loser}. ({luser} and {loser} are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out some status information, including how many people were already using the computer; it might print "14 users", for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a great controversy, as some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to their faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether it would say "users" or "losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported `luser' as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term `luser' is often seen in program comments. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% macdink: /mak'dink/ [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior] vt. To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better off without them. "When I left at 11 P.M. last night, he was still macdinking the slides for his presentation." See also {fritterware}, {window shopping}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% machinable: adj. Machine-readable. Having the {softcopy} nature. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% machoflops: /mach'oh-flops/ [pun on `megaflops', a coinage for `millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second'] n. Refers to artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications are lucky to get half the quoted speed. See {Your mileage may vary}, {benchmark}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% macro-: pref. Large. Opposite of {micro-}. In the mainstream and among other technical cultures (for example, medical people) this competes with the prefix {mega-}, but hackers tend to restrict the latter to quantification. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% macro: /mak'roh/ [techspeak] n. A name (possibly followed by a formal {arg} list) that is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it is to be expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual arguments) by a macro expander. This definition can be found in any technical dictionary; what those won't tell you is how the hackish connotations of the term have changed over time. The term `macro' originated in early assemblers, which encouraged the use of macros as a structuring and information-hiding device. During the early 1970s, macro assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes quite as powerful and expensive as {HLL}s, only to fall from favor as improving compiler technology marginalized assembler programming (see {languages of choice}). Nowadays the term is most often used in connection with the C preprocessor, LISP, or one of several special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion facility (such as TeX or UNIX's [nt]roff suite). Indeed, the meaning has drifted enough that the collective `macros' is now sometimes used for code in any special-purpose application control language (whether or not the language is actually translated by text expansion), and for macro-like entities such as the `keyboard macros' supported in some text editors (and PC TSR or Macintosh INIT/CDEV keyboard enhancers). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% macrology: /mak-rol'*-jee/ n. 1. Set of usually complex or crufty macros, e.g., as part of a large system written in {LISP}, {TECO}, or (less commonly) assembler. 2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology in sense 1. Sometimes studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archeology, ecology, or {theology}, hence the sound-alike construction. See also {boxology}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% macrotape: /ma'kroh-tayp/ n. An industry-standard reel of tape, as opposed to a {microtape}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% maggotbox: /mag'*t-boks/ n. See {Macintrash}. This is even more derogatory. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% magic cookie: [UNIX] n. 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g., on non-UNIX OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of `ftell(3)' may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to `fseek(3)', but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase `it hands you a magic cookie' means it returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later. 2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse video or underlining) or performing other control functions. Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a {glitch}. See also {cookie}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% magic number: [UNIX/C] n. 1. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line ({hardcoded}), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a commented `#define'. Magic numbers in this sense are bad style. 2. A number that encodes critical information used in an algorithm in some opaque way. The classic examples of these are the numbers used in hash or CRC functions, or the coefficients in a linear congruential generator for pseudo-random numbers. This sense actually predates and was ancestral to the more common sense 1. 3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file to indicate its type to a utility. Under UNIX, the system and various applications programs (especially the linker) distinguish between types of executable file by looking for a magic number. Once upon a time, these magic numbers were PDP-11 branch instructions that skipped over header data to the start of executable code; the 0407, for example, was octal for `branch 16 bytes relative'. Nowadays only a {wizard} knows the spells to create magic numbers. How do you choose a fresh magic number of your own? Simple --- you pick one at random. See? It's magic! -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% magic smoke: n. A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function (also called `blue smoke'; this is similar to the archaic `phlogiston' hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up --- the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more. See {smoke test}, {let the smoke out}. USENETter Jay Maynard tells the following story: "Once, while hacking on a dedicated Z80 system, I was testing code by blowing EPROMs and plugging them in the system, then seeing what happened. One time, I plugged one in backwards. I only discovered that *after* I realized that Intel didn't put power-on lights under the quartz windows on the tops of their EPROMs --- the die was glowing white-hot. Amazingly, the EPROM worked fine after I erased it, filled it full of zeros, then erased it again. For all I know, it's still in service. Of course, this is because the magic smoke didn't get let out." Compare the original phrasing of {Murphy's Law}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% magic: adj. 1. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare {automagically} and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits." "This routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions." 2. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially called {black magic}). 3. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled. Compare {black magic}, {wizardly}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}. For more about hackish `magic', see {A Story About `Magic'} (in {appendix A}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% maging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See {mess-dos}, {ill-behaved}. %% mailing list: n. (often shortened in context to `list') 1. An {email} address that is an alias (or {macro}, though that word is never used in this connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple `reflectors', redirecting mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said to be `moderated'. 2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an address. Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction, along with {USENET}. They predate USENET, having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They are often used for private information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for or inappropriate to public USENET groups. Though some of these maintain purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like the `sf-lovers' list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and others are purely social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was the eccentric bandykin distribution; its latter-day progeny, lectroids and tanstaafl, still include a number of the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom. Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike USENET) don't tie up a significant amount of machine resources (until they get very large, at which point they can become interesting torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often created temporarily by working groups, the members of which can then collaborate on a project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list (called `jargon-friends'), which included all the co-authors of Steele-1983. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% main loop: n. Software tools are often written to perform some actions repeatedly on whatever input is handed to them, terminating when there is no more input or they are explicitly told to go away. In such programs, the loop that gets and processes input is called the `main loop'. See also {driver}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mainframe: n. Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine. After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great {dinosaur}s surviving from computing's {Stone Age}. It is common wisdom among hackers that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for {number-crunching} supercomputers (see {cray})), having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. As of 1991, corporate America hasn't quite figured this out yet, though the wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers are certainly straws in the wind (see {dinosaurs mating}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% man 1: My doctor's a quack! My wife got treated for liver problems for 20 years, and then she dies from a heart attack! man 2: My doctor's much better than that. If he treats you for liver problems, you can bet your last 50 cents you're going to die of liver problems. %% man who aim high get wall wet. %% man-hour n. A sexist, obsolete measure of macho effort, equal to 60 Kiplings. %% management: n. 1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also {suit}). Spoken derisively, as in "*Management* decided that ...". 2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed `The Mgt'; this derives from the `Illuminatus' novels (see the Bibliography in {appendix C}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mandate: an appointment with a male. %% mandelbug: /mon'del-buhg/ [from the Mandelbrot set] n. A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a {Bohr bug}, rather than a {heisenbug}. See also {schroedinbug}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% manged: /monjd/ [probably from the French `manger' or Italian `mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English n. `mange', `mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the electrical storm." Compare {mung}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mangle: vt. Used similarly to {mung} or {scribble}, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mangler: [DEC] n. A manager. Compare {mango}; see also {management}. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat different in connotation. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mango: /mang'go/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A manager. Compare {mangler}. See also {devo} and {doco}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% manularity: /man`yoo-la'ri-tee/ [prob. fr. techspeak `granularity' + `manual'] n. A notional measure of the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort that automation is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on paper has much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising stage." Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing task {by hand} will usually consider it motivation enough to build another tool. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% marbles: [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] pl.n. The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile {hello, world}." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% marginal: adj. 1. Extremely small. "A marginal increase in {core} can decrease {GC} time drastically." In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through it. 2. Of extremely small merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability of {win}ning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% marginally: adv. Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." See {epsilon}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% marketroid: /mar'k*-troyd/ alt. `marketing slime', `marketing droid', `marketeer', `marketdroid'. n. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare {droid}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% martian: n. A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back at you labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mashies: reconstituted freeze dried potatoes. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% massage: vt. Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than {munch} or {crunch}. "He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format." Compare {slurp}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% math-out: [poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] n. A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually {content-free}. See also {numbers}, {social science number}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% matterhorn: trumpetlike musical instrument favored by swiss mountaineers. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% maximum Maytag mode: What a {washing machine} or, by extension, any hard disk is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming {walking drives}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% may a thousand denebian cock-biters nest in your room. %% may everything you eat taste like the rotted feces of . %% may that big purple pimple between your eyes turn out to be your life-force. %% may you accidently broadcast your life story to the NET. %% may you acquire a SEVERE headache everytime you get aroused. %% may you acquire a deep longing to listen to Venom (ugg). %% may you be a preppie and ENJOY it. %% may you die and be reborn as a mouse in a radioactive lab. %% may you get so tired of reading this that you fall asleep, fall over and land on your keyboard, and , upon awakening, discover that you are a modern rip van winkle, and are in a society where being an individual with your own thoughts and not the governments is a crime. You are soon grabbed by the "police", large men in blue bodysuits. This crime, it turns out, is a capital crime punishable by 1) complete separation from anything even remotely sexual, 2) a diet highlighted by grass that was rejected by the cows and pigs in the stables, and 3) main lab animal in the latest research lab that is currently searching for a cure for a disease that is characterized by green,itchy, cold skin and a deep down body hurt. ---- You don't have this awful pox of a disease? well, we can fix that. Step right up. - jab - aaaaaahhhhhhhh.... whew. it was only a dream. how come theres no-one here.???? hey, was that a blue body suit? NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. wow. whata dream. I hate those kind where you dream you've woke up but you really haven't. NNOOOOO a blue body suit. ggggaaaaaa. am I still dreaming? ... I hope not. sigh. - 10 min. later - NNOOOOO, a blue bodysuit. aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!$@##$%$%%!#@#!#!@!@! no more, I cant take it. aaaahhhhhhhhh. hey, no blue suits. yyyaaaa!! at last!!!! %% may you program forever in basic, with no frills, on a TRS-80 model I. %% may you spend eternity pissing your bed. %% may your ass acquire tastebuds. %% may your eyes see like picasso on a bad day. %% may your favorite woman turn out to be a man. %% may your firstborn child turn out to be a bleeding heart liberal. %% may your hair constantly try to escape your skull, violently. %% may your hands decide they don't like you any more. %% may your jar of vaseline turn out to be crazy glue. %% may your knees be knobbier than mine. :-) %% may your nose run faster than Ben Johnson. %% may your saliva turn out to be poisonous. %% may your stay in the afterlife be a warm one. %% may your toes grow 5 foot hairs that cannot be cut. %% meadow mine (meh-dough myn) n. rural: cow pie so obviously old and solid as to tempt one to step on it; beneath its tissue-thin crust lurks a pudding of green putrescence %% meatware: n. Synonym for {wetware}. Less common. %% meeces: /mees'*z/ [TMRC] n. Occasional furry visitors who are not {urchin}s. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character Mr. Jinx: "I hate meeces to *pieces*!" --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% meg: /meg/ n. See {{quantifiers}}. %% mega-: /me'g*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}. %% megapenny: /meg'*-pen`ee/ n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% melancholic: caused by eating too much cantaloupe. %% meltdown, network: n. See {network meltdown}. %% meme plague: n. The spread of a successful but pernicious {meme}, esp. one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it. Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact that `joiner' ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% meme: /meem/ [coined on analogy with `gene' by Richard Dawkins] n. An idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture' meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, `meme' is often misused to mean `meme complex'. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% memetics: /me-met'iks/ [from {meme}] The study of memes. As of mid-1991, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% memory farts: n. The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make when checking memory on bootup. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% memory leak: n. An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called {core leak}. See {aliasing bug}, {fandango on core}, {smash the stack}, {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}, {leaky heap}, {leak}. %% memory leak: n. An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called {core leak}. These problems were severe on older machines with small, fixed-size address spaces, and special "leak detection" tools were commonly written to root them out. With the advent of virtual memory, it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got a *real* leak!). See {aliasing bug}, {fandango on core}, {smash the stack}, {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}, {leaky heap}, {leak}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% memory smash: [XEROX PARC] n. Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what you think it does. This occasionally reduces your machine to a rubble of bits. Note that this is subtly different from (and more general than) related terms such as a {memory leak} or {fandango on core} because it doesn't imply an allocation error or overrun condition. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% menuitis: /men`yoo-i:'tis/ n. Notional disease suffered by software with an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape. Hackers find this intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of command-line or language-style interfaces, especially those customizable via macros or a special-purpose language in which one can encode useful hacks. See {user-obsequious}, {drool-proof paper}, {WIMP environment}, {for the rest of us}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mess-dos: /mes-dos/ n. Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!" See {{MS-DOS}}. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathe MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, its nasty primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness (see {fear and loathing}). Also `mess-loss', `messy-dos', `mess-dog', `mess-dross', `mush-dos', and various combinations thereof. In Ireland and the U.K. it is even sometimes called `Domestos' after a brand of toilet cleanser. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% meta bit: n. The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128--255. Also called {high bit}, {alt bit}, or {hobbit}. Some terminals and consoles (see {space-cadet keyboard}) have a META shift key. Others (including, *mirabile dictu*, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT key. See also {bucky bits}. %% meta bit: n. The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128--255. Also called {high bit}, {alt bit}, or {hobbit}. Some terminals and consoles (see {space-cadet keyboard}) have a META shift key. Others (including, *mirabile dictu*, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT key. See also {bucky bits}. Historical note: although in modern usage shaped by a universe of 8-bit bytes the meta bit is invariably hex 80 (octal 0200), things were different on earlier machines with 36-bit words and 9-bit bytes. The MIT and Stanford keyboards (see {space-cadet keyboard}) generated hex 100 (octal 400) from their meta keys. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% meta: /me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ [from analytic philosophy] adj.,pref. One level of description up. A metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language. This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See {{Humor, Hacker}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% metasyntactic variable: n. A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word {foo} is the {canonical} example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a {scratch} file that may be deleted at any time. To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures: {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}, quuux, quuuux...: MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to early versions of this lexicon!). At MIT, {baz} dropped out of use for a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts {qux} before {quux}. {foo}, {bar}, thud, grunt: This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include {gorp}. {foo}, {bar}, fum: This series is reported common at XEROX PARC. {fred}, {barney}: See the entry for {fred}. These tend to be Britishisms. {toto}, titi, tata, tutu: Standard series of metasyntactic variables among francophones. {corge}, {grault}, {flarp}: Popular at Rutgers University and among {GOSMACS} hackers. zxc, spqr, {wombat}: Cambridge University (England). shme Berkeley, GeoWorks. Pronounced /shmee/. {foo}, {bar}, zot Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. blarg, wibble New Zealand Of all these, only `foo' and `bar' are universal (and {baz} nearly so). The compounds {foobar} and `foobaz' also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; {barf} and {mumble}, for example. See also {{Commonwealth Hackish}} for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylluecylphenyialanylalanylglutamin- ylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamylglycylalanylphenylalanylvalylprolyl- phenylalanylyalylthreonylleucylglycylaspartylprolylglycylisoleucylglutamylglu- taminylserylleucyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucylisoleucylglutamylalanyl- glycylalanylaspartylalanylleucylglutamylleucylglycylisoleucylprolyphenylalanyl- serylaspartylprolylleucylalanylaspartylglycylprolylthreonylisoleucylglutaminyl- asparaginylalanylthreonylleucylarginylalanylphenylalanylalanylalanylglycylva- lythreonylprolyalanylglutaminylcysteinylphenylalanylglutamylmethionylleucyala- nylleucylisoleucylarginylglutaminyllysylhistidylprolythreonylisoleucylprolyli- soleucylglyclleucylleucylmethionyltyrosylalanylasparaginylleucylvalylphenylala- nylasparaginyllysylglycylisoleucylaspartylglutamylphenylalanyltyrosylalanylglu- taminylcysteinylglutamyllysylvalylglycylvalylaspartylserylvalylleucylvalylala- nylaspartylvalylprolylvalylglutaminylglutamylserylalanylprolyphenylalanylargi- nylglutaminylalanylalanylleucylarginylhistidylasparaginylvalylalanylprolyiso- leucylphenylalanylisoleucylcysteinylprolylprolylaspartylalanylaspartylaspartyl- aspartylleucylleucylarginylglutaminylisoleucylalanylseryltyrosylglycylarginyl- glycyltyrosylthreonyltyrosylleucylleucylserylarginylalanylglycylvalylthreonyl- gylcylalanylglutamylasparaginylarginyalanylalanylleucylprolylleucylaspartagi- nylhistidylleucylvalylalanyllysylleucylysylglutamyltyrosylasparaginylalanylala- nylprolylprolylleucylglutaminylglycylphenylalanylglycylisoleucylserylalanylpro- lyaspartylglutaminylvalyllysylalanylalanylisoleucylaspartylalanylglycylalanyla- lanylglycylalanylisoleucylserylglycylserylalanylisoleucylvalyllysylisoleucyli- soleucylglutamylglutaminylhistidylasparaginylisoleucylglutamylprolyglutamylly- sylmethionylleucylalanylalanylleucyllysylvalylphenylalanylvalyglutaminylproly- methionyllysylalanylalanylthreonylarginylserine, n.: The chemical name for tryptophan synthetase A protien, a 1,913-letter enzyme with 267 amino acids. -- Mrs. Bryne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words %% me -- woke up in the darkness got myself dressed and stumbled to the car drove myself to Mcdonalds for breakfast but it was getting too light to see the stars by the time i got to work it was bright enough to say hello to the secretary and the mailroom clerks so i sat in my office in my little swivel chair Then i stare at the off-white wall cause i'm not important enough to rate a window and i dont want to walk down the goddamned hall just to look at a few green trees or a bird or those kind of things seems just a short time later and a couple dozen cups from the office percolator im back in my car and its dark again and i'm driving home -- seems its only light when im at McDonalds this doesn't have an ending every day i go to the first line again and keep on pretending get undressed and wish i wasnt so damn depressed i dont read this for three minutes and walk away wish i could read this and throw it all away -- dan farmer (ajm@k.cc.purdue.edu) %% mickey mouse program: n. North American equivalent of a {noddy} (that is, trivial) program. Doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be very useful. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mickey: n. The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that the `disney' will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics performance. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% micro-: pref. 1. Very small; this is the root of its use as a quantifier prefix. 2. A quantifier prefix, calling for multiplication by 10^(-6) (see {{quantifiers}}). Neither of these uses is peculiar to hackers, but hackers tend to fling them both around rather more freely than is countenanced in standard English. It is recorded, for example, that one CS professor used to characterize the standard length of his lectures as a microcentury --- that is, about 52.6 minutes (see also {attoparsec}, {nanoacre}, and especially {microfortnight}). 3. Personal or human-scale --- that is, capable of being maintained or comprehended or manipulated by one human being. This sense is generalized from `microcomputer', and is esp. used in contrast with `macro-' (the corresponding Greek prefix meaning `large'). 4. Local as opposed to global (or {macro-}). Thus a hacker might say that buying a smaller car to reduce pollution only solves a microproblem; the macroproblem of getting to work might be better solved by using mass transit, moving to within walking distance, or (best of all) telecommuting. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% microLenat: /mi:-kroh-len'-*t/ n. See {bogosity}. %% microReid: /mi:'kroh-reed/ n. See {bogosity}. %% microfloppies: n. 3.5-inch floppies, as opposed to 5.25-inch {vanilla} or mini-floppies and the now-obsolete 8-inch variety. This term may be headed for obsolescence as 5.25-inchers pass out of use, only to be revived if anybody floats a sub-3-inch floppy standard. See {stiffy}, {minifloppies}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% microfortnight: n. 1/1000000 of the fundamental unit of time in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 1/4th of a barrel; the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water). The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights! Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and {nanofortnight} have also been reported. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% microtape: /mi:'kroh-tayp/ n. Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a {macrotape}. A DECtape is a small reel, about 4 inches in diameter, of magnetic tape about an inch wide. Unlike drivers for today's {macrotape}s, microtape drivers allow random access to the data, and therefore could be used to support file systems and even for swapping (this was generally done purely for {hack value}, as they were far too slow for practical use). In their heyday they were used in pretty much the same ways one would now use a floppy disk: as a small, portable way to save and transport files and programs. Apparently the term `microtape' was actually the official term used within DEC for these tapes until someone coined the word `DECtape', which, of course, sounded sexier to the {marketroid}s; another version of the story holds that someone discovered a conflict with another company's `microtape' trademark. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% middle-endian: adj. Not {big-endian} or {little-endian}. Used of perverse byte orders such as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal formats of minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See {NUXI problem}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% milliLampson: /mil'*-lamp`sn/ n. A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200 milliLampsons. Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the (sometimes widely disparate) rates at which people can generate ideas and actually emit them in speech. For example, noted computer architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the PDP-11) is said, with some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about 300; he is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries to keep up with his speeding brain. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% minifloppies: n. 5.25-inch {vanilla} floppy disks, as opposed to 3.5-inch or {microfloppies} and the now-obsolescent 8-inch variety. At one time, this term was a trademark of Shugart Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy drive. Nobody paid any attention. See {stiffy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% miracle: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment. -- Webster's Dictionary %% mis-authenticated me %% misbug: /mis-buhg/ [MIT] n. An unintended property of a program that turns out to be useful; something that should have been a {bug} but turns out to be a {feature}. Usage: rare. Compare {green lightning}. See {miswart}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% misfeature: /mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee`chr/ n. A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation which has evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and properly-implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or adequately predicted (which is quite different from not having thought ahead at all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial philosophical change to the structure of the system involved. Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise because the designers/implementors mistake their personal tastes for laws of nature. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature because a tradeoff was made whose parameters subsequently change (possibly only in the judgment of the implementors). "Well, yeah, it is kind of a misfeature that file names are limited to six characters, but the original implementors wanted to save directory space and we're stuck with it for now." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% misocainea (miss-o-KEE-nee-ya), n. An abnormal aversion to anything new. %% miswart: /mis-wort/ [from {wart} by analogy with {misbug}] n. A {feature} that superficially appears to be a {wart} but has been determined to be the {Right Thing}. For example, in some versions of the {EMACS} text editor, the `transpose characters' command exchanges the character under the cursor with the one before it on the screen, *except* when the cursor is at the end of a line, in which case the two characters before the cursor are exchanged. While this behavior is perhaps surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found through extensive experimentation to be what most users want. This feature is a miswart. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mkdir: arg count %% mkdir: cannot access %% mkdir: cannot link %% mkdir: cannot make directory %% moby: /moh'bee/ [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago. Derived from Melville's `Moby Dick' (some say from `Moby Pickle').] 1. adj. Large, immense, complex, impressive. "A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby frob." "Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale game." (See "{The Meaning of `Hack'}"). 2. n. obs. The maximum address space of a machine (see below). For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes). 3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent hacker. "Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for the Mac going?" 4. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in `moby sixes', `moby ones', etc. Compare this with {bignum} (sense 2): double sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use of `moby' to describe double ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic forms: `Moby foo', `moby win', `moby loss'. `Foby moo': a spoonerism due to Richard Greenblatt. This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory added to the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered unimaginably huge when it was installed in the 1960s (at a time when a more typical memory size for a timesharing system was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby is classically 256K 36-bit words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby. Back when address registers were narrow the term was more generally useful, because when a computer had virtual memory mapping, it might actually have more physical memory attached to it than any one program could access directly. One could then say "This computer has 6 mobies" meaning that the ratio of physical memory to address space is 6, without having to say specifically how much memory there actually is. That in turn implied that the computer could timeshare six `full-sized' programs without having to swap programs between memory and disk. Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address spaces are usually larger than the most physical memory you can cram onto a machine, so most systems have much *less* than one theoretical `native' moby of {core}. Also, more modern memory-management techniques (esp. paging) make the `moby count' less significant. However, there is one series of popular chips for which the term could stand to be revived --- the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their incredibly {brain-damaged} segmented-memory designs. On these, a `moby' would be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair (by coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly 1 megabyte of 9-bit bytes). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mockingbird: n. Software that intercepts communications (especially login transactions) between users and hosts and provides system-like responses to the users while saving their responses (especially account IDs and passwords). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mod: vt.,n. 1. Short for `modify' or `modification'. Very commonly used --- in fact the full terms are considered markers that one is being formal. The plural `mods' is used esp. with reference to bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software, most esp. with respect to {patch} sets or a {diff}. 2. Short for {modulo} but used *only* for its techspeak sense. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mode bit: n. A {flag}, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from {flag} bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360. Another was the bit on a PDP-12 that controlled whether it ran the PDP-8 or the LINC instruction set. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mode: n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. Use of the word `mode' rather than `state' implies that the state is extended over time, and probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being carried out. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." In its jargon sense, `mode' is most often attributed to people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. In particular, see {hack mode}, {day mode}, {night mode}, {demo mode}, {fireworks mode}, and {yoyo mode}; also {talk mode}. One also often hears the verbs `enable' and `disable' used in connection with jargon modes. Thus, for example, a sillier way of saying "I'm going to crash" is "I'm going to enable crash mode now". One might also hear a request to "disable flame mode, please". %% mode: n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. Use of the word `mode' rather than `state' implies that the state is extended over time, and probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being carried out. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." In its jargon sense, `mode' is most often attributed to people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. In particular, see {hack mode}, {day mode}, {night mode}, {demo mode}, {fireworks mode}, and {yoyo mode}; also {talk mode}. One also often hears the verbs `enable' and `disable' used in connection with jargon modes. Thus, for example, a sillier way of saying "I'm going to crash" is "I'm going to enable crash mode now". One might also hear a request to "disable flame mode, please". In a usage much closer to techspeak, a mode is a special state which certain user interfaces must pass into in order to perform certain functions. For example, in order to insert characters into a document in the UNIX editor `vi', one must type the "i" key, which invokes the "Insert" command. The effect of this command is to put vi into "insert mode", in which typing the "i" key has a quite different effect (to wit, it inserts an "i" into the document). One must then hit another special key, "ESC", in order to leave "insert mode". Nowadays, moded interfaces are generally considered {losing}, but survive in quite a few widely-used tools built in less enlightened times. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% modem - what people of a particular ethenic group say when they want a second helping of black-eyed peas. %% modem -- A contraction; as in "Give me some mo'dem cookies." %% modulo: /mo'dyu-loh/ prep. Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 = 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9). "Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that {GC} bug." "I feel fine today modulo a slight headache." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mohair: hair of a mo. see scree. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% mole foam: frothy exudation that appears on the lip of a furious mole. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% molly-guard: /mol'ee-gard/ [University of Illinois] n. A shield to prevent tripping of some {Big Red Switch} by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of some plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% monkey up: vt. To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely {crufty} and consciously temporary solution. Compare {hack up}, {kluge up}, {cruft together}, {cruft together}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% monkey, scratch: n. See {scratch monkey}. %% monstrosity: 1. n. A ridiculously {elephantine} program or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional. 2. The quality of being monstrous (see `Overgeneralization' in the discussion of jargonification). See also {baroque}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% monty: /mon'tee/ [US Geological Survey] n. n. A program with a ludicrously complex user interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for listing directories. The original monty was an infamous weather-reporting program, Monty the Amazing Weather Man, written at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed X-window interface with over 200 buttons; and all monty actually *did* was {FTP} files off the network. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% moraine: forecast for an extended period of wet weather. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% moria: /mor'ee-*/ n. Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. Extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for hacking. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mouse ahead: vi. Point-and-click analog of `type ahead'. To manipulate a computer's pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mouse around: vi. To explore public portions of a large system, esp. a network such as Internet via {FTP} or {TELNET}, looking for interesting stuff to {snarf}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mouse belt: n. See {rat belt}. %% mouse droppings: [MS-DOS] n. Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mouse elbow: n. A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, `mouse shoulder'; GLS reports that he used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mouso: /mow'soh/ n. [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare {thinko}, {braino}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mu: /moo/ The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter (see the Bibliography in {appendix C}), the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense, but native speakers do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use. It almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzei Zen teaching riddle: A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu retorted, "Mu!" See also {has the X nature}, {AI Koans}, and Douglas Hofstadter's `G"odel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid' (pointer in the Bibliography in appendix C). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% muddie: n. Syn. {mudhead}. More common in Great Britain, possibly because system administrators there like to mutter "bloody muddies" when annoyed at the species. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mudhead: n. Commonly used to refer to a {MUD} player who eats, sleeps, and breathes MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc., with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When encountered in person, on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the specific game he/she has experience with is so much better than any other, and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write because his/her design ideas are so much better than in any existing MUD. See also {wannabee}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% multician: /muhl-ti'shn/ [coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] n. Competent user of {{Multics}}. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous `Unician'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% multitask: n. Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but see {thrash}). The term `multiplex', from communications technology (meaning to handle more than one channel at the same time), is used similarly. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mumblage: /muhm'bl*j/ n. The topic of one's mumbling (see {mumble}). "All that mumblage" is used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when `mumble' is being used as an implicit replacement for pejoratives. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mumble: interj. 1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?" "Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it." 2. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement. "I think we should buy a {VAX}." "Mumble!" Common variant: `mumble frotz' (see {frotz}; interestingly, one does not say `mumble frobnitz' even though `frotz' is short for `frobnitz'). 3. Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo}. 4. When used as a question ("Mumble?") means "I didn't understand you". 5. Sometimes used in `public' contexts on-line as a placefiller for things one is barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco." 6. A conversational wild card used to designate something one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be {glark}ed from context. Compare {blurgle}. 7. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would be fruitless. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% munch: [often confused with {mung}, q.v.] vt. To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to {crunch} and nearly synonymous with {grovel}, but connotes less pain. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% munching squares: n. A {display hack} dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T --- see {HAKMEM} items 146--148) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later (re)discovered on the LISP machine, have been christened `munching triangles' (try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), `munching w's', and `munching mazes'. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on a display terminal, and does it using a relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as `munching foos'. [This is a good example of the use of the word {foo} as a {metasyntactic variable}.] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% munching: n. Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager. Compare {cracker}. See also {hacked off}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% munchkin: /muhnch'kin/ [from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's `The Wizard of Oz'] n. A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision --- munchkins are annoying but some grow up to be hackers after passing through a {larval stage}. The term {urchin} is also used. See also {wannabee}, {bitty box}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mundane: [from SF fandom] n. 1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom. 2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my mundane life...." See also {Real World}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mung: /muhng/ [in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime after that the derivation from the {{recursive acronym}} `Mung Until No Good' became standard] vt. 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes. See {BLT}. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence of {Finagle's Law}. See {scribble}, {mangle}, {trash}, {nuke}. Reports from {USENET} suggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the spelling `mung' is still common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion over the proper spelling of {kluge}). 3. The kind of beans of which the sprouts are used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!) Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at {TMRC}; it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being twanged. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% munge: /muhnj/ vt. 1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information. 2. A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole program. This term is often confused with {mung} and may derive from it, or possibly vice-versa. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% music:: n. A common extracurricular interest of hackers (compare {{science-fiction fandom}}, {{oriental food}}; see also {filk}). Hackish folklore has long claimed that musical and programming abilities are closely related, and there has been at least one large-scale statistical study that supports this. Hackers, as a rule, like music and often develop musical appreciation in unusual and interesting directions. Folk music is very big in hacker circles; so is electronic music, and the sort of elaborate instrumental jazz/rock that used to be called `progressive' and isn't recorded much any more. The hacker's musical range tends to be wide; many can listen with equal appreciation to (say) Talking Heads, Yes, Gentle Giant, Pat Metheny, Scott Joplin, Tangerine Dream, King Sunny Ade, The Pretenders, or the Brandenburg Concerti. It is also apparently true that hackerdom includes a much higher concentration of talented amateur musicians than one would expect from a similar-sized control group of {mundane} types. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% mutter: vt. To quietly enter a command not meant for the ears, eyes, or fingers of ordinary mortals. Often used in `mutter an {incantation}'. See also {wizard}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% my brothers, my eyes they show me the street and sing of our offices seeing the soft things moving so far apart how can they be stable with no mortar and nearby friends? the big moving brother (though it's made of metal) swallows the soft ones rolling away it hisses in delight. my vantage point lets me see the city only from 1 placetime but how my brothers communicate with me when there's an earthquake! Then we See the city ! And our origins - no family tree there. we became family moments, years ago having the familiar eyes of stone so common to the soft ones. even walls have eyes - %% my-program n. A gem of algoristic precision, offering the most sublime balance between compact, efficient coding on the one hand and fully commented legibility for posterity on the other. Compare YOUR PROGRAM. %% myth: accounts of adventure related by a mountaineer. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% n + 1 trivial tasks take twice as long as n trivial tasks, for n sufficiently large. -- Ed Logg %% n = ((n >> 1) & 0x55555555) | ((n << 1) & 0xaaaaaaaa); n = ((n >> 2) & 0x33333333) | ((n << 2) & 0xcccccccc); n = ((n >> 4) & 0x0f0f0f0f) | ((n << 4) & 0xf0f0f0f0); n = ((n >> 8) & 0x00ff00ff) | ((n << 8) & 0xff00ff00); n = ((n >> 16) & 0x0000ffff) | ((n << 16) & 0xffff0000); -- Yet another mystical 'C' gem. This one reverses the bits in a word. %% na"ive user: n. A {luser}. Tends to imply someone who is ignorant mainly owing to inexperience. When this is applied to someone who *has* experience, there is a definite implication of stupidity. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% na"ive: adj. Untutored in the perversities of some particular program or system; one who still tries to do things in an intuitive way, rather than the right way (in really good designs these coincide, but most designs aren't `really good' in the appropriate sense). This is completely unrelated to general maturity or competence, or even competence at any other specific program. It is a sad commentary on the primitive state of computing that the natural opposite of this term is often claimed to be `experienced user' but is really more like `cynical user'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nadger: /nad'jr/ [Great Britain] v. Of software or hardware (not people), to twiddle some object in a hidden manner, generally so that it conforms better to some format. For instance, string printing routines on 8-bit processors often take the string text from the instruction stream, thus a print call looks like `jsr print:"Hello world"'. The print routine has to `nadger' the return instruction pointer so that the processor doesn't try to execute the text as instructions. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nailed to the wall: [like a trophy] adj. Said of a bug finally eliminated after protracted, and even heroic, effort. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nailing jelly: vi. See {like nailing jelly to a tree}. %% naive alien. And if certain things stand in our way -- Klingons for Kirk, reality for me -- well, we just have to suck in our guts, set the phasers on Stun, and hope for the best." -- Merle Kessler, IAN SHOALES' PERFECT WORLD %% nano-: [SI: the next quantifier below {micro-}; meaning * 10^(-9)] pref. Smaller than {micro-}, and used in the same rather loose and connotative way. Thus, one has {{nanotechnology}} (coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with `microtechnology'; and a few machine architectures have a `nanocode' level below `microcode'. Tom Duff at Bell Labs has also pointed out that "Pi seconds is a nanocentury". See also {{quantifiers}}, {pico-}, {nanoacre}, {nanobot}, {nanocomputer}, {nanofortnight}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nano: /nan'oh/ [CMU: from `nanosecond'] n. A brief period of time. "Be with you in a nano" means you really will be free shortly, i.e., implies what mainstream people mean by "in a jiffy" (whereas the hackish use of `jiffy' is quite different --- see {jiffy}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nanoacre: /nan'oh-ay`kr/ n. A unit (about 2 mm square) of real estate on a VLSI chip. The term gets its giggle value from the fact that VLSI nanoacres have costs in the same range as real acres once one figures in design and fabrication-setup costs. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nanobot: /nan'oh-bot/ n. A robot of microscopic proportions, presumably built by means of {{nanotechnology}}. As yet, only used informally (and speculatively!). Also called a `nanoagent'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nanocomputer: /nan'oh-k*m-pyoo'tr/ n. A computer whose switching elements are molecular in size. Designs for mechanical nanocomputers which use single-molecule sliding rods for their logic have been proposed. The controller for a {nanobot} would be a nanocomputer. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nanofortnight: [Adelaide University] n. 1 fortnight * 10^-9, or about 1.2 msec. This unit was used largely by students doing undergraduate practicals. See {microfortnight}, {attoparsec}, and {micro-}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nanotechnology:: /nan'-oh-tek-no`l*-jee/ n. A hypothetical fabrication technology in which objects are designed and built with the individual specification and placement of each separate atom. The first unequivocal nanofabrication experiments are taking place now (1990), for example with the deposition of individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate to spell the logo of a certain very large computer company. Nanotechnology has been a hot topic in the hacker subculture ever since the term was coined by K. Eric Drexler in his book `Engines of Creation', where he predicted that nanotechnology could give rise to replicating assemblers, permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal wealth. See also {blue goo}, {gray goo}, {nanobot}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nasal demons: n. During a discussion on the USENET group comp.std.c in early 1992, a regular remarked "When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose" (the implication is that it may choose any arbitrarily bizarre way to interpret the code without violating the ANSI C standard). Someone else followed up with a reference to "nasal demons", which became recognized shorthand on that group for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nastygram: /nas'tee-gram/ n. 1. A protocol packet or item of email (the latter is also called a {letterbomb}) that takes advantage of misfeatures or security holes on the target system to do untoward things. 2. Disapproving mail, esp. from a {net.god}, pursuant to a violation of {netiquette} or a complaint about failure to correct some mail- or news-transmission problem. Compare {shitogram}. 3. A status report from an unhappy, and probably picky, customer. "What'd Corporate say in today's nastygram?" 4. [deprecated] An error reply by mail from a {daemon}; in particular, a {bounce message}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nature: n. See {has the X nature}. %% navigation: science of becoming temporarily disoriented. because instruments don't lie, and because art is truth, mountaineers are never lost. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% neat hack: n. 1. A clever technique. 2. A brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch (see "{The Meaning of `Hack'}", appendix A). See also {hack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% neats vs. scruffies: n. The label used to refer to one of the continuing {holy wars} in AI research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the relationship between human reasoning and AI; `neats' tend to try to build systems that `reason' in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report themselves as doing, while `scruffies' profess not to care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly, `neats' tend to believe that logic is king, while `scruffies' favor looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a `neat', `scruffy' methods appear promiscuous and successful only by accident; to a `scruffy', `neat' methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture `common sense' of living intelligences. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% neep-neep: /neep neep/ [onomatopoeic, from New York SF fandom] n. One who is fascinated by computers. More general than {hacker}, as it need not imply more skill than is required to boot games on a PC. The derived noun `neep-neeping' applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties. Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that "Hacking is a conversational black hole!". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% neophilia: /nee`oh-fil'-ee-*/ n. The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. Common trait of most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology `Whole Earth' wing of the ecology movement, space activists, many members of Mensa, and the Discordian/neo-pagan underground. All these groups overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction, {{music}}, and {{oriental food}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% net.-: /net dot/ pref. [USENET] Prefix used to describe people and events related to USENET. From the time before the {Great Renaming}, when most non-local newsgroups had names beginning `net.'. Includes {net.god}s, `net.goddesses' (various charismatic net.women with circles of on-line admirers), `net.lurkers' (see {lurker}), `net.person', `net.parties' (a synonym for {boink}, sense 2), and many similar constructs. See also {net.police}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% net.god: /net god/ n. Used to refer to anyone who satisfies some combination of the following conditions: has been visible on USENET for more than 5 years, ran one of the original backbone sites, moderated an important newsgroup, wrote news software, or knows Gene, Mark, Rick, Mel, Henry, Chuq, and Greg personally. See {demigod}. Net.goddesses such as Rissa or the Slime Sisters have (so far) been distinguished more by personality than by authority. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% net.personality: /net per`sn-al'-*-tee/ n. Someone who has made a name for him or herself on {USENET}, through either longevity or attention-getting posts, but doesn't meet the other requirements of {net.god}hood. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% net.police: /net-p*-lees'/ n. (var. `net.cops') Those USENET readers who feel it is their responsibility to pounce on and {flame} any posting which they regard as offensive or in violation of their understanding of {netiquette}. Generally used sarcastically or pejoratively. Also spelled `net police'. See also {net.-}, {code police}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% netburp: [IRC] n. When {netlag} gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a certain threshhold, the {IRC} network effectively becomes partitioned for a period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this is called a `netburp' (or, sometimes, {netsplit}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% netdead: [IRC] n. The state of someone who signs off {IRC}, perhaps during a {netburp}, and doesn't sign back on until later. In the interim, he is "dead to the net". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nethack: /net'hak/ [UNIX] n. A dungeon game similar to {rogue} but more elaborate, distributed in C source over {USENET} and very popular at UNIX sites and on PC-class machines (nethack is probably the most widely distributed of the freeware dungeon games). The earliest versions, written by Jay Fenlason and later considerably enhanced by Andries Brouwer, were simply called `hack'. The name changed when maintenance was taken over by a group of hackers originally organized by Mike Stephenson; the current contact address (as of mid-1991) is nethack-bugs@linc.cis.upenn.edu. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% netiquette: /net'ee-ket/ or /net'i-ket/ [portmanteau from "network etiquette"] n. Conventions of politeness recognized on {USENET}, such as avoidance of cross-posting to inappropriate groups or refraining from commercial pluggery on the net. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% netlag: [IRC, MUD] n. A condition that occurs when the delays in the {IRC} network or on a {MUD} become severe enough that servers briefly lose and then reestablish contact, causing messages to be delivered in bursts, often with delays of up to a minute. (Note that this term has nothing to do with mainstream "jetlag", a condition which hackers tend not to be much bothered by.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% netnews: /net'n[y]ooz/ n. 1. The software that makes {USENET} run. 2. The content of USENET. "I read netnews right after my mail most mornings." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% netrock: /net'rok/ [IBM] n. A {flame}; used esp. on VNET, IBM's internal corporate network. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% netter: n. 1. Loosely, anyone with a {network address}. 2. More specifically, a {USENET} regular. Most often found in the plural. "If you post *that* in a technical group, you're going to be flamed by angry netters for the rest of time!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% network address: n. (also `net address') As used by hackers, means an address on `the' network (see {network, the}; this is almost always a {bang path} or {{Internet address}}). Such an address is essential if one wants to be to be taken seriously by hackers; in particular, persons or organizations that claim to understand, work with, sell to, or recruit from among hackers but *don't* display net addresses are quietly presumed to be clueless poseurs and mentally flushed (see {flush}, sense 4). Hackers often put their net addresses on their business cards and wear them prominently in contexts where they expect to meet other hackers face-to-face (see also {{science-fiction fandom}}). This is mostly functional, but is also a signal that one identifies with hackerdom (like lodge pins among Masons or tie-dyed T-shirts among Grateful Dead fans). Net addresses are often used in email text as a more concise substitute for personal names; indeed, hackers may come to know each other quite well by network names without ever learning each others' `legal' monikers. See also {sitename}, {domainist}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% network meltdown: n. A state of complete network overload; the network equivalent of {thrash}ing. This may be induced by a {Chernobyl packet}. See also {broadcast storm}, {kamikaze packet}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% network, the: n. 1. The union of all the major noncommercial, academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the old ARPANET, NSFnet, {BITNET}, and the virtual UUCP and {USENET} `networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial time-sharing services (such as CompuServe) that gateway to them. A site is generally considered `on the network' if it can be reached through some combination of Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP (bang-path) addresses. See {bang path}, {{Internet address}}, {network address}. 2. A fictional conspiracy of libertarian hacker-subversives and anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described in Robert Anton Wilson's novel `Schr"odinger's Cat', to which many hackers have subsequently decided they belong (this is an example of {ha ha only serious}). In sense 1, `network' is often abbreviated to `net'. "Are you on the net?" is a frequent question when hackers first meet face to face, and "See you on the net!" is a frequent goodbye. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% never enter the dungeon naked! the monsters will laugh at you! %% never got a chance to tell you anything before you went away you left me tongue-tied and speechless i was never sure just what i ought to say you always said such crazy things you never told me anything it's the strangest thing never got a chance to touch you when i had the chance to touch you never would've had the nerve i was always much too much too shy but now that you're not here with me i make love to your memory it's the strangest thing i hope you never hear this cause i know you'd only laugh don't call me on the telephone or send a photograph i've got you so idealized my memories don't match my eyes it's the strangest thing... -- (c) 1988 meredith tanner %% newbie: /n[y]oo'bee/ n. [orig. from British public-school and military slang variant of `new boy'] A USENET neophyte. This term surfaced in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre but is now in wide use. Criteria for being considered a newbie vary wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one newsgroup while remaining a respected regular in another. The label `newbie' is sometimes applied as a serious insult to a person who has been around USENET for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence of having a clue. See {BIFF}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% newgroup wars: /n[y]oo'groop wohrz/ [USENET] n. The salvos of dueling `newgroup' and `rmgroup' messages sometimes exchanged by persons on opposite sides of a dispute over whether a {newsgroup} should be created net-wide. These usually settle out within a week or two as it becomes clear whether the group has a natural constituency (usually, it doesn't). At times, especially in the completely anarchic alt hierarchy, the names of newsgroups themselves become a form of comment or humor; e.g., the spinoff of alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork from alt.tv.muppets in early 1990, or any number of specialized abuse groups named after particularly notorious {flamer}s, e.g., alt.weemba. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% newline: /n[y]oo'li:n/ n. 1. [techspeak, primarily UNIX] The ASCII LF character (0001010), used under {{UNIX}} as a text line terminator. A Bell-Labs-ism rather than a Berkeleyism; interestingly (and unusually for UNIX jargon), it is said to have originally been an IBM usage. (Though the term `newline' appears in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before UNIX). 2. More generally, any magic character, character sequence, or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure) required to terminate a text record or separate lines. See {crlf}, {terpri}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% news: gotcha %% news: n. See {netnews}. %% newsfroup: // [USENET] n. Silly synonym for {newsgroup}, originally a typo but now in regular use on USENET's talk.bizarre and other lunatic-fringe groups. Compare {hing} and {filk}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% newsgroup: [USENET] n. One of {USENET}'s huge collection of topic groups or {fora}. Usenet groups can be `unmoderated' (anyone can post) or `moderated' (submissions are automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts the results). Some newsgroups have parallel {mailing list}s for Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as `digests', with groups of postings periodically collected into a single large posting with an index. Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum), comp.arch (on computer architectures), comp.unix.wizards (for UNIX wizards), rec.arts.sf-lovers (for science-fiction fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political discussions and {flamage}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% next block in the {arena}, producing massive lossage within malloc and often a core dump on the next operation to use `stdio(3)' or `malloc(3)' itself. See {spam}, {overrun}; see also {memory leak}, {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {fandango on core}, {secondary damage}. %% nick: [IRC] n. Short for nickname. On {IRC}, every user must pick a nick, which is sometimes the same as the user's real name or login name, but is often more fanciful. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nickle: /ni'kl/ [from `nickel', common name for the U.S. 5-cent coin] n. A {nybble} + 1; 5 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See also {deckle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% night mode: n. See {phase} (of people). %% no clock %% no file %% no imt iaddress > 2^24 iaddress %% no process %% no space %% no-op: /noh'op/ alt. NOP /nop/ [no operation] n. 1. (also v.) A machine instruction that does nothing (sometimes used in assembler-level programming as filler for data or patch areas, or to overwrite code to be removed in binaries). See also {JFCL}. 2. A person who contributes nothing to a project, or has nothing going on upstairs, or both. As in "He's a no-op." 3. Any operation or sequence of operations with no effect, such as circling the block without finding a parking space, or putting money into a vending machine and having it fall immediately into the coin-return box, or asking someone for help and being told to go away. "Oh, well, that was a no-op." Hot-and-sour soup (see {great-wall}) that is insufficiently either is `no-op soup'; so is wonton soup if everybody else is having hot-and-sour. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% noddy: /nod'ee/ [UK: from the children's books] adj. 1. Small and un-useful, but demonstrating a point. Noddy programs are often written by people learning a new language or system. The archetypal noddy program is {hello, world}. Noddy code may be used to demonstrate a feature or bug of a compiler. May be used of real hardware or software to imply that it isn't worth using. "This editor's a bit noddy." 2. A program that is more or less instant to produce. In this use, the term does not necessarily connote uselessness, but describes a {hack} sufficiently trivial that it can be written and debugged while carrying on (and during the space of) a normal conversation. "I'll just throw together a noddy {awk} script to dump all the first fields." In North America this might be called a {mickey mouse program}. See {toy program}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nohup rm -fr /& %% non-optimal solution: n. (also `sub-optimal solution') An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. Compare {stunning}. See also {Bad Thing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nonlinear: adj. [scientific computation] 1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion; unstable. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design specifications. This behavior may be induced by unreasonable inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the computation far off from its expected course. 2. When describing the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or a {flame}. "When you talk to Bob, don't mention the drug problem or he'll go nonlinear for hours." In this context, `go nonlinear' connotes `blow up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nontrivial: adj. Requiring real thought or significant computing power. Often used as an understated way of saying that a problem is quite difficult or impractical, or even entirely unsolvable ("Proving P=NP is nontrivial"). The preferred emphatic form is `decidedly nontrivial'. See {trivial}, {uninteresting}, {interesting}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% not my job, man" attitude. Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures constitute software that the droid is executing. This becomes a problem when the software has not been properly debugged. The term `droid mentality' is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}; see {-oid}. %% not written by Homer but by another man of that name. %% notwork: /not'werk/ n. A network, when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare {nyetwork}. Said at IBM to have orig. referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET corporate network, ca. 1988; but there are independent reports of the term from elsewhere. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nroff:: /en'rof/ [UNIX, from "new runoff"] n. A companion program to the UNIX typesetter {{troff}}, accepting identical input but preparing output for terminals and line printers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nude: adj. Said of machines delivered without an operating system (compare {bare metal}). "We ordered 50 systems, but they all arrived nude, so we had to spend a an extra weekend with the install-tapes." This usage is a recent innovation reflecting the fact that most PC clones are now delivered with DOS or Microsoft Windows pre-installed at the factory. Other kinds of hardware are still normally delivered without OS, so this term is particular to PC support groups. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nuke: vt. 1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a given directory or storage volume. "On UNIX, `rm -r /usr' will nuke everything in the usr filesystem." Never used for accidental deletion. Oppose {blow away}. 2. Syn. for {dike}, applied to smaller things such as files, features, or code sections. Often used to express a final verdict. "What do you want me to do with that 80-meg {wallpaper} file?" "Nuke it." 3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent verbal alias for `kill -9' on UNIX. 4. On IBM PCs, a bug that results in {fandango on core} can trash the operating system, including the FAT (the in-core copy of the disk block chaining information). This can utterly scramble attached disks, which are then said to have been `nuked'. This term is also used of analogous lossages on Macintoshes and other micros without memory protection. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% number-crunching: n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thing {Fortrash} is good for. This term is in widespread informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but has additional hackish connotations: namely, that the computations are mindless and involve massive use of {brute force}. This is not always {evil}, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals or some other use that makes {pretty pictures}, esp. if such pictures can be used as {wallpaper}. See also {crunch}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% numbers: [scientific computation] n. Output of a computation that may not be significant results but at least indicate that the program is running. May be used to placate management, grant sponsors, etc. `Making numbers' means running a program because output --- any output, not necessarily meaningful output --- is needed as a demonstration of progress. See {pretty pictures}, {math-out}, {social science number}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nybble: /nib'l/ (alt. `nibble') [from v. `nibble' by analogy with `bite' => `byte'] n. Four bits; one {hex} digit; a half-byte. Though `byte' is now techspeak, this useful relative is still jargon. Compare {{byte}}, {crumb}, {tayste}, {dynner}; see also {bit}, {nickle}, {deckle}. Apparently this spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British orthography suggests the pronunciation /ni:'bl/. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nyetwork: /nyet'werk/ [from Russian `nyet' = no] n. A network, when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare {notwork}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% nymphs have light fingers %% o A smart man knows on which side his broad is better. %% o Ah spring, when a fancy young man lightly turns his lover over. %% o He who findeth sensuous splendor in the hot pink bodys of luscious damsels is not righteous. %% o People who live in stone houses shouldn't throw glasses. %% o The devil finds work for idle glands. %% obi-wan error: /oh'bee-won` er'*r/ [RPI, from `off-by-one' and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] n. A loop of some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. A kind of {off-by-one error}. See also {zeroth}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% obscure: adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total incomprehensibility. "The reason for that last crash is obscure." "The `find(1)' command's syntax is obscure!" The phrase `moderately obscure' implies that it could be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction `obscure in the extreme' is the preferred emphatic form. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% octal forty: /ok'tl for'tee/ n. Hackish way of saying "I'm drawing a blank." Octal 40 is the {{ASCII}} space character, 0100000; by an odd coincidence, {hex} 40 (01000000) is the {{EBCDIC}} space character. See {wall}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% off the trolley: adj. Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually {crash} or abort. See {glitch}, {bug}, {deep space}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% off width crack: remark made in a smartass manner. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% off-by-one error: n. Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice versa, or by writing `< N' instead of `<= N' or vice-versa. Also applied to giving something to the person next to the one who should have gotten it. Often confounded with {fencepost error}, which is properly a particular subtype of it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% offline: adv. Not now or not here. "Let's take this discussion offline." Specifically used on {USENET} to suggest that a discussion be taken off a public newsgroup to email. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% old fart: n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) USENETters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in {sig block}s attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological significance. This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of pride in first person. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% olfactory: an ancient mill. %% one-banana problem: n. At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that the incentives which would be offered said monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence "It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long?" At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house {sysape}s is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes "However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO"). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also {Infinite-Monkey Theorem}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% one-line fix: n. Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually `cured' by another one-line fix. See also {I didn't change anything!} -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% one-liner wars: n. A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see {write-only language} and {line noise}). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL's exceedingly {hairy} primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among {TECO} hackers and is now popular among {Perl} aficionados. Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this: (2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <- iN where `o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a single character, and `i' represents the APL iota. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ooblick: /oo'blik/ [from Dr. Seuss's `Bartholomew and the Oobleck'] n. A bizarre semi-liquid sludge made from cornstarch and water. Enjoyed among hackers who make batches during playtime at parties for its amusing and extremely non-Newtonian behavior; it pours and splatters, but resists rapid motion like a solid and will even crack when hit by a hammer. Often found near lasers. Here is a field-tested ooblick recipe contributed by GLS: 1 cup cornstarch 1 cup baking soda 3/4 cup water N drops of food coloring This recipe isn't quite as non-Newtonian as a pure cornstarch ooblick, but has an appropriately slimy feel. Some, however, insist that the notion of an ooblick *recipe* is far too mechanical, and that it is best to add the water in small increments so that the various mixed states the cornstarch goes through as it *becomes* ooblick can be grokked in fullness by many hands. For optional ingredients of this experience, see the "{Ceremonial Chemicals}" section of {appendix B}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% op: /op/ [IRC] n. Someone who is endowed with privileges on {IRC}, not limited to a particular channel. These are generally people who are in charge of the IRC server at their particular site. Sometimes used interchangably with {CHOP}. Compare {sysop}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% open switch: [IBM: prob. from railroading] n. An unresolved question, issue, or problem. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% open: n. Abbreviation for `open (or left) parenthesis' --- used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: "Open defun foo, open eks close, open, plus eks one, close close." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% operating system:: [techspeak] n. (Often abbreviated `OS') The foundation software of a machine, of course; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the {{UNIX}}, {{ITS}}, {{TOPS-10}}, {{TOPS-20}}/{{TWENEX}}, {{WAITS}}, {{CP/M}}, {{MS-DOS}}, and {{Multics}} operating systems (most importantly by ITS and UNIX). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see {Brooks's Law}, {creeping elegance}, {creeping featurism}. See also {{Multics}}, {OS/2}, {X}, {software bloat}. This version of the jargon lexicon has been described (with altogether too much truth for comfort) as an example of second-system effect run amok on jargon-1.... %% organized: state of complete chaos. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% oriental food:: n. Hackers display an intense tropism towards oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best local Chinese place and be right at least three times out of four. See also {ravs}, {great-wall}, {stir-fried random}, {laser chicken}, {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. Thai, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% orienting: preparing for a trip to asia. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% orphan: [UNIX] n. A process whose parent has died; one inherited by `init(1)'. Compare {zombie}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% orphaned i-node: /or'f*nd i:'nohd/ [UNIX] n. 1. [techspeak] A file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories of a filesystem. 2. By extension, a pejorative for any person serving no useful function within some organization, esp. {lion food} without subordinates. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% orthogonal: [from mathematics] adj. Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the entire `capability space' of the system and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to any instruction, the register set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators `not' and `or' is orthogonal, but the set `nand', `or', and `not' is not (because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on human discourse: "This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but...." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% out of memory %% out of swap space %% out of text %% out-of-band: [from telecommunications and network theory] adj. 1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its `natural' range of return values, but are rather signals that some kind of exception has occurred. Many C functions, for example, return either a nonnegative integral value, or indicate failure with an out-of-band return value of -1. Compare {hidden flag}, {green bytes}. 2. Also sometimes used to describe what communications people call `shift characters', like the ESC that leads control sequences for many terminals, or the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes. 3. In personal communication, using methods other than email, such as telephones or {snail-mail}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% overflow bit: n. 1. [techspeak] On some processors, an attempt to calculate a result too large for a register to hold causes a particular {flag} called an {overflow bit} to be set. 2. Hackers use the term of human thought too. "Well, the {{Ada}} description was {baroque} all right, but I could hack it OK until they got to the exception handling ... that set my overflow bit." 3. The hypothetical bit that will be set if a hacker doesn't get to make a trip to the Room of Porcelain Fixtures: "I'd better process an internal interrupt before the overflow bit gets set". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% overflow pdl: [MIT] n. The place where you put things when your {pdl} is full. If you don't have one and too many things get pushed, you forget something. The overflow pdl for a person's memory might be a memo pad. This usage inspired the following doggerel: Hey, diddle, diddle The overflow pdl To get a little more stack; If that's not enough Then you lose it all, And have to pop all the way back. -- The Great Quux The term {pdl} seems to be primarily an MITism; outside MIT this term would logically be replaced by `overflow {stack}', but the editors have heard no report of the latter term actually being in use. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% overrun screw: [C programming] n. A variety of {fandango on core} produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C implementations typically have no checks for this error). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is auto, the result may be to {smash the stack} --- often resulting in {heisenbug}s of the most diabolical subtlety. The term `overrun screw' is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of arrays allocated with `malloc(3)'; this typically trashes the allocation header for the next block in the {arena}, producing massive lossage within malloc and often a core dump on the next operation to use `stdio(3)' or `malloc(3)' itself. See {spam}, {overrun}; see also {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {fandango on core}, {secondary damage}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% overrun: n. 1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp. in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if your {silo} can hold only two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost. 2. Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. "I forgot to pay my electric bill due to mail overrun." "Sorry, I got four phone calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your message to overrun." When {thrash}ing at tasks, the next person to make a request might be told "Overrun!" Compare {firehose syndrome}. 3. More loosely, may refer to a {buffer overflow} not necessarily related to processing time (as in {overrun screw}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% padded cell: n. Where you put {luser}s so they can't hurt anything. A program that limits a luser to a carefully restricted subset of the capabilities of the host system (for example, the `rsh(1)' utility on USG UNIX). Note that this is different from an {iron box} because it is overt and not aimed at enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the luser) from the consequences of the luser's boundless na"ivet'e (see {na"ive}). Also `padded cell environment'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% page in: [MIT] vi. 1. To become aware of one's surroundings again after having paged out (see {page out}). Usually confined to the sarcastic comment: "Eric pages in. Film at 11." See {film at 11}. 2. Syn. `swap in'; see {swap}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% page out: [MIT] vi. 1. To become unaware of one's surroundings temporarily, due to daydreaming or preoccupation. "Can you repeat that? I paged out for a minute." See {page in}. Compare {glitch}, {thinko}. 2. Syn. `swap out'; see {swap}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pain in the net: n. A {flamer}. %% panic: Kernel segmentation violation %% panic: can't find / %% panic: kernal segmentation violation. core dumped (only kidding) %% panic: kernel trap (ignored) %% panic: on dev %% paper-net: n. Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it to a very slow, low-reliability network. USENET {sig block}s not uncommonly include a "Paper-Net:" header just before the sender's postal address; common variants of this are "Papernet" and "P-Net". Compare {voice-net}, {snail-mail}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% paradox - a brace of physicians %% param: /p*-ram'/ n. Shorthand for `parameter'. See also {parm}; compare {arg}, {var}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% parent message: n. See {followup}. %% parity errors: pl.n. Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases) consciousness, usually brought on by having spent all night and most of the next day hacking. "I need to go home and crash; I'm starting to get a lot of parity errors." Derives from a relatively common but nearly always correctable transient error in RAM hardware. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% parm: /parm/ n. Further-compressed form of {param}. This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym {arg} is favored among hackers. Compare {arg}, {var}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% parse: [from linguistic terminology] vt. 1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I can't parse that." 2. More generally, to understand or comprehend. "It's very simple; you just kretch the glims and then aos the zotz." "I can't parse that." 3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing fish", means "I don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is okay". A `parsed fish' has been deboned. There is some controversy over whether `unparsed' should mean `bony', or also mean `deboned'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pastie: /pay'stee/ n. An adhesive-backed label designed to be attached to a key on a keyboard to indicate some non-standard character which can be accessed through that key. Pasties are likely to be used in APL environments, where almost every key is associated with a special character. A pastie on the R key, for example, would remind the user that it is used to generate the rho character. The term properly refers to nipple-concealing devices formerly worn by strippers in concession to indecent-exposure laws; compare {tits on a keyboard}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% patch space: n. An unused block of bits left in a binary so that it can later be modified by insertion of machine-language instructions there (typically, the patch space is modified to contain new code, and the superseded code is patched to contain a jump or call to the patch space). The widening use of HLLs has made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM shops. See {patch} (sense 4), {zap} (sense 4), {hook}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% patch: 1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a {quick-and-dirty} remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. Distinguished from a {diff} or {mod} by the fact that a patch is generated by more primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical examples are instructions modified by using the front panel switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a program originally written in an {HLL}. Compare {one-line fix}. 2. vt. To insert a patch into a piece of code. 3. [in the UNIX world] n. A {diff} (sense 2). 4. A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching program. IBM operating systems often receive updates to the operating system in the form of absolute hexadecimal patches. If you have modified your OS, you have to disassemble these back to the source. The patches might later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were said to "grow scar tissue"). The result was often a convoluted {patch space} and headaches galore. 5. [UNIX] the `patch(1)' program, written by Larry Wall, which automatically applies a patch (sense 3) to a set of source code. There is a classic story of a {tiger team} penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any that you can't --- or don't --- inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any {trap door}s or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% path: n. 1. A {bang path} or explicitly routed {{Internet address}}; a node-by-node specification of a link between two machines. 2. [UNIX] A filename, fully specified relative to the root directory (as opposed to relative to the current directory; the latter is sometimes called a `relative path'). This is also called a `pathname'. 3. [UNIX and MS-DOS] The `search path', an environment variable specifying the directories in which the {shell} (COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should look for commands. Other, similar constructs abound under UNIX (for example, the C preprocessor has a `search path' it uses in looking for `#include' files). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pathological: adj. 1. [scientific computation] Used of a data set that is grossly atypical of normal expected input, esp. one that exposes a weakness or bug in whatever algorithm one is using. An algorithm that can be broken by pathological inputs may still be useful if such inputs are very unlikely to occur in practice. 2. When used of test input, implies that it was purposefully engineered as a worst case. The implication in both senses is that the data is spectacularly ill-conditioned or that someone had to explicitly set out to break the algorithm in order to come up with such a crazy example. 3. Also said of an unlikely collection of circumstances. "If the network is down and comes up halfway through the execution of that command by root, the system may just crash." "Yes, but that's a pathological case." Often used to dismiss the case from discussion, with the implication that the consequences are acceptable since that they will happen so infrequently (if at all) that there is no justification for going to extra trouble to handle that case (see sense 1). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% patience is a virtue, unless your daughter dies %% payware: /pay'weir/ n. Commercial software. Oppose {shareware} or {freeware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pdl: /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ [abbreviation for `Push Down List'] 1. n. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for {stack}. See {overflow pdl}. 2. n. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of {Zork}; (his {network address} on the ITS machines was at one time pdl@dms). 3. n. `Program Design Language'. Any of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which {management} forces one to design programs. {Management} often expects it to be maintained in parallel with the code. See also {{flowchart}}. 4. v. To design using a program design language. "I've been pdling so long my eyes won't focus beyond 2 feet." 5. n. `Page Description Language'. Refers to any language which is used to control a graphics device, usually a laserprinter. The most common example, is of course, Adobe's {{PostScript}} language, but there are many others, such as Xerox InterPress, etc. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pdl: /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ [acronym for `Push Down List'] 1. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for {stack}. 2. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of {Zork}; (his {network address} on the ITS machines was at one time pdl@dms). 3. `Program Design Language'. Any of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which {management} forces one to design programs. {Management} often expects it to be maintained in parallel with the code. See also {{flowchart}}. 4. To design using a program design language. "I've been pdling so long my eyes won't focus beyond 2 feet." %% peek: n.,vt. (and {poke}) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any {HLL} (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much hacking on small, non-MMU micros consists of `peek'ing around memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for various computers circulate (see {{interrupt list, the}}). The results of `poke's at these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total {lossage} (see {killer poke}). Since a {real operating system} provides useful, higher-level services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?" is diagnostic of the {newbie}. (Of course, OS kernels often have to do exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and indirect through it.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% peek: n.,vt. (and {poke}) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any {HLL} (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much hacking on small, non-MMU micros consists of {peek}ing around memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for various computers circulate (see {{interrupt list, the}}). The results of {poke}s at these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total {lossage} (see {killer poke}). %% pencil and paper: n. An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved `write-once' update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at so-called `handwriting' technique. These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts. See also {appendix B}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% peon: n. A person with no special ({root} or {wheel}) privileges on a computer system. "I can't create an account on *foovax* for you; I'm only a peon there." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% percent-S: /per-sent' es'/ [From the code in C's `printf(3)' library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] n. An unspecified person or object. "I was just talking to some percent-s in administration." Compare {random}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% perf: /perf/ n. See {chad} (sense 1). The term `perfory' /per'f*-ree/ is also heard. %% perf: /perf/ n. See {chad} (sense 1). The term `perfory' /per'f*-ree/ is also heard. The term {perf} may also refer to the preforations themselves, rather than the chad they produce when torn. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% perfect programmer syndrome: n. Arrogance; the egotistical conviction that one is above normal human error. Most frequently found among programmers of some native ability but relatively little experience (especially new graduates; their perceptions may be distorted by a history of excellent performance at solving {toy problem}s). "Of course my program is correct, there is no need to test it." "Yes, I can see there may be a problem here, but *I'll* never type `rm -r /' while in {root}." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% person of no account: [University of California at Santa Cruz] n. Used when referring to a person with no {network address}, frequently to forestall confusion. Most often as part of an introduction: "This is Bill, a person of no account, but he used to be bill@random.com". Compare {return from the dead}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pessimal: /pes'im-l/ [Latin-based antonym for `optimal'] adj. Maximally bad. "This is a pessimal situation." Also `pessimize' vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for `optimal' and `optimize', but for some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although `pessimize' is listed in the OED. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pessimizing compiler: /pes'*-mi:z`ing k*m-pi:l'r/ [antonym of `optimizing compiler'] n. A compiler that produces object code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious hand translation. The implication is that the compiler is actually trying to optimize the program, but through excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or burlesques. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% peta-: /pe't*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}. %% phage: n. A program which modifies other programs or databases in unauthorized ways; esp. one which propagates a {virus} or {Trojan horse}. See also {worm}, {mockingbird}. The analogy, of course, is with phage viruses in biology. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% phase of the moon: n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There is a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would {barf}. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% phase: 1. n. The phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful concept among people who often work at night and/or according to no fixed schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's phase by as much as 6 hours per day on a regular basis. "What's your phase?" "I've been getting in about 8 P.M. lately, but I'm going to {wrap around} to the day schedule by Friday." A person who is roughly 12 hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in `night mode'. (The term `day mode' is also (but less frequently) used, meaning you're working 9 to 5 (or, more likely, 10 to 6).) The act of altering one's cycle is called `changing phase'; `phase shifting' has also been recently reported from Caltech. 2. `change phase the hard way': To stay awake for a very long time in order to get into a different phase. 3. `change phase the easy way': To stay asleep, etc. However, some claim that either staying awake longer or sleeping longer is easy, and that it is *shortening* your day or night that's hard (see {wrap around}). The `jet lag' that afflicts travelers who cross many time-zone boundaries may be attributed to two distinct causes: the strain of travel per se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers who suddenly find that they must change phase drastically in a short period of time, particularly the hard way, experience something very like jet lag without traveling. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% phreaking: /freek'ing/ [from `phone phreak'] n. 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks) (see {cracking}). At one time phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious theft of services was taboo. There was significant crossover between the hacker community and the hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as the legendary `TAP Newsletter'. This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in the hands of less responsible phreaks. Around the same time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came to depend more on overtly criminal acts such as stealing phone-card numbers. The crimes and punishments of gangs like the `414 group' turned that game very ugly. A few old-time hackers still phreak casually just to keep their hand in, but most these days have hardly even heard of `blue boxes' or any of the other paraphernalia of the great phreaks of yore. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% picket, snow: rank and file member of union internationale des associations d'alpinisme publicly protesting grievances in the dead of winter. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% pico-: [SI: a quantifier meaning * 10^-12] pref. Smaller than {nano-}; used in the same rather loose connotative way as {nano-} and {micro-}. This usage is not yet common in the way {nano-} and {micro-} are, but should be instantly recognizable to any hacker. See also {{quantifiers}}, {micro-}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pig, run like a: v. To run very slowly on given hardware, said of software. Distinct from {hog}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pilot error: [Sun: from aviation] n. A user's misconfiguration or misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results (compare {UBD}). "Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that causes it to generate bogus headers." "That's not a bug, that's pilot error. His `sendmail.cf' is hosed." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ping: [from the TCP/IP acronym `Packet INternet Groper', prob. originally contrived to match the submariners' term for a sonar pulse] 1. n. Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO) sent by a computer to check for the presence and aliveness of another. Occasionally used as a phone greeting. See {ACK}, also {ENQ}. 2. vt. To verify the presence of. 3. vt. To get the attention of. From the UNIX command `ping(1)' that sends an ICMP ECHO packet to another host. 4. vt. To send a message to all members of a {mailing list} requesting an {ACK} (in order to verify that everybody's addresses are reachable). "We haven't heard much of anything from Geoff, but he did respond with an ACK both times I pinged jargon-friends." 5. n. A quantum packet of happiness. People who are very happy tend to exude pings; furthermore, one can intentionally create pings and aim them at a needy party (e.g., a depressed person). This sense of ping may appear as an exclamation; "Ping!" (I'm happy; I am emitting a quantum of happiness; I have been struck by a quantum of happiness). The form "pingfulness", which is used to describe people who exude pings, also occurs. (In the standard abuse of language, "pingfulness" can also be used as an exclamation, in which case it's a much stronger exclamation than just "ping"!). Oppose {blargh}. The funniest use of `ping' to date was described in January 1991 by Steve Hayman on the USENET group comp.sys.next. He was trying to isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet hooked up to a NeXT machine, and got tired of having to run back to his console after each cabling tweak to see if the ping packets were getting through. So he used the sound-recording feature on the NeXT, then wrote a script that repeatedly invoked `ping(8)', listened for an echo, and played back the recording on each returned packet. Result? A program that caused the machine to repeat, over and over, "Ping ... ping ... ping ..." as long as the network was up. He turned the volume to maximum, ferreted through the building with one ear cocked, and found a faulty tee connector in no time. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pistol: [IBM] n. A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "UNIX `rm *' makes such a nice pistol!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% piton: antique metal work. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% pizza box: [Sun] n. The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes. Two meg single-platter removable disk packs used to be called pizzas, and the huge drive they were stuck into was referred to as a pizza oven. It's an index of progress that in the old days just the disk was pizza-sized, while now the entire computer is. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pizza, ANSI standard: /an'see stan'd*rd peet'z*/ [CMU] Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of that flavor. See also {rotary debugger}; compare {tea, ISO standard cup of}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% plaid screen: [XEROX PARC] n. A `special effect' which occurs when certain kinds of {memory smash}es overwrite the control blocks or image memory of a bit-mapped display. The term "salt & pepper" may refer to a different pattern of similar origin. Though the term as coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the {X} demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as a {display hack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% plain-ASCII: /playn-as'kee/ Syn. {flat-ASCII}. %% plan file: [UNIX] n. On systems that support {finger}, the `.plan' file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes (like a {sig block}). See {Hacking X for Y}. %% plan file: [UNIX] n. On systems that support {finger}, the `.plan' file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes (like a {sig block}). See {Hacking X for Y}. A recent innovation in plan files has been the introduction of "scrolling plan files" which are one-dimensional animations made using only the printable ASCII character set, carriage return and line feed, avoiding terminal specific escape sequences, since the {finger} command will not pass the escape character. Scrolling .plan files have become art forms in miniature, and some sites have started competitions to find who can create the longest running, funniest, and most original animations. Various animation characters include: Centipede: mmmmme Lorry/Truck: oo-oP Andalusian Video Snail: _@/ and a compiler (ASP) is available on USENET for producing them. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% platinum-iridium: adj. Standard, against which all others of the same category are measured. Usage: silly. The notion is that one of whatever it is has actually been cast in platinum-iridium alloy and placed in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. (From 1889 to 1960, the meter was defined to be the distance between two scratches in a platinum-iridium bar kept in that vault --- this replaced an earlier definition as 10^(-7) times the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian through Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact value of the circumference of the Earth. From 1960 to 1984 it was defined to be 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86 propagating in a vacuum. It is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The kilogram is now the only unit of measure officially defined in terms of a unique artifact.) "This garbage-collection algorithm has been tested against the platinum-iridium cons cell in Paris." Compare {golden}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% playpen: [IBM] n. A room where programmers work. Compare {salt mines}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% playte: /playt/ 16 bits, by analogy with {nybble} and {{byte}}. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also {dynner} and {crumb}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% plingnet: /pling'net/ n. Syn. {UUCPNET}. Also see {{Commonwealth Hackish}}, which uses `pling' for {bang} (as in {bang path}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% plokta: /plok't*/ [Acronym for `Press Lots Of Keys To Abort'] v. To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into `plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and presses down, hoping for some useful response. %% plokta: /plok't*/ [Acronym for `Press Lots Of Keys To Abort'] v. To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into `plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and presses down, hoping for some useful response. A slightly more directed form of plokta can often be seen in mail messages or USENET articles from new users --- the text might end with q quit :q ^C end x exit ZZ ^D ? help as the user vainly tries to find the right exit sequence, with the incorrect tries piling up at the end of the message.... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% plonk: [USENET: possibly influenced by British slang `plonk' for cheap booze] The sound a {newbie} makes as he falls to the bottom of a {kill file}. Used almost exclusively in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre, this term (usually written "*plonk*") is a form of public ridicule. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% plumbing: [UNIX] n. Term used for {shell} code, so called because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under UNIX, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of UNIX's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp. used in the construction `hairy plumbing' (see {hairy}). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out of `sort(1)', `comm(1)', and `tr(1)' with a little plumbing." See also {tee}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pnambic: /p*-nam'bik/ [Acronym from the scene in the film version of `The Wizard of Oz' in which the true nature of the wizard is first discovered: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."] 1. A stage of development of a process or function that, owing to incomplete implementation or to the complexity of the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or function. 2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose apparent operations are wholly or partially falsified. 3. Requiring {prestidigitization}. The ultimate pnambic product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program which supported flashy user-interface design prototyping. There is a related maxim among hackers: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." See {magic}, sense 1, for illumination of this point. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pod: [allegedly from abbreviation POD for `Prince Of Darkness'] n. A Diablo 630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer). From the DEC-10 PODTYPE program used to feed formatted text to it. See also {P.O.D.} -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% poetry is an attempt to express the inexpressible %% point-and-drool interface: n. Parody of the techspeak term `point-and-shoot interface', describing a windows, icons, and mice-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh. The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for idiots. See {for the rest of us}, {WIMP environment}, {Macintrash}, {drool-proof paper}. Also `point-and-grunt interface'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% poke: n.,vt. See {peek}. %% poll: v.,n. 1. [techspeak] The action of checking the status of an input line, sensor, or memory location to see if a particular external event has been registered. 2. To repeatedly call or check with someone: "I keep polling him, but he's not answering his phone; he must be swapped out." 3. To ask. "Lunch? I poll for a takeout order daily." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% polygon pusher: n. A chip designer who spends most of his or her time at the physical layout level (which requires drawing *lots* of multi-colored polygons). Also `rectangle slinger'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% polyurine (paw-lee-yer-in) n.: liquid found in the bottom of kitchen garbage can whenever the bag is removed %% pop: [from the operation that removes the top of a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on the stack] (also capitalized `POP' /pop/) 1. vt. To remove something from a {stack} or {pdl}. If a person says he/she has popped something from his stack, that means he/she has finally finished working on it and can now remove it from the list of things hanging overhead. 2. When a discussion gets to too deep a level of detail so that the main point of the discussion is being lost, someone will shout "Pop!", meaning "Get back up to a higher level!" The shout is frequently accompanied by an upthrust arm with a finger pointing to the ceiling. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% posing: n. On a {MUD}, the use of `:' or an equivalent command to announce to other players that one is taking a certain physical action that has no effect on the game (it may, however, serve as a social signal or propaganda device that induces other people to take game actions). For example, if one's character name is Firechild, one might type `: looks delighted at the idea and begins hacking on the nearest terminal' to broadcast a message that says "Firechild looks delighted at the idea and begins hacking on the nearest terminal". See {RL}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% post: v. To send a message to a {mailing list} or {newsgroup}. Distinguished in context from `mail'; one might ask, for example: "Are you going to post the patch or mail it to known users?" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% postcardware: n. {Shareware} that borders on {freeware}, in that the author requests only that satisfied users send a postcard of their home town or something. (This practice, silly as it might seem, serves to remind users that they are otherwise getting something for nothing, and may also be psychologically related to real estate "sales" in which $1 changes hands just to keep the transaction from being a gift.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% posting: n. Noun corresp. to v. {post} (but note that {post} can be nouned). Distinguished from a `letter' or ordinary {email} message by the fact that it is broadcast rather than point-to-point. It is not clear whether messages sent to a small mailing list are postings or email; perhaps the best dividing line is that if you don't know the names of all the potential recipients, it is a posting. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% postmaster: n. The email contact and maintenance person at a site connected to the Internet or UUCPNET. Often, but not always, the same as the {admin}. The Internet standard for electronic mail ({RFC}-822) requires each machine to have a `postmaster' address; usually it is aliased to this person. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pound on: vt. Syn. {bang on}. %% power cycle: vt. (also, `cycle power' or just `cycle') To power off a machine and then power it on immediately, with the intention of clearing some kind of {hung} or {gronk}ed state. Syn. {120 reset}; see also {Big Red Switch}. Compare {Vulcan nerve pinch}, {bounce}, and {boot}, and see the AI Koan in "{A Selection of AI Koans}" (in {appendix A}) about Tom Knight and the novice. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% power hit: n. A spike or drop-out in the electricity supplying your machine; a power {glitch}. These can cause crashes and even permanent damage to your machine(s). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% precedence lossage: /pre's*-dens los'*j/ [C programmers] n. Coding error in an expression due to unexpected grouping of arithmetic or logical operators by the compiler. Used esp. of certain common coding errors in C due to the nonintuitively low precedence levels of `&', `|', `^', `<<', and `>>' (for this reason, experienced C programmers deliberately forget the language's {baroque} precedence hierarchy and parenthesize defensively). Can always be avoided by suitable use of parentheses. {LISP} fans enjoy pointing out that this can't happen in *their* favorite language, which eschews precedence entirely, requiring one to use explicit parentheses everywhere. See {aliasing bug}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {smash the stack}, {fandango on core}, {overrun screw}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% prepend: /pree`pend'/ [by analogy with `append'] vt. To prefix. As with `append' (but not `prefix' or `suffix' as a verb), the direct object is always the thing being added and not the original word (or character string, or whatever). "If you prepend a semicolon to the line, the translation routine will pass it through unaltered." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% prestidigitization: /pres`t*-di`j*-ti:-zay'sh*n/ n. 1. The act of putting something into digital notation via sleight of hand. 2. Data entry through legerdemain. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pretty pictures: n. [scientific computation] The next step up from {numbers}. Interesting graphical output from a program that may not have any sensible relationship to the system the program is intended to model. Good for showing to {management}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% prettyprint: /prit'ee-print/ (alt. `pretty-print') v. 1. To generate `pretty' human-readable output from a {hairy} internal representation; esp. used for the process of {grind}ing (sense 2) LISP code. 2. To format in some particularly slick and nontrivial way. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pretzel key: [Mac users] n. See {command key}. %% prime time: [from TV programming] n. Normal high-usage hours on a timesharing system; the day shift. Avoidance of prime time is a major reason for {night mode} hacking. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% printing discussion: [PARC] n. A protracted, low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of something only peripherally interesting to all. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% priority interrupt: [from the hardware term] n. Describes any stimulus compelling enough to yank one right out of {hack mode}. Classically used to describe being dragged away by an {SO} for immediate sex, but may also refer to more mundane interruptions such as a fire alarm going off in the near vicinity. Also called an {NMI} (non-maskable interrupt), especially in PC-land. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% product: a water bird who is on your side. %% profile: n. 1. A control file for a program, esp. a text file automatically read from each user's home directory and intended to be easily modified by the user in order to customize the program's behavior. Used to avoid {hardcoded} choices. 2. [techspeak] A report on the amounts of time spent in each routine of a program, used to find and {tune} away the {hot spot}s in it. This sense is often verbed. Some profiling modes report units other than time (such as call counts) and/or report at granularities other than per-routine, but the idea is similar. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% progasm: the feeling you get when your code works the first time %% proglet: /prog'let/ [UK] n. A short extempore program written to meet an immediate, transient need. Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long, and contains no subroutines. The largest amount of code that can be written off the top of one's head, that does not need any editing, and that runs correctly the first time (this amount varies significantly according to the language one is using). Compare {toy program}, {noddy}, {one-liner wars}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% program: n. 1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. 2. An exercise in experimental epistemology. 3. A form of art, ostensibly intended for the instruction of computers, which is nevertheless almost inevitably a failure if other programmers can't understand it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% programming fluid: n. 1. Coffee. 2. Cola. 3. Any caffeinacious stimulant. Many hackers consider these essential for those all-night hacking runs. See {unleaded}, {wirewater}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% programming: n. 1. The art of debugging a blank sheet of paper (or, in these days of on-line editing, the art of debugging an empty file). 2. n. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward. 3. n. The most fun you can have with your clothes on (although clothes are not mandatory). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% propagate - to hold open an passage thru a fence, as with a stick. %% propeller head: n. Used by hackers, this is syn. with {computer geek}. Non-hackers sometimes use it to describe all techies. Prob. derives from SF fandom's tradition (originally invented by old-time fan Ray Faraday Nelson) of propeller beanies as fannish insignia (though nobody actually wears them except as a joke). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% propeller key: [Mac users] n. See {command key}. %% proprietary: adj. 1. In {marketroid}-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's hardware or software designers. 2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a product not conforming to open-systems standards, and thus one that puts the customer at the mercy of a vendor able to gouge freely on service and upgrade charges after the initial sale has locked the customer in (that's assuming it wasn't too expensive in the first place). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% protocol: n. As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place setting; hackers don't care about such things. It is used instead to describe any set of rules that allow different machines or pieces of software to coordinate with each other without ambiguity. So, for example, it does include niceties about the proper form for addressing packets on a network or the order in which one should use the forks in the Dining Philosophers Problem. It implies that there is some common message format and an accepted set of primitives or commands that all parties involved understand, and that transactions among them follow predictable logical sequences. See also {handshaking}, {do protocol}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% provocative maintenance: [common ironic mutation of `preventive maintenance'] n. Actions performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often performed by a {field servoid} who doesn't know what he is doing; this results in the machine's remaining in an *un*usable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also {scratch monkey}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% prowler: [UNIX] n. A {daemon} that is run periodically (typically once a week) to seek out and erase {core} files, truncate administrative logfiles, nuke `lost+found' directories, and otherwise clean up the {cruft} that tends to pile up in the corners of a file system. See also {GFR}, {reaper}, {skulker}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pseudo: /soo'doh/ [USENET: truncation of `pseudonym'] n. 1. An electronic-mail or {USENET} persona adopted by a human for amusement value or as a means of avoiding negative repercussions of one's net.behavior; a `nom de USENET', often associated with forged postings designed to conceal message origins. Perhaps the best-known and funniest hoax of this type is {BIFF}. 2. Notionally, a {flamage}-generating AI program simulating a USENET user. Many flamers have been accused of actually being such entities, despite the fact that no AI program of the required sophistication yet exists. However, in 1989 there was a famous series of forged postings that used a phrase-frequency-based travesty generator to simulate the styles of several well-known flamers; it was based on large samples of their back postings (compare {Dissociated Press}). A significant number of people were fooled by the forgeries, and the debate over their authenticity was settled only when the perpetrator came forward to publicly admit the hoax. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pseudoprime: n. A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied points) with one point missing. This term is an esoteric pun derived from a mathematical method that, rather than determining precisely whether a number is prime (has no divisors), uses a statistical technique to decide whether the number is `probably' prime. A number that passes this test is called a pseudoprime. The hacker backgammon usage stems from the idea that a pseudoprime is almost as good as a prime: it does the job of a prime until proven otherwise, and that probably won't happen. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pseudosuit: /soo'doh-s[y]oot`/ n. A {suit} wannabee; a hacker who has decided that he wants to be in management or administration and begins wearing ties, sport coats, and (shudder!) suits voluntarily. It's his funeral. See also {lobotomy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% psychedelicware: /si:`k*-del'-ik-weir/ [UK] n. Syn. {display hack}. See also {smoking clover}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% psyton: /si:'ton/ [TMRC] n. The elementary particle carrying the sinister force. The probability of a process losing is proportional to the number of psytons falling on it. Psytons are generated by observers, which is why demos are more likely to fail when lots of people are watching. [This term appears to have been largely superseded by {bogon}; see also {quantum bogodynamics}. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pubic directory: [NYU] (also `pube directory' /pyoob' d*-rek't*-ree/) n. The `pub' (public) directory on a machine that allows {FTP} access. So called because it is the default location for {SEX} (sense 1). "I'll have the source in the pube directory by Friday." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% puff: vt. To decompress data that has been crunched by Huffman coding. At least one widely distributed Huffman decoder program was actually *named* `PUFF', but these days it is usually packaged with the encoder. Oppose {huff}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% punched card:: alt. `punch card' [techspeak] n.obs. The signature medium of computing's {Stone Age}, now obsolescent outside of some IBM shops. The punched card actually predated computers considerably, originating in 1801 as a control device for mechanical looms. The version patented by Hollerith and used with mechanical tabulating machines in the 1890 U.S. Census was a piece of cardboard about 90 mm by 215 mm, designed to fit exactly in the currency trays used for that era's larger dollar bills. IBM (which originated as a tabulating-machine manufacturer) married the punched card to computers, encoding binary information as patterns of small rectangular holes; one character per column, 80 columns per card. Other coding schemes, sizes of card, and hole shapes were tried at various times. The 80-column width of most character terminals is a legacy of the IBM punched card; so is the size of the quick-reference cards distributed with many varieties of computers even today. See {chad}, {chad box}, {eighty-column mind}, {green card}, {dusty deck}, {lace card}, {card walloper}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% punt: [from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"] v. 1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this feature in, but I decided to punt" may mean that you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the {Right Thing} is and resort to an inefficient hack. 3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in is --- we'll punt that for now." 4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other section of the design. "It's too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pupchuck (puhp-tshuk) n.: dog vomit (edible, to dogs) %% purple wire: [IBM] n. Wire installed by Field Engineers to work around problems discovered during testing or debugging. These are called `purple wires' even when (as is frequently the case) their actual physical color is yellow.... Compare {blue wire}, {purple wire}, and {red wire}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% pursuant - what aunt sue said %% push: [from the operation that puts the current information on a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on a stack] Also PUSH /push/ or PUSHJ /push'J/ (the latter based on the PDP-10 procedure call instruction). 1. To put something onto a {stack} or {pdl}. If one says that something has been pushed onto one's stack, it means that the Damoclean list of things hanging over ones's head has grown longer and heavier yet. This may also imply that one will deal with it *before* other pending items; otherwise one might say that the thing was `added to my queue'. 2. vi. To enter upon a digression, to save the current discussion for later. Antonym of {pop}; see also {stack}, {pdl}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% q: What was John Sununu's least offensive ethics violation? a: He used to make Dan Quayle wash his car. %% q: What's the opposite of a Hot Dog? a: A Pup-Scicle %% q:What is the difference between computers and sex? a:In computers, the software goes into the hardware. %% quad: n. 1. Two bits; syn. for {quarter}, {crumb}, {tayste}. 2. A four-pack of anything (compare {hex}, sense 2). 3. The rectangle or box glyph used in the APL language for various arcane purposes mostly related to I/O. Former Ivy-Leaguers and Oxbridge types are said to associate it with nostalgic memories of dear old University. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% quadruple bucky: n., obs. 1. On an MIT {space-cadet keyboard}, use of all four of the shifting keys (control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key. 2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in {raw mode}, use of four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and meta keys on *both* sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: "Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle." See {double bucky}, {bucky bits}, {cokebottle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% quantifiers:: In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Syst`eme International) conventions for scientific measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that come in powers of 10, such as money, they retain their usual meanings of multiplication by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 2^(10). Here are the SI magnifying prefixes, along with the corresponding binary interpretations in common use: prefix decimal binary kilo- 1000^1 1024^1 = 2^10 = 1,024 mega- 1000^2 1024^2 = 2^20 = 1,048,576 giga- 1000^3 1024^3 = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 tera- 1000^4 1024^4 = 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 peta- 1000^5 1024^5 = 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 exa- 1000^6 1024^6 = 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 zetta- 1000^7 1024^7 = 2^70 = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 yotta- 1000^8 1024^8 = 2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Here are the SI fractional prefixes: *prefix decimal jargon usage* milli- 1000^-1 (seldom used in jargon) micro- 1000^-2 small or human-scale (see {micro-}) nano- 1000^-3 even smaller (see {nano-}) pico- 1000^-4 even smaller yet (see {pico-}) femto- 1000^-5 (not used in jargon---yet) atto- 1000^-6 (not used in jargon---yet) zepto- 1000^-7 (not used in jargon---yet) yocto- 1000^-8 (not used in jargon---yet) The prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto-, and yocto- have been included in these tables purely for completeness and giggle value; they were adopted in 1990 by the `19th Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures'. The binary peta- and exa- loadings, though well established, are not in jargon use either --- yet. The prefix milli-, denoting multiplication by 1000^(-1), has always been rare in jargon (there is, however, a standard joke about the `millihelen' --- notionally, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship). See the entries on {micro-}, {pico-}, and {nano-} for more information on connotative jargon use of these terms. `Femto' and `atto' (which, interestingly, derive not from Greek but from Danish) have not yet acquired jargon loadings, though it is easy to predict what those will be once computing technology enters the required realms of magnitude (however, see {attoparsec}). There are, of course, some standard unit prefixes for powers of 10. In the following table, the `prefix' column is the international standard suffix for the appropriate power of ten; the `binary' column lists jargon abbreviations and words for the corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are commonly used for byte quantities; the words `meg' and `gig' are nouns which may (but do not always) pluralize with `s'. prefix decimal binary pronunciation kilo- k K, KB, /kay/ mega- M M, MB, meg /meg/ giga- G G, GB, gig /gig/,/jig/ Confusingly, hackers often use K or M as though they were suffix or numeric multipliers rather than a prefix; thus "2K dollars", "2M of disk space". This is also true (though less commonly) of G. Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is `k'; some use this strictly, reserving `K' for multiplication by 1024 (KB is `kilobytes'). K, M, and G used alone refer to quantities of bytes; thus, 64G is 64 gigabytes and `a K' is a kilobyte (compare mainstream use of `a G' as short for `a grand', that is, $1000). Whether one pronounces `gig' with hard or soft `g' depends on what one thinks the proper pronunciation of `giga-' is. Confusing 1000 and 1024 (or other powers of 2 and 10 close in magnitude) --- for example, describing a memory in units of 500K or 524K instead of 512K --- is a sure sign of the {marketroid}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% quantum bogodynamics: /kwon'tm boh`goh-di:-nam'iks/ n. A theory that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and {suit}s in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of the bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood and remain to be elucidated. Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb. See {bogon}, {computron}, {suit}, {psyton}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% quarter: n. Two bits. This in turn comes from the `pieces of eight' famed in pirate movies --- Spanish silver crowns that could be broken into eight pie-slice-shaped `bits' to make change. Early in American history the Spanish coin was considered equal to a dollar, so each of these `bits' was considered worth 12.5 cents. Syn. {tayste}, {crumb}, {quad}. Usage: rare. See also {nickle}, {nybble}, {{byte}}, {dynner}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ques: /kwes/ 1. n. The question mark character (`?', ASCII 0111111). 2. interj. What? Also frequently verb-doubled as "Ques ques?" See {wall}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% questionable: what the police do when they interrogate a cow's husband. %% quick-and-dirty: adj. Describes a {crock} put together under time or user pressure. Used esp. when you want to convey that you think the fast way might lead to trouble further down the road. "I can have a quick-and-dirty fix in place tonight, but I'll have to rewrite the whole module to solve the underlying design problem." See also {kluge}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% quine: [from the name of the logician Willard V. Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter] n. A program which generates a copy of its source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement. Here is one classic quine: ((lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))) (quote (lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))))) This one works in LISP or Scheme. It's relatively easy to write quines in other languages such as Postscript which readily handle programs as data; much harder (and thus more challenging!) in languages like C which do not. Here is a classic C quine for ASCII machines: char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c"; main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);} For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the line break after the second semicolon. Some infamous {Obfuscated C Contest} entries have been quines that reproduced in exotic ways. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% quote chapter and verse: [by analogy with the mainstream phrase] v. To cite a relevant excerpt from an appropriate {bible}. "I don't care if `rn' gets it wrong; `Followup-To: poster' is explicitly permitted by {RFC}-1036. I'll quote chapter and verse if you don't believe me." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% quotient: n. See {coefficient}. %% quux: /kwuhks/ [Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent verb quuxo, quuxare, quuxandum iri; noun form variously `quux' (plural `quuces', anglicized to `quuxes') and `quuxu' (genitive plural is `quuxuum', for four u-letters out of seven in all, using up all the `u' letters in Scrabble).] 1. Originally, a {metasyntactic variable} like {foo} and {foobar}. Invented by Guy Steele for precisely this purpose when he was young and na"ive and not yet interacting with the real computing community. Many people invent such words; this one seems simply to have been lucky enough to have spread a little. In an eloquent display of poetic justice, it has returned to the originator in the form of a nickname. 2. interj. See {foo}; however, denotes very little disgust, and is uttered mostly for the sake of the sound of it. 3. Guy Steele in his persona as `The Great Quux', which is somewhat infamous for light verse and for the `Crunchly' cartoons. 4. In some circles, quux is used as a punning opposite of `crux'. "Ah, that's the quux of the matter!" implies that the point is *not* crucial (compare {tip of the ice-cube}). 5. quuxy: adj. Of or pertaining to a quux. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% qux: /kwuhks/ The fourth of the standard {metasyntactic variable}, after {baz} and before the quu(u...)x series. See {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}. This appears to be a recent mutation from {quux}, and many versions of the standard series just run {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}, .... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rabbit job: [Cambridge] n. A batch job which does little, if any, real work, but creates one or more copies of itself, breeding like rabbits. Compare {wabbit}, {fork bomb}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rain dance: n. 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc. "I can't boot up the machine. We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain dance." 2. Any arcane sequence of actions performed with computers or software in order to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals that include both an {incantation} or two and physical activity or motion. Compare {magic}, {voodoo programming}, {black art}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rainbow series: n. Any of several series of technical manuals distinguished by cover color. The original rainbow series was the NCSC security manuals (see {Orange Book}, {crayola books}); the term has also been commonly applied to the PostScript reference set (see {Red Book}, {Green Book}, {Blue Book}, {White Book}). Which books are meant by "`the' rainbow series" unqualified is thus dependent on one's local technical culture. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rainfly: pesky insect that only appears during wet weather. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% random numbers:: n. When one wishes to specify a large but random number of things, and the context is inappropriate for {N}, certain numbers are preferred by hacker tradition (that is, easily recognized as placeholders). These include the following: 17 Long described at MIT as `the least random number'; see 23. 23 Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and 5). 42 The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Note that this answer is completely fortuitous. `:-)') 69 From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS culture. 105 69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal. 666 The Number of the Beast. For further enlightenment, study the `Principia Discordia', `{The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy}', `The Joy of Sex', and the Christian Bible (Revelation 13:8). See also {Discordianism} or consult your pineal gland. See also {for values of}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% random: adj. 1. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical definition); weird. "The system's been behaving pretty randomly." 2. Assorted; undistinguished. "Who was at the conference?" "Just a bunch of random business types." 3. (pejorative) Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. "He's just a random loser." 4. Incoherent or inelegant; poorly chosen; not well organized. "The program has a random set of misfeatures." "That's a random name for that function." "Well, all the names were chosen pretty randomly." 5. In no particular order, though deterministic. "The I/O channels are in a pool, and when a file is opened one is chosen randomly." 6. Arbitrary. "It generates a random name for the scratch file." 7. Gratuitously wrong, i.e., poorly done and for no good apparent reason. For example, a program that handles file name defaulting in a particularly useless way, or an assembler routine that could easily have been coded using only three registers, but redundantly uses seven for values with non-overlapping lifetimes, so that no one else can invoke it without first saving four extra registers. What {randomness}! 8. n. A random hacker; used particularly of high-school students who soak up computer time and generally get in the way. 9. n. Anyone who is not a hacker (or, sometimes, anyone not known to the hacker speaking); the noun form of sense 2. "I went to the talk, but the audience was full of randoms asking bogus questions". 10. n. (occasional MIT usage) One who lives at Random Hall. See also {J. Random}, {some random X}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% randomness: n. 1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 2. A {hack} or {crock} that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to malfunction). "This hack can output characters 40--57 by putting the character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting six bits --- the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing." "What randomness!" 3. Of people, synonymous with `flakiness'. The connotation is that the person so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately for reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to pass with time. "Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just randomness. See if he calls back." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rape: vt. 1. To {screw} someone or something, violently; in particular, to destroy a program or information irrecoverably. Often used in describing file-system damage. "So-and-so was running a program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up raping the master directory." 2. To strip a piece of hardware for parts. 3. [CMU/Pitt] To mass-copy files from an anonymous ftp site. "Last night I raped Simtel's dskutl directory." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rare mode: [UNIX] adj. CBREAK mode (character-by-character with interrupts enabled). Distinguished from {raw mode} and {cooked mode}; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode" is used in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode. Usage: rare. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% raster blaster: n. [Cambridge] Specialized hardware for {bitblt} operations (a {blitter}). Allegedly inspired by `Rasta Blasta', British slang for the sort of portable stereo Americans call a `boom box' or `ghetto blaster'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% raster burn: n. Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics monitors. See {terminal illness}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rat belt: n. A cable tie, esp. the sawtoothed, self-locking plastic kind that you can remove only by cutting (as opposed to a random twist of wire or a twist tie or one of those humongous metal clip frobs). Small cable ties are `mouse belts'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rave on!: imp. Sarcastic invitation to continue a {rave}, often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rave: [WPI] vi. 1. To persist in discussing a specific subject. 2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows very little. 3. To complain to a person who is not in a position to correct the difficulty. 4. To purposely annoy another person verbally. 5. To evangelize. See {flame}. 6. Also used to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bullshitting. `Rave' differs slightly from {flame} in that `rave' implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the person speaking that is annoying, while {flame} implies somewhat more strongly that the tone is offensive as well. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% ravs: /ravz/, also `Chinese ravs' n. Jiao-zi (steamed or boiled) or Guo-tie (pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known variously in the plural as dumplings, pot stickers (the literal translation of guo-tie), and (around Boston) `Peking Ravioli'. The term `rav' is short for `ravioli', which among hackers always means the Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind. Both consist of a filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes no cheese, uses a thinner pasta, has a pork-vegetable filling (good ones include Chinese chives), and is cooked differently, either by steaming or frying. A rav or dumpling can be cooked any way, but a potsticker is always the fried kind (so called because it sticks to the frying pot and has to be scraped off). "Let's get hot-and-sour soup and three orders of ravs." See also {{oriental food}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% raw mode: n. A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device (or, under {bogus} systems which make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare {rare mode}, {cooked mode}. This is techspeak under UNIX, jargon elsewhere. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rc file: /R-C fi:l/ [UNIX: from the startup script `/etc/rc', but this is commonly believed to have been named after older scripts to `run commands'] n. Script file containing startup instructions for an application program (or an entire operating system), usually a text file containing commands of the sort that might have been invoked manually once the system was running but are to be executed automatically each time the system starts up. See also {dot file}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% read-only user: n. Describes a {luser} who uses computers almost exclusively for reading USENET, bulletin boards, and/or email, rather than writing code or purveying useful information. See {twink}, {terminal junkie}, {lurker}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% real estate: n. May be used for any critical resource measured in units of area. Most frequently used of `chip real estate', the area available for logic on the surface of an integrated circuit (see also {nanoacre}). May also be used of floor space in a {dinosaur pen}, or even space on a crowded desktop (whether physical or electronic). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% real hack: n. A {crock}. This is sometimes used affectionately; see {hack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% real operating system: n. The sort the speaker is used to. People from the BSDophilic academic community are likely to issue comments like "System V? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?", people from the commercial/industrial UNIX sector are known to complain "BSD? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?", and people from IBM object "UNIX? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?" See {holy wars}, {religious issues}, {proprietary}, {Get a real computer!} -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% real time: 1. [techspeak] adj. Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the classic example. Such applications often require special operating systems (because everything else must take a back seat to response time) and speed-tuned hardware. 2. adv. In jargon, refers to doing something while people are watching or waiting. "I asked her how to find the calling procedure's program counter on the stack and she came up with an algorithm in real time." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% real user: n. 1. A commercial user. One who is paying *real* money for his computer usage. 2. A non-hacker. Someone using the system for an explicit purpose (a research project, a course, etc.) other than pure exploration. See {user}. Hackers who are also students may also be real users. "I need this fixed so I can do a problem set. I'm not complaining out of randomness, but as a real user." See also {luser}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% real: adj. Not simulated. Often used as a specific antonym to {virtual} in any of its jargon senses. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% reality check: n. 1. The simplest kind of test of software or hardware; doing the equivalent of asking it what 2 + 2 is and seeing if you get 4. The software equivalent of a {smoke test}. 2. The act of letting a {real user} try out prototype software. Compare {sanity check}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% realized with shame what I had done. My shame is gone and now I am looking for a submissive typewriter, any color, or model. No electric typewriters please! -- Rick Kleiner %% reaper: n. A {prowler} that {GFR}s files. A file removed in this way is said to have been `reaped'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rebuttal - the procedure used to affix new hindquarters %% rectangle slinger: n. See {polygon pusher}. %% recursive acronym:: pl.n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms/abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and {GNU} (q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not UNIX!" --- and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". See also {mung}, {EMACS}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% red wire: [IBM] n. Patch wires installed by programmers who have no business mucking with the hardware. It is said that the only thing more dangerous than a hardware guy with a code patch is a {softy} with a soldering iron.... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% refers to a scene that took place in a programmers' terminal room at Yorktown in 1978. A luser overheard one of the programmers ask another "Do you have a green card?" The other grunted and passed the first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to return. See also {card}. %% regexp: /reg'eksp/ [UNIX] n. (alt. `regex' or `reg-ex') 1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for `regular expression', one of the wildcard patterns used, e.g., by UNIX utilities such as `grep(1)', `sed(1)', and `awk(1)'. These use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described under {glob}. For purposes of this lexicon, it is sufficient to note that regexps also allow complemented character sets using `^'; thus, one can specify `any non-alphabetic character' with `[^A-Za-z]'. 2. Name of a well-known PD regexp-handling package in portable C, written by revered USENETter Henry Spencer . -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% register dancing: n. Many older processor architectures suffer from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This is especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like intermediate values in expression evaluation. Some designs with this problem, like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of special-purpose registers that can be pressed into service, providing suitable care is taken to avoid unpleasant side-effects on the state of the processor: while the special-purpose register is being used to hold an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is required in which the previous value of the register is saved and then restored just before the official function (and value) of the special-purpose register is again needed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% reincarnation, cycle of: n. See {cycle of reincarnation}. %% reinvent the wheel: v. To design or implement a tool equivalent to an existing one or part of one, with the implication that doing so is silly or a waste of time. This is often a valid criticism. On the other hand, automobiles don't use wooden rollers, and some kinds of wheel have to be reinvented many times before you get them right. On the third hand, people reinventing the wheel do tend to come up with the moral equivalent of a trapezoid with an offset axle. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% religious issues: n. Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off {holy wars}, such as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that Heinlein guy, eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?" See {holy wars}; see also {theology}, {bigot}. This term is an example of {ha ha only serious}. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble {Get a life!} and leave --- unless, of course, one's *own* unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% replicator: n. Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see {meme}), a program (see {worm}, {wabbit}, {fork bomb}, and {virus}), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see {life}, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or {nanobot}. It is even claimed by some that {{UNIX}} and {C} are the symbiotic halves of an extremely successful replicator; see {UNIX conspiracy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% reply: n. See {followup}. %% reset: [the MUD community] v. In AberMUD, to bring all dead mobiles to life and move items back to their initial starting places. New players who can't find anything shout "Reset! Reset!" quite a bit. Higher-level players shout back "No way!" since they know where points are to be found. Used in {RL}, it means to put things back to the way they were when you found them. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% restart memory size = %% restriction: n. A {bug} or design error that limits a program's capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a {feature}. Often used (esp. by {marketroid} types) to make it sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost invariably false). Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 17 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number --- on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less {flamage} for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially suspect. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% retcon: /ret'kon/ [short for `retroactive continuity', from the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.comics] 1. n. The common situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or soap operas) where a new story `reveals' things about events in previous stories, usually leaving the `facts' the same (thus preserving continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For example, revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a dream was a retcon. 2. vt. To write such a story about a character or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures were retconned into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was retconned from a transformed person into a sentient vegetable." "Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in "The Empire Strikes Back". [This is included because it is a good example of hackish linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers. The word `retcon' will probably spread through comics fandom and lose its association with hackerdom within a couple of years; for the record, it started here. --- ESR] [1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics. In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% retrocomputing: /ret'-roh-k*m-pyoo'ting/ n. Refers to emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software, or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies, written mostly for {hack value}, of more `serious' designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the `pnch(6)' or `bcd(6)' program on V7 and other early UNIX versions, which would accept up to 80 characters of text argument and display the corresponding pattern in {{punched card}} code. Other well-known retrocomputing hacks have included the programming language {INTERCAL}, a {JCL}-emulating shell for UNIX, the card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate PDP-11 hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an old, sourceless {Zork} binary running. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% retry attempted count = %% return from the dead: v. To regain access to the net after a long absence. Compare {person of no account}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rezero count = %% rib site: [by analogy with {backbone site}] n. A machine that has an on-demand high-speed link to a {backbone site} and serves as a regional distribution point for lots of third-party traffic in email and USENET news. Compare {leaf site}, {backbone site}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rice box: [from ham radio slang] n. Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp. an 80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus standards. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% roach: [Bell Labs] vt. To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets {toast}ed or {fried}, software gets roached. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% robot: [IRC, MUD] n. An {IRC} or {MUD} user who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries to prevent random users from adopting {nick}s already claimed by others, and MsgServ, which allows one to send asynchronous messages to be delivered when the recipient signs on. Also common are "annoybots", such as KissServ, which perform no useful function except to send cute messages to other people. Service robots are less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the `Julia' robot active in 1990--91, have been remarkably impressive Turing-test experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of conversation. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% robust: adj. Said of a system that has demonstrated an ability to recover gracefully from the whole range of exceptional inputs and situations in a given environment. One step below {bulletproof}. Carries the additional connotation of elegance in addition to just careful attention to detail. Compare {smart}, oppose {brittle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rock band: enthusiastic group of musical noisemakers. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% rockies: very small stones. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% rococo: adj. {Baroque} in the extreme. Used to imply that a program has become so encrusted with the software equivalent of gold leaf and curlicues that they have completely swamped the underlying design. Called after the later and more extreme forms of Baroque architecture and decoration prevalent during the mid-1700s in Europe. Alan Perlis said: "Every program eventually becomes rococo, and then rubble." Compare {critical mass}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rogue: [UNIX] n. A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written under BSD UNIX and subsequently ported to other UNIX systems. The original BSD `curses(3)' screen-handling package was hacked together by Ken Arnold to support `rogue(6)' and has since become one of UNIX's most important and heavily used application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, and an entire subgenre of computer dungeon games all took off from the inspiration provided by `rogue(6)'. See {nethack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rolling seas of blinding thunder wash me in drown me under let me swim leagues of waves stillest waters rant and rave riding high upon your crest make me scream do your best wash me cleanse me strike me with your sea if i go down for the count break waves and mount as i travel to your destiny ripple under the moon, set me free %% room-temperature IQ: [IBM] quant. 80 or below. Used in describing the expected intelligence range of the {luser}. "Well, but how's this interface going to play with the room-temperature IQ crowd?" See {drool-proof paper}. This is a much more insulting phrase in countries that use Celsius thermometers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% root mode: n. Syn. with {wizard mode} or `wheel mode'. Like these, it is often generalized to describe privileged states in systems other than OSes. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% root: [UNIX] n. 1. The {superuser} account that ignores permission bits, user number 0 on a UNIX system. This account has the user name `root'. The term {avatar} is also used. 2. The top node of the system directory structure (home directory of the root user). 3. By extension, the privileged system-maintenance login on any OS. See {root mode}, {go root}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rot13: /rot ther'teen/ [USENET: from `rotate alphabet 13 places'] n., v. The simple Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each English letter with the one 13 places forward or back along the alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes "Gur ohgyre qvq vg!" Most USENET news reading and posting programs include a rot13 feature. It is used to enclose the text in a sealed wrapper that the reader must choose to open --- e.g., for posting things that might offend some readers, or answers to puzzles. A major advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is that it is self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding and decoding. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rotary debugger: [Commodore] n. Essential equipment for those late-night or early-morning debugging sessions. Mainly used as sustenance for the hacker. Comes in many decorator colors, such as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. See {pizza, ANSI standard}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% round tape: n. Industry-standard 1/2" magnetic tape (7- or 9-track) on traditional circular reels; oppose {square tape}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rows upon rows on top of rows of unmarching soldiers; white crosses borne as arms protruding skyward. virtual sea of shimmering white on green; blood stains, perhaps lack of, blinding. and there is hate between neighbors. -- Michael Paul Pierce March 1987 %% rude: [WPI] adj. 1. (of a program) Badly written. 2. Functionally poor, e.g., a program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions. Oppose {cuspy}. 3. Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem is said to be `rude'. Examples: programs that change tty modes without resetting them on exit, or windowing programs that keep forcing themselves to the top of the window stack. Compare {all-elbows}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% runes: pl.n. 1. Anything that requires {heavy wizardry} or {black art} to {parse}: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to read. Compare {casting the runes}, {Great Runes}. 2. Special display characters (for example, the high-half graphics on an IBM PC). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% runic: adj. Syn. {obscure}. VMS fans sometimes refer to UNIX as `Runix'; UNIX fans return the compliment by expanding VMS to `Very Messy Syntax' or `Vachement Mauvais Syst`eme' (French; lit. "Cowlike Bad System", idiomatically "Bitchy Bad System"). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% runner: very fast climber. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% rurp: sound made by a climber after downing a hasty lunch. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% rusty iron: n. Syn. {tired iron}. It has been claimed that this is the inevitable fate of {water MIPS}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% rusty memory: n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp. tape and the pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in {washing machine}s). Compare {donuts}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sacred: adj. Reserved for the exclusive use of something (an extension of the standard meaning). Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object, but clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to. The comment "Register 7 is sacred to the interrupt handler" appearing in a program would be interpreted by a hacker to mean that if any *other* part of the program changes the contents of register 7, dire consequences are likely to ensue. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% saga: [WPI] n. A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people. Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L. Steele: Jon L. White (login name JONL) and I (GLS) were office mates at MIT for many years. One April, we both flew from Boston to California for a week on research business, to consult face-to-face with some people at Stanford, particularly our mutual friend Richard P. Gabriel (RPG; see {Gabriel}). RPG picked us up at the San Francisco airport and drove us back to Palo Alto (going {logical} south on route 101, parallel to {El Camino Bignum}). Palo Alto is adjacent to Stanford University and about 40 miles south of San Francisco. We ate at The Good Earth, a `health food' restaurant, very popular, the sort whose milkshakes all contain honey and protein powder. JONL ordered such a shake --- the waitress claimed the flavor of the day was "lalaberry". I still have no idea what that might be, but it became a running joke. It was the color of raspberry, and JONL said it tasted rather bitter. I ate a better tostada there than I have ever had in a Mexican restaurant. After this we went to the local Uncle Gaylord's Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. They make ice cream fresh daily, in a variety of intriguing flavors. It's a chain, and they have a slogan: "If you don't live near an Uncle Gaylord's --- MOVE!" Also, Uncle Gaylord (a real person) wages a constant battle to force big-name ice cream makers to print their ingredients on the package (like air and plastic and other non-natural garbage). JONL and I had first discovered Uncle Gaylord's the previous August, when we had flown to a computer-science conference in Berkeley, California, the first time either of us had been on the West Coast. When not in the conference sessions, we had spent our time wandering the length of Telegraph Avenue, which (like Harvard Square in Cambridge) was lined with picturesque street vendors and interesting little shops. On that street we discovered Uncle Gaylord's Berkeley store. The ice cream there was very good. During that August visit JONL went absolutely bananas (so to speak) over one particular flavor, ginger honey. Therefore, after eating at The Good Earth --- indeed, after every lunch and dinner and before bed during our April visit --- a trip to Uncle Gaylord's (the one in Palo Alto) was mandatory. We had arrived on a Wednesday, and by Thursday evening we had been there at least four times. Each time, JONL would get ginger honey ice cream, and proclaim to all bystanders that "Ginger was the spice that drove the Europeans mad! That's why they sought a route to the East! They used it to preserve their otherwise off-taste meat." After the third or fourth repetition RPG and I were getting a little tired of this spiel, and began to paraphrase him: "Wow! Ginger! The spice that makes rotten meat taste good!" "Say! Why don't we find some dog that's been run over and sat in the sun for a week and put some *ginger* on it for dinner?!" "Right! With a lalaberry shake!" And so on. This failed to faze JONL; he took it in good humor, as long as we kept returning to Uncle Gaylord's. He loves ginger honey ice cream. Now RPG and his then-wife KBT (Kathy Tracy) were putting us up (putting up with us?) in their home for our visit, so to thank them JONL and I took them out to a nice French restaurant of their choosing. I unadventurously chose the filet mignon, and KBT had je ne sais quoi du jour, but RPG and JONL had lapin (rabbit). (Waitress: "Oui, we have fresh rabbit, fresh today." RPG: "Well, JONL, I guess we won't need any *ginger*!") We finished the meal late, about 11 P.M., which is 2 A.M Boston time, so JONL and I were rather droopy. But it wasn't yet midnight. Off to Uncle Gaylord's! Now the French restaurant was in Redwood City, north of Palo Alto. In leaving Redwood City, we somehow got onto route 101 going north instead of south. JONL and I wouldn't have known the difference had RPG not mentioned it. We still knew very little of the local geography. I did figure out, however, that we were headed in the direction of Berkeley, and half-jokingly suggested that we continue north and go to Uncle Gaylord's in Berkeley. RPG said "Fine!" and we drove on for a while and talked. I was drowsy, and JONL actually dropped off to sleep for 5 minutes. When he awoke, RPG said, "Gee, JONL, you must have slept all the way over the bridge!", referring to the one spanning San Francisco Bay. Just then we came to a sign that said "University Avenue". I mumbled something about working our way over to Telegraph Avenue; RPG said "Right!" and maneuvered some more. Eventually we pulled up in front of an Uncle Gaylord's. Now, I hadn't really been paying attention because I was so sleepy, and I didn't really understand what was happening until RPG let me in on it a few moments later, but I was just alert enough to notice that we had somehow come to the Palo Alto Uncle Gaylord's after all. JONL noticed the resemblance to the Palo Alto store, but hadn't caught on. (The place is lit with red and yellow lights at night, and looks much different from the way it does in daylight.) He said, "This isn't the Uncle Gaylord's I went to in Berkeley! It looked like a barn! But this place looks *just like* the one back in Palo Alto!" RPG deadpanned, "Well, this is the one *I* always come to when I'm in Berkeley. They've got two in San Francisco, too. Remember, they're a chain." JONL accepted this bit of wisdom. And he was not totally ignorant --- he knew perfectly well that University Avenue was in Berkeley, not far from Telegraph Avenue. What he didn't know was that there is a completely different University Avenue in Palo Alto. JONL went up to the counter and asked for ginger honey. The guy at the counter asked whether JONL would like to taste it first, evidently their standard procedure with that flavor, as not too many people like it. JONL said, "I'm sure I like it. Just give me a cone." The guy behind the counter insisted that JONL try just a taste first. "Some people think it tastes like soap." JONL insisted, "Look, I *love* ginger. I eat Chinese food. I eat raw ginger roots. I already went through this hassle with the guy back in Palo Alto. I *know* I like that flavor!" At the words "back in Palo Alto" the guy behind the counter got a very strange look on his face, but said nothing. KBT caught his eye and winked. Through my stupor I still hadn't quite grasped what was going on, and thought RPG was rolling on the floor laughing and clutching his stomach just because JONL had launched into his spiel ("makes rotten meat a dish for princes") for the forty-third time. At this point, RPG clued me in fully. RPG, KBT, and I retreated to a table, trying to stifle our chuckles. JONL remained at the counter, talking about ice cream with the guy b.t.c., comparing Uncle Gaylord's to other ice cream shops and generally having a good old time. At length the g.b.t.c. said, "How's the ginger honey?" JONL said, "Fine! I wonder what exactly is in it?" Now Uncle Gaylord publishes all his recipes and even teaches classes on how to make his ice cream at home. So the g.b.t.c. got out the recipe, and he and JONL pored over it for a while. But the g.b.t.c. could contain his curiosity no longer, and asked again, "You really like that stuff, huh?" JONL said, "Yeah, I've been eating it constantly back in Palo Alto for the past two days. In fact, I think this batch is about as good as the cones I got back in Palo Alto!" G.b.t.c. looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're *in* Palo Alto!" JONL turned slowly around, and saw the three of us collapse in a fit of giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, "I've been hacked!" [My spies on the West Coast inform me that there is a close relative of the raspberry found out there called an `ollalieberry' --- ESR] [Ironic footnote: it appears that the {meme} about ginger vs. rotting meat may be an urban legend. It's not borne out by an examination of medieval recipes or period purchase records for spices, and appears full-blown in the works of Samuel Pegge, a gourmand and notorious flake case who originated numerous food myths. --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sagan: /say'gn/ [from Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos"; think "billions and billions"] n. A large quantity of anything. "There's a sagan different ways to tweak EMACS." "The U.S. Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare --- hard to say which is more destructive." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% salescritter: /sayls'kri`tr/ n. Pejorative hackerism for a computer salesperson. Hackers tell the following joke: Q. What's the difference between a used-car dealer and a computer salesman? A. The used-car dealer knows he's lying. [Some versions add: ...and probably knows how to drive.] This reflects the widespread hacker belief that salescritters are self-selected for stupidity (after all, if they had brains and the inclination to use them, they'd be in programming). The terms `salesthing' and `salesdroid' are also common. Compare {marketroid}, {suit}, {droid}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% salsman: /salz'm*n/ v. To flood a mailing list or newsgroup with huge amounts of useless, trivial or redundant information. From the name of a hacker who has frequently done this on some widely distributed mailing lists. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% salt mines: n. Dense quarters housing large numbers of programmers working long hours on grungy projects, with some hope of seeing the end of the tunnel in N years. Noted for their absence of sunshine. Compare {playpen}, {sandbox}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% salt substrate: [MIT] n. Collective noun used to refer to potato chips, pretzels, saltines, or any other form of snack food designed primarily as a carrier for sodium chloride. From the technical term `chip substrate', used to refer to the silicon on the top of which the active parts of integrated circuits are deposited. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% same-day service: n. Ironic term used to describe long response time, particularly with respect to {{MS-DOS}} system calls (which ought to require only a tiny fraction of a second to execute). Such response time is a major incentive for programmers to write programs that are not {well-behaved}. See also {PC-ism}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% samurai: n. A hacker who hires out for legal cracking jobs, snooping for factions in corporate political fights, lawyers pursuing privacy-rights and First Amendment cases, and other parties with legitimate reasons to need an electronic locksmith. In 1991, mainstream media reported the existence of a loose-knit culture of samurai that meets electronically on BBS systems, mostly bright teenagers with personal micros; they have modeled themselves explicitly on the historical samurai of Japan and on the "net cowboys" of William Gibson's {cyberpunk} novels. Those interviewed claim to adhere to a rigid ethic of loyalty to their employers and to disdain the vandalism and theft practiced by criminal crackers as beneath them and contrary to the hacker ethic; some quote Miyamoto Musashi's `Book of Five Rings', a classic of historical samurai doctrine, in support of these principles. See also {Stupids}, {social engineering}, {cracker}, {hacker ethic, the}, and {dark-side hacker}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sandbender: [IBM] n. A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips. Compare {ironmonger}, {polygon pusher}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sandbox: n. 1. (also `sandbox, the') Common term for the R&D department at many software and computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments are likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth that research is a form of creative play. Compare {playpen}. 2. Syn. {link farm} -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sanity check: n. 1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else, e.g., a USENET posting) for completely stupid mistakes. Implies that the check is to make sure the author was sane when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific software relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected results, one might first look at the nesting of parentheses or the coding of the formula, as a `sanity check', before looking at the more complex I/O or data structure manipulation routines, much less the algorithm itself. Compare {reality check}. 2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that the program hasn't screwed up internally (producing an inconsistent value or state). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% say: vt. 1. To type to a terminal. "To list a directory verbosely, you have to say `ls -l'." Tends to imply a {newline}-terminated command (a `sentence'). 2. A computer may also be said to `say' things to you, even if it doesn't have a speech synthesizer, by displaying them on a terminal in response to your commands. Hackers find it odd that this usage confuses {mundane}s. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scag: vt. To destroy the data on a disk, either by corrupting the filesystem or by causing media damage. "That last power hit scagged the system disk." Compare {scrog}, {roach}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scanno: /skan'oh/ n. An error in a document caused by a scanner glitch, analgous to typo or {thinko}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% schroedinbug: /shroh'din-buhg/ [MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] n. A design or implementation bug in a program which doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years. Compare {heisenbug}, {Bohr bug}, {mandelbug}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% science-fiction fandom:: n. Another voluntary subculture having a very heavy overlap with hackerdom; most hackers read SF and/or fantasy fiction avidly, and many go to `cons' (SF conventions) or are involved in fandom-connected activities such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. Some hacker jargon originated in SF fandom; see {defenestration}, {great-wall}, {cyberpunk}, {h}, {ha ha only serious}, {IMHO}, {mundane}, {neep-neep}, {Real Soon Now}. Additionally, the jargon terms {cowboy}, {cyberspace}, {de-rezz}, {go flatline}, {ice}, {phage}, {virus}, {wetware}, {wirehead}, and {worm} originated in SF stories. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scram switch: [from the nuclear power industry] n. An emergency-power-off switch (see {Big Red Switch}), esp. one positioned to be easily hit by evacuating personnel. In general, this is *not* something you {frob} lightly; these often initiate expensive events (such as Halon dumps) and are installed in a {dinosaur pen} for use in case of electrical fire or in case some luckless {field servoid} should put 120 volts across himself while {Easter egging}. (See also {molly-guard}.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scratch monkey: n. As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a {scratch monkey}", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed. This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto ca. 1986. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when DEC {PM}ed the PDP-11 controlling her regulator (see also {provocative maintenance}). It is recorded that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the {field circus} manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local `humane' society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scratch: 1. [from `scratchpad'] adj. Describes a data structure or recording medium attached to a machine for testing or temporary-use purposes; one that can be {scribble}d on without loss. Usually in the combining forms `scratch memory', `scratch register', `scratch disk', `scratch tape', `scratch volume'. See {scratch monkey}. 2. [primarily IBM] vt. To delete (as in a file). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scream and die: v. Syn. {cough and die}, but connotes that an error message was printed or displayed before the program crashed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scree: sound made by a mo when its hair is being removed. see mohair. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% screw: [MIT] n. A {lose}, usually in software. Especially used for user-visible misbehavior caused by a bug or misfeature. This use has become quite widespread outside MIT. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% screwage: /skroo'*j/ n. Like {lossage} but connotes that the failure is due to a designed-in misfeature rather than a simple inadequacy or a mere bug. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scribble: n. To modify a data structure in a random and unintentionally destructive way. "Bletch! Somebody's disk-compactor program went berserk and scribbled on the i-node table." "It was working fine until one of the allocation routines scribbled on low core." Synonymous with {trash}; compare {mung}, which conveys a bit more intention, and {mangle}, which is more violent and final. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scrog: /skrog/ [Bell Labs] vt. To damage, trash, or corrupt a data structure. "The list header got scrogged." Also reported as `skrog', and ascribed to the comic strip "The Wizard of Id". Compare {scag}; possibly the two are related. Equivalent to {scribble} or {mangle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scrool: /skrool/ [from the pioneering Roundtable chat system in Houston ca. 1984; prob. originated as a typo for `scroll'] n. The log of old messages, available for later perusal or to help one get back in synch with the conversation. It was originally called the `scrool monster', because an early version of the roundtable software had a bug where it would dump all 8K of scrool on a user's terminal. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% scrozzle: /skroz'l/ vt. Used when a self-modifying code segment runs incorrectly and corrupts the running program or vital data. "The damn compiler scrozzled itself again!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% search-and-destroy mode: n. Hackerism for the search-and-replace facility in an editor, so called because an incautiously chosen match pattern can cause {infinite} damage. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% second-system effect: n. (sometimes, more euphoniously, `second-system syndrome') When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an {elephantine} feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic `The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering' (Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN 0-201-00650-2). It described the jump from a set of nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see {Brooks's Law}, {creeping elegance}, {creeping featurism}. See also {{Multics}}, {OS/2}, {X}, {software bloat}. This version of the jargon lexicon has been described (with altogether too much truth for comfort) as an example of second-system effect run amok on jargon-1.... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% secondary damage: n. When a fatal error occurs (esp. a {segfault}) the immediate cause may be that a pointer has been trashed due to a previous {fandango on core}. However, this fandango may have been due to an *earlier* fandango, so no amount of analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred. "The data structure was clobbered, but it was secondary damage." By extension, the corruption resulting from N cascaded fandangoes on core is `Nth-level damage'. There is at least one case on record in which 17 hours of {grovel}ling with `adb' actually dug up the underlying bug behind an instance of seventh-level damage! The hacker who accomplished this near-superhuman feat was presented with an award by his fellows. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% security through obscurity: alt. `security by obscurity' n. A name applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes --- namely, ignoring them and not documenting them and trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit them. This never works for long and occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the {RTM} worm of 1988 (see {Great Worm, the}), but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list --- and besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might begin to *expect* it and imagine that their warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of *right* to a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and *then* where would we be? Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the origin of this term. It has been claimed that it was first used in the USENET newsgroup in comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its UNIX-{clone} Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). {ITS} fans, on the other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to the incredibly paranoid {Multics} people down the hall, for whom security was everything. In the ITS culture it referred to (1) the fact that that by the time a tourist figured out how to make trouble he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it, because he felt part of the community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the documentation and obscurity of many commands. One instance of *deliberate* security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the running ITS system ({altmode} altmode control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you actually typed alt alt ^D, that set a flag which would prevent patching the system even if you later got it right. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% security through obscurity: n. A name applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes --- namely, ignoring them and not documenting them and trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit them. This never works for long and occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the {RTM} worm of 1988, but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list --- and besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might begin to *expect* it and imagine that their warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of *right* to a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and then where would we be? Historical note: It is claimed (with dissent from {{ITS}} fans who say they used to use `security through obscurity' in a positive sense) that this term was first used in the USENET newsgroup in comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its UNIX-{clone} Aegis/DomainOS. They didn't change a thing. %% segfault: n.,vi. Syn. {segment}, {seggie}. %% seggie: /seg'ee/ [UNIX] n. Shorthand for {segmentation fault} reported from Britain. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% segment: /seg'ment/ vi. To experience a {segmentation fault}. Confusingly, this is often pronounced more like the noun `segment' than like mainstream v. segment; this is because it is actually a noun shorthand that has been verbed. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% segmentation fault: n. [UNIX] 1. An error in which a running program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and {core dump}s with a segmentation violation error. 2. To lose a train of thought or a line of reasoning. Also uttered as an exclamation at the point of befuddlement. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% segv: /seg'vee/ n.,vi. Yet another synonym for {segmentation fault} (actually, in this case, `segmentation violation'). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% self-reference: n. See {self-reference}. %% selvage: /sel'v*j/ [from sewing] n. See {chad} (sense 1). %% semi-infinite: n. See {infinite}. %% semi: /se'mee/ or /se'mi:/ 1. n. Abbreviation for `semicolon', when speaking. "Commands to {grind} are prefixed by semi-semi-star" means that the prefix is `;;*', not 1/4 of a star. 2. A prefix used with words such as `immediately' as a qualifier. "When is the system coming up?" "Semi-immediately." (That is, maybe not for an hour.) "We did consider that possibility semi-seriously." See also {infinite}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% semper en excretus %% semper ubi sub ubi %% senior bit: [IBM] n. Syn. {meta bit}. %% server: n. A kind of {daemon} that performs a service for the requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the server runs. A particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with `name servers', `domain servers', `news servers', `finger servers', and the like. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sex changer: n. Syn. {gender mender}. %% shambolic link: /sham-bol'ik link/ n. A UNIX symbolic link, particularly when it confuses you, points to nothing at all, or results in you ending up in some completely unexpected part of the filesystem.... -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shared novel complete with scenery, `foreground characters' that may be personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common `background characters' manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a character without the consent of the person who `owns' it. Otherwise anything goes. See {bamf}, {cyberspace}. %% shareware: /sheir'weir/ n. {Freeware} (sense 1) for which the author requests some payment, usually in the accompanying documentation files or in an announcement made by the software itself. Such payment may or may not buy additional support or functionality. See also {careware}, {charityware}, {crippleware}, {guiltware}, {postcardware}, and {-ware}; compare {payware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shawangunks: gunks that belong to shawans. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% she shells (shee shelz) n. pl.: plastic tampon applicators washed up on the beach %% shelfware: /shelfweir/ n. Software purchased on a whim (by an individual user) or in accordance with policy (by a corporation or government agency), but not actually required for any particular use. Therefore, it often ends up on some shelf. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shell out: [UNIX] n. To spawn an interactive {subshell} from within a program (e.g., a mailer or editor). "Bang foo runs foo in a subshell, while bang alone shells out." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shell: [orig. {{Multics}} techspeak, widely propagated via UNIX] n. 1. [techspeak] The command interpreter used to pass commands to an operating system; so called because it is the part of the operating system that interfaces with the outside world. 2. More generally, any interface program that mediates access to a special resource or {server} for convenience, efficiency, or security reasons; for this meaning, the usage is usually `a shell around' whatever. This sort of program is also called a `wrapper'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shift left (or right) logical: [from any of various machines' instruction sets] 1. vi. To move oneself to the left (right). To move out of the way. 2. imper. "Get out of that (my) seat! You can shift to that empty one to the left (right)." Often used without the `logical', or as `left shift' instead of `shift left'. Sometimes heard as LSH /lish/, from the {PDP-10} instruction set. See {Programmer's Cheer}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shim: n. A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired memory alignment or other addressing property. For example, the PDP-11 UNIX linker, in split I&D (instructions and data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with the C null pointer). See also {loose bytes}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shitogram: /shit'oh-gram/ n. A *really* nasty piece of email. Compare {nastygram}, {flame}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shock: large fish that can bite your leg off. chiefly of concern to sea cliff climbers. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% short card: n. A half-length IBM PC expansion card or adapter that will fit in one of the two short slots located towards the right rear of a standard chassis (tucked behind the floppy disk drives). See also {tall card}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shotgun debugging: n. The software equivalent of {Easter egging}; the making of relatively undirected changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of existence. This almost never works, and usually introduces more bugs. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% showstopper: n. A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can go on. Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers to something stunningly *good*. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% shriek: n. See {excl}. Occasional CMU usage, also in common use among APL fans and mathematicians, especially category theorists. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sidecar: n. 1. Syn. {slap on the side}. Esp. used of add-ons for the late and unlamented IBM PCjr. 2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side of an Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the company's own rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it was by {magic}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sig block: /sig blok/ [UNIX; often written `.sig' there] n. Short for `signature', used specifically to refer to the electronic signature block that most UNIX mail- and news-posting software will {automagically} append to outgoing mail and news. The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an ASCII logo or one's choice of witty sayings (see {sig quote}, {fool file, the}); but many consider large sigs a waste of {bandwidth}, and it has been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's longevity and level of prestige on the net. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sig quote: /sig kwoht/ [USENET] n. A maxim, quote, proverb, joke, or slogan embedded in one's {sig block} and intended to convey something of one's philosophical stance, pet peeves, or sense of humor. "Calm down, it's only ones and zeroes." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sig virus: n. A parasitic {meme} embedded in a {sig block}. There was a {meme plague} or fad for these on USENET in late 1991. Most were equivalents of "I am a .sig virus. Please reproduce me in your .sig block.". Of course, the .sig virus's memetic hook is the giggle value of going along with the gag; this, however, was a self-limiting phenomenon as more and more people picked up on the idea. There were creative variants on it; some people stuck `sig virus antibody' texts in their sigs, and there was at least one instance of a sig virus eater. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% signal-to-noise ratio: [from analog electronics] n. Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning. `Signal' refers to useful information conveyed by some communications medium, and `noise' to anything else on that medium. Hence a low ratio implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Figures for such metaphorical ratios are never given. The term is most often applied to {USENET} newsgroups during {flame war}s. Compare {bandwidth}. See also {coefficient of X}, {lost in the noise}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% silicon foundry: n. A company that {fab}s chips to the designs of others. As of the late 1980s, the combination of silicon foundries and good computer-aided design software made it much easier for hardware-designing startup companies to come into being. The downside of using a silicon foundry is that the distance from the actual chip-fabrication processes reduces designers' control of detail. This is somewhat analogous to the use of {HLL}s versus coding in assembler. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% silicon: n. Hardware, esp. ICs or microprocessor-based computer systems (compare {iron}). Contrasted with software. See also {sandbender}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sillema sillema nika su (translation: look it up...hint-fin) %% silly walk: [from Monty Python's Flying Circus] vi. 1. A ridiculous procedure required to accomplish a task. Like {grovel}, but more {random} and humorous. "I had to silly-walk through half the /usr directories to find the maps file." 2. Syn. {fandango on core}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% silo: n. The FIFO input-character buffer in an RS-232 line card. So called from DEC terminology used on DH and DZ line cards for the VAX and PDP-11, presumably because it was a storage space for fungible stuff that you put in the top and took out the bottom. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% since time T equals minus infinity: adj. A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed. Usually the word `time' is omitted. See also {time T}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sitename: /si:t'naym/ [UNIX/Internet] n. The unique electronic name of a computer system, used to identify it in UUCP mail, USENET, or other forms of electronic information interchange. The folklore interest of sitenames stems from the creativity and humor they often display. Interpreting a sitename is not unlike interpreting a vanity license plate; one has to mentally unpack it, allowing for mono-case and length restrictions and the lack of whitespace. Hacker tradition deprecates dull, institutional-sounding names in favor of punchy, humorous, and clever coinages (except that it is considered appropriate for the official public gateway machine of an organization to bear the organization's name or acronym). Mythological references, cartoon characters, animal names, and allusions to SF or fantasy literature are probably the most popular sources for sitenames (in roughly descending order). The obligatory comment when discussing these is Harris's Lament: "All the good ones are taken!" See also {network address}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sitting down can have unexpected results %% ski mountaineering: simplified way to move fast, fall a short distance, and remain uninjured. usually. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% skrog: v. Syn. {scrog}. %% skulker: n. Syn. {prowler}. %% slack: n. 1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used to store useful information. The techspeak equivalent is `internal fragmentation'. 2. In the theology of the {Church of the SubGenius}, a mystical substance or quality which is the prerequisite of all human happiness. Since UNIX files are stored compactly, except for the unavoidable wastage in the last block or fragment, it might be said that "Unix has no slack". See {ha ha only serious}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% slap on the side: n. (also called a {sidecar}, or abbreviated `SOTS'.) A type of external expansion hardware marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g., Commodore for the Amiga 500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called `PCjr'). Various SOTS boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive controllers, and conventional expansion slots. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% slash: n. Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% slave of fashion. %% sleep: vi. 1. [techspeak] On a timesharing system, a process that relinquishes its claim on the scheduler until some given event occurs or a specified time delay elapses is said to `go to sleep'. 2. In jargon, used very similarly to v. {block}; also in `sleep on', syn. with `block on'. Often used to indicate that the speaker has relinquished a demand for resources until some (possibly unspecified) external event: "They can't get the fix I've been asking for into the next release, so I'm going to sleep on it until the release, then start hassling them again." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% slim: n. A small, derivative change (e.g., to code). %% sling: versatile strap dating to biblical times. when david the israelite descended into the vale of elah, after a hard day of climbing, he used a sling to slay the philistine goliath. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% slop: n. 1. A one-sided {fudge factor}, that is, an allowance for error but in only one of two directions. For example, if you need a piece of wire 10 feet long and have to guess when you cut it, you make very sure to cut it too long, by a large amount if necessary, rather than too short by even a little bit, because you can always cut off the slop but you can't paste it back on again. When discrete quantities are involved, slop is often introduced to avoid the possibility of being on the losing side of a {fencepost error}. 2. The percentage of `extra' code generated by a compiler over the size of equivalent assembler code produced by {hand-hacking}; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn't do it yourself. This number is often used as a measure of the goodness of a compiler; slop below 5% is very good, and 10% is usually acceptable. With modern compiler technology, esp. on RISC machines, the compiler's slop may actually be *negative*; that is, humans may be unable to generate code as good. This is one of the reasons assembler programming is no longer common. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% slopsucker: /slop'suhk-r/ n. A lowest-priority task that must wait around until everything else has `had its fill' of machine resources. Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the task allowed to `suck up the slop'. Also called a `hungry puppy' or `bottom feeder'. One common variety of slopsucker hunts for large prime numbers. Compare {background}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% slurp: vt. To read a large data file entirely into {core} before working on it. This may be contrasted with the strategy of reading a small piece at a time, processing it, and then reading the next piece. "This program slurps in a 1K-by-1K matrix and does an FFT." See also {sponge}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smart terminal: n. 1. A terminal that has enough computing capability to render graphics or to offload some kind of front-end processing from the computer it talks to. The development of workstations and personal computers has made this term and the product it describes semi-obsolescent, but one may still hear variants of the phrase `act like a smart terminal' used to describe the behavior of workstations or PCs with respect to programs that execute almost entirely out of a remote {server}'s storage, using said devices as displays. Compare {glass tty}. 2. obs. Any terminal with an addressable cursor; the opposite of a {glass tty}. Today, a terminal with merely an addressable cursor, but with none of the more-powerful features mentioned in sense 1, is called a {dumb terminal}. There is a classic quote from Rob Pike (inventor of the {blit} terminal): "A smart terminal is not a smart*ass* terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate." This illustrates a common design problem: The attempt to make peripherals (or anything else) intelligent sometimes results in finicky, rigid `special features' that become just so much dead weight if you try to use the device in any way the designer didn't anticipate. Flexibility and programmability, on the other hand, are *really* smart. Compare {hook}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smart: adj. Said of a program that does the {Right Thing} in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a difference between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in particular, there do not exist any intelligent programs (yet --- see {AI-complete}). Compare {robust} (smart programs can be {brittle}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smash case: vi. To lose or obliterate the uppercase/lowercase distinction in text input. "MS-DOS will automatically smash case in the names of all the files you create." Compare {fold case}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smash the stack: [C programming] n. On many C implementations it is possible to corrupt the execution stack by writing past the end of an array declared `auto' in a routine. Code that does this is said to `smash the stack', and can cause return from the routine to jump to a random address. This can produce some of the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind. Variants include `trash' the stack, {scribble} the stack, {mangle} the stack; the term *{mung} the stack is not used, as this is never done intentionally. See {spam}; see also {aliasing bug}, {fandango on core}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smear: long, vertical mark left on rock surface by a climber whose friction move has failed. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% smiley: n. See {emoticon}. %% smoke and mirrors: n. Marketing deceptions. The term is mainstream in this general sense. Among hackers it's strongly associated with bogus demos and crocked {benchmark}s (see also {MIPS}, {machoflops}). "They claim their new box cranks 5 MIPS for under $5000, but didn't specify the instruction mix --- sounds like smoke and mirrors to me." The phrase has been said to derive from carnie slang for magic acts and `freak show' displays that depend on `trompe l'oeil' effects, but also calls to mind the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") to whom mass human sacrifices were regularly made. Upon hearing about a rigged demo or yet another round of fantasy-based marketing promises hackers often feel similarly disheartened. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smoke test: n. 1. A rudimentary form of testing applied to electronic equipment following repair or reconfiguration, in which power is applied and the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other dramatic signs of fundamental failure. See {magic smoke}. 2. By extension, the first run of a piece of software after construction or a critical change. See and compare {reality check}. There is an interesting semi-parallel to this term among typographers and printers: When new typefaces are being punch-cut by hand, a `smoke test' (hold the letter in candle smoke, then press it onto paper) is used to check out new dies. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smokies: little cigars, cigarettes, etc. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% smoking clover: [ITS] n. A {display hack} originally due to Bill Gosper. Many convergent lines are drawn on a color monitor in {AOS} mode (so that every pixel struck has its color incremented). The lines all have one endpoint in the middle of the screen; the other endpoints are spaced one pixel apart around the perimeter of a large square. The color map is then repeatedly rotated. This results in a striking, rainbow-hued, shimmering four-leaf clover. Gosper joked about keeping it hidden from the FDA (the U.S.'s Food and Drug Administration) lest its hallucinogenic properties cause it to be banned. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% smurf: /smerf/ [from the soc.motss newsgroup on USENET, after some obnoxiously gooey cartoon characters] n. A newsgroup regular with a habitual style that is irreverent, silly, and cute. Like many other hackish terms for people, this one may be praise or insult depending on who uses it. In general, being referred to as a smurf is probably not going to make your day unless you've previously adopted the label yourself in a spirit of irony. Compare {old fart}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snail-mail: n. Paper mail, as opposed to electronic. Sometimes written as the single word `SnailMail'. One's postal address is, correspondingly, a `snail address'. Derives from earlier coinage `USnail' (from `U.S. Mail'), for which there have been parody posters and stamps made. Oppose {email}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snail: vt. To {snail-mail} something. "Snail me a copy of those graphics, will you?" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snap: v. To replace a pointer to a pointer with a direct pointer; to replace an old address with the forwarding address found there. If you telephone the main number for an institution and ask for a particular person by name, the operator may tell you that person's extension before connecting you, in the hopes that you will `snap your pointer' and dial direct next time. The underlying metaphor may be that of a rubber band stretched through a number of intermediate points; if you remove all the thumbtacks in the middle, it snaps into a straight line from first to last. See {chase pointers}. Often, the behavior of a {trampoline} is to perform an error check once and then snap the pointer that invoked it so as henceforth to bypass the trampoline (and its one-shot error check). In this context one also speaks of `snapping links'. For example, in a Lisp implementation, a function interface trampoline might check to make sure that the caller is passing the correct number of arguments; if it is, and if the caller and the callee are both compiled, then snapping the link allows that particular path to use a direct procedure-call instruction with no further overhead. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snarf & barf: /snarf'n-barf`/ n. Under a {WIMP environment}, the act of grabbing a region of text and then stuffing the contents of that region into another region (or the same one) to avoid retyping a command line. In the late 1960s, this was a mainstream expression for an `eat now, regret it later' cheap-restaurant expedition. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snarf down: v. To {snarf}, with the connotation of absorbing, processing, or understanding. "I'll snarf down the latest version of the {nethack} user's guide --- It's been a while since I played last and I don't know what's changed recently." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snarf: /snarf/ vt. 1. To grab, esp. to grab a large document or file for the purpose of using it with or without the author's permission. See also {BLT}. 2. [in the UNIX community] To fetch a file or set of files across a network. See also {blast}. This term was mainstream in the late 1960s, meaning `to eat piggishly'. It may still have this connotation in context. "He's in the snarfing phase of hacking --- {FTP}ing megs of stuff a day." 3. To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or politesse (but not quite by stealing). "They were giving away samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them." 4. Syn. for {slurp}. "This program starts by snarfing the entire database into core, then...." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snark: [Lewis Carroll, via the Michigan Terminal System] n. 1. A system failure. When a user's process bombed, the operator would get the message "Help, Help, Snark in MTS!" 2. More generally, any kind of unexplained or threatening event on a computer (especially if it might be a boojum). Often used to refer to an event or a log file entry that might indicate an attempted security violation. See {snivitz}. 3. UUCP name of snark.thyrsus.com, home site of the Jargon File 2.*.* versions (i.e., this lexicon). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sneakernet: /snee'ker-net/ n. Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs." Also called `Tennis-Net', `Armpit-Net', `Floppy-Net' or `Shoenet'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sniff: v.,n. Synonym for {poll}. %% snivitz: /sniv'itz/ n. A hiccup in hardware or software; a small, transient problem of unknown origin (less serious than a {snark}). Compare {glitch}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% snow bridge: card game played on a glacier. as in other alpine endeavors, tricks are common, and there is always a dummy. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% social engineering: n. Term used among {cracker}s and {samurai} for cracking techniques that rely on weaknesses in {wetware} rather than software; the aim is to trick people into revealing passwords or other information that compromises a target system's security. Classic scams include phoning up a mark who has the required information and posing as a field service tech or a fellow employee with an urgent access problem. See also the {tiger team} story in the {patch} entry. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% social science number: [IBM] n. A statistic that is {content-free}, or nearly so. A measure derived via methods of questionable validity from data of a dubious and vague nature. Predictively, having a social science number in hand is seldom much better than nothing, and can be considerably worse. {Management} loves them. See also {numbers}, {math-out}, {pretty pictures}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% soft boot: n. See {boot}. %% softcopy: /soft'ko-pee/ n. [by analogy with `hardcopy'] A machine-readable form of corresponding hardcopy. See {bits}, {machinable}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% software bloat: n. The results of {second-system effect} or {creeping featuritis}. Commonly cited examples include `ls(1)', {X}, {BSD}, {Missed'em-five}, and {OS/2}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% software rot: n. Term used to describe the tendency of software that has not been used in a while to {lose}; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to {bit rot}. More commonly, `software rot' strikes when a program's assumptions become out of date. If the design was insufficiently {robust}, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways. For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, most will succumb to software rot when their 2-digit year counters {wrap around} at the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot be distinguished. Historical note: Software rot in an even funnier sense than the mythical one was a real problem on early research computers (e.g., the R1; see {grind crank}). If a program that depended on a peculiar instruction hadn't been run in quite a while, the user might discover that the opcodes no longer did the same things they once did. ("Hey, so-and-so needs an instruction to do such-and-such. We can {snarf} this opcode, right? No one uses it.") Another classic example of this sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a simple way to double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a PDP-6, so he patched the hardware. Unfortunately, this broke some fragile timing software in a music-playing program, throwing its output out of tune. This was fixed by adding a defensive initialization routine to compare the speed of a timing loop with the real-time clock; in other words, it figured out how fast the PDP-6 was that day, and corrected appropriately. Compare {bit rot}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% softwarily: /soft-weir'i-lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to software. "The system is softwarily unreliable." The adjective `softwary' is *not* used. See {hardwarily}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% softy: [IBM] n. Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% some dragons can fly %% some monsters are greedy %% some random X: adj. Used to indicate a member of class X, with the implication that Xs are interchangeable. "I think some random cracker tripped over the guest timeout last night." See also {J. Random}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% something went wrong. we try again... %% sorcerer's apprentice mode: [from Friedrich Schiller's `Der Zauberlehrling' via the film "Fantasia"] n. A bug in a protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received, triggers the same bug. Used esp. of such behavior caused by {bounce message} loops in {email} software. Compare {broadcast storm}, {network meltdown}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% source of all good bits: n. A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a {guru} might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secretary. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% space-cadet keyboard: n. A now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of {EMACS}. It was equipped with no fewer than *seven* shift keys: four keys for {bucky bits} (`control', `meta', `hyper', and `super') and three like regular shift keys, called `shift', `top', and `front'. Many keys had three symbols on them: a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek letter on the front. For example, the `L' key had an `L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. By pressing this key with the right hand while playing an appropriate `chord' with the left hand on the shift keys, you can get the following results: L lowercase l shift-L uppercase L front-L lowercase lambda front-shift-L uppercase lambda top-L two-way arrow (front and shift are ignored) And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you could type over 8000 different characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command meanings of that many characters if it reduced typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to operate. See {bucky bits}, {cokebottle}, {double bucky}, {meta bit}, {quadruple bucky}. Note: early versions of this entry incorrectly identified the space-cadet keyboard with the `Knight keyboard'. Though both were designed by Tom Knight, the latter term was properly applied only to a keyboard used for ITS on the PDP-10 and modeled on the Stanford keyboard (as described under {bucky bits}). The true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the Knight keyboard. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spaghetti code: n. Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other `unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym `kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such code has many jumps in it. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spaghetti inheritance: n. [encountered among users of object-oriented languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the sake of reusing their code. Coined in a (successful) attempt to discourage such practice, through guilt-by-association with {spaghetti code}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spam: [from the {MUD} community] vt. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also {buffer overflow}, {overrun screw}, {smash the stack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% special-case: vt. To write unique code to handle input to or situations arising in program that are somehow distinguished from normal processing. This would be used for processing of mode switches or interrupt characters in an interactive interface (as opposed, say, to text entry or normal commands), or for processing of {hidden flag}s in the input of a batch program or {filter}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% speedometer: n. A pattern of lights displayed on a linear set of LEDs (today) or nixie tubes (yesterday, on ancient mainframes). The pattern is shifted left every N times the software goes through its main loop. A swiftly moving pattern indicates that the system is mostly idle; the speedometer slows down as the system becomes overloaded. The speedometer on Sun Microsystems hardware bounces back and forth like the eyes on one of the Cylons from the wretched "Battlestar Galactica" TV series. Historical note: One computer, the Honeywell 6000 (later GE 600) actually had an *analog* speedometer on the front panel, calibrated in instructions executed per second. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spell: n. Syn. {incantation}. %% spiffy: /spi'fee/ adj. 1. Said of programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. "Have you seen the spiffy {X} version of {empire} yet?" 2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to #1. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spike: v. To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes temporary) device which forces a specific result. The word is used in several industries; telephone engineers refer to spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the relay in either the closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming environments it normally refers to a temporary change, usually for testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change which would be called {hardwired}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spin: vi. Equivalent to {buzz}. More common among C and UNIX programmers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spl: /S-P-L/ [abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way traditional UNIX kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code at high interrupt levels. Used in jargon to describe the act of tuning in or tuning out ordinary communication. Classically, spl levels run from 1 to 7; "Fred's at spl 6 today." would mean that he is very hard to interrupt. "Wait till I finish this; I'll spl down then." See also {interrupts locked out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% splat: n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk (`*') character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the `squashed-bug' appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers. 2. [MIT] Name used by some people for the `#' character (ASCII 0100011). 3. [Rochester Institute of Technology] The {feature key} on a Mac (same as {alt}, sense 2). 4. [Stanford] Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This character is also called `blobby' and `frob', among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for `tensor product'. 5. [Stanford] Name for the semi-mythical extended ASCII circle-plus character. 6. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs whatever the local interpretation of `splat' is. With ITS and WAITS gone, senses 4--6 are now nearly obsolete. See also {{ASCII}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spod: [Great Britain] n. A lower form of life found on {talker system}s and {MUD}s. The spod has few friends in {RL} and uses talkers instead, finding communication easier and preferable over the net. He has all the negative traits of the {computer geek} without having any interest in computers per se. Lacking any knowledge of or interest in how networks work, and considering his access a God-given right, he is a major irritant to sysadmins, clogging up lines in order to reach new MUDs, following passed-on instructions on how to sneak his way onto Internet ("Wow! It's in America!") and complaining when he is not allowed to use busy routes. A true spod will start any conversation with "Are you male or female?" (and follow it up with "Got any good numbers/IDs/passwords?") and will not talk to someone physically present in the same terminal room until they log onto the same machine that he is using and enter talk mode. Compare {newbie}, {tourist}, {weenie}, {twink}, {terminal junkie}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sponge: [UNIX] n. A special case of a {filter} that reads its entire input before writing any output; the canonical example is a sort utility. Unlike most filters, a sponge can conveniently overwrite the input file with the output data stream. If your file system has versioning (as ITS did and VMS does now) the sponge/filter distinction loses its usefulness, because directing filter output would just write a new version. See also {slurp}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spooge: /spooj/ 1. n. Inexplicable or arcane code, or random and probably incorrect output from a computer program. 2. vi. To generate spooge (sense 1). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spool file: n. Any file to which data is {spool}ed to await the next stage of processing. Especially used in circumstances where spooling the data copes with a mismatch between speeds in two devices or pieces of software. For example, when you send mail under UNIX, it's typically copied to a spool file to await a transport {demon}'s attentions. This is borderline techspeak. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% spool: [from early IBM `Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line', but this acronym is widely thought to have been contrived for effect] vt. To send files to some device or program (a `spooler') that queues them up and does something useful with them later. The spooler usually understood is the `print spooler' controlling output of jobs to a printer, but the term has been used in connection with other peripherals (especially plotters and graphics devices) and occasionally even for input devices. See also {demon}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sprachgefuhl (2 dots over the u) - n: a feeling for what is linguistically effective or appropriate %% square tape: n. Mainframe magnetic tape cartridges for use with IBM 3480 or compatible tape drives. The term comes from the square (actually rectangular) shape of the cartridges; contrast {round tape}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stack puke: n. Some processor architectures are said to `puke their guts onto the stack' to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a while. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stack: ERROR: mismatch above (Everything ok) %% stack: n. A person's stack is the set of things he or she has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack. "I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my stack." "I haven't done it yet because every time I pop my stack something new gets pushed." If you are interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, "My stack overflowed" means "I forget what we were talking about." The implication is that more items were pushed onto the stack than could be remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The usual physical example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates or trays sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest spring up a bit. See also {push} and {pop}. At MIT, {pdl} used to be a more common synonym for {stack} in all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere else {stack} seems to be the preferred term. {Knuth} (`The Art of Computer Programming', second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says: Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists! -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stale pointer bug: n. Synonym for {aliasing bug} used esp. among microcomputer hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stance: pose struck by a climber when an appreciative audience is watching. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% state: n. 1. Condition, situation. "What's the state of your latest hack?" "It's winning away." "The system tried to read and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totally wedged state." The standard question "What's your state?" means "What are you doing?" or "What are you about to do?" Typical answers are "about to gronk out", or "hungry". Another standard question is "What's the state of the world?", meaning "What's new?" or "What's going on?". The more terse and humorous way of asking these questions would be "State-p?". Another way of phrasing the first question under sense 1 would be "state-p latest hack?". 2. Information being maintained in non-permanent memory (electronic or human). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% steam-powered: adj. Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This term does not have a strong negative loading and may even be used semi-affectionately for something that clanks and wheezes a lot but hangs in there doing the job. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stiffy: [University of Lowell, Massachusetts.] n. 3.5-inch {microfloppies}, so called because their jackets are more firm than those of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch floppy. Elsewhere this might be called a `firmy'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stir-fried random: alt. `stir-fried mumble' n. Term used for the best dish of many of those hackers who can cook. Consists of random fresh veggies and meat wokked with random spices. Tasty and economical. See {random}, {great-wall}, {ravs}, {{laser chicken}}, {{oriental food}}; see also {mumble}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stomp on: vt. To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually automatically. "All the work I did this weekend got stomped on last night by the nightly server script." Compare {scribble}, {mangle}, {trash}, {scrog}, {roach}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stone knives and bearskins: [ITS, prob. from the Star Trek Classic episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"] n. A term traditionally used by {ITS} fans to describe (and deprecate) computing environments they regard as less advanced, with the (often correct) implication that said environments were grotesquely primitive in light of what is known about good ways to design things. As in "Don't get too used to the facilities here. Once you leave MIT it's stone knives and bearskins as far as the eye can see". Compare {steam-powered}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stoppage: /sto'p*j/ n. Extreme {lossage} that renders something (usually something vital) completely unusable. "The recent system stoppage was caused by a {fried} transformer." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% store: [prob. from techspeak `main store'] n. Preferred Commonwealth synonym for {core}. Thus, `bringing a program into store' means not that one is returning shrink-wrapped software but that a program is being {swap}ped in. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stray interrupt at %% stroke: n. Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% strudel: n. Common (spoken) name for the at-sign (`@', ASCII 1000000) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stubroutine: /stuhb'roo-teen/ [contraction of `stub subroutine'] n. Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine that is to be written or fleshed out later. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% studlycaps: /stuhd'lee-kaps/ n. A hackish form of silliness similar to {BiCapitalization} for trademarks, but applied randomly and to arbitrary text rather than to trademarks. ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stunning: adj. Mind-bogglingly stupid. Usually used in sarcasm. "You want to code *what* in ADA? That's ... a stunning idea!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% stupid-sort: n. Syn. {bogo-sort}. %% stupidity. %% subshell: /suhb'shel/ [UNIX, MS-DOS] n. An OS command interpreter (see {shell}) spawned from within a program, such that exit from the command interpreter returns one to the parent program in a state that allows it to continue execution. Compare {shell out}; oppose {chain}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sucking mud: [Applied Data Research] adj. (also `pumping mud') Crashed or wedged. Usually said of a machine that provides some service to a network, such as a file server. This Dallas regionalism derives from the East Texas oilfield lament, "Shut 'er down, Ma, she's a-suckin' mud". Often used as a query. "We are going to reconfigure the network, are you ready to suck mud?" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sufficiently small: adj. Syn. {suitably small}. %% suit: n. 1. Ugly and uncomfortable `business clothing' often worn by non-hackers. Invariably worn with a `tie', a strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the behavior of suit-wearers. Compare {droid}. 2. A person who habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. See {loser}, {burble}, {management}, {Stupids}, {SNAFU principle}, and {brain-damaged}. English, by the way, is relatively kind; our Moscow correspondent informs us that the corresponding idiom in Russian hacker jargon is `sovok', lit. a tool for grabbing garbage. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% suitable win: n. See {win}. %% suitably small: [perverted from mathematical jargon] adj. An expression used ironically to characterize unquantifiable behavior that differs from expected or required behavior. For example, suppose a newly created program came up with a correct full-screen display, and one publicly exclaimed: "It works!" Then, if the program dumps core on the first mouse click, one might add: "Well, for suitably small values of `works'." Compare the characterization of pi under {{random numbers}}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sun balls: painful affliction common to male alpinists who climb nude. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% sun lounge: [Great Britain] n. The room where all the Sun workstations live. The humor in this term comes from the fact that it's also in mainstream use to describe a solarium, and all those Sun workstations clustered together give off an amazing amount of heat. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sun-stools: n. Unflattering hackerism for SunTools, a pre-X windowing environment notorious in its day for size, slowness, and misfeatures. {X}, however, is larger and slower; see {second-system effect}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sunspots: n. 1. Notional cause of an odd error. "Why did the program suddenly turn the screen blue?" "Sunspots, I guess." 2. Also the cause of {bit rot} --- from the myth that sunspots will increase {cosmic rays}, which can flip single bits in memory. See {cosmic rays}, {phase of the moon}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% superprogrammer: n. A prolific programmer; one who can code exceedingly well and quickly. Not all hackers are superprogrammers, but many are. (Productivity can vary from one programmer to another by three orders of magnitude. For example, one programmer might be able to write an average of 3 lines of working code in one day, while another, with the proper tools, might be able to write 3,000. This range is astonishing; it is matched in very few other areas of human endeavor.) The term `superprogrammer' is more commonly used within such places as IBM than in the hacker community. It tends to stress na"ive measures of productivity and to underweight creativity, ingenuity, and getting the job *done* --- and to sidestep the question of whether the 3,000 lines of code do more or less useful work than three lines that do the {Right Thing}. Hackers tend to prefer the terms {hacker} and {wizard}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% superuser: [UNIX] n. Syn. {root}, {avatar}. This usage has spread to non-UNIX environments; the superuser is any account with all {wheel} bits on. A more specific term than {wheel}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% support: n. After-sale handholding; something many software vendors promise but few deliver. To hackers, most support people are useless --- because by the time a hacker calls support he or she will usually know the relevant manuals better than the support people (sadly, this is *not* a joke or exaggeration). A hacker's idea of `support' is a t^ete-`a-t^ete with the software's designer. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sureg: SEG_USR bit on in SCR segment number not found %% sureg: user is segmented %% swab: /swob/ [From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 `SWAp Byte' instruction, as immortalized in the `dd(1)' option `conv=swab' (see {dd})] 1. vt. To solve the {NUXI problem} by swapping bytes in a file. 2. n. The program in V7 UNIX used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also {big-endian}, {little-endian}, {middle-endian}, {bytesexual}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% swap space: n. Storage space, especially temporary storage space used during a move or reconfiguration. "I'm just using that corner of the machine room for swap space." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% swap: vt. 1. [techspeak] To move information from a fast-access memory to a slow-access memory (`swap out'), or vice versa (`swap in'). Often refers specifically to the use of disks as `virtual memory'. As pieces of data or program are needed, they are swapped into {core} for processing; when they are no longer needed they may be swapped out again. 2. The jargon use of these terms analogizes people's short-term memories with core. Cramming for an exam might be spoken of as swapping in. If you temporarily forget someone's name, but then remember it, your excuse is that it was swapped out. To `keep something swapped in' means to keep it fresh in your memory: "I reread the TECO manual every few months to keep it swapped in." If someone interrupts you just as you got a good idea, you might say "Wait a moment while I swap this out", implying that the piece of paper is your extra-somatic memory and if you don't swap the info out by writing it down it will get overwritten and lost as you talk. Compare {page in}, {page out}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% swapped in: n. See {swap}. See also {page in}. %% swapped out: n. See {swap}. See also {page out}. %% swizzle: v. To convert external names, array indices, or references within a data structure into address pointers when the data structure is brought into main memory from external storage (also called `pointer swizzling'); this may be done for speed in chasing references or to simplify code (e.g., by turning lots of name lookups into pointer dereferences). The converse operation is sometimes termed `unswizzling'. See also {snap}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sync: /sink/ (var. `synch') n., vi. 1. To synchronize, to bring into synchronization. 2. [techspeak] To force all pending I/O to the disk; see {flush}, sense 2. 3. More generally, to force a number of competing processes or agents to a state that would be `safe' if the system were to crash; thus, to checkpoint (in the database-theory sense). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% syntactic sugar: [coined by Peter Landin] n. Features added to a language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans, that do not affect the expressiveness of the formalism (compare {chrome}). Used esp. when there is an obvious and trivial translation of the `sugar' feature into other constructs already present in the notation. C's `a[i]' notation is syntactic sugar for `*(a + i)'. "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." -- Alan J. Perlis The variants `syntactic saccharin' and `syntactic syrup' are also recorded. These denotes something even more gratuitous, in that syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more acceptable to humans) but syntactic saccharin or syrup serves no purpose at all. Compare {candygrammar}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sys-frog: /sis'frog/ [the PLATO system] n. Playful variant of `sysprog', which is in turn short for `systems programmer'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sysadmin: /sis'ad-min/ n. Common contraction of `system admin'; see {admin}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sysape: /sysape/ n. A rather derogatory term for a computer operator; a play on {sysop} common at sites that use the banana hierarchy of problem complexity (see {one-banana problem}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% sysop: /sis'op/ n. [esp. in the BBS world] The operator (and usually the owner) of a bulletin-board system. A common neophyte mistake on {FidoNet} is to address a message to `sysop' in an international {echo}, thus sending it to hundreds of sysops around the world. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% system mangler: n. Humorous synonym for `system manager', poss. from the fact that one major IBM OS had a {root} account called SYSMANGR. Refers specifically to a systems programmer in charge of administration, software maintenance, and updates at some site. Unlike {admin}, this term emphasizes the technical end of the skills involved. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% system: n. 1. The supervisor program or OS on a computer. 2. The entire computer system, including input/output devices, the supervisor program or OS, and possibly other software. 3. Any large-scale program. 4. Any method or algorithm. 5. `System hacker': one who hacks the system (in senses 1 and 2 only; for sense 3 one mentions the particular program: e.g., `LISP hacker') -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% systems jock: n. See {jock}, (sense 2). %% tail recursion: n. If you aren't sick of it already, see {tail recursion}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% talk mode: n. A feature supported by UNIX, ITS, and some other OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line conversation. It combines the immediacy of talking with all the precision (and verbosity) that written language entails. It is difficult to communicate inflection, though conventions have arisen for some of these (see the section on writing style in the Prependices for details). Talk mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing, which are not used orally. Some of these are identical to (and probably derived from) Morse-code jargon used by ham-radio amateurs since the 1920s. BCNU be seeing you BTW by the way BYE? are you ready to unlink? (this is the standard way to end a talk-mode conversation; the other person types `BYE' to confirm, or else continues the conversation) CUL see you later ENQ? are you busy? (expects `ACK' or `NAK' in return) FOO? are you there? (often used on unexpected links, meaning also "Sorry if I butted in ..." (linker) or "What's up?" (linkee)) FYI for your information FYA for your amusement GA go ahead (used when two people have tried to type simultaneously; this cedes the right to type to the other) GRMBL grumble (expresses disquiet or disagreement) HELLOP hello? (an instance of the `-P' convention) JAM just a minute (equivalent to `SEC....') MIN same as `JAM' NIL no (see {NIL}) O over to you OO over and out / another form of "over to you" (from x/y as "x over y") \ lambda (used in discussing LISPy things) OBTW oh, by the way R U THERE? are you there? SEC wait a second (sometimes written `SEC...') T yes (see the main entry for {T}) TNX thanks TNX 1.0E6 thanks a million (humorous) TNXE6 another form of "thanks a million" WRT with regard to, or with respect to. WTF the universal interrogative particle; WTF knows what it means? WTH what the hell? When the typing party has finished, he/she types two newlines to signal that he/she is done; this leaves a blank line between `speeches' in the conversation, making it easier to reread the preceding text. : When three or more terminals are linked, it is conventional for each typist to {prepend} his/her login name or handle and a colon (or a hyphen) to each line to indicate who is typing (some conferencing facilities do this automatically). The login name is often shortened to a unique prefix (possibly a single letter) during a very long conversation. /\/\/\ A giggle or chuckle. On a MUD, this usually means `earthquake fault'. Most of the above sub-jargon is used at both Stanford and MIT. Several of these expressions are also common in {email}, esp. FYI, FYA, BTW, BCNU, WTF, and CUL. A few other abbreviations have been reported from commercial networks, such as GEnie and CompuServe, where on-line `live' chat including more than two people is common and usually involves a more `social' context, notably the following: grin grinning, running, and ducking BBL be back later BRB be right back HHOJ ha ha only joking HHOK ha ha only kidding HHOS {ha ha only serious} IMHO in my humble opinion (see {IMHO}) LOL laughing out loud NHOH Never Heard of Him/Her (often used in {initgame}) ROTF rolling on the floor ROTFL rolling on the floor laughing AFK away from keyboard b4 before CU l8tr see you later MORF male or female? TTFN ta-ta for now TTYL talk to you later OIC oh, I see rehi hello again Most of these are not used at universities or in the UNIX world, though ROTF and TTFN have gained some currency there and IMHO is common; conversely, most of the people who know these are unfamiliar with FOO?, BCNU, HELLOP, {NIL}, and {T}. The {MUD} community uses a mixture of USENET/Internet emoticons, a few of the more natural of the old-style talk-mode abbrevs, and some of the `social' list above; specifically, MUD respondents report use of BBL, BRB, LOL, b4, BTW, WTF, TTFN, and WTH. The use of `rehi' is also common; in fact, mudders are fond of re- compounds and will frequently `rehug' or `rebonk' (see {bonk/oif}) people. The word `re' by itself is taken as `regreet'. In general, though, MUDders express a preference for typing things out in full rather than using abbreviations; this may be due to the relative youth of the MUD cultures, which tend to include many touch typists and to assume high-speed links. The following uses specific to MUDs are reported: CU l8er see you later (mutant of `CU l8tr') FOAD fuck off and die (use of this is often OTT) OTT over the top (excessive, uncalled for) ppl abbrev for "people" THX thanks (mutant of `TNX'; clearly this comes in batches of 1138 (the Lucasian K)). UOK? are you OK? Some {BIFF}isms (notably the variant spelling `d00d') appear to be passing into wider use among some subgroups of MUDders. One final note on talk mode style: neophytes, when in talk mode, often seem to think they must produce letter-perfect prose because they are typing rather than speaking. This is not the best approach. It can be very frustrating to wait while your partner pauses to think of a word, or repeatedly makes the same spelling error and backs up to fix it. It is usually best just to leave typographical errors behind and plunge forward, unless severe confusion may result; in that case it is often fastest just to type "xxx" and start over from before the mistake. See also {hakspek}, {emoticon}, {bonk/oif}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% talker system: n. British hackerism for software that enables real-time chat or {talk mode}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tall card: n. A PC/AT-size expansion card (these can be larger than IBM PC or XT cards because the AT case is bigger). See also {short card}. When IBM introduced the PS/2 model 30 (its last gasp at supporting the ISA) they made the case lower and many industry-standard tall cards wouldn't fit; this was felt to be a reincarnation of the {connector conspiracy}, done with less style. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tanked: adj. Same as {down}, used primarily by UNIX hackers. See also {hosed}. Popularized as a synonym for `drunk' by Steve Dallas in the late lamented "Bloom County" comic strip. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tar and feather: [from UNIX `tar(1)'] vt. To create a transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them together with `tar(1)' (the Tape ARchiver) and then compressing the result (see {compress}). The latter action is dubbed `feathering' by analogy to what you do with an airplane propeller to decrease wind resistance, or with an oar to reduce water resistance; smaller files, after all, slip through comm links more easily. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% taste: [primarily MIT] n. 1. The quality in a program that tends to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also `tasty', `tasteful', `tastefulness'. "This feature comes in N tasty flavors." Although `tasteful' and `flavorful' are essentially synonyms, `taste' and {flavor} are not. Taste refers to sound judgment on the part of the creator; a program or feature can *exhibit* taste but cannot *have* taste. On the other hand, a feature can have {flavor}. Also, {flavor} has the additional meaning of `kind' or `variety' not shared by `taste'. {Flavor} is a more popular word than `taste', though both are used. See also {elegant}. 2. Alt. sp. of {tayste}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tayste: /tayst/ n. Two bits; also as {taste}. Syn. {crumb}, {quarter}. Compare {{byte}}, {dynner}, {playte}, {nybble}, {quad}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tea, ISO standard cup of: [South Africa] n. A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on. Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous `ANSI standard cup of tea' and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. Milk and lemon don't mix very well. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tee: n.,vt. [Purdue] A carbon copy of an electronic transmission. "Oh, you're sending him the {bits} to that? Slap on a tee for me." From the UNIX command `tee(1)', itself named after a pipe fitting (see {plumbing}). Can also mean `save one for me', as in "Tee a slice for me!" Also spelled `T'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% teledildonics: /tel'*-dil-do`-niks/ n. Sex in a computer simulated virtual reality, esp. computer-mediated sexual interaction between the {VR} presences of two humans. This is not yet possible except in the rather limited form of erotic conversation on {MUD}s and the like. The term, however, is widely recognized in the VR community as a {ha ha only serious} projection of things to come. "When we can sustain a multi-sensory surround good enough for teledildonics, then we'll know we're getting somewhere." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% telephony - to identify an imposter %% ten-finger interface: n. The interface between two networks that cannot be directly connected for security reasons; refers to the practice of placing two terminals side by side and having an operator read from one and type into the other. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tenured graduate student: n. One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual maximum is 5 or 6): a `ten-yeared' student (get it?). Actually, this term may be used of any grad student beginning in his seventh year. Students don't really get tenure, of course, the way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably been around the university longer than any untenured professor. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tera-: /te'r*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}. %% teraflop club: /te'r*-flop kluhb/ [FLOP = Floating Point Operation] n. A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% terminak: /ter'mi-nak`/ [Caltech, ca. 1979] n. Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the `L' key to produce the `K' code instead; complaints about this tended to look like "Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix." See {AIDX}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {Telerat}, {HP-SUX}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% terminal brain death: n. The extreme form of {terminal illness} (sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% terminal illness: n. 1. Syn. {raster burn}. 2. The `burn-in' condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a screen saver. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% terminal junkie: [UK] n. A {wannabee} or early {larval stage} hacker who spends most of his or her time wandering the directory tree and writing {noddy} programs just to get a fix of computer time. Variants include `terminal jockey', `console junkie', and {console jockey}. The term `console jockey' seems to imply more expertise than the other three (possibly because of the exalted status of the {{console}} relative to an ordinary terminal). See also {twink}, {read-only user}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% terminal moraine: the last glacier you'll ever climb. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% terpri: /ter'pree/ [from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)] vi. To output a {newline}. Now rare as jargon, though still used as techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of `TERminate PRInt line', named for the fact that, on some early OSes and hardware, no characters would be printed until a complete line was formed, so this operation terminated the line and emitted the output. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% terrace - To leave hurriedly %% test: n. 1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to get thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and followup of the results. 2. Some bored random user trying a couple of the simpler features with a developer looking over his or her shoulder, ready to pounce on mistakes. Judging by the quality of most software, the second definition is far more prevalent. See also {demo}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% text: n. 1. [techspeak] Executable code, esp. a `pure code' portion shared between multiple instances of a program running in a multitasking OS (compare {English}). 2. Textual material in the mainstream sense; data in ordinary {{ASCII}} or {{EBCDIC}} representation (see {flat-ASCII}). "Those are text files; you can review them using the editor." These two contradictory senses confuse hackers, too. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% thanks in advance: [USENET] Conventional net.politeness ending a posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes written `advTHANKSance' or `aTdHvAaNnKcSe' or abbreviated `TIA'. See {net.-}, {netiquette}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% the X that can be Y is not the true X: Yet another instance of hackerdom's peculiar attraction to mystical references --- a common humorous way of making exclusive statements about a class of things. The template is from the `Tao te Ching': "The Tao which can be spoken of is not the true Tao." The implication is often that the X is a mystery accessible only to the enlightened. See the {trampoline} entry for an example, and compare {has the X nature}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% the agony of defeat: caused by attending the NCC exhibit hall! %% the business plan you prepare must be a lie... But it must be a detailed and precise lie rather than a vague and general lie. -- Edward M. Bennett %% the following was a headline on "THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN" ( U.C. Berkeley's Campus Newspaper ) Vol. XX NO. 78 Friday, April 24 1987 STUDENTS' NEW COMPANY OFFERS `RUBBERS TO GO' [...] Protectel, "protect-telephone", guarantees that it will have condoms or sponges delivered to your door less then 15 minutes after receiving an order. "This is a High demand, fast-paced society. We want things now, But sometimes people are caught unprepared, and that's where we come in," said Edwin Ishoo. [...] ... Protectel will also supply spermicidal lubricant ... [...] "The problem with teenagers is that they are somewhat too bashful to buy condoms, but they are not bashful to when it comes to personal relationships", Ishoo said. [...] For information or to place orders, call Protectel at (415) 548-5623. [...] %% the greatest weapon in the game has not the highest Weapon Class %% the path is the way. the way is the truth it is found, but not held walked on, but not followed. %% the value in traveling the more difficult route is in the sweeter taste of a victory truly won. %% them. -- Brian Crozier %% theology: n. 1. Ironically or humorously used to refer to {religious issues}. 2. Technical fine points of an abstruse nature, esp. those where the resolution is of theoretical interest but is relatively {marginal} with respect to actual use of a design or system. Used esp. around software issues with a heavy AI or language-design component, such as the smart-data vs. smart-programs dispute in AI. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% theory: n. The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being used to inform a behavior. This is a generalization and abuse of the technical meaning. "What's the theory on fixing this TECO loss?" "What's the theory on dinner tonight?" ("Chinatown, I guess.") "What's the current theory on letting lusers on during the day?" "The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw...." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% there's more than one way through a wall %% thinko: /thing'koh/ [by analogy with `typo'] n. A momentary, correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of consciousness. Syn. {braino}; see also {brain fart}. Compare {mouso}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% thrash: vi. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation) and are therefore said to thrash. Someone who keeps changing his mind (esp. about what to work on next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying to execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on any single task) may also be described as thrashing. Compare {multitask}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% thread: n. [USENET, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of `topic thread', a more or less continuous chain of postings on a single topic. %% thread: n. [USENET, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of `topic thread', a more or less continuous chain of postings on a single topic. To `follow a thread' is to read a series of USENET postings sharing a common subject or (more correctly) which are connected by Reference headers. The better newsreaders present news in thread order. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% three-finger salute: n. Syn. {Vulcan nerve pinch}. %% thud: n. 1. Yet another {metasyntactic variable} (see {foo}). It is reported that at CMU from the mid-1970s the canonical series of these was `foo', `bar', `thud', `blat'. 2. Rare term for the hash character, `#' (ASCII 0100011). See {ASCII} for other synonyms. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% thumb: n. The slider on a window-system scrollbar. So called because moving it allows you to browse through the contents of a text window in a way analogous to thumbing through a book. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% thunk: /thuhnk/ n. 1. "A piece of coding which provides an address", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a {thunk} to compute the expression and leave the address of the result in some standard location. 2. Later generalized into: an expression, frozen together with its environment, for later evaluation if and when needed (similar to what in techspeak is called a `closure'). The process of unfreezing these thunks is called `forcing'. 3. A {stubroutine}, in an overlay programming environment, that loads and jumps to the correct overlay. Compare {trampoline}. 4. People and activities scheduled in a thunklike manner. "It occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately modeled by a thunk --- I frequently need to be forced to completion." --- paraphrased from a {plan file}. Historical note: There are a couple of onomatopoeic myths circulating about the origin of this term. The most common is that it is the sound made by data hitting the stack; another holds that the sound is that of the data hitting an accumulator. Yet another holds that it is the sound of the expression being unfrozen at argument-evaluation time. In fact, according to the inventors, it was coined after they realized (in the wee hours after hours of discussion) that the type of an argument in Algol-60 could be figured out in advance with a little compile-time thought, simplifying the evaluation machinery. In other words, it had `already been thought of'; thus it was christened a `thunk', which is "the past tense of `think' at two in the morning". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tick-list features: [Acorn Computers] n. Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be `checklist features', but this jargon sense of the phrase has not been reported. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tick: n. 1. A {jiffy} (sense 1). 2. In simulations, the discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount of time is often left unspecified, since the only constraint of interest is the ordering of events. This sort of AI simulation is often pejoratively referred to as `tick-tick-tick' simulation, especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long, independent chains of causes is {handwave}d. 3. In the FORTH language, a single quote character. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tickle a bug: vt. To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest through some known series of inputs or operations. "You can tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA card's highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow reverse video." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tiger team: [U.S. military jargon] n. 1. Originally, a team whose purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures. These people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks, e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defense installations, hand-lettered notes saying "Your codebooks have been stolen" (they usually haven't been) inside safes, etc. After a successful penetration, some high-ranking security type shows up the next morning for a `security review' and finds the sign, note, etc., and all hell breaks loose. Serious successes of tiger teams sometimes lead to early retirement for base commanders and security officers (see the {patch} entry for an example). 2. Recently, and more generally, any official inspection team or special {firefighting} group called in to look at a problem. A subset of tiger teams are professional {cracker}s, testing the security of military computer installations by attempting remote attacks via networks or supposedly `secure' comm channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times. The term has been adopted in commercial computer-security circles in this more specific sense. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% time T: /ti:m T/ n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1. "We'll meet on campus at time T or at Louie's at time T+1" means, in the context of going out for dinner: "We can meet on campus and go to Louie's, or we can meet at Louie's itself a bit later." (Louie's was a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that was a favorite with hackers.) Had the number 30 been used instead of the number 1, it would have implied that the travel time from campus to Louie's is 30 minutes; whatever time T is (and that hasn't been decided on yet), you can meet half an hour later at Louie's than you could on campus and end up eating at the same time. See also {since time T equals minus infinity}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% time bomb: n. A subspecies of {logic bomb} that is triggered by reaching some preset time, either once or periodically. There are numerous legends about time bombs set up by programmers in their employers' machines, to go off if the programmer is fired or laid off and is not present to perform the appropriate suppressing action periodically. [I have been unable to verify that any of these legends are true, and they have all the characteristics of urban folklore --- ESR] -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% time sink: [poss. by analogy with `heat sink' or `current sink'] n. A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% times-or-divided-by: [by analogy with `plus-or-minus'] quant. Term occasionally used when describing the uncertainty associated with a scheduling estimate, for either humorous or brutally honest effect. For a software project, the scheduling uncertainty factor is usually at least 2. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tinycrud: /ti:'nee-kruhd/ n. 1. A pejorative used by habitues of older game-oriented {MUD} versions for TinyMUDs and other user-extensible {MUD} variants; esp. common among users of the rather violent and competitive AberMUD and MIST systems. These people justify the slur on the basis of how (allegedly) inconsistent and lacking in genuine atmosphere the scenarios generated in user extensible MUDs can be. Other common knocks on them are that they feature little overall plot, bad game topology, little competitive interaction, etc. --- not to mention the alleged horrors of the TinyMUD code itself. This dispute is one of the MUD world's hardiest perennial {holy wars}. 2. TinyMud-oriented chat on the USENET group rec.games.mud and elsewhere, especially {newbie} questions and flamage. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tip of the ice-cube: [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and insignificant. Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip of the iceberg' might be appropriate if the subject were at all important. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tired iron: [IBM] n. Hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that the old stuff is starting to look a bit like a {dinosaur}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tits on a keyboard: n. Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered (usually on the `5' of a numeric keypad, and on the `F' and `J' of a QWERTY keyboard; but the Mac, perverse as usual, has them on the `D' and `K' keys). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% to a first approximation: 1. [techspeak] When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value. By using the starting point of a first approximation of the answer, one can write an algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result. 2. In jargon, a preface to any comment that indicates that the comment is only approximately true. The remark "To a first approximation, I feel good" might indicate that deeper questioning would reveal that not all is perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains after an illness). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% to a zeroth approximation: [from `to a first approximation'] A *really* sloppy approximation; a wild guess. Compare {social science number}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toast: 1. n. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp. one that has just crashed and burned: "Uh, oh ... I think the serial board is toast." 2. vt. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manual rebooting. "Rick just toasted the {firewall machine} again." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toaster: n. 1. The archetypal really stupid application for an embedded microprocessor controller; often used in comments that imply that a scheme is inappropriate technology (but see {elevator controller}). "{DWIM} for an assembler? That'd be as silly as running UNIX on your toaster!" 2. A very, very dumb computer. "You could run this program on any dumb toaster." See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!}, {toy}, {beige toaster}. 3. A Macintosh, esp. the Classic Mac. Some hold that this is implied by sense 2. 4. A peripheral device. "I bought my box without toasters, but since then I've added two boards and a second disk drive." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toeprint: n. A {footprint} of especially small size. %% toggle: vt. To change a {bit} from whatever state it is in to the other state; to change from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1. This comes from `toggle switches', such as standard light switches, though the word `toggle' actually refers to the mechanism that keeps the switch in the position to which it is flipped rather than to the fact that the switch has two positions. There are four things you can do to a bit: set it (force it to be 1), clear (or zero) it, leave it alone, or toggle it. (Mathematically, one would say that there are four distinct boolean-valued functions of one boolean argument, but saying that is much less fun than talking about toggling bits.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tool: 1. n. A program used primarily to create, manipulate, modify, or analyze other programs, such as a compiler or an editor or a cross-referencing program. Oppose {app}, {operating system}. 2. [UNIX] An application program with a simple, `transparent' (typically text-stream) interface designed specifically to be used in programmed combination with other tools (see {filter}). 3. [MIT: general to students there] vi. To work; to study (connotes tedium). The TMRC Dictionary defined this as "to set one's brain to the grindstone". See {hack}. 4. [MIT] n. A student who studies too much and hacks too little. (MIT's student humor magazine rejoices in the name `Tool and Die'.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toolsmith: n. The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the {tool}s with which other programmers create applications. See also {uninteresting}. %% toolsmith: n. The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the {tool}s with which other programmers create applications. Many hackers consider this more fun than applications per se; to understand why, see {uninteresting}. Jon Bentley, in the "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" chapter of his book `More Programming Pearls', quotes Dick Sites from DEC as saying "I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% topic drift: n. Term used on GEnie, USENET and other electronic fora to describe the tendency of a {thread} to drift away from the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject header of the originating message), or the results of that tendency. Often used in gentle reminders that the discussion has strayed off any useful track. "I think we started with a question about Niven's last book, but we've ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset. Now *that's* topic drift!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% topic group: n. Syn. {forum}. %% toto: /toh'toh/ n. This is reported to be the default scratch file name among French-speaking programmers --- in other words, a francophone {foo}. %% toto: /toh'toh/ n. This is reported to be the default scratch file name among French-speaking programmers --- in other words, a francophone {foo}. It is reported that the phonetic mutations "titi", "tata", and "tutu" canonically follow `toto', analogously to {bar}, {baz} and {quux} in English. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tourist information: n. Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The `bytes free' information at the bottom of an MS-DOS `dir' display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a UNIX `ps(1)' display. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tourist: [ITS] n. A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for {comm mode}, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below {luser}. Hackers often spell this {turist}, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with {luser} (this also expresses the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms). Compare {twink}, {read-only user}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% touristic: adj. Having the quality of a {tourist}. Often used as a pejorative, as in `losing touristic scum'. Often spelled `turistic' or `turistik', so that phrase might be more properly rendered `lusing turistic scum'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toy language: n. A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. {Bad Thing}s can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see {bondage-and-discipline language}); the classic example is {{Pascal}}. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense. See also {MFTL}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toy problem: [AI] n. A deliberately oversimplified case of a challenging problem used to investigate, prototype, or test algorithms for a real problem. Sometimes used pejoratively. See also {gedanken}, {toy program}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toy program: n. 1. One that can be readily comprehended; hence, a trivial program (compare {noddy}). 2. One for which the effort of initial coding dominates the costs through its life cycle. See also {noddy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% toy: n. A computer system; always used with qualifiers. 1. `nice toy': One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately. 2. `just a toy': A machine that yields insufficient {computron}s for the speaker's preferred uses. This is not condemnatory, as is {bitty box}; toys can at least be fun. It is also strongly conditioned by one's expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes consider the Cray-1 a `toy', and certainly all RISC boxes and mainframes are toys by their standards. See also {Get a real computer!}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% trampoline: n. An incredibly {hairy} technique, found in some {HLL} and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. These pieces of {live data} are called `trampolines'. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also {snap}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% trap door: alt. `trapdoor' n. 1. Syn. {back door} --- a {Bad Thing}. 2. [techspeak] A `trap-door function' is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions are {Good Thing}s with important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% trap: 1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program. 2. vi. To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor." Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor traps all input/output instructions." This term is associated with assembler programming (`interrupt' or `exception' is more common among {HLL} programmers) and appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see {system}, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% trash: vt. To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including {mung}, {mangle}, and {scribble}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% trawl: v. To sift through large volumes of data (e.g., USENET postings or FTP archives) looking for something of interest. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tree-killer: [Sun] n. 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This should be interpreted in a broad sense; `wasting paper' includes the production of {spiffy} but {content-free} documents. Thus, most {suit}s are tree-killers. %% tree-killer: [Sun] n. 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This should be interpreted in a broad sense; `wasting paper' includes the production of {spiffy} but {content-free} documents. Thus, most {suit}s are tree-killers. The negative loading of this term may reflect the epithet `tree-killer' applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J. R. R. Tolkien's `Lord of the Rings' trilogy (see also {elvish}, {elder days}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% trit: /trit/ [by analogy with `bit'] n. One base-3 digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also {bit}). These arise, for example, in the context of a {flag} that should actually be able to assume *three* values --- such as yes, no, or unknown. Trits are sometimes jokingly called `3-state bits'. A trit may be semi-seriously referred to as `a bit and a half', although it is linearly equivalent to 1.5849625 bits (that is, log2(3) bits). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% trivial: adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly {cretinous} would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish `trivial' usually evaluates to `I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See {nontrivial}, {uninteresting}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% troff:: /tee'rof/ or /trof/ [UNIX] n. The gray eminence of UNIX text processing; a formatting and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after Multics' RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer (*that* name came from the expression "to run off a copy"). A companion program, `nroff', formats output for terminals and line printers. In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified TROFF so that it could drive phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper describing that work ("A Typesetter-independent TROFF," AT&T CSTR #97) explains `troff''s durability. After discussing the program's "obvious deficiencies --- a rebarbative input syntax, mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious appetite for computer resources" and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals, Kernighan concludes: None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna's accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses that were never conceived of in the original design, all with considerable grace under fire. The success of {{TeX}} and desktop publishing systems have reduced `troff''s relative importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths that secured `troff' a place in hacker folklore; indeed, it could be taken more generally as an indication of those qualities of good programs which, in the long run, hackers most admire. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% troglodyte mode: [Rice University] n. Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt (see {raster burn}). Loud music blaring from a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended. See {larval stage}, {hack mode}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% troglodyte: [Commodore] n. 1. A hacker who never leaves his cubicle. The term `Gnoll' (from Dungeons & Dragons) is also reported. 2. A curmudgeon attached to an obsolescent computing environment. The combination `ITS troglodyte' was flung around some during the USENET and email wringle-wrangle attending the 2.x.x revision of the Jargon File; at least one of the people it was intended to describe adopted it with pride. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tron: [NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie `Tron'] v. To become inaccessible except via email or `talk(1)', especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: "Ran seems to have tronned on us this week" or "Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself". One may also speak of `tron mode'; compare {spod}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% true-hacker: [analogy with `trufan' from SF fandom] n. One who exemplifies the primary values of hacker culture, esp. competence and helpfulness to other hackers. A high compliment. "He spent 6 hours helping me bring up UUCP and netnews on my FOOBAR 4000 last week --- manifestly the act of a true-hacker." Compare {demigod}, oppose {munchkin}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% try again %% try kissing a disenchantress! %% tty: /T-T-Y/ [UNIX], /tit'ee/ [ITS, but some UNIX people say it this way as well; this pronunciation is not considered to have sexual undertones] n. 1. A terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print quality. Usage: antiquated (like the TTYs themselves). See also {bit-paired keyboard}. 2. [especially UNIX] Any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal controlling a given job. 3. [UNIX] Any serial port, whether or not the device connected to it is a terminal; so called because under UNIX such devices have names of the form tty*. Ambiguity between senses 2 and 3 is common but seldom bothersome. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tube time: n. Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of one's environment one uses most heavily. "I find I'm spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I started this revision." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tube: 1. n. A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream sense of TV; real hackers don't watch TV, except for Loony Toons, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, and the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie (see {appendix B}). 2. [IBM] To send a copy of something to someone else's terminal. "Tube me that note?" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tunafish: n. In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of `tunefs(8)' in the original {BSD} 4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once commercial sites started using 4.2. Tunefs relates to the `tuning' of file-system parameters for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a `BUGS' section consisting of the line "You can tune a file system, but you can't tunafish". Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by humorless management {droid}s. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this: "Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until the `time_t''s wrap around." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tune: [from automotive or musical usage] vt. To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as {hook}s for tuning, e.g., by changing `#define' lines in C. One may `tune for time' (fastest execution), `tune for space' (least memory use), or `tune for configuration' (most efficient use of hardware). See {bum}, {hot spot}, {hand-hacking}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% turbo nerd: n. See {computer geek}. %% turist: /too'rist/ n. Var. sp. of {tourist}, q.v. Also in adjectival form, `turistic'. Poss. influenced by {luser} and `Turing'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tweak: vt. 1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with {twiddle}. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See {frobnicate} and {fudge factor}; also see {shotgun debugging}. 2. To {tune} or {bum} a program; preferred usage in the U.K. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% tweeter: [University of Waterloo] n. Syn. {perf}, {chad} (sense 1). This term (like {woofer}) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% twiddle: n. 1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, `~'). Also called `squiggle', `sqiggle' (sic --- pronounced /skig'l/), and `twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones. 3. vt. To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knob implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see {frobnicate}. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; `toggling a bit' has a more specific meaning (see {bit twiddling}, {toggle}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% twilight zone: [IRC] n. Notionally, the area of cyberspace where {IRC} operators live. An {op} is said to have a "connection to the twilight zone". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% twink: /twink/ [UCSC] n. Equivalent to {read-only user}. Also reported on the USENET group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream `chick'). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% two pi: quant. The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in stories in the following form: "He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later..." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% two-to-the-N: quant. An amount much larger than {N} but smaller than {infinity}. "I have 2-to-the-N things to do before I can go out for lunch" means you probably won't show up. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% twonkie: /twon'kee/ n. The software equivalent of a Twinkie (a variety of sugar-loaded junk food, or (in gay slang) the male equivalent of `chick'); a useless `feature' added to look sexy and placate a {marketroid} (compare {Saturday-night special}). This may also be related to "The Twonky", title menace of a classic SF short story by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), first published in the September 1942 `Astounding Science Fiction' and subsequently much anthologized. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% undefined external reference: excl. [UNIX] A message from UNIX's linker. Used in speech to flag loose ends or dangling references in an argument or discussion. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% under the hood: prep. [hot-rodder talk] 1. Used to introduce the underlying implementation of a product (hardware, software, or idea). Implies that the implementation is not intuitively obvious from the appearance, but the speaker is about to enable the listener to {grok} it. "Let's now look under the hood to see how ...." 2. Can also imply that the implementation is much simpler than the appearance would indicate: "Under the hood, we are just fork/execing the shell." 3. Inside a chassis, as in "Under the hood, this baby has a 40MHz 68030!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% undocumented feature: n. See {feature}. %% uninteresting: adj. 1. Said of a problem that, although {nontrivial}, can be solved simply by throwing sufficient resources at it. 2. Also said of problems for which a solution would neither advance the state of the art nor be fun to design and code. Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of time, to be solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. *Real* hackers (see {toolsmith}) generalize uninteresting problems enough to make them interesting and solve them --- thus solving the original problem as a special case (and, it must be admitted, occasionally turning a molehill into a mountain, or a mountain into a tectonic plate). See {WOMBAT}, {SMOP}; compare {toy problem}, oppose {interesting}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% unix real mem = bytes %% unix soit qui mal y pense %% unixism: n. A piece of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected multi-tasking environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead that exists on virtual-memory UNIX systems. Common {unixism}s include: gratuitous use of `fork(2)'; the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known features of UNIX libraries such as `stdio(3)' are supported elsewhere; reliance on {obscure} side-effects of system calls (use of `sleep(2)' with a 0 argument to clue the scheduler that you're willing to give up your time-slice, for example); the assumption that freshly allocated memory is zeroed; and the assumption that fragmentation problems won't arise from never `free()'ing memory. Compare {vaxocentrism}; see also {New Jersey}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% unleaded: adj. Said of decaffeinated coffee, Diet Coke, and other imitation {programming fluid}s. "Do you want regular or unleaded?". Appears to be widespread among programmers associated with the oil industry in Texas (and probably elsewhere). Usage: silly, and probably unintelligible to the next generation of hackers. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% unlike real code - doesn't have to be maintained, no one will maintain it. It will soon become out of date and everyone will ignore it. (Once, I did an informal survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode. Of those 42, 0 [zero!], found that it had any value as maintenance documentation." -- Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988 %% unroll: v. To repeat the body of a loop several times in succession. This optimization technique reduces the number of times the loop-termination test has to be executed. But it only works if the number of iterations desired is a multiple of the number of repetitions of the body. Something has to be done to take care of any leftover iterations --- such as {Duff's device}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% unswizzle: v. See {swizzle}. %% untry. U.S. polls show that 87% of Americans support the president and think they "probably would have made the same mistake." %% unwind the stack: vi. 1. [techspeak] During the execution of a procedural language, one is said to `unwind the stack' from a called procedure up to a caller when one discards the stack frame and any number of frames above it, popping back up to the level of the given caller. In C this is done with `longjmp'/`setjmp', in LISP with `throw/catch'. See also {smash the stack}. 2. People can unwind the stack as well, by quickly dealing with a bunch of problems: "Oh heck, let's do lunch. Just a second while I unwind my stack." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% unwind-protect: [MIT: from the name of a LISP operator] n. A task you must remember to perform before you leave a place or finish a project. "I have an unwind-protect to call my advisor." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% unzip: simple yet spectacular way to remove protection. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% up: adj. 1. Working, in order. "The down escalator is up." Oppose {down}. 2. `bring up': vt. To create a working version and start it. "They brought up a down system." 3. `come up' vi. To become ready for production use. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% upload: /uhp'lohd/ v. 1. [techspeak] To transfer programs or data over a digital communications link from a smaller or peripheral `client' system to a larger or central `host' one. A transfer in the other direction is, of course, called a {download} (but see the note about ground-to-space comm under that entry). 2. [speculatively] To move the essential patterns and algorithms that make up one's mind from one's brain into a computer. Only those who are convinced that such patterns and algorithms capture the complete essence of the self view this prospect with gusto. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% upthread: adv. Earlier in the discussion (see {thread}), i.e., `above'. "As Joe pointed out upthread, ..." See also {followup}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% urchin: n. See {munchkin}. %% user-friendly: adj. Programmer-hostile. Generally used by hackers in a critical tone, to describe systems that hold the user's hand so obsessively that they make it painful for the more experienced and knowledgeable to get any work done. See {menuitis}, {drool-proof paper}, {Macintrash}, {user-obsequious}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% user-obsequious: adj. Emphatic form of {user-friendly}. Connotes a system so verbose, inflexible, and determinedly simple-minded that it is nearly unusable. "Design a system any fool can use and only a fool will want to use it." See {WIMP environment}, {Macintrash}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% user: n. 1. Someone doing `real work' with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See {real user}. 2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See {luser}. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them. The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and {luser}s. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as `real winners'.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vadding: /vad'ing/ [from VAD, a permutation of ADV (i.e., {ADVENT}), used to avoid a particular {admin}'s continual search-and-destroy sweeps for the game] n. A leisure-time activity of certain hackers involving the covert exploration of the `secret' parts of large buildings --- basements, roofs, freight elevators, maintenance crawlways, steam tunnels, and the like. A few go so far as to learn locksmithing in order to synthesize vadding keys. The verb is `to vad' (compare {phreaking}; see also {hack}, sense 9). This term dates from the late 1970s, before which such activity was simply called `hacking'; the older usage is still prevalent at MIT. The most extreme and dangerous form of vadding is `elevator rodeo', a.k.a. `elevator surfing', a sport played by wrasslin' down a thousand-pound elevator car with a 3-foot piece of string, and then exploiting this mastery in various stimulating ways (such as elevator hopping, shaft exploration, rat-racing, and the ever-popular drop experiments). Kids, don't try this at home! See also {hobbit} (sense 2). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vanilla: [from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] adj. Ordinary {flavor}, standard. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, `vanilla wonton soup' means ordinary wonton soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware and software, as in "Vanilla Version 7 UNIX can't run on a vanilla 11/34." Also used to orthogonalize chip nomenclature; for instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as distinct from a 74LS00, etc. This word differs from {canonical} in that the latter means `default', whereas vanilla simply means `ordinary'. For example, when hackers go on a {great-wall}, hot-and-sour wonton soup is the {canonical} wonton soup to get (because that is what most of them usually order) even though it isn't the vanilla wonton soup. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vannevar: /van'*-var/ n. A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, esp. one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule. The prototype was Vannevar Bush's prediction of `electronic brains' the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays, made at a time when the semiconductor effect had already been demonstrated. Other famous vannevars have included magnetic-bubble memory, LISP machines, {videotex}, and a paper from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate limit on areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine densities of 5 years later. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vaporware: /vay'pr-weir/ n. Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). See also {brochureware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% var: /veir/ or /var/ n. Short for `variable'. Compare {arg}, {param}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vaxherd: n. /vaks'herd/ [from `oxherd'] A VAX operator. %% vaxism: /vak'sizm/ n. A piece of code that exhibits {vaxocentrism} in critical areas. Compare {PC-ism}, {unixism}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vaxocentrism: /vak`soh-sen'trizm/ [analogy with `ethnocentrism'] n. A notional disease said to afflict C programmers who persist in coding according to certain assumptions that are valid (esp. under UNIX) on {VAXen} but false elsewhere. Among these are: 1. The assumption that dereferencing a null pointer is safe because it is all bits 0, and location 0 is readable and 0. Problem: this may instead cause an illegal-address trap on non-VAXen, and even on VAXen under OSes other than BSD UNIX. Usually this is an implicit assumption of sloppy code (forgetting to check the pointer before using it), rather than deliberate exploitation of a misfeature.) 2. The assumption that characters are signed. 3. The assumption that a pointer to any one type can freely be cast into a pointer to any other type. A stronger form of this is the assumption that all pointers are the same size and format, which means you don't have to worry about getting the types correct in calls. Problem: this fails on word-oriented machines or others with multiple pointer formats. 4. The assumption that the parameters of a routine are stored in memory, contiguously, and in strictly ascending or descending order. Problem: this fails on many RISC architectures. 5. The assumption that pointer and integer types are the same size, and that pointers can be stuffed into integer variables (and vice-versa) and drawn back out without being truncated or mangled. Problem: this fails on segmented architectures or word-oriented machines with funny pointer formats. 6. The assumption that a data type of any size may begin at any byte address in memory (for example, that you can freely construct and dereference a pointer to a word- or greater-sized object at an odd char address). Problem: this fails on many (esp. RISC) architectures better optimized for {HLL} execution speed, and can cause an illegal address fault or bus error. 7. The (related) assumption that there is no padding at the end of types and that in an array you can thus step right from the last byte of a previous component to the first byte of the next one. This is not only machine- but compiler-dependent. 8. The assumption that memory address space is globally flat and that the array reference `foo[-1]' is necessarily valid. Problem: this fails at 0, or other places on segment-addressed machines like Intel chips (yes, segmentation is universally considered a {brain-damaged} way to design machines (see {moby}), but that is a separate issue). 9. The assumption that objects can be arbitrarily large with no special considerations. Problem: this fails on segmented architectures and under non-virtual-addressing environments. 10. The assumption that the stack can be as large as memory. Problem: this fails on segmented architectures or almost anything else without virtual addressing and a paged stack. 11. The assumption that bits and addressable units within an object are ordered in the same way and that this order is a constant of nature. Problem: this fails on {big-endian} machines. 12. The assumption that it is meaningful to compare pointers to different objects not located within the same array, or to objects of different types. Problem: the former fails on segmented architectures, the latter on word-oriented machines or others with multiple pointer formats. 13. The assumption that an `int' is 32 bits, or (nearly equivalently) the assumption that `sizeof(int) == sizeof(long)'. Problem: this fails on PDP-11s, 286-based systems and even on 386 and 68000 systems under some compilers. 14. The assumption that `argv[]' is writable. Problem: this fails in many embedded-systems C environments and even under a few flavors of UNIX. Note that a programmer can validly be accused of vaxocentrism even if he or she has never seen a VAX. Some of these assumptions (esp. 2--5) were valid on the PDP-11, the original C machine, and became endemic years before the VAX. The terms `vaxocentricity' and `all-the-world's-a-VAX syndrome' have been used synonymously. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vdiff: /vee'dif/ v.,n. Visual diff. The operation of finding differences between two files by {eyeball search}. The term `optical diff' has also been reported, and is sometimes more specifically used for the act of superimposing two nearly identical printouts on one another and holding them up to a light to spot differences. Though this method is poor for detecting omissions in the `rear' file, it can also be used with printouts of graphics, a claim few if any diff programs can make. See {diff}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vdiff: /vee'dif/ v.,n. Visual diff. The operation of finding differences between two files by {eyeball search}. The term `optical diff' has also been reported. See {diff}. %% veeblefester: /vee'b*l-fes`tr/ [from the "Born Loser" comix via Commodore; prob. originally from `Mad' Magazine's `Veeblefeetzer' parodies ca. 1960] n. Any obnoxious person engaged in the (alleged) professions of marketing or management. Antonym of {hacker}. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% verbage: /ver'b*j/ n. A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of {verbiage} that assimilates it to the word `garbage'. Compare {content-free}. More pejorative than `verbiage'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% verbiage: n. When the context involves a software or hardware system, this refers to {{documentation}}. This term borrows the connotations of mainstream `verbiage' to suggest that the documentation is of marginal utility and that the motives behind its production have little to do with the ostensible subject. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vertical feet: what a mountaineer has on the ends of his legs when lying flat on his back. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% vgrep: /vee'grep/ v.,n. Visual grep. The operation of finding patterns in a file optically rather than digitally (also called an `optical grep'). See {grep}; compare {vdiff}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vi: /V-I/, *not* /vi:/ and *never* /siks/ [from `Visual Interface'] n. A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early {BSD} release. Became the de facto standard UNIX editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of {EMACS} after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup provides no indication of which mode one is in (one correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 USENET poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See {holy wars}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% videotex: n. obs. An electronic service offering people the privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they brush their teeth. The idea bombed everywhere it wasn't government-subsidized, because by the time videotex was practical the installed base of personal computers could hook up to timesharing services and do the things for which videotex might have been worthwhile better and cheaper. Videotex planners badly overestimated both the appeal of getting information from a computer and the cost of local intelligence at the user's end. Like the {gorilla arm} effect, this has been a cautionary tale to hackers ever since. See also {vannevar}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% virgin: adj. Unused; pristine; in a known initial state. "Let's bring up a virgin system and see if it crashes again." (Esp. useful after contracting a {virus} through {SEX}.) Also, by extension, buffers and the like within a program that have not yet been used. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% virtual Friday: n. The last day before an extended weekend, if that day is not a `real' Friday. For example, the U.S. holiday Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. The next day is often also a holiday or taken as an extra day off, in which case Wednesday of that week is a virtual Friday (and Thursday is a virtual Saturday, as is Friday). There are also `virtual Mondays' that are actually Tuesdays, after the three-day weekends associated with many national holidays in the U.S. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% virtual reality: n. 1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics and devices such as the Dataglove to allow the user to interact with the simulation. See {cyberspace}. 2. A form of network interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games, interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and `true confessions' magazines. In a virtual reality forum (such as USENET's alt.callahans newsgroup or the {MUD} experiments on Internet), interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel complete with scenery, `foreground characters' that may be personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common `background characters' manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a character without the consent of the person who `owns' it. Otherwise anything goes. See {bamf}, {cyberspace}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% virtual: [via the technical term `virtual memory', prob. from the term `virtual image' in optics] adj. 1. Common alternative to {logical}. 2. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. %% virtual: [via the technical term `virtual memory', prob. from the term `virtual image' in optics] adj. 1. Common alternative to {logical}; often used to refer to the artificial objects created by a computer system to help the system control access to shared resources. 2. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Oppose {real}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% virus: [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF] n. A cracker program that searches out other programs and `infects' them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become {Trojan horse}s. When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the `infection'. This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a {worm}, a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their friends (see {SEX}). The virus may do nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with your display (some viruses include nice {display hack}s). Many nasty viruses, written by particularly perversely minded {cracker}s, do irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files. In the 1990s, viruses have become a serious problem, especially among IBM PC and Macintosh users (the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating system). The production of special anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many {luser}s tend to blame *everything* that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of `virus' has passed not only into techspeak but into also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a {worm} or even a {Trojan horse}). See {phage}; compare {back door}; see also {UNIX conspiracy}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% visionary: n. 1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial Intelligence researcher working on the problem of getting computers to `see' things using TV cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a computer. The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of the camera information? See {SMOP}, {AI-complete}.) 2. [IBM] One who reads the outside literature. At IBM, apparently, such a penchant is viewed with awe and wonder. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vmunix: kbd: Too many keys down! %% voice-net: n. Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to a digital network. USENET {sig block}s not uncommonly include the sender's phone next to a "Voice:" or "Voice-Net:" header; common variants of this are "Voicenet" and "V-Net". Compare {paper-net}, {snail-mail}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% voice: vt. To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or connecting in {talk mode}. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you later." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% voodoo programming: [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n. The use by guess or cookbook of an {obscure} or {hairy} system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and if it doesn't, one will never know why. Almost synonymous with {black magic}, except that black magic typically isn't documented and *nobody* understands it. Compare {magic}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {rain dance}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a dead chicken}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% vulture capitalist: n. Pejorative hackerism for `venture capitalist', deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and most of the money they ought to have made from them. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wabbit: /wab'it/ [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not a {virus} or {worm}. See {fork bomb} and {rabbit job}, see also {cookie monster}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% waist band: group of paunchy musicians. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% waldo: /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of {foobar} as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See {foo}, {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% walk off the end of: vt. To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it --- a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an {off-by-one error}. Compare {clobber}, {roach}, {smash the stack}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% walk: n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in {core}. See also {codewalker}, {silly walk}, {clobber}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% walking drives: n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing machine}s. Those old {dinosaur} parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% walking: uncommon means of mountain locomotion. see fall, glissade, etc. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% wall follower: n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls `Harvey Wallbanger', the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes --- and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term *is* pejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also {code grinder}, {droid}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wall time: n. (also `wall clock time') 1. `Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of {clocks} required to execute it (on a timesharing system these will differ, as no one program gets all the {clocks}, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wall: [WPI] interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare {octal forty}. 3. [UNIX] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall(8) utility. It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom `like talking to a blank wall'. It was originally used in situations where, after you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing "Wall?" themselves. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wallpaper: n. 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.) Now rare, esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on TWENEX). However, the UNIX world doesn't have an equivalent term, so perhaps {wallpaper} will take hold there. The term probably originated on ITS, where the commands to begin and end transcript files were `:WALBEG' and `:WALEND', with default file `WALL PAPER' (the space was a path delimiter). 2. The background pattern used on graphical workstations (this is techspeak under the `Windows' graphical user interface to MS-DOS). 3. `wallpaper file' n. The file that contains the wallpaper information before it is actually printed on paper. (Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the file, it is still called a wallpaper file.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wango: /wang'goh/ n. Random bit-level {grovel}ling going on in a system during some unspecified operation. Often used in combination with {mumble}. For example: "You start with the `.o' file, run it through this postprocessor that does mumble-wango --- and it comes out a snazzy object-oriented executable." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wank: /wangk/ [Columbia University: prob. by mutation from Commonwealth slang v. `wank', to masturbate] n.,v. Used much as {hack} is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe (negatively) the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get supper!") or (more positively) a {wizard}. Adj. `wanky' describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when there are too many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is signalled by an overload of the `wankometer' (compare {bogometer}). When the wankometer overloads, the conversation's subject must be changed, or all non-wanks will leave. Compare `neep-neeping' (under {neep-neep}). Usage: U.S. only. In Britain and the Commonwealth this word is *extremely* rude and is best avoided unless one intends to give offense. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wannabee: /won'*-bee/ (also, more plausibly, spelled `wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] n. A would-be {hacker}. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering {larval stage}, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, or {suit}, it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of the {wannabee} nature. Compare {newbie}. Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1991) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in {larval stage}, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture --- communities formed spontaneously around people who, *as individuals*, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out to *be hackers* and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects of public compendia of lore like this one. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% warlording: [from the USENET group alt.fan.warlord] v. The act of excoriating a bloated, ugly, or derivative {sig block}. Common grounds for warlording include the presence of a signature rendered in a {BUAF}, over-used or cliched {sig quote}s, ugly {ASCII art}, or simply excessive size. The original `Warlord' was a {BIFF}-like {newbie} c.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie; the group name alt.fan.warlord was sarcasm, and the characteristic mode of warlording is devastatingly sarcastic praise. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% warm boot: n. See {boot}. %% wart: n. A small, {crock}y {feature} that sticks out of an otherwise {clean} design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of `csh(1)', single quotes literalize every character inside them except `!'. In ANSI C, the `??' syntax used obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart. See also {miswart}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% washing machine: n. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the `top-loading' access to the media packs --- and, of course, they were always set on `spin cycle'. The washing-machine idiom transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker jargon. See also {walking drives}. The thick channel cables connecting these were called `bit hoses' (see {hose}). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% water MIPS: n. (see {MIPS}, sense 2) Large, water-cooled machines of either today's ECL-supercomputer flavor or yesterday's traditional {mainframe} type. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% water knot: rope configuration used by sea cliff climbers who tend to fall a lot. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% watershed: small, rustic shed used to store water. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% wave a dead chicken: v. To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended. "I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug." Compare {voodoo programming}, {rain dance}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% 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 gentile creatures from other planets who were afraid of us till then & in the end a summer with wild winds & new friends will be. %% weasel: n. [Cambridge] A na"ive user, one who deliberately or accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly synonymous with {loser}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% webbing: rope that has been stepped on so many times it is flat. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% wedged: [from a common description of recto-cranial inversion] adj. 1. To be stuck, incapable of proceeding without help. This is different from having crashed. If the system has crashed, then it has become totally non-functioning. If the system is wedged, it is trying to do something but cannot make progress; it may be capable of doing a few things, but not be fully operational. For example, a process may become wedged if it {deadlock}s with another (but not all instances of wedging are deadlocks). See also {gronk}, {locked up}, {hosed}. Describes a {deadlock}ed condition. 2. Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions. "He's totally wedged --- he's convinced that he can levitate through meditation." 3. [UNIX] Specifically used to describe the state of a TTY left in a losing state by abort of a screen-oriented program or one that has messed with the line discipline in some obscure way. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wedgie: [Fairchild] n. A bug. Prob. related to {wedged}. %% wedgitude: /wedj'i-t[y]ood/ n. The quality or state of being {wedged}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% weeble: /weeb'l/ [Cambridge] interj. Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing stupidity. "I stuck the disk in upside down." "Weeble...." Compare {gurfle}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% weeds: n. 1. Refers to development projects or algorithms that have no possible relevance or practical application. Comes from `off in the weeds'. Used in phrases like "lexical analysis for microcode is serious weeds...." 2. At CDC/ETA before its demise, the phrase `go off in the weeds' was equivalent to IBM's {branch to Fishkill} and mainstream hackerdom's {jump off into never-never land}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% weenie: n. 1. When used with a qualifier (for example, as in {UNIX weenie}, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice, and whether or not it is applied by a person who considers him or herself to be the same sort of weenie. Implies that the weenie has put a major investment of time, effort, and concentration into the area indicated; whether this is positive or negative depends on the hearer's judgment of how the speaker feels about that area. See also {bigot}. 2. The semicolon character, `;' (ASCII 0111011). %% weenie: n. 1. [on BBSes] Any of a species of luser resembling a less amusing version of {BIFF} that infests many {BBS} systems. The typical weenie is a teenage boy with poor social skills travelling under a grandiose {handle} derived from fantasy or heavy-metal rock lyrics. Among sysops, `the weenie problem' refers to the marginally literate and profanity-laden {flamage} weenies tend to spew all over a newly-discovered BBS. Compare {spod}, {computer geek}, {terminal junkie}. 2. [Among hackers] When used with a qualifier (for example, as in {UNIX weenie}, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice, and whether or not it is applied by a person who considers him or herself to be the same sort of weenie. Implies that the weenie has put a major investment of time, effort, and concentration into the area indicated; whether this is positive or negative depends on the hearer's judgment of how the speaker feels about that area. See also {bigot}. 3. The semicolon character, `;' (ASCII 0111011). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% well-behaved: adj. 1. [primarily {{MS-DOS}}] Said of software conforming to system interface guidelines and standards. Well-behaved software uses the operating system to do chores such as keyboard input, allocating memory and drawing graphics. Oppose {ill-behaved}. 2. Software that does its job quietly and without counterintuitive effects. Esp. said of software having an interface spec sufficiently simple and well-defined that it can be used as a {tool} by other software. See {cat}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% well-connected: adj. Said of a computer installation, this means that it has reliable email links with the network and/or that it relays a large fraction of available {USENET} newsgroups. `Well-known' can be almost synonymous, but also implies that the site's name is familiar to many (due perhaps to an archive service or active USENET users). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wetware: /wet'weir/ [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] n. 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See {liveware}, {meatware}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% whack: v. According to arch-hacker James Gosling, to "...modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it works." (See {whacker}.) It is actually possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if the change is small and well-defined and you are very good at {glark}ing things from context. As a trivial example, it is relatively easy to change all `stderr' writes to `stdout' writes in a piece of C filter code which remains otherwise mysterious. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% whacker: [University of Maryland: from {hacker}] n. 1. A person, similar to a {hacker}, who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker only ends up whacking the system or program in question. Whackers are often quite egotistical and eager to claim {wizard} status, regardless of the views of their peers. 2. A person who is good at programming quickly, though rather poorly and ineptly. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% whales: n. See {like kicking dead whales down the beach}. %% whalesong: n. The peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by a PEP modem such as the Telebit Trailblazer as it tries to synchronize with another PEP modem for their special high-speed mode. This sound isn't anything like the normal two-tone handshake between conventional modems and is instantly recognizable to anyone who has heard it more than once. It sounds, in fact, very much like whale songs. This noise is also called "the moose call" or "moose tones". -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% what DON'T you call a guy... - LEFTY - WALKER - HANS %% what do ethiopians and Yoko Ono have in common? they both live off dead beatles (beetles) %% what do you do if your nose goes on strike? picket %% what does a potion of cure dianthroritis taste like? %% what does the Eye of Larn see in its guardian? %% what urge will save us now that sex won't -- Jenny Holzer, word artist %% wheel bit: n. A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called `wheel mode'. This term entered the UNIX culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See also {root}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wheel wars: [Stanford University] A period in {larval stage} during which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wheel: [from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] n. A person who has an active {wheel bit}. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (see {wedged}, sense 1.) -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% whizzy: [Sun] adj. (alt. `wizzy') Describes a {cuspy} program; one that is feature-rich and well presented. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% widget: n. 1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries...." 2. [poss. evoking `window gadget'] A user interface object in {X} graphical user interfaces. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wiggles: n. [scientific computation] In solving partial differential equations by finite difference and similar methods, wiggles are sawtooth (up-down-up-down) oscillations at the shortest wavelength representable on the grid. If an algorithm is unstable, this is often the most unstable waveform, so it grows to dominate the solution. Alternatively, stable (though inaccurate) wiggles can be generated near a discontinuity by a Gibbs phenomenon. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wilderness act: short theatrical performance done in the backcountry. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% wilderness travel: art of avoiding snowmobiles, four wheel drives and oil wells. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% wilderness: archaic word used to refer to the space that once existed between urban areas and which is now used as a proving ground for 4-wheel drive vehicles. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% win big: vi. To experience serendipity. "I went shopping and won big; there was a 2-for-1 sale." See {big win}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% win win: interj. Expresses pleasure at a {win}. %% win: [MIT] 1. vi. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions arise, or (especially) if it sufficiently {robust} to take exceptions in stride. 2. n. Success, or a specific instance thereof. A pleasing outcome. A {feature}. Emphatic forms: `moby win', `super win', `hyper-win' (often used interjectively as a reply). For some reason `suitable win' is also common at MIT, usually in reference to a satisfactory solution to a problem. Oppose {lose}; see also {big win}, which isn't quite just an intensification of `win'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wind pants: short, labored breathing. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% window shopping: [US Geological Survey] n. Among users of {WIMP environment}s like {X} or the Macintosh, extended experimentation with new window colors, fonts, and icon shapes. This activity can take up hours of what might otherwise have been productive working time. "I spent the afternoon window shopping until I found the coolest shade of green for my active window borders --- now they perfectly match my medium slate blue background." The serious window shoppers will spend their days with bitmap editors, creating new and different icons and background patterns for all to see. Also: `window dressing', the act of applying new fonts, colors, etc. See {fritterware}, compare {macdink}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% winged comments: n. Comments set on the same line as code, as opposed to {boxed comments}. In C, for example: d = sqrt(x*x + y*y); /* distance from origin */ Generally these refer only to the action(s) taken on that line. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% winkey: n. (alt. `winkey face') See {emoticon}. %% winnage: /win'*j/ n. The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is winning. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% winner: 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer, or person. "So it turned out I could use a {lexer} generator instead of hand-coding my own pattern recognizer. What a win!" 2. `real winner': Often sarcastic, but also used as high praise (see also the note under {user}). "He's a real winner --- never reports a bug till he can duplicate it and send in an example." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% winnitude: /win'*-t[y]ood/ n. The quality of winning (as opposed to {winnage}, which is the result of winning). "Guess what? They tweaked the microcode and now the LISP interpreter runs twice as fast as it used to." "That's really great! Boy, what winnitude!" "Yup. I'll probably get a half-hour's winnage on the next run of my program." Perhaps curiously, the obvious antonym `lossitude' is rare. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% winter dream ------------ we dream our winter dreams of bright green days with clear blue skies of birdsong of cool clear streams and playing otters of the singing forests and burbling brooks of verdant plains and grazing deer 'til the year leaves behind its desolate cold and acrid rain its muddy land and empty caves and dens 'til the summer comes with its barren parched land browned and withered blown by a searing ghost wind with murky rivers and oily seas with dull orange skies and then we dream our summer dreams of a land hiddened by a cold winter coat of snow of bright starry nights and the north wind's purging howl of thing that will not be -- (c) 1988 random grafitti c60a-1et@web.berkeley.edu any and all comments welcome %% wired: n. See {hardwired}. %% wirehead: /wi:r'hed/ n. [prob. from SF slang for an electrical-brain-stimulation addict] 1. A hardware hacker, especially one who concentrates on communications hardware. 2. An expert in local-area networks. A wirehead can be a network software wizard too, but will always have the ability to deal with network hardware, down to the smallest component. Wireheads are known for their ability to lash up an Ethernet terminator from spare resistors, for example. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wirewater: n. Syn. {programming fluid}. This melds the mainstream slang adjective `wired' (stimulated, up, hyperactive) with `firewater'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wish list: n. A list of desired features or bug fixes that probably won't get done for a long time, usually because the person responsible for the code is too busy or can't think of a clean way to do it. "OK, I'll add automatic filename completion to the wish list for the new interface." Compare {tick-list features}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% within delta of: adj. See {delta}. %% within epsilon of: adj. See {epsilon}. %% wizard mode: [from {rogue}] n. A special access mode of a program or system, usually passworded, that permits some users godlike privileges. Generally not used for operating systems themselves (`root mode' or `wheel mode' would be used instead). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wizard: n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who {grok}s it); esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is a {hacker} if he or she has general hacking ability, but is a wizard with respect to something only if he or she has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it. 2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has {wheel} privileges on a system. 3. A UNIX expert, esp. a UNIX systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that `UNIX Wizard' is a recognized job title at some corporations and to most headhunters. See {guru}, {lord high fixer}. See also {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {incantation}, {magic}, {mutter}, {rain dance}, {voodoo programming}, {wave a dead chicken}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wizardly: adj. Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly {feature} is one that only a wizard could understand or use properly. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% womb box: n. 1. [TMRC] Storage space for equipment. 2. [proposed] A variety of hard-shell equipment case with heavy interior padding and/or shaped carrier cutouts in a foam-rubber matrix; mundanely called a `flight case'. Used for delicate test equipment, electronics, and musical instruments. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wonky: /wong'kee/ [from Australian slang] adj. Yet another approximate synonym for {broken}. Specifically connotes a malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or amusingly perverse. "That was the day the printer's font logic went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar." Also in `wonked out'. See {funky}, {demented}, {bozotic}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% woofer: [University of Waterloo] n. Some varieties of wide paper for printers have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin that allows the excess on the right-hand side to be torn off when the print format is 80 columns or less wide. The right-hand excess may be called `woofer'. This term (like {tweeter}, which see) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi. 2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what some currently non-working feature should do. Hypothetical example: "Using META-F7 {crash}es the 4.43 build of Weemax, but as a workaround you can type CTRL-R, then SHIFT-F5, and delete the remaining {cruft} by hand." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% words do a poem make -------------------- i have seen beauty in these ungainly black things i have seen horror and other such things here on the printed page i have heard nonsense in these silent black things i have heard wisdom and other such things here in the printed word i have felt life's rhythm in these unliving black things i have felt death's hand and other such things here in the dead poet's dead word. i have taste the elixir of youth in these bland black things i have taste salt of sorrow and other such things here in the ripen books i have smelled the rose in these odorless black things i have smelled decay and other such things here among the musty tomes i have caught life in these dead black things i have caught death in these silent black things i have caught eternity in these meaningless things i have caught meaning and other such things here there on the terminal screen -- (c) 1988 kim dong hwan c60a-1et@web.berkeley.edu %% workaround: n. A temporary {kluge} inserted in a system under development or test in order to avoid the effects of a {bug} or {misfeature} so that work can continue. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by {fix}es; in practice, customers often find themselves living with workarounds in the first couple of releases. "The code died on NUL characters in the input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces." "That's not a fix, that's a workaround!" -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% working as designed: [IBM] adj. 1. In conformance to a wrong or inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned. 2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility. 3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or suggestion. At {IBM}, this sense is used in official documents! See {BAD}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% worm: [from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel `The Shockwave Rider', via XEROX PARC] n. A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Compare {virus}. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is assumed that only {cracker}s write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's `Internet Worm' of 1988, a `benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also {cracker}, {RTM}, {Trojan horse}, {ice}, and {Great Worm, the}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wound around the axle: adj. In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wow %% wrap around: vi. (also n. `wraparound' and v. shorthand `wrap') 1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over at zero or at `minus infinity' (see {infinity}) after its maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, either because it is programmed to do so or because of an overflow (as when a car's odometer starts over at 0). 2. To change {phase} gradually and continuously by maintaining a steady wake-sleep cycle somewhat longer than 24 hours, e.g., living six long (28-hour) days in a week (or, equivalently, sleeping at the rate of 10 microhertz). This sense is also called {phase-wrapping}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% write-only code: [a play on `read-only memory'] n. Code so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even by him/her. A {Bad Thing}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% write-only language: n. A language with syntax (or semantics) sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is {write-only code}. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and often to APL, though {INTERCAL} and {TECO} certainly deserve it more. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% write-only memory: n. The obvious antonym to `read-only memory'. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications, during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics {management} only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the `erroneous' ones. Later, around 1974, Signetics bought a double-page spread in `Electronics' magazine's April issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day joke. Instead of the more conventional characteristic curves, the 25120 "fully encoded, 9046 x N, Random Access, write-only-memory" data sheet included diagrams of "bit capacity vs. Temp.", "Iff vs. Vff", "Number of pins remaining vs. number of socket insertions", and "AQL vs. selling price". The 25120 required a 6.3 VAC VFF supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, +/- 2%. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wugga wugga: /wuh'g* wuh'g*/ n. Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task. Compare {cruncha cruncha cruncha}, {grind} (sense 4). -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% wumpus: /wuhm'p*s/ n. The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games called "Hunt The Wumpus", dating back at least to 1972 (several years before {ADVENT}) on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five `crooked arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added `anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations). This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured {ADVENT} and {Zork} and was directly ancestral to both (Zork acknowledged this by including a super-bat colony). Today, a port is distributed with SunOS and as freeware for the Mac. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% xor: /X'or/, /kzor/ conj. Exclusive or. `A xor B' means `A or B, but not both'. "I want to get cherry pie xor a banana split." This derives from the technical use of the term as a function on truth-values that is true if exactly one of its two arguments is true. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% xref: /X'ref/ vt., n. Hackish standard abbreviation for `cross-reference'. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% xyzzy: /X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/ [from the ADVENT game] adj. The {canonical} `magic word'. This comes from {ADVENT}, in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you find there. If you type `xyzzy' at the appropriate time, you can move instantly between two otherwise distant points. If, therefore, you encounter some bit of {magic}, you might remark on this quite succinctly by saying simply "Xyzzy!" "Ordinarily you can't look at someone else's screen if he has protected it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you do it anyway." "Xyzzy!" Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op command on several OSes; in Data General's AOS/VS, for example, it would typically respond "Nothing happens", just as {ADVENT} did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. In more recent 32-bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS responds "Twice as much happens". See also {plugh}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! %% yellow wire: [IBM] n. Repair wires used when connectors (especially ribbon connectors) got broken due to some schlemiel pinching them, or to reconnect cut traces after the FE mistakenly cut one. Compare {blue wire}, {purple wire}, {red wire}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% yeti: (also called abominable snowman, bigfoot, sasquatch): large upright creature that roams the high country. because no anthropologist has ever seen a yeti, its reality is discredited by science. on the other hand, there is no evidence of a scientist ever having been seen by a yeti, which makes the former's existence equally doubtful. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% you are less important than the most insignificant politician in siberia may your key to the after-life fit the gates of hell. %% you are more insignificant than a piece of hang-off from a hair on the underside of the stomach of a hog. %% you are so fat that if you ran into a brick wall with an erection, the only thing injured would be you navel! %% you called me late at night again to tell me you could go no further no one loves you (so you've said) no one needs you no one wants you what (i asked) about me and you said (how could you say) "you don't count" ah but you are mistaken i count 27 times you've called me wanting pity wanting mercy wanting only the things i can't give you and never what was always yours -- (c) 1988 meredith tanner %% you can get 2 points of WC for the price of one %% you can't buy the most powerful scroll %% you can't fit this five-foot oyster through that little passage! %% you klutz! %% you try, to tread, a razor's edge, but slice in two, and die, instead. %% yoyo mode: n. The state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down. Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits. Sun Microsystems gave out logoized yoyos at SIGPLAN '88. Tourists staying at one of Atlanta's most respectable hotels were subsequently treated to the sight of 200 of the country's top computer scientists testing yo-yo algorithms in the lobby. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% yurk (yerck) v.: to abort a belch; an unwholesome and unnatural act, causing severe jaw strain and resulting in "afterburp" (which See). Compare: "downchuck," "bumpgulp" %% zap: 1. n. Spiciness. 2. vt. To make food spicy. 3. vt. To make someone `suffer' by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.) See {zapped}. 4. vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. "Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again." In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called `superzap', whose file name is `IMASPZAP' (possibly contrived from I M A SuPerZAP). 5. vt. To erase or reset. 6. To {fry} a chip with static electricity. "Uh oh --- I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk controller." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zapped: adj. Spicy. This term is used to distinguish between food that is hot (in temperature) and food that is *spicy*-hot. For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by contrast, {vanilla} wonton soup is hot but not zapped. See also {{oriental food}}, {laser chicken}. See {zap}, senses 1 and 2. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zd: cntrlr may be busy %% zd: command rejected : %% zd: defect mapping gone astray %% zd: fatal error %% zd: unexpected intrpt %% zebra - an item of ladies underware purchased by Dolly Parton %% zen: vt. To figure out something by meditation or by a sudden flash of enlightenment. Originally applied to bugs, but occasionally applied to problems of life in general. "How'd you figure out the buffer allocation problem?" "Oh, I zenned it." Contrast {grok}, which connotes a time-extended version of zenning a system. Compare {hack mode}. See also {guru}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zero-content: adj. Syn. {content-free}. %% zero: vt. 1. To set to 0. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (esp. in the construction `zero out'). 2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where `zeroing' need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being `logically zeroed' rather than being `physically zeroed'. See {scribble}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zeroth: /zee'rohth/ adj. First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the binary numbers 0, 1, ..., 255 and the digital devices known as `counters' count in this way. Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first chapter of a publication `chapter 0', especially if it is of an introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the First Edition of {K&R}). In recent years this trait has also been observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent tradition of numbering from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to reduce {fencepost error}s, though it cannot eliminate them entirely. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zigamorph: /zig'*-morf/ n. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or {fence} character. Usage: primarily at IBM shops. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zip: [primarily MS-DOS] vt. To create a compressed archive from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written. Commonly used as follows: "I'll zip it up and send it to you." See {arc}, {tar and feather}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zip: placing protection while climbing. compare with unzip. -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% zipperhead: [IBM] n. A person with a closed mind. %% zizz: sound made by a rope running without restraint through a braking device during a free rappel. the sound changes markedly when joined by a piece of clothing or hair (see scree). -- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982 %% zombie: [UNIX] n. A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet). These can be seen in `ps(1)' listings occasionally. Compare {orphan}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zorch: /zorch/ 1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat sink. 2. [TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed --- ESR]. 3. [MIT] v. To propel something very quickly. "The new comm software is very fast; it really zorches files through the network." 4. [MIT] n. Influence. Brownie points. Good karma. The intangible and fuzzy currency in which favors are measured. "I'd rather not ask him for that just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with him for the week." 5. [MIT] n. Energy, drive, or ability. "I think I'll {punt} that change for now; I've been up for 30 hours and I've run out of zorch." -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% zorkmid: /zork'mid/ n. The canonical unit of currency in hacker-written games. This originated in {zork} but has spread to {nethack} and is referred to in several other games. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary %% %% %%